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By Root 367 0

fell very early. My grandparents had not yet returned to Cracow for the winter from their property near S., a town to the north of T. Metternich once spent a night in S.; in his memoirs it is recorded that his enjoyment of the admirable natural beauty of the site and the surrounding countryside was spoiled by the large number of Jews living there. To relieve Tania of some of her responsibilities and to spend more time with me, they decided to come to us directly from the country, although my father had assured them I was not in danger. I was allowed to get up from bed to welcome them at the door. They arrived in their old, broad, open carriage. The coachman, who was my friend, was on the box. A wagon pulled by two horses followed with their luggage. As we had no stable, the horses would return to S., which made me cry with disappointment. My grandfather, rubbing his mustache against my face, patting me on the back, and crying a little himself, said that a man like me really needed his own carriage, that Jan would bring the horses back as soon as I was well enough to keep them busy going out every day; if I liked, I could even learn to drive the carriage myself.

Very tall, very straight, always dressed in black, with a mustache that was still black and white hair cut short in the “porcupine” style then favored by Polish gentry, my grandfather had a way of opening a world of infinite possibilities. His daughter Tania was his favorite; in her eyes, he was the paragon of men. On a word from him, she would bend consecrated rules governing my schedule and manners. As for my cautious, methodical and tender father, in his heart of hearts he thought of his father-in-law as a sort of benevolent centaur. In fact, the old gentleman was happier in the saddle than on the ground. Fondness for the myth (it was my father’s habit to think of people closest to him as characters out of books, so that my grandmother, preoccupied with confitures and jams, was for him Countess Shcherbatskaya, and Bern, egging Tania on to some indiscretion, Rodolphe) and family piety eased the acceptance of my grandfather’s very personal notions of hygiene in our modern and scientific household. My father was confiding his little Maciek to Chiron.

So it happened that, as soon as I was allowed to go out of the house again, grandfather introduced me to the delights of miód, a Polish liquor made of honey and thought by him to possess unique restorative properties. His carriage would wait before the gate. We would climb in, he reclining in the vast black leather seat, bareheaded (which was against the custom), a yellow cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and I on the box. Jan cracked his whip, and we would roll along to the first of my grandfather’s favorite drinking cellars. He was of the view that miód could not be properly enjoyed elsewhere, certainly not in a café, that the steamy air of a good cellar, rich with odors of food, pickles and beer, in itself cleared one’s lungs, and that his treatment was already working. He would order a carafe of miód and two glasses and pour a thimbleful for me. The idea was that we shared the work: I drank a sip and he took care of his glass and what was left in the carafe. There was another part of the deal: we ate two pairs of steamed sausages, work again being divided so that I ate one sausage while my grandfather polished off three. He showed me that both miód and steamed sausages went down faster if accompanied by horseradish—the red kind, mixed with beets, for me, and pure white, which made one’s eyes water, for him. In the second and third cellars our system was the same, except that sometimes he would take herring and vodka for himself. In such a case, I could have a hard, honey-flavored cake to dip in my glass of miód.

As I was indeed becoming stronger and hardly coughed anymore, grandfather kept his promise about teaching me to drive. Tania was invited to come along: he called her his second-best pupil; I was to be the best. As soon as we left T. and reached one of the straight, long, white country roads, with fields