House of Day, House of Night

by Olga Tokarczuk

  screws had rounded heads, and it felt nice to touch their cool

  bulges. Even when he looked at the icons hanging on the walls

  of the church he wasn't at all attracted by their content, but by

  the sort of board or canvas they were painted on, or their frames.

  Yes, the frames round the icons were the real works of an.

  There was one icon in the church that he couldn't stop looking at, although he knew it inside out. It showed the Virgin Mary with an entourage of saints. One of them was holding his

  own chopped-off head on a plate. But the important thing was

  that the icon was round, and its wonderfully ornate frame

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  formed a perfect circle on the wall. Franz tried to work out what

  sort of wood must have been used to make something so beautiful. A fter mass he often went up to the icon and inspected the layers in the frame. It wasn't made up of separate pieces, as he

  had at first expected, and as common sense and his own experience led him to believe. It had been made out of a single piece of wood, with the ends joined together at the bottom, admittedly in

  a rather flimsy way, using ordinary tin. He was convinced that

  specially prepared wood had been used to make the frame, and

  that a young branch had been bent so that it would grow in a

  circle. It may have been bound with wire, bent to the ground,

  and deliberately forced to grow into the space that completed the

  invisible circle. The tree that produced such an eccentric branch

  must have felt ashamed. The curved branch must have spoiled

  the perpendicular pattern of the spruces and alders. Everyone's

  gaze - both man and beast - must have been arrested by it.

  Plants aren·t aware that geometrical figures exist; at best they

  copy them by accident. Yet even in this unin tentional mimicry a

  knot will always appear, a lump, a lack of symmetry. People call

  this 'imperfection' because for some reason they're convinced

  that perfection does exist.

  Franz was excited by the existence of shapes that are invisible

  to the eye, patterns and designs that are right under your nose,

  right in front o f your eyes, yet have no substance, so your hand

  passes through them like smoke. Maybe that's the nature of all

  existence, both past and future, he thought - maybe there are

  things that exist, but are inaccessible to us. Maybe the pump that

  he was ha,·ing trouble designing already existed, a brilliant solution to the problem of pushing water uphill; maybe there were machines that people had yet to invent, and shapes which were

  so far inconceivable, and devices designed for copying things

  and capturing them in metal, wood or stone. A space full of

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  invisible cogs, gears, solid shapes, obvious and elementary, but

  not yet within human reach.

  Sometime early in the 1930s Franz Frost felt that something

  wasn't right. He would walk up the hill between the two villages

  and sniff the wind, inspect blades of grass and rub earth between

  his fingers. He noticed something he had felt before - that nothing was quite the same. The grass seemed sharper - it cut his fingers at the slightest careless move - and the earth had become

  darker and redder than before. It also seemed to him that the

  paths among the meadows had grown longer and that he had

  further to walk home, which made him late for dinner. Even the

  potatoes didn't taste right; the young ones, freshly dug up, tasted

  of damp and moss, as if they'd been lying in the cellar for ages.

  People's faces were becoming hazy, and when he went to church

  on Sundays he felt as if he were looking at blurred photographs.

  He confided in his wife, who said maybe it was his eyes, night

  blindness or some such ailment. The idea had never even

  entered his head. He thought it through and came to the conclusion that it wasn't his eyes. Fabrics had changed their texture, after all, and the taste of food and the smell of wood had

  changed. Knives cut the bread differently somehow, and the

  buzzing of insects sounded different. It wasn't his eyes or any of

  his other senses - the change was on the outside, but other

  people weren't aware of it, even though they themselves were

  taking part in this transformation. Women had changed the way

  they dressed. Their shoulders looked more powerful now, stiffened inside with special little pads, and their skirts were shorter, making their calves look more angular. Even bread baked in

  tins had sharper edges, as if to make your tongue bleed.

  All this worried him, because he had just bought the stone for

  a new house (the stone too was different, more rectangular than

  before) that was to be built up the hill from the old one.

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  I le heard on the radio that an astronomer had discovered a

  new planet, and ever since he had worried about it endlessly that somewhere far out in space the planet was revolving, small and icy, sure to be angular too. If it wasn't there before, but

  now was, that meant that even things that should always stay

  the same did in fact change. What's the good of a world that

  keeps changing like. that - how can one go on calmly living in

  it?

  In spite of his worries he started building the house. A diviner

  found water for him and they began by digging a new well. They

  had to dig deep , so water flowing from the melting snows

  wouldn't mix with the clean water, as had happened with the old

  well. They had a hard time digging, and extracted some large red

  stones from the ground that lay drying i n the sun like dead animals. It was a sad sight. He promised the stones that he would use them to lay the foundations of the house and thus put them

  back where they came from.

