It has to be the best, the kind that doesn’t make your head hurt the next day. After wine, however, he sleeps badly, and wakes first thing in the morning, and that is the worst time of day: everything at that time seems to be a problem, some terrible misunderstanding. As he tosses and turns on his bed, old memories come back to him, very distinct in all their details. More and more often the stubborn thought comes to mind: When did he reach the halfway point of his life? What day was it when his story reached its highest point, its noon, and from that time on—though he did not know about it—began to progress toward setting? It is a very interesting problem, for if people knew which day was the midpoint of their lives, perhaps they would be able to imbue their lives and the events taking place within them with some kind of meaning. Lying sleeplessly, he adds up dates, creates combinations of numbers, like Jakubowski with his obsession with Kabbalah. It is 1786, late autumn. He was born in the summer of 1718. He is therefore sixty-eight years old. If he died now, that would indicate that the middle of his life fell in the year 1752. He tries to remember that year, turning the pages of the internal, not especially precise calendar in his mind, and in the end he finds that if he were to die right now, then that point might well be the day he arrived in Craiova. How strange: he remembers it well. He even remembers that he was wearing the white linen shirt of the Bogomils, that it was hot, and that small overripe plums were falling on the dry road, where they were soon crushed by carts’ wheels. Big, fat wasps, more like hornets, drank up the sweet pear juice in the orchard. People dressed in white were dancing in a circle. Moliwda stands among them and feels joy, but it is the kind of joy you have to force yourself to undergo—and then it blossoms.
His work in the royal chancellery is not the most difficult; he, as a senior clerk, oversees more than he actually writes. To him belongs the division in communication with the Ottoman Porte, since he knows languages. In fact, at his age, a person can simply pretend to be working, and that is what Moliwda does.
The king likes the witty Moliwda, his hoarse voice, his yarns. They often trade a few sentences; the exchange is always humorous and ends in a burst of laughter. This is why Moliwda is widely respected. When Stanis?aw August comes into the chancellery, everyone quickly gets up and bows—it is only Moliwda who takes a long time to rise, having to exert himself on account of his big belly, and since the king does not care for exaggeration, Moliwda limits his bow to a quick tilt of the head.
Moliwda considers himself to be something of a wise man now, and in spite of small crises, he maintains his good opinion of himself. Ultimately, he does not believe that he has been harmed by life. He tries to live like a Cynic philosopher. Few things are capable of wounding him. He has a sharp pen, of which he makes frequent enough use. Recently someone named Antoni Felicjan Nag?owski wrote a book titled The Warsaw Guide, in which he presented the beautiful and important places of the capital. Moliwda mocked him, deeming that complaisant vision of the capital worthy of a schoolgirl. He determined to write an homage to Warsaw’s whores, whose customs he had been investigating over the last few years, as a scholar investigates the lives of the savages on distant islands. This work, called A Supplement to the Guide Published by Another Author, appeared in 1779 and was rapidly disseminated. It made some Warsaw courtesans famous, while Moliwda’s own social position improved; even though the publication was not only ephemeral but anonymous, everyone knew it had been done by him.
For years he has been getting together with a group of friends—among them are some men from the chancellery, but there are also journalists, and playwrights. A merry company that never shies away from intelligent conversations. The men meet every Wednesday to taste wine, smoke pipes, and then, happily, bolstered by the wine, they set out into Warsaw, seeking new places, even better than the ones they found the week before. For instance, they go to Liza Szynder’s on Krochmalna Street, where it is cheap and comfortable. The girls wear flimsy little shirts, not some frippery with frills. Moliwda does not care for that sort of overperformance in his girls. Sometimes they head over to Trembecka Street, where the ground floor of every home is a shrine of sorts to love, and the women sit in the windows and beckon to their customers. It should be said that he rarely makes use of their services now, his manhood does not share his enthusiasm for women in flimsy shirts that barely cover their bottoms—in half-asses, as the men say jokingly, maliciously of them. Women still attract him, but he is rarely up to the execution of ordinary relations, which exposes him to smirks and ambiguous glances. For some time now, he has not even tried.