Moliwda stays with them until evening, observing the constant movement at this place—men come and go, drop in for a moment, then return to their tasks, their caravans, their stalls. In private conversations they give each other addresses and names of Turkish clerks who can be bought off. They have little notebooks especially for this purpose; you can buy them at the stalls here. Then they rejoin the general conversation as if they had never left. The disputation is ongoing. Someone asks a question, a stupid one or a provocative one, and the race begins: everyone wants to answer at the same time, they all shout over one another. Sometimes they can’t understand one another—some of them have caught an accent somewhere, like a disease, so that they must repeat everything twice. There are also translators, and then Moliwda recognizes the Jewish language from Poland, that strange blend of German, Polish, and Hebrew. When he hears it, he is overwhelmed by sudden emotion, especially when he sees that one of the speakers is Nahman, who has resurfaced here as well. Nahman speaks the way Malka and her sisters spoke, and suddenly Moliwda is covered with a warm coat of images from those times. For instance: crops, grain all along the horizon, light yellow, and interspersed in them the dark blue points of cornflowers; fresh milk and a just-cut loaf of bread that is lying on the table; a beekeeper in a halo of bees, extracting sheets sticky with honey.
But who cares, there is honey in Turkey, too, and bread. Moliwda feels deeply ashamed of himself. He banishes the suddenly blooming bouquet of images to the back of his mind and is present again, just as the discussion is winding down and the prophet is telling little tales, a spiteful smile lurking on his face. He tells of how he fought a hundred highwaymen, how he slashed his way through them like through nettles. Someone interrupts him, shouts out something over the heads of those assembled. Others leave or just move away, into the shadows of the olive trees, and there, smoking their pipes, they murmur commentaries on all that they have heard. At some point, Nahman’s voice takes over. He speaks in a learned, elegant manner. He invokes Isaiah. It would be hard to outtalk him. He has evidence for everything. When he cites the appropriate passage from the Scripture, he looks up, as though somewhere in the air a library hangs, invisible to others’ eyes. Jacob does not react to Nahman’s lectures, gives no indications that he’s heard. When Nahman finishes, Jacob doesn’t even nod to him. What a strange school.
It is getting dark by the time the audience thins out, and a raucous group of young men forms around this Frank. Then they head into town. They meander noisily down its narrow streets, looking to get into fights. They intercept passersby, comment on the street performers, drink wine, make trouble. Moliwda and Reb Mordke follow at a distance of several steps, so as to avoid becoming embroiled in a brawl should one erupt. This little group with Jacob at its head has some sort of strange power; they’re like young bucks looking for a chance to prove their mettle. Moliwda likes this. It would be nice to be in their midst, shoulder to shoulder with them, to clap them on the back, move in the cloud of their scent—the tart sweat of young men, wind, dust. Jacob has a rakish smile on his face, which makes him look like an amused little boy. Moliwda catches his eye for a moment and wants to lift his hand and wave, but already Jacob is turning away. Women selling fruit and men selling pancakes dart out of the way of this retinue. Suddenly the whole procession stops for a moment. Moliwda can’t see what’s going on up there ahead, but he waits patiently, buys himself a piece of cake with sweet syrup poured on top and eats it with great pleasure. Up ahead there is some sort of commotion, voices raised, an outburst of laughter. Yet another incident with Jacob. What happened this time, he isn’t sure.
The story of His Lordship Moliwda, or Antoni Kossakowski, of the ?lepowron coat of arms, which is also known as Korwin
He comes from ?mud?, his father was a Hussar in the Crown Army. He has five brothers: one of them is a military man, two are priests, and of the other two he knows nothing. Of the priests, one lives in Warsaw, and they exchange letters once a year.
He hasn’t been in Poland for over twenty years. At this point, it is a strain for him to put together any even remotely eloquent sentence in his native tongue, but by some miracle, he still thinks in Polish. And yet for many things he lacks the Polish words. He has had so many experiences in life that he lacks the Polish words to describe them all. He does this with the aid of a mixture of Greek and Turkish. Now, working for the Jews, Hebrew words enter the mix. Described in these languages, Moliwda is a hybrid, a strange creature from the antipodes.
In Polish, he can tell of his childhood in the home of the Kowno stolnik Dominik, Kossakowski’s uncle, who—after the sudden death of both his parents—took him in along with his five brothers. But the uncle was demanding, and ruled his home with an iron fist. When he caught one of his nephews in a lie, or some prevarication, he would backhand him hard. In cases of more severe transgressions (when, for instance, Antoni ate a little honey out of the pot and then, hoping to cover up his crime, added a little water, which spoiled the remainder), he would take out a leather scourge—probably intended for self-flagellation, as the family was very pious—that would slice through the boy’s naked back and buttocks. The most robust of the brothers the uncle prepared for a military career, and the two calmer and more trustworthy ones he sent off to the priesthood, but Antoni wasn’t suited for either. Several times he ran away from home, and the servants would search for him around the village or dig him out of peasants’ barns, where he had cried himself to sleep in the hay. Uncle Dominik’s methods were hard and painful, but at last there came a hope that Antoni might find his place in good society. His influential uncle had, after all, educated him well, and soon he arranged for the fifteen-year-old to take up a position in King Stanis?aw Leszczyński’s chancellery. He got him the appropriate clothing, bought him a travel case and shoes, sets of undergarments, and a handkerchief, and, so equipped, the boy set off for Warsaw. Once he got there, it turned out no one knew what to do with such a youngster, so he was made to write out copies of documents in his fine hand and to trim the wicks of candles. He told the chancellors that his uncle had found him in the forests of ?mud?, where a she-wolf had raised him for several years, so that he was fluent in the languages of dogs and wolves, and that he was the son of the sultan, begotten when the sultan was traveling incognito to the Radziwi??s’. When he had had enough of copying out boring reports, he hid a whole folder of them behind a heavy piece of furniture under a window, where, since the panes weren’t fully sealed, they were ruined by damp. There were other offenses, too—schoolboy stuff, like when some older kids got him drunk and left him in a brothel in Powi?le, and he only narrowly escaped with his life, taking three full days to recover. In the end, he took the money he had so unwisely been entrusted with and used it to reign over Powi?le, until what he had left was stolen, and he was beaten up.
Moliwda has thought a lot lately about what would have happened if he had stayed in the chancellery, what he might have become by now—maybe a lord, a royal officer in the capital, under the new king, who is so rarely in Warsaw, residing instead by the border with Saxony, in order to be close to Dresden. What has become of Moliwda instead?
He was told in the chancellery never to show his face around there again; his uncle had been informed. He had come after his nephew, but he hadn’t dared beat him now as he had done in the past—after all, young Antoni was, in spite of everything, in the employ of the king.