Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

  But when the squire’s wife saw the girl’s alien, insolent look, as it boldly travelled across the paintings, furniture and upholstery, she hesitated. And when this gaze moved across the innocent faces of her sons and daughter, she changed her tone.

  “It is our duty to help our neighbours in need. But our neighbours must want help. I provide this sort of help. I run a shelter in Jeszkotle. You can hand in the child there, it’s clean and very nice there.”

  The word “shelter” grabbed Cornspike’s attention. She looked at the squire’s wife. Mrs Popielska gained in confidence.

  “I distribute food and clothing before the harvest. People don’t want you here. You bring confusion and depravity. You are a loose woman. You should go away from here.”

  “Aren’t I free to be where I want?”

  “All this is mine, these are my lands and forest.”

  Cornspike revealed her white teeth in a broad smile.

  “All yours? You poor, skinny little bitch …”

  Mrs Popielska’s face stiffened. “Get out,” she said calmly.

  Cornspike turned around, and now the sound of her bare feet could be heard slapping against the parquet floor.

  “You whore,” said Mrs Franiowa, the char at the manor, whose husband had been crazy about Cornspike that summer, and slapped her in the face.

  As Cornspike reeled her way across the coarse gravel in the drive, the carpenters on the roof whistled at her. So she lifted her skirt and showed them her bare behind.

  Outside the park she stopped and stood wondering where to go.

  On the right she had Jeszkotle, and on the left the forest. She felt drawn to the forest. As soon as she went in among the trees she was aware that everything smelled different, stronger and sharper. She walked towards an abandoned house in Wydymacz, where she sometimes spent the night. The house was the remains of a burned-down hamlet, and now the forest had grown over it. Swollen from the weight she was carrying and the heat, her feet could not feel the hard pinecones. By the river she felt the first, alien pain flooding her body. Gradually panic was starting to take hold of her. “I’m going to die, now I’m going to die, because there’s no one to help me,” she thought in terror. She stopped in the middle of the Black River and refused to take another step. The cold water washed at her legs and lower body. From the water she saw a hare, who was quick to hide under a fern. She envied it. She saw a fish, weaving among the tree roots. She envied it. She saw a lizard that slithered under a stone. And she envied it too. She felt another pain, stronger this time, more terrifying. “I’m going to die,” she thought, “now I’m simply going to die. I’ll start to give birth and no one will help me.” She wanted to lie down in the ferns by the river, because she needed coolness and darkness, but, in defiance of her entire body, she walked onwards. The pain came back a third time, and now she knew she did not have much time left.

  The tumbledown house in Wydymacz consisted of four walls and a bit of roof. Inside lay rubble overgrown with nettles. It stank of damp. Blind snails trailed along the walls. Cornspike picked some large burdock leaves and made herself a bed with them. The pain kept coming back in more and more impatient waves. When at moments it became unbearable, Cornspike realised that she had to do something to push it out of her, throw it out onto the nettles and burdock leaves. She clenched her jaw and began to push. “The pain will come out the way it went in,” she thought, and sat down. She pulled up her skirt. She couldn’t see anything in particular, just the wall of her belly and her thighs. Her body was still taut and locked up in itself. Cornspike tried to peep inside herself there, but her belly got in her way. So with hands trembling from the pain, she tried to feel the spot where the child should come out of her. Her fingertips could feel her swollen vulva and her rough pubic hairs, but her groin couldn’t feel the touch of her fingers. She was touching herself like something alien, like an object.

  The pain intensified and muddled her senses. Her thoughts were torn like decaying fabric. Her words and ideas were falling apart and soaking into the ground. Tumescent from giving birth, her body had taken total control. And as the human body thrives on images, they flooded Cornspike’s semi-conscious mind.

