Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

  Cornspike emerged from the darkness of the open door with a bundle full of grain. She was looking at something behind Genowefa’s back, and her face brightened.

  “Sweetie-pie,” she said to Misia, who had come up to the fence.

  “What happened to your child?”

  “It died.”

  Genowefa handed her the loaf of bread at arm’s length, but Cornspike came very close to her, and as she took the loaf, she pressed her lips to Genowefa’s mouth. Genowefa recoiled and jumped back. Cornspike burst out laughing. She put the loaf into her bundle. Misia began to cry.

  “Don’t cry, sweetie-pie, your daddy’s on his way home to you,” muttered Cornspike and walked off towards the village.

  Genowefa wiped her lips on her apron until they darkened.

  That evening she found it hard to sleep. Cornspike couldn’t be wrong. Cornspike could tell the future, everyone knew about it.

  And from the next day Genowefa started waiting. But not as she had done until now. Now she waited from one hour to the next. She put the potatoes under the eiderdown so they wouldn’t go cold too quickly. She made the bed. She poured water into a basin for shaving. She laid Michał’s clothes over a chair. She waited as if Michał had gone to Jeszkotle for tobacco and was coming straight back.

  And so she waited all summer and autumn, and winter. She didn’t go far from home, and she didn’t go to church. In February, Squire Popielski came back and gave the mill some work. Where he got the grain for milling nobody knew. As manager and assistant, the squire recommended a man called Niedziela from Wola. Niedziela was quick and reliable. He bustled about between the top and bottom of the mill, shouting at the peasants. He wrote the number of bags milled in chalk on the wall. Whenever Genowefa came to the mill, Niedziela moved about even faster and shouted even louder, while stroking his sparse whiskers, which were nothing like Michał’s bushy moustache.

  She was reluctant to go up there. Only on truly essential matters – if there was a mistake in the grain receipt, or if the machinery stopped.

  Once, when she was looking for Niedziela, she saw the boys carrying the sacks. They were naked to the waist, and their upper bodies were coated in flour, like big pretzels. The sacks were shielding their heads, so they all looked identical. She could not see in them the young Serafin or Malak, but just men. The naked torsos riveted her gaze and made her feel anxious. She had to turn and look away.

  One day Niedziela arrived with a Jewish boy. The boy was very young. He didn’t look more than seventeen. He had dark eyes and black curly hair. Genowefa saw his lips – large, with a finely drawn line, darker than any she had seen before.

  “I’ve taken on another one,” said Niedziela, and told the boy to join the porters.

  Genowefa talked to Niedziela absent-mindedly, and when he went off, she found an excuse to linger. She saw the boy take off his linen shirt, fold it carefully and hang it over the stair rail. She was moved when she saw his naked rib cage – slim, but muscular, and his swarthy skin, under which his blood was pulsating and his heart was beating. She went home, but from then on she often found a reason to go down to the gate, where the sacks of grain or flour were received and collected. Or she came at dinner time, when the men came down to eat. She looked at their flour-dusted shoulders, sinewy arms and their linen trousers, damp with sweat. Involuntarily her gaze sought out one among them, and when it found him, she felt a hot flush as the blood rushed to her face.

  That boy, that Eli – as she heard him being called – aroused fear in her, anxiety and shame. At the sight of him her heart began to pound and her breathing became faster. She tried to watch coolly and indifferently. His dark, curling hair, strong nose and strange, dark lips. The dark, hairy atrium of his armpit as he wiped the sweat from his face. He swayed as he walked. Several times he met her gaze and was startled, like an animal that has come too close. Finally they bumped into each other in the narrow doorway. She smiled at him.

  “Bring a sack of flour to my house,” she said.

  From then on she stopped waiting for her husband.

  Eli put the sack down on the floor and took off his linen cap. He crumpled it in his whitened hands. She thanked him, but he didn’t leave. She saw that he was chewing his lip.

  “Would you like some fruit juice?”

  He said yes. She handed him a mug and watched him drink. He lowered his long, girlish eyelashes.

  “I’d like to ask you a favour …”

  “Yes?”

  “Come and chop some wood for me this evening, could you?”

  He nodded and left.

  She waited all afternoon. She did up her hair and looked at herself in the mirror. Then, once he had come, as he was chopping the wood, she brought him some buttermilk and bread. He sat down on the chopping block and ate. Without knowing why, she told him about Michał at the war. He said: “The war’s over now. Everyone’s coming back.”

  She gave him a bag of flour. She asked him to come the next day, and the next day she asked him to come again.

  Eli chopped wood, cleaned the stove, and did some minor repairs. They rarely talked, and always on trivial subjects. Genowefa watched him furtively, and the longer she looked at him the more her gaze grew attached to him. Finally she could not bear not to look at him. She devoured him with her gaze. At night she dreamed she was making love with a man, and it was not Michał, or Eli, but a stranger. She would wake up feeling dirty. She would get up, fill the basin with water and wash her entire body. She wanted to forget the dream. Then she would watch through the window as the workmen came down to the mill. She would see Eli furtively looking in at her windows. She would hide behind the curtain, angry with herself because her heart was thumping as if she had been running. “I won’t think about him, I swear,” she would decide, and get down to work. At about noon she would go and see Niedziela, always by some chance meeting Eli on the way. Amazed by her own voice, one day she asked him to come by.