  They wanted to have a child, but his wife's womb remained

  empty. He told her not to worry, because once the house was

  built the child would come of its own accord. But when he

  was left alone he had gloomy thoughts. He was tormented by

  the existence of that planet, although he couldn't even remember what it was called. He worked all day, cutting the rafters for the roof. He ran his fingers along them, but they were rough

  and chafed his skin. The bricks , badly fired perhaps, kept

  crumbling, scattering dust on the new floors. Water flowed

  down from the mountains and through the house, and the

  ceramic drainpipes didn't help. But in spite of all this he

  believed that through hard work and resourcefulness a person

  can cope with anything. So he left the rafters imperfectly cut,

  plastered the walls roughly, and their neighbour, the wig-maker,

  advised him to forget about the drainpipes and let the water

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  run through the house, just let it flow through the cellars and

  on down the stone steps each spring. Make an outlet for it, she

  said, cut holes in the founda tions, let it flow into the pond. And

  so he did. But the whole time he never stopped thinking about

  that planet. What sort of a world is it if a new heavenly body

  can appear at any time? If you aren't aware of something, does

  that mean it doesn't exist? If a person becomes aware of something, does that
knowledge change him? Can a planet change the world?

  While he was laying the roof tiles, he started to have terrible

  dreams. In them, the valley was different, darker, and the trees in

  it were bigger, but there weren't any houses among them, just

  waist-high grass. The stream had dried up, the mountain peaks

  were blunted and looked squat, as if old and bald. There were no

  roads or people. In his dream he came to the place that was

  dear to him and looked for his wife there, and even his children,

  yes, once upon a time he had had some children. But there was

  no one there, and he was a stranger even to himself; he looked

  at his hands but they were someone else's hands, someone he

  didn't know. He suffered in this dream, because he felt as if he

  had gone astray for ever, as if he were lost like a small child; he

  not only felt that he didn't know the way, but that the way itself

  simply didn't exist. He woke up trembling and examined the

  whole dream from a distance, image by image, trying to find the

  most terrifying moment of all in order to make himself come to

  terms with it, and use his powers of reasoning to show up the

  senselessness of the dream. But he cou ldn't find the right

  moment - it was all terrifying, for the simple reason that it made

  no sense.

  And so it went on, even when his wife finally became pregnant and started getting up several times a nigh t to relieve herself. He was awoken by her shufning about in her slippers on

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  the new, spruce-scented floors, and then he would fall asleep

  again and dream the same thing over and over. On the day their

  son was born, he had an even more terrifying dream: in it, there

  were some red Oy agaric toadstools lying on the table. His wife

  was frying them in a great big pan and feeding them to their

  defenceless child. And he was watching this scene without a

  single thought in his head, no warning of death. The child died

  and shrank to the size of a doll; he carried it into the garden and

  buried its naked pink body in a hole. He felt such acute pain that

  he woke up and had to check whether his son was breathing,

  whether the dream had broken through i ts hazy borders and

  become reality.

  He suffered like this for a long time, fearing every evening and

  night. He felt only half alive because of these dreams.

  'Have you heard about the new planet, Father?' he asked the

  priest, who came each Sunday from Konigswald to say mass.

  The priest was unaware of it.

  ·How do you know about it, Frost?' he asked, intrigued.

  'It was on the radio .'

  'Which radio station do you listen to?'

  Like everyone in the village Franz Frost listened to Radio

  Vienna.

  'Don't listen to that channel, they're always making things

  up. Why not listen to Radio Berlin instead?'

  'But we always listen to the weather forecast on Radio Vienna.'

  'Maybe so,' replied the priest.

  When it was time for him to go , Franz plucked up the

  courage and said, Tm having dreams that aren't mine. They're

  stopping me from getting on with my life.'

  The priest from Konigswald stared at some point on the

  crown of Franz's head and replied, 'Can dreams really be

  "mine" ?"

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  So Franz Frost got no help from the priest. It was as if they

  thought quite differently, despite belonging to the same church,

  despite gazing at the same icons, including that same round

  frame around the Virgin Mary and the saints.