  It seemed to Cornspike as if she were giving birth in a church, on the cold stone floor, just in front of an icon. She could hear the soothing drone of the organ. Then she imagined she was the organ, and she was playing, she had all sorts of sounds inside her, and whenever she wanted she could emit them all at once. She felt mighty and omnipotent. But at once her omnipotence was shattered by a fly, the common buzzing of a large purple fly just above her ear. The pain hit Cornspike with new force. “I’m going to die, I’m going to die,” she moaned. “I’m not going to die, I’m not going to die,” she moaned a moment later. Sweat clogged her eyelids and stung her eyes. She began to sob. She propped herself up on her arms and desperately began to push. And after this effort she felt relief. Something splashed and sprang out of her. Cornspike was open now. She fell back on the burdock leaves and sought the child among them, but there was nothing there except warm water. So Cornspike gathered her strength and began to push again. She closed her eyes tight and pushed. She took a breath and pushed. She cried and stared upwards. Between the rotten beams she could see a cloudless sky. And there she saw her child. The child got up hesitantly and stood on its legs. It was looking at her as no one had ever looked at her before: with vast, inexpressible love. It was a little boy. He picked up a twig from the ground and it changed into a little grass snake. Cornspike was happy. She lay down on the leaves and fell into a sort of dark well. Her thoughts returned, and calmly, gracefully, floated across her mind. “So the house has a well. So there’s water in the well. I’m living in the well, because it’s cool and damp in there. Children play in wells, snails regain their sight and grain ripens. I’ll have something to feed the child on. Where is the child?”

  She opened her eyes, terrified, and felt that time had stopped. That there was no child.

  The pain came again, and Cornspike began to scream. She screamed so loud the walls of the tumbledown house shook, the birds were startled, and the people raking hay in the meadows looked up and crossed themselves. Cornspike had a choking fit and swallowed the scream. Now she was screaming to the inside, into herself. Her scream was so mighty that her belly moved. Cornspike felt something new and strange between her legs. She raised herself on her arms and looked her child in the face. The child’s eyes were painfully tight shut. Cornspike pushed once more and the child was born. Trembling with effort, she tried to take it in her arms, but her hands couldn’t reach the image her eyes could see. In spite of this she heaved a sigh of relief and let herself slip away into the darkness.

  When she awoke, she saw the child beside her – shrunken and dead. She tried to set it to her breast. Her breast was bigger than it, painfully alive. There were flies circling above it.

  All afternoon Cornspike tried hard to encourage the dead child to suck. Towards evening the pain returned and Cornspike delivered the afterbirth. Then she fell asleep again. In her dream she fed the child not on milk but on water from the Black River. The child was an incubus that sits on a person’s chest and sucks the life out of him. It wanted blood. Cornspike’s dream was becoming more and more disturbed and oppressive, but she couldn’t wake up from it. In it a woman appeared, as large as a tree. Cornspike could see her perfectly, every detail of her face, her hairstyle and her clothing. She had curly black hair, like a Jew, and a wonderfully expressive face. Cornspike found her beautiful. She desired her with her entire body, but it wasn’t the desire she already knew, from the bottom of her belly, from between her legs; it flowed from somewhere inside her body, from a point above her belly, close to her heart. The mighty woman leaned over Cornspike and stroked her cheek. Cornspike looked into her eyes at close range, and saw in them something she had never known before and had never even thought existed. “You are mine,” said the enormous woman, and caressed Cornspike’s neck and swollen b
reasts. Wherever her fingers touched Cornspike, her body became blessed and immortal. Cornspike surrendered entirely to this touch, spot after spot. Then the large woman took Cornspike in her arms and cuddled her to her breast. Cornspike’s cracked lips found the nipple. It smelled of animal fur, camomile and rue. Cornspike drank and drank.

  A thunderbolt crashed into her dream and all of a sudden she saw that she was still lying in the ruined cottage on the burdock leaves. There was greyness all around her. She didn’t know if it was dawn or dusk. For the second time lightning struck somewhere very close by, and seconds later a downpour tumbled from the sky that drowned out the next peal of thunder. Water poured through the leaking roof beams and washed the blood and sweat off Cornspike, cooled her burning body, watered and fed her. Cornspike drank water straight from the sky.

  When the sun emerged, she crawled out in front of the cottage and began to dig a hole, then pulled some tangled roots from the ground. The ground was soft and yielding, as if wanting to help her with the burial. She laid the baby’s body in the uneven hole.

