Eva looks curiously but discreetly at Sophie—she is around fifty years old, but her face is surprisingly fresh and young, and her eyes downright girlish. She dresses modestly, not like an aristocrat, more like a townswoman. Her gray hair is combed up and held in place by a delicate bonnet with meticulously pleated frills. She appears quite neat and tidy, until you look at her hands, which are stained with ink, like a child’s.
When the small ensemble finally begins to play, Eva takes advantage of the fact that she no longer needs to converse with anyone to look around the room. She sees something that holds her attention longer than the music. As soon as the break begins she intends to ask her hostess about it, but the musicians come back to the coffee table, and cups are clinking, the men are joking, and their hostess is busy introducing the latest guests in the midst of all the hubbub. Eva has never seen such direct, such amusing society people. In Vienna everyone was very artificial and distant. And suddenly, without knowing how it has happened—it must have been because of Anusia, who, in her excitement, her cheeks flushed, praised Eva, and then there were Sophie’s kind, wise eyes, reassuring her and guaranteeing her safety—Eva finds herself sitting down at Mrs. von La Roche’s clavichord, her heart pounding, but of course she knows that her greatest talent is certainly not playing the clavichord, but rather keeping her feelings under control: “The lips won’t let themselves be fooled by the heart, nor will the body reveal what the heart feels,” a function of old lessons. Eva tries to think of what to play, she is handed some music, but calmly pushes that aside, and from under her fingers flows what she learned in Warsaw, when her father was still locked up in Cz?stochowa, a simple country ballad.
When Eva and Anusia take their leave, Sophie von La Roche stops Eva by the dollhouse.
“I noticed you were interested,” she says. “That’s for my granddaughters. They’ll come soon. These wonders are created by this craftsman from Bürgel, just take a look—the most recent thing he did was the linen press.”
Eva moves closer so she can make out the smallest details. She sees a tiny chest of drawers, a linen cupboard with a wooden bolt mounted on top, pressing a minute piece of white cloth.
Before she goes to sleep, she takes the time to recall every element of that little home. On the first floor, the sewing room and the laundry room, filled with washtubs and buckets, a stove and pots, a loom and little barrels. There is even a little henhouse, painted white, and a tiny ladder for the poultry. And the poultry itself, the miniature wooden ducks and chickens. On the second floor there is a room for the women, with walls covered in paper and a four-poster bed, while on the coffee table there is a beautiful cream-colored coffee set, and next to it a lovely little crib surrounded by a tiny lace curtain. On the third floor, there is the man of the house’s office, and the man himself in his frock coat; on his desk lie his writing instruments and a ream of paper not much larger than a thumbnail. Over all this hangs a crystal chandelier, and on the wall there is a crystal mirror. At the very top of the dollhouse is the kitchen, filled to the brim with pots, sieves, plates, and bowls the size of thimbles; on the floor there is even a tin butter churn with a wooden crank, the same kind they had in Brünn, as the women preferred to make their butter themselves.
“Just take a look at it from up close,” says her hostess, and hands her the tiny butter churn. Eva takes the thing between her thumb and her forefinger and brings it up to her eyes. She sets it down carefully.
That night, Eva cannot sleep, and Anusia hears her quietly crying. Barefoot on the icy floor, she goes over to her mistress’s bed and puts her arms around her back shaken by sobs.
The dangerous smell of the raspberry bush and muscatel
In the mornings, Jakubowski transcribes a version of the Lord’s dream from his notes. Thus he dreamed:
I saw a very aged Pole whose gray hair reached down to his chest. I drove with Avachunia and arrived at his apartment. His home stood alone on the plain beneath a tall mountain. We walked up to that home, and beneath our feet there was ice, and on that ice grew lovely herbs. The palace was all underground, and in it there were six hundred rooms, each of them covered in red cloth, and farther inside, in a great quantity of rooms, sat Polish magnates, Radziwi??s and Lubomirskis and Potockis, and not one of them had on an expensive belt, they were all young and humbly dressed, with black and red beards, and they were employed to do tailoring work. I was much surprised by that sight. And then an old man showed us the siphon in the wall from which it was possible to draw a certain libation, and Avachunia and I drank of that elixir, and its taste was unspeakably good, like that of a raspberry bush or muscatel, and it remained on my lips even after I awoke.
It is a late December night, the stove has just gone out, and Jakubowski is planning on going to bed. Suddenly there is some sort of racket downstairs, as if something made of metal has fallen on the floor, and then women’s cries and the stamping of feet. He throws on his coat and carefully goes down the winding stairs. On the second floor, candle flames are flickering. Zwierzchowska races by:
“The Lord has passed out!”
Jakubowski presses into the room. Almost everyone is already in here (they either live on lower floors or are quicker at those awful stairs than he is). Jakubowski forces his way to the front and starts praying loudly: “Dio mio Baruchiah . . .” But someone shushes him.
“We can’t hear if he’s breathing. The doctor’s on his way.”
Jacob is lying on his back as though sleeping; he’s trembling slightly, or perhaps these are convulsions. Eva kneels beside her father and cries silently.
Before the doctor comes, Zwierzchowska removes everyone from Jacob’s room. They are now standing in the corridor, where they can hear the howling of the wind, and it is horrifically cold. With numbed fingers, Jakubowski holds his coat shut tight and prays quietly, rocking back and forth. The men who lead in the doctor from Offenbach push Jakubowski back almost angrily. He stands there with the others until morning, and it isn’t until almost dawn that it occurs to someone to bring into the corridor some Turkish stoves.
The morning of the next day is strange, as if the day hadn’t started at all. The kitchen does not open; there is no breakfast. The young people, who gathered here like every morning for their lessons, were informed that everything’s been canceled. People come up to the castle from town to inquire after the baron’s health.
It is interesting, everyone says, that the Lord knew what would happen, for why else would he have sent out all those letters to Warsaw telling the true believers to make their way to Offenbach?