And that’s another thing—women attract him, but they also disgust him more and more. He has the impression that only now has the whole construct of his attitude toward women, a kind of edifice that built itself up so intricately all his life—their defenselessness, their sanctity, their purity—finally begun to rumble toward collapse. He always suffered on their score, was always falling in love, and more often than not his love went unrequited. He prayed to them . . . Now he sees women in their overwhelming majority as very simple things, wily little whores, empty and cynical, doing business off their own bodies, trading in holes, the one and the other, as though they were eternal, their youth carved out of stone. He’s known so many and observes their falls with satisfaction. A few of them have been able to use their cunts to come into considerable wealth—like that Maciejewska all the officers used to go and see, one after the next, which permitted her to get a little tenement house on Nowe Miasto. Then it was just ordinary soldiers, but she did not stop there, he had seen her lately in excellent health, now a dowager and a member of the bourgeoisie. This contempt of Moliwda’s applies to all women, even the noble ones (who only appear noble, he thinks), those who loftily flaunt their origins, over which they had no influence at all, of course, and who, themselves quite frigid, become guardians of others’ purity.
His buddies seem to take the same pleasure from this doddering misogyny as he does, and afterward they have all kinds of discussions about their girls, entertaining themselves by drawing up lists and tallies, making rankings. In his old age, Moliwda realizes that he despises women, not just those on the lists, but all of them. That it was this way from the very beginning, that he has always felt this, that he was raised this way, and that this is how his brain works. And that the pure love of his youth was an attempt to deal with this very dark sensation that must necessarily be contempt. A naive revolution, an attempt to make himself pure and free from all bad thoughts. In vain.
When at last he left his position for a well-deserved rest, his friends commissioned his portrait and told the painter to include in it all of Moliwda’s many adventures, just as he had recounted them—adventures at sea, pirates, the island where he was king, the exotic lovers, the Jewish Kabbalah, the monastery on Athos, converting pagans . . . Of course the bulk of it was an egregious lie. A monument to his lying life was thus erected.
He sometimes wanders the streets of Warsaw, muddy and riddled with holes. He sometimes goes all the way to Ceglana Street, where many of the court’s craftsmen reside, and where the Wo?owskis have their businesses. Here is where Shlomo Wo?owski built his home—it is a stillunfinished two-story tenement house with a shop on the ground floor and brewery buildings in the courtyard. Over everything here hangs a nauseating smell of malt that also arouses hunger.
Once, seeing some young woman, he worked up his courage and asked about Nahman Jakubowski.
The woman cast him an unfriendly glance and replied:
“You mean Piotr. I don’t know anybody here named Nahman.”
Moliwda enthusiastically confirmed.
“We knew each other in our youth,” he added, to set her mind at ease.
Now he takes out of his pocket a little slip of paper where she wrote Jakubowski’s address for him, and he decides to go.
He finds him at home, packed for the road. Nahman, who does not seem too pleased to see him, pushes a little boy, no doubt a grandson, off his lap, and stands to greet Moliwda. He is slight, unshaven.
“Going somewhere?” Moliwda asks him, and without waiting for an answer, he sits down on a free chair.
“What, can’t you see? I am an envoy,” says a smiling Jakubowski, showing his teeth darkened by tobacco.
And Moliwda smiles, too, looking at this funny little old man who just recently was telling him of the light that escapes from within man. Amusing, too, is the word “envoy” in conjunction with this old bag of bones. Jakubowski seems a little bit embarrassed that Moliwda has found him in such a shameful situation—children racing around the table, a daughter-in-law who bursts in with a menacing face and then flees. Shortly she will reappear with a jug of compote and a little basket of small, sweet buns. But Moliwda will not drink that compote. They go out to the tavern, and there Moliwda orders a whole jug of wine. Nahman Jakubowski does not protest, although he knows it will mean heartburn tomorrow.
The next chapter in the history of His Lordship Antoni Kossakowski, also known as Moliwda
“I took one of your women as my wife, and had a child with her,” he begins. “I ran away from home and had a Christian wedding with her.”
Jakubowski looks at him in some surprise, touches his chin with its several days of stubble. He knows he will have to listen to the whole tale, until the very end. Moliwda says:
“And I abandoned them.”
After the miller Berek Kozowicz sent off his daughter Ma?ka and the young Kossakowski to Lithuania, the couple sought lodging with a cousin of Ma?ka’s who collected bridge tolls, a busy man with an enormous family. Right away they understood that it was only temporary, although they were given their own chamber by the cowshed, heated by the bodies of the cows. The whole family, including the little children, never took their eyes off Kossakowski, as if he were some freak of nature. It was unbearable. Antoni helped his cousin by marriage with his paperwork, dressed in Jewish attire handed down to him by one of the toll collector’s teenagers, and would go into the village or conduct his arguments about the toll right there at the bridge. He feared, however, that his language would betray him, and so he intentionally muddled it with different sorts of accents, throwing in words from other tongues: Lithuanian, Ruthenian, Yiddish. When he returned, his heart would tighten at the sight of Ma?ka, suddenly heavy, terrified, surprised by her own condition, childish. What could be done? The toll collector, who smelled of arak, always asked him to read the same thing, pointing with his black-nailed finger to that same part of the scripture with which Antoni was as yet unfamiliar—and at last Ma?ka told him that it was the story of Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob, who in spite of being warned went far from her home and was raped by a foreigner, Shechem.
“You are Shechem,” she added.
And when some boy at the bridge started jamming his finger into Antoni’s chest and demanding to know who he was, a crummy Jew or a crummy Pole, he started to be afraid, as if he were swimming in a river and had lost the ground beneath his feet, as if the water were carrying him now, as if he were defenseless, going into the unknown. He became more and more anxious, and then he panicked, perhaps already sensing what was going to happen. Then he remembered that in Trakai he had some family on his mother’s side, some relatives of the Kamińskis, and he fantasized about going to them and asking for help.
And he did set off, in fact, in January, having changed his attire from Jewish to Polish and noble. In three days, he found himself in Trakai, but he found no one there by a name like Kamiński. That aunt had died several years ago, her daughters had gone off with their husbands, one of them to someplace in Poland, the other deep into Russia. He learned, however, by accident, that there was a certain merchant from Trakai who was seeking a Polish tutor for his children in Pskov, where he operated his business.