  She spent a long time smoothing the ground over the grave, and when she raised her eyes and looked around, everything was different. It was no longer a world consisting of objects, of things, phenomena that exist alongside each other. Now what Cornspike saw had become one single mass, one great animal or one great person, who took on many forms, to burgeon, to die and be born again. Everything around Cornspike was one single body, and her body was a part of this great body – enormous, omnipotent, unimaginably mighty. In every movement, in every sound its power showed through, which by sheer will could create something out of nothing and change something into nothing.

  Cornspike’s head began to spin and she leaned back against a low ruined wall. Simply looking intoxicated her like vodka, muddled her head and aroused laughter somewhere in her belly. Everything seemed just the same as ever: beyond the small green meadow bisected by the sandy road was the pine forest, with hazel bushes growing densely along its edges. A light breeze was stirring the grass and leaves, a grasshopper was singing somewhere and flies were buzzing. Nothing more. And yet now Cornspike could see how the grasshopper was joined to the sky, and what was keeping the hazel bushes by the forest path. She could see more than that too. She could see the force that pervades everything, she could understand how it works. She could see the contours of other worlds and other times, stretched out above and below ours. She could also see things that cannot be described in words.

  THE TIME OF THE BAD MAN

  The Bad Man appeared in the forests of Primeval before the war, though there may have been someone like him living in those woods forever.

  First, in spring they found the half decomposed body of Bronek Malak in Wodenica, whom everyone thought had gone to America. The police came from Taszów, examined the site and took the body away on a cart. The policemen came to Primeval several times more, but nothing happened as a result. No murderer was found. Then someone dropped a hint that he had seen a stranger in the forest. He was naked, and hairy like a monkey, flitting among the trees. Then others remembered that they had found strange tracks and marks in the forest too – a footprint on a sandy path, a hole dug in the ground, discarded animal carcasses. Someone had heard howling in the forest, a half-human, half-animal wail.

  So people began to tell stories of where the Bad Man came from. They said that before the Bad Man became the Bad Man, he was an ordinary peasant who committed a terrible crime, though no one knew exactly what.

  Regardless of what the crime was about, his conscience gnawed at him and wouldn’t allow him a moment’s rest, and so, tormented by its voice, he ran away from himself, until he found solace in the woods. He trudged about the forest and finally lost his way. He thought he saw the sun dancing in the sky, and that was what made him lose direction. He reckoned the road north would definitely take him somewhere. But then he lost faith in the road north and headed east, believing that to the east the forest would finally end. But as he was going east, he was overcome by doubts again. He stopped in confusion, unsure of his direction. So he changed his plan and decided to go south, but he lost faith in the road south too, and duly headed west. Then it turned out he had returned to the spot he had started from – at the very centre of the great forest. So on the fourth day he lost faith in all the points of the compass. On the fifth day he stopped trusting his own reason. On the sixth day he forgot where he had come from and why he had come to the forest, and on the seventh day he forgot his own name.

  And ever since he had become like the animals in the forest. He lived on berries and mushrooms, then started hunting small animals. Each successive day wiped larger and larger pieces from his memory – the Bad Man’s mind was becoming smoother and smoother. He forgot words, because he didn’t use them. He forgot how he was to pray each evening. He forgot how to kindle a fire and how to make use of it. How to do up the buttons on his coat and how to lace his boots. He forgot the songs he had known since childhood, and then his entire childhood. He forgot the faces of the people dearest to him, his mother, wife and children, he forgot the taste of cheese, roast meat, potatoes and potato soup.

  This forgetting went on for many years, and finally the Bad Man was nothing like the man who had come to the forest any more. The Bad Man was not himself, and had forgotten what it meant to be himself. Hair started growing on his body, and from eating raw meat his teeth became strong and white, like an animal’s teeth. Now his throat emitted hoarse noises and grunts.

  One day the Bad Man saw an old fellow in the forest gathering brushwood and felt the human being was alien to him, revolting even, so he ran up to the old man and killed him. Another time he attacked a peasant driving a carthorse. He killed him and the horse. He devoured the horse, but didn’t touch the man – a dead person was even more repulsive than a live one. Then he killed Bronek Malak.

