Hry?ko speaks, making use of gestures. The other man looks at him with his dark, impenetrable eyes, and it occurs to Father Chmielowski that he might be dealing with a blind man.
“Having read several hundred authors cover to cover,” the priest goes on, “borrowing some, purchasing others, I still feel that I have missed many volumes, and that it is not possible for me to access them, in any case.”
Here he stops to wait for a response, but Shorr merely nods with an ingratiating smile that tells Chmielowski nothing at all.
“And since I heard that Your Excellency is in possession of a fully realized library,” says the priest, adding hurriedly, reluctantly, “without wishing to cause any trouble, of course, or any inconvenience, I gathered up the courage, contrary to custom, but for the benefit of many, to come here and—”
He breaks off because suddenly the door flies open and with no warning a woman enters the low-ceilinged room. Now faces peer in from the hallway, half visible in the low light, whispering. A little child whimpers and then stops, as if all must focus on this woman: bareheaded, wreathed in lush curls, she doesn’t look at the men at all, but rather gazes fixedly, brazenly, at something straight ahead of her as she brings in a tray with a pitcher and some dried fruits. She is wearing a wide floral dress, and over it an embroidered apron. Her pointy-toed shoes clack. She is petite, but she is shapely—her figure is attractive. Behind her pads a little girl carrying two glasses. She looks at the priest in such terror that she inadvertently crashes into the woman in front of her and falls over, still clasping the glasses in her little hands. It’s a good thing they are sturdily made. The woman pays no attention to the child, though she does glance once—rapidly, impudently—at the priest. Her dark eyes shine, large and seemingly bottomless, and her overwhelmingly white skin is instantly covered in a flush. The vicar forane, who very rarely has any contact with young women, is terribly surprised by this barging in; he gulps. The woman sets the pitcher and the plate on the table with a clatter and, still looking straight ahead, leaves the room. The door slams. Hry?ko, the interpreter, also looks perplexed. Meanwhile, Elisha Shorr leaps up, lifts the child, and sits down with her in his lap. The little girl wriggles loose and runs after her mother.
The priest would wager anything that this whole scene with the woman and the child coming in here was staged solely for the purpose of everyone getting a look at him. It is something, a priest in a Jewish home! Exotic as a salamander. But so what? Isn’t he seen by a Jewish doctor? And are not his medicaments ground by another Jew? The matter of the books is a health issue, too, in its way.
“The volumes,” says the priest, pointing to the spines of the folios and the smaller Elzevir editions lying on the table. Each contains two symbols in gold, which the priest assumes are the initials of their owner, as he can recognize the Hebrew letters:
He reaches for what he thinks will be his ticket into the fold of Israel and carefully sets the book he’s brought before Shorr. He smiles triumphantly: this is Athanasius Kircher’s Turris Babel, a great work in terms of both content and format; the priest took a big risk in dragging it all the way here. What if it fell into the fetid Rohatyn mud? Or what if some ruffian snatched it from him in the marketplace? Without it, the vicar forane would not be what he is today—he’d just be some ordinary rector, a Jesuit teacher on some estate, a useless clerk of the Church, bejeweled and begrudging.
He slides the book toward Shorr as if presenting his own beloved wife. He delicately raps its wooden cover.
“I have others,” he comments. “But Kircher is the best.” He opens the book at random, landing on a drawing of the Earth represented as a globe, and on it, the long, slender cone of the Tower of Babel.
“Kircher demonstrates that the Tower of Babel, the description of which is contained within the Bible, could not have been as tall as is commonly thought. A tower that reaches all the way to the moon would disrupt the whole order of the cosmos. Its base, founded upon the Earth, would have had to be enormous. It would have obscured the sun, which would have had catastrophic consequences for all of creation. People would have needed to use up the entire earthly supply of wood and clay . . .”
The priest feels as if he is espousing heresies, and the truth is he doesn’t even really know why he is saying all this to the taciturn Jew. He wants to be regarded as a friend, not as an enemy. But is that even possible? Perhaps they can come to understand each other, despite being unfamiliar with each other’s languages or customs, unfamiliar with each other in general, their objects and instruments, their smiles, the gestures of their hands that carry meaning—everything, really; but maybe they can reach some understanding by way of books? Is this not in fact the only possible route? If people could read the same books, they would inhabit the same world. Now they live in different worlds, like the Chinese described by Kircher. And then there are those—and their numbers are vast—who cannot read at all, whose minds are dormant, thoughts simple, animal, like the peasants with their empty eyes. If he, the priest, were king, he would decree that there be one day each week reserved for the peasants to read; by urging all peasants to engage with literature, he could instantly change the Commonwealth. Perhaps it also has to do with the alphabet—that there isn’t only one, that there are lots of them; each produces its own type of thinking. Like bricks: some, fired and smooth, yield cathedrals, while others, of rough clay, become the peasants’ shacks. And while Latin is clearly the most perfect, it appears that Shorr does not know Latin. Father Chmielowski points out an illustration, and then another, and another, and he notices his interlocutor begin to lean in with rising interest, until finally he pulls out a pair of spectacles, elegantly set in wire—Chmielowski wouldn’t mind having a pair like that himself, he’ll have to inquire how he might order them. The interpreter is curious, too, and the three of them lean in over the illustration.
The priest glances at them, pleased to have hooked them both. He sees strands of gold and auburn hair in the Jew’s dark beard.
“We could exchange books,” suggests the priest.