  “I’ve baked you a bun,” she said, and pointed at the table.

  He timidly took a seat and put his cap down in front of him. She sat opposite, watching him eat. He ate cautiously and slowly. White crumbs remained on his lips.

  “Eli?”

  “Yes?” He looked up at her.

  “Did you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  He stretched his hand out across the table towards her face. She recoiled abruptly.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said.

  The boy lowered his head. His hand went back to the cap. He said nothing. Genowefa sat down.

  “Tell me, where did you want to touch me?” she asked quietly.

  He raised his head and stared at her. She thought she could see flashes of red in his eyes.

  “I’d have touched you here,” he said, pointing to a spot on his neck.

  Genowefa ran her hand down her neck, feeling the warm skin and blood pulsing beneath her fingers. She closed her eyes.

  “And then?”

  “Then I would have touched your breasts …”

  She sighed deeply and threw her head back.

  “Tell me where exactly.”

  “Where they are softest and hottest … Please … let me …”

  “No,” she said.

  Eli got up and stood in front of her. She could smell the scent of sweet bun and milk on his breath, like the breath of a child.

  “You’re not allowed to touch me. Swear to your God you won’t touch me.”

  “You whore,” he croaked, and threw his crumpled cap to the floor. The door slammed behind him.

  Eli came back that night. He knocked gently, and Genowefa knew it was him.

  “I forgot my cap,” he whispered. “I love you. I swear I won’t touch you until you want me to.”

  They sat down on the floor in the kitchen. Streams of red heat lit up their faces.

  “It has to become clear if Michał is alive. I am still his wife.”

  “I’ll wait, but tell me, how long?”


  “I don’t know. You can look at me.”

  “Show me your breasts.”

  Genowefa slipped her nightdress off her shoulders. Her naked breasts and belly shone red. She could hear Eli catch his breath.

  “Show me how much you want me,” she whispered.

  He unbuttoned his trousers and Genowefa saw his swollen member. She felt the bliss from her dream, which was the crowning moment of all her efforts, glances and rapid breathing. This bliss was beyond all control, it could not be restrained. What had appeared now was terrifying, because nothing could ever be any more. It had already come true, flowed over, ended and begun, and from then on everything that happened would be dull and loathsome, and the hunger that would awaken would be even more powerful than ever before.

  THE TIME OF SQUIRE POPIELSKI

  Squire Popielski was losing his faith. He hadn’t stopped believing in God, but God and all the rest of it were becoming rather flat and expressionless, like the etchings in his Bible.

  For the squire, everything seemed to be all right when the Pelskis came by from Kotuszów, when he played whist in the evenings, when he had conversations about art, when he visited his cellars and pruned the roses. Everything was all right when the wardrobes smelled of lavender, when he sat at his oak desk with his pen with the gold holder in his hand, and in the evening his wife massaged his tired shoulders. But as soon as he went out, drove away from home somewhere, even to the dirty marketplace in Jeszkotle or the local villages, he entirely lost his physical immunity to the world.

  He saw the crumbling houses, rotting fences, and time-worn stones cobbling the main street, and thought: “I was born too late, the world is coming to an end. It’s all over.” His head ached and his sight was growing weak – to the squire it all seemed darker, his feet were frozen and an indeterminate pain ran right through him. Everything was empty and hopeless. And there was no helping it. He would go home to his manor house and hide in his study – that stopped the world from collapsing for a while.

  But the world collapsed anyway. The squire discovered this for himself when he saw his cellars on returning after his hasty escape from the Cossacks. Everything in them had been destroyed, smashed, chopped, burned, trampled, and spilled. He surveyed the losses as he waded up to his ankles in wine.

  “Chaos and destruction, chaos and destruction,” he whispered.

  Then he lay down on the bed in his plundered home and wondered: “Where does evil come from in this world? Why does God allow evil to happen, if He is so good? Or maybe God is not good?”

  The changes taking place in the country provided a remedy for the squire’s depression.

  In 1918 there was a great deal to do, and nothing is as good a cure for grief as activity. For the whole of October the squire gradually geared himself up for social action, until in November the depression left him and he found himself on the other side of it. Now for a change he hardly slept at all and had no time to eat. He ran about the country, made trips to Kraków and saw it as a princess awoken from sleep. He organised elections for the first parliament, founded several associations, two parties, and the Malopolski Union of Fish Pond Owners. In February the next year, when the Small Constitution was enacted, Squire Popielski caught cold and ended up in his room again, in bed, with his head turned towards the window – in other words, in the place where he had started.

