This is Rohatyn.
It starts with huts, tiny houses made of clay with straw thatch that seems to be pressing the structures down into the ground. The closer you get to the market square, the shapelier these little houses become, and the finer the thatching, until thatch disappears altogether into the wooden shingles of the smaller town houses, made of unfired bricks. Now there is the parish church, now the Dominican monastery, now the Church of Saint Barbara on the market square. Continuing on, two synagogues and five Orthodox churches. Little houses all around the market square like mushrooms; each of these contains a business. The tailor, the ropemaker, the furrier in close proximity, all of them Jews; then there’s the baker whose last name is Loaf, which always delights the vicar forane because it suggests a sort of hidden order that—were it more visible and consistent—might lead people to live more virtuous lives. Then there’s Luba the swordsmith, the facade of his workshop more lavish than anything nearby, its walls newly painted sky blue. A great rusted sword hangs over the entrance to show that Luba is an excellent craftsman, and that his customers have deep pockets. Then there’s the saddler, who has set out a wooden sawhorse in front of his door, and on it a beautiful saddle with stirrups that must be plated in silver, so they gleam.
In every place there is the cloying smell of malt that gets into all that is up for sale and gluts a person just as bread can. On the outskirts of Rohatyn, in Babińce, are several small breweries that give the whole region this satiating scent. Many stalls here sell beer, and the better shops also keep vodka, and mead—mostly trójniak. The Jewish merchant Wachshul, meanwhile, sells wine, real Hungarian and Rhineland wine, as well as some sourer stuff they bring in from Wallachia.
The priest moves among stands made out of every imaginable material—boards, pieces of thickly woven canvas, wicker baskets, even leaves. This good woman with the white kerchief on her head is selling pumpkins out of a cart; their bright orange color draws in the children. Next, another woman offers up lumps of cheese on horseradish leaves. There are many women merchants besides, those who have suffered the misfortune of widowhood or who are married to drunks; they trade in oil, salt, linen. The priest generally purchases something from this lady pasztet-maker; now he gives her a kind smile. After her are two stands that feature evergreen branches—a sign they’re selling freshly brewed beer. Here is a rich stall that is operated by Armenian merchants, with light, beautiful materials, knives in ornamental scabbards. Next to it is the dried sturgeon stand, with a sickening scent that gets into the wool of the Turkish tapestries. Farther along, a man in a dusty smock sells eggs by the dozen in little baskets woven out of blades of grass, which he keeps in a box that hangs from his skinny shoulders. Another sells his eggs sixty at a time, in large baskets, at a competitive, almost wholesale price. A baker’s stall is completely covered in bagels—someone must have dropped one into the mud because a little dog is now rapturously scarfing it up off the ground.
People sell whatever they can here. Floral materials, kerchiefs, and scarves straight from the bazaar in Stamboul, and children’s shoes, and nuts, and that man over by the fence is offering a plow and all different sizes of nails, as thin as pins or as thick as fingers, to build houses. Nearby, a handsome woman in a starched bonnet has set out little clappers for night watchmen, the kind that sound more like crickets’ nocturnes than a summons from sleep, alongside bigger ones, loud enough to wake the dead.
How many times have the Jews been told not to sell things having to do with the Church. They’ve been forbidden by priests and rabbis alike, to no avail. There are lovely prayer books, a ribbon between their pages, letters so marvelously embossed in silver on the cover that when you run your fingertip along their surface they seem warm and alive. A smart, almost lavishly dapper man in a yarmulke holds them like they’re relics, wrapped in thin paper—a creamy tissue to keep the foggy day from sullying their innocent Christian pages, fragrant with printing ink. He also has wax candles and even pictures of the saints with their halos.
Father Chmielowski goes up to one of the traveling booksellers, hoping he might find something in Latin, but all the books are Jewish; beside them lie yarmulkes and other things of which the priest does not know the nature.
The farther you look down the little side streets, the more obvious the poverty becomes, like a dirty toe sticking out of a torn shoe; a plain old poverty, quiet, low to the ground. There are no more shops now, no more stalls—instead, hovels like doghouses, thrown together out of flimsy boards picked from around the trash heaps. In one of them, a cobbler fixes shoes that have been mended again and again, patched up and resoled repeatedly. In another, a tinker has set up shop, surrounded by hanging iron pots. His face is thin and sunken. His cap is drawn down over his forehead, which is covered in brown lesions; the vicar forane would be afraid to have his pots mended here, lest this wretch pass along some terrible disease through his touch. Next, an old man sharpens knives along with all types of sickles and scythes. His workstation consists of a stone wheel tied around his neck. When given a thing to sharpen, he sets up a primitive wooden rack that several leather straps make into a simple machine, the wheel of which, set in motion by his hand, hones the metal blade. Sometimes sparks fly and then careen into the mud, which provides particular pleasure to the filthy, mangy children around here. From his profession, this man will earn groszy: a pittance. Someday, this wheel may help him drown himself—an occupational advantage of sorts.
On the street, women in tattered rags gather dung and wood shavings for fuel. It would be hard to say, based on their rags, whether this is a Jewish poverty, or Eastern Orthodox, or Catholic. Poverty is nondenominational and has no national identity.