  One time the Bad Man accidentally reached the edge of the forest and got a view of Primeval. The sight of the houses stirred a sort of vague emotion in him, which included regret and rage. Just then a terrible wail was heard in the village, like the howling of a wolf. The Bad Man stood at the edge of the forest for a while, then turned around and tentatively leaned his hands against the ground. To his amazement he discovered that this way of moving about was much more comfortable and much faster. His eyes, now closer to the ground, could see more and better. His as yet weak sense of smell could pick up the odours of the ground better. One single forest was better than all the villages, all the roads and bridges, cities and towers. So the Bad Man went back into the forest forever.

  THE TIME OF GENOWEFA

  The war caused chaos in the world. The forest at Przyjmy burned down, the Cossacks shot the Cherubins’ son, there weren’t enough men, there was no one to reap the fields, and there was nothing to eat.

  Squire Popielski from Jeszkotle packed his belongings on carts and disappeared for several months. Then he came back. The Cossacks had looted his house and cellars. They had drunk his hundred-year-old wines. Old Boski, who saw it happen, said one wine was so old that they had sliced it with a bayonet like jelly.

  Genowefa oversaw the mill while it was still working. She got up at dawn and supervised everything. She checked no one was late for work. Then, once everything was running in its rhythmical, noisy way, she felt the sudden surge of a wave of relief, warm as milk. Everything was safe, so she went home and made breakfast for the sleeping Misia.

  In spring 1917, the mill stopped working. There was nothing to mill – people had eaten up all their stores of grain. Primeval lacked its familiar noise. The mill was the motor that drove the world, the machinery that set it in motion. Now all that was audible was the rushing of the River. Its strength went to waste. Genowefa walked about the empty mill and cried. She wandered like a ghost, like a white, floury lady. In the evenings she sat on the steps of her house and gazed at the mill. She dreamed about it at night. In her dreams the mill was a ship with white sails, the kind she had seen in books.
Inside its wooden hulk it had enormous, grease-coated pistons that went back and forth. It puffed and panted. Heat belched from its interior. Genowefa desired it. She awoke from these dreams sweating and anxious. As soon as it was light, she got up and sewed her tapestry at the table.

  During the flu epidemic of 1918, when the village boundaries were ploughed up, Cornspike came to the mill. Genowefa saw her circling it, staring in at the windows. She looked exhausted. She was thin and seemed very tall. Her fair hair had gone grey and covered her shoulders like a dirty shawl. Her clothes were torn.

  Genowefa watched her from the kitchen, and when Cornspike peered in at the window, she withdrew. She was afraid of Cornspike. Everyone was afraid of Cornspike. Cornspike was mad, maybe sick too. She talked nonsense and swore. Now, as she circled the mill she looked like a hungry bitch.

  Genowefa glanced at the icon of the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle, crossed herself and went outside.

  Cornspike turned towards her and Genowefa felt a shudder. What a terrible look that Cornspike had in her eyes.

  “Let me into the mill,” she said.

  Genowefa went back inside for the key. Without a word she opened the door.

  Cornspike went into the cool shade ahead of her, and instantly fell to her knees to gather up the scattered, single grains and heaps of dust that had once been flour. She scooped up the grains with her slender fingers and stuffed them into her mouth.

  Genowefa followed her every step of the way. From above, Cornspike’s stooping figure looked like a heap of rags. Once she had eaten her fill of grain, she sat down on the ground and began to cry. The tears flowed down her dirty face. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling. Genowefa felt a lump rise to her throat. Where was she living? Did she have any family? What had she done at Christmas? What had she eaten? She could see how frail her body was now, and remembered Cornspike from before the war. In those days she was a buxom, beautiful girl. Now she looked at her bare, wounded feet with toenails as tough as an animal’s claws. She reached out a hand to touch the grey hair. Just then Cornspike opened her eyes and looked straight into Genowefa’s eyes, not even into her eyes but straight into her soul, into her very centre. Genowefa withdrew her hand. They were not the eyes of a human being. She ran outside and felt relief as she saw her house, the hollyhocks, Misia’s little dress twinkling among the gooseberry bushes, and the curtains. She fetched a loaf of bread from indoors and went back to the mill.