  His recovery from pneumonia was like coming back from a distant journey. He read a lot and began to write a memoir. He wanted to talk to someone, but everyone around him seemed banal and uninteresting. So he ordered books to be brought up to his bed from the library and ordered new ones by post.

  Early in March he went out on his first walk about the park, and saw an ugly, grey world again, full of decay and destruction. National independence didn’t help, nor did the constitution. On a path in the park he saw a red, child’s glove sticking out of the melting snow, and for some strange reason the sight of it sank deep into his memory. Dogged, blind regeneration. The apathy of life and death. The inhuman machinery of life.

  Last year’s efforts to rebuild everything anew had come to nothing.

  The older Squire Popielski became, the more terrible the world seemed to him. A young man is busy with his own blooming, pushing forwards and extending the boundaries: from his childhood bed to the walls of the room, the house, the park, the city, the country, the world, and then, in his manhood, comes a time of fantasising about something even greater. The turning point occurs at about forty. Youth in its intensity, in its full force, tires itself out. One night or one morning a man crosses a boundary, reaches his peak and takes his first step downwards, towards death. Then the question arises: should he descend proudly with his face turned towards the darkness, or should he turn around towards what was, keep up an appearance and pretend it isn’t darkness, but just that the light in the room has been extinguished?

  Meanwhile the sight of the red glove emerging from under the dirty snow convinced the squire that the greatest deception of youth is optimism of any kind, a persistent faith in the idea that something will change or improve, or that there is progress in everything. So now the vessel had broken inside him, full of the despair he had always carried within him like hemlock. The squire looked around him and saw suffering, death and decay, which were as widespread as dirt. He crossed the whole of Jeszkotle and saw the kosher abattoir, the rotten meat on hooks, a frozen beggar outside Szenbert’s shop, a small funeral cortege following a child’s coffin, low clouds over low houses on the marketplace, and the gloom that was invading from all directions, already infesting everything. It was like a gradual, continual self-immolation, in which human destinies, whole lives are thrown into the consuming flames of time.

  On his way back to the manor house he passed the church, so he dropped in there, but found nothing inside. He saw an icon of the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle, but there was no God in the church capable of restoring the squire’s hope.

  THE TIME OF THE VIRIGN MARY OF JESZKOTLE

  Enclosed in the icon’s decorative frame, the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle had a limited view of the church. She hung in a side nave, so she couldn’t see the altar, or the stoup at the entrance. A pillar shielded her view of the pulpit. All she could see were the people arriving – individuals who dropped in at the church to pray, or else whole strings of them as they glided up to the altar for communion. During mass she saw dozens of people’s profiles – men’s and women’s, old people’s and children’s.

  The Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle was the pure will to provide help for the sick and the weak. She was a strength inscribed into the icon by a divine miracle. When people turned their faces towards her, when they moved their lips, pressed their hands to their bellies or folded them at the level of their hearts, the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle gave them strength and the power to recover. She gave to it everyone without exception, not out of mercy, but because that was her nature – to give the power to recover to those who needed it. What happened thereafter was for the people to decide. Some allowed this strength to take effect within them, and those ones got better. Then they came back with votive offerings, miniatures of the healed parts of the body cast in silver, copper, or even gold, and with beads and necklaces with which they decked the icon.

  Others let the power trickle out of them, as out of a leaking vessel, and it soaked into the ground. And then they lost their faith in miracles.

  So it was with Squire Popielski, who appeared before the icon of the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle. She saw him kneel down and try to pray. But he couldn’t, so he stood up angrily and looked at the valuable votive offerings and the bright colours of the holy painting. The Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle saw that he was greatly in need of good, helpful strength for his body and soul. And she gave it to him, she filled him with it and immersed him in it. But Squire Popielski was as watertight as a crystal ball, so the good strength flowed off him onto the cold church floor and set the church in a gentle, barely palpable tremble.

  THE TIME OF MICHA�
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  Michał came back in the summer of 1919. It was a miracle, because in a world where war has pushed every kind of law beyond its limits, miracles often occur.

  Michał spent three months getting home. The place he had set off from was on virtually the other side of the globe – Vladivostok, a city on the coast of a foreign sea. So he had broken free of the ruler of the East, the king of chaos, but as whatever exists beyond the boundaries of Primeval is blurred and fluid as a dream, Michał was no longer thinking of that as he stepped onto the bridge.

  He was sick, emaciated, and dirty. His face was covered in black stubble, and there were swarms of lice revelling in his hair. The threadbare uniform of a beaten army hung on him as on a stick, without a single button. Michał had swapped the shining buttons with the imperial eagle for bread. He also had a fever, diarrhoea, and the tormenting feeling that the world he had set out from no longer existed. Hope came back to him as he stood on the bridge and saw the Black and White Rivers merging together in a never-ending wedding. The rivers were still there, the bridge was still there, and so was the stone-crushing heat.

  From the bridge Michał saw the white mill and the red geraniums in the windows.