She watches them scribble inept reports on dirty roadhouse tabletops, entrusting them to messengers who will carry them to Kamieniec and Lwów. There they are transformed in chancelleries, taking on a more refined character, becoming disquisitions, rubrics of events; they wind up on better paper and earn seals—and so, as official dispatches, they go by post to Warsaw, to the tired clerks of that collapsing state,