  He would have to cope on his own. He sawed the stump off a

  huge fallen ash tree, stripped off the bark, and made himself a

  wooden hat. He carved a hollow for his head, and left a brim

  around the sides. He polished it inside and out and lined it with

  wool. He made it so perfectly that from a distance it was hard to

  tell that it wasn't a shop-bought hat made of felt. After all, he was

  a master craftsman. Only from close up did the grain of the

  wood show. His wife noticed this eccentric new headgear, of

  course, but maybe she didn't know what to say. He would have

  replied (for he had prepared a clever answer) that it was to protect him from the newly discovered planet, which he didn't know by name; the planet that was sending down powerful

  nightmares that wore you out and exhausted your mind until it

  grew weak, and then you had nothing to hold on to and went

  mad.

  Thanks to the wooden hat his life improved a bit. He planted

  an apple tree at the spot in the garden where he buried his dead

  child in his dreams each night. But he never did taste its apples,

  because the war came and he was drafted into the Vehrmacht.

  Apparently it was the hat that killed him, because he refused to

  swap it for a helmet.

  H i s w ife a n d h i s c h i l d

  The woman with no name, whose special feature was a hairdo

  full of ringlets, the wife of Franz Frost, whose special feature was

  a wooden hat to counteract planetary i n Ouences. was sweeping

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  the excess limestone grouting from the front steps. The new

  house stood behind her, silent in the sunshine. It was young and

  did not yet have a story to tell. Her husband was with their

  small son by the pond behind the house. Somewhere far off to

  the west the war had begun.

  Then from the direction of the sun someone came towards

  her. She raised her head and saw that it was her son. At the

  same time she could hear the child's voice from behind the

  house, so she froze on the spot, rigid with fear.

  'Where is your son, my brother? I'd like to see him,' said the

  child.

  She let him into the house and told him to sit at the table just

  as she always told her child to. This one, too, obeyed her.

  'I know who you are,' she said, and tied his leg to the table

  with the belt of her apron. Then she ran to the pond and stammered out the whole story to her husband. They stood face to face, staring each o ther in the eye, but they couldn't see inside

  each other, they couldn't see their thoughts or their fears or anything else. They could only examine each other and go on waiting for the first word to be uttered. As they were standing

  there their son, who had heard everything, spoke out, though he

  couldn't understand much yet - or so they thought. 'Where is

  he? Is he waiting for me in the kitchen? Does he really look just

  like me? Can I go and see him?'

  And he ran uphill towards the house, with his parents after

  him. They found the little boy tied to the table and stared for

  some time at both faces, both children - the familiar one that

  was their flesh and blood, and the other that was identical but

  alien. Their son kissed the boy on both cheeks, just as they had

  taught him to kiss his aunts and uncles, and the other child

  returned his kiss. They looked like twin brothers, eager to play,

  keen to run behind the house where raspberries and luxuriant

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  gooseberries grew, eager to skip along the cold stones in the

  stream, or play hide-and-seek - the burdock leaves always guaranteed the best hiding place.

  They had no choice - they had to untie the visitor's leg and

  the boys ran outside at once, then vanished from the parents'

  sight into the tall grass beneath the apple and plum trees. Their

  reedy voices floated up over the garden of their neighbour the

  wig-maker.

  'Do you know what it is?' Franz asked his wife.

  He didn't ask 'who' but 'what'. In such situations, when your

  heart is thumping and your hands are shaking, when your head

  is strangely empty and you don't know what to do - whether to

  stay put or to run away, or whether to pretend nothing has actually happened - you never ask 'who', but always 'what'. 'What' is after all greater than 'who', and covers a wider range of possibilities. I t's the same with God - you never ask who He is, only what He is.

  Franz's wife burst into tears and wiped her eyes on a checked

  handkerchief that she always carried in her apron.

  Their child came home in the afternoon, with grass seeds in

  his hair. He was tired and fell asleep at the table during dinner.

  They didn't ask about the other child, about where he was sleeping and whose son he was.

  Then Franz went off to the war, which had been caused by

  the newly discovered planet. He went the day after the workmen had finished laying the roo f tiles. So now his house had a roof.

  In summer mushrooms appeared in the meadows. There were

  no potatoes left in the cellars, the cabbages had rotted , the apples

  had dried up, the walnuts had been eaten, and the fields and

  vegetable patches were only just putting out shoots. There was

  nothing but rhubarb for compote and cake.

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  Franz Frost's wife took her son by the hand and went to the

  meadows by the forest. There they picked wonderfully smooth

  mushrooms out of the grass. Agaricus campestris, the meadow

  mushroom, feels nice to touch and loves the caress of human

  fingers. When rubbed, its white skin smells of aniseed. I ts pink

  or coffee-coloured gills look like flower petals. You can't resist

  touching it and stroking it before slicing it up and throwing it

  into the frying pan.

  They threw the round, white mushrooms into a wicker