Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

  Outside the mill a child was playing, a little girl with thick plaits. She must have been three or four years old. White hens were earnestly tripping around her. A woman’s hands opened the window. “The worst is going to happen,” thought Michał. Reflected in the moving windowpane, the sun dazzled him for a moment. Michał headed for the mill.

  He slept all day and all night, and in his sleep he counted all the days of the past five years. His tired, fuddled mind lost its way and wandered in the labyrinths of sleep, so Michał had to start his count all over again. During this time Genowefa took a close look at the uniform, stiff with dust, touched the sweat-soaked collar, and plunged her hands in the pockets that smelled of tobacco. She caressed the buckles of the rucksack but did not dare to open it. Then the uniform hung on the fence, so that everyone who walked past the mill was bound to see it.

  Michał awoke the next day at dawn and examined the sleeping child. He gave precise names to what he saw:

  “She has thick, brown hair. She has dark eyebrows, a dark complexion, small ears, a small nose, all children have small noses, her hands are plump and childish, but you can see the fingernails, they’re round.”

  Then he went up to the mirror and examined himself. He was a stranger to himself.

  He walked around the mill and stroked the great stone wheel as it turned. He gathered flour dust in his hand and tasted it with the tip of his tongue. He plunged his hands in the water, ran his finger along the fence boards, sniffed the flowers, and set the wheel of the chaff-cutter in motion. It creaked and cut off a swathe of crushed nettles.

  Behind the mill he walked into the tall grass and peed.

  When he came back into the room he mustered the courage to look at Genowefa. She wasn’t asleep. He gazed at her.

  “Michał, no man has touched me.”

  THE TIME OF MISIA

  Like every person, Misia was born broken into pieces, incomplete, in bits. Everything in her was separate – looking, hearing, understanding, feeling, sensing, and experiencing. Misia’s entire future life would depend on putting it all together into a single whole, and then letting it fall apart.

  She needed someone who would stand before her and be a mirror for her, in which she was reflected as a whole.

  Misia’s first memory was the sight of the ragged man on the road to the mill. Her father staggered as he walked, and then often cried at night, nestling against her mother’s breasts. So Misia treated him as her equal.

  From then on she felt there was no difference between adult and child in anything that really mattered. Child and adult – they were transitory states. Misia watched closely to see how she herself was changing and how the other people around her were changing, but she didn’t know where it was all heading, what the aim of these changes was. In a cardboard box she kept mementoes of herself, her little self and then the bigger one – knitted baby bootees, a tiny cap as if made to fit a fist, not a child’s head, a little linen top, and her first little dress. Then she placed her six-year-old foot next to the knitted bootee and felt a sense of the fascinating laws of time.

  Since her father’s return, Misia had started to see the world. Before then everything had been blurred and out of focus. Misia could not remember herself from before her father’s return, as if she hadn’t existed at all. She remembered individual objects. The mill had seemed enormous to her then, a monolithic mass with no beginning or end, no top or bottom. Afterwards she saw the mill differently, with her reason. It had meaning and form. It was the same with other things. Once, when Misia had thought “river,” it had meant something cold and wet. Now she could see that the river flowed to and from somewhere, and that the same river existed before and after the bridge, and that there were other rivers … Scissors – once they were a strange, complicated tool, difficult to make work, which Mama put to magical use. Ever since her father had sat down at the table, Misia could see that the scissors were a simple mechanism with two blades. She made something similar out of two flat sticks. Then for a long time she tried seeing things as they had formerly been again, but her father had changed the world forever.

  THE TIME OF MISIA’S GRINDER

  People think they live more intensely than animals, than plants, and especially than things. Animals sense that they live more intensely than plants and things. Plants dream that they live more intensely than things. But things last, and this lasting is more alive than anything else.

  Misia’s grinder came into being because of someone’s hands combining wood, china and brass into a single object. The wood, china and brass made the idea of grinding materialise. Grinding coffee beans to pour boiling water on them afterwards. There is no one of whom it could be said that he invented the grinder, because creating is merely reminding yourself of what exists beyond time, in other words, since time began. Man is incapable of creating out of nothing – that is a divine skill.

  The grinder has a belly made of white china, and in the belly an opening, in which a small wooden drawer collects the fruits of its labour. The belly is covered with a brass hat, with a handle ending in a bit of wood. The hat has a closing hole, into which the rattling coffee beans are poured.

  The grinder was made in some factory workshop, and then ended up at someone’s house, where every morning it ground coffee. Hands held it, warm and alive. They pressed it to someone’s breasts, where under calico or flannel a human heart was beating. Then the impetus of war transferred it from a safe shelf in the kitchen to a box with other objects, into valises and sacks, into train carriages, in which people pushed ahead in panic-stricken flight from violent death. Like every other thing, the grinder absorbed all the world’s confusion: images of trains under fire, idle rivulets of blood, and abandoned houses, as a different wind played with their windows every year. It absorbed the warmth of human bodies going cold and the despair of abandoning the familiar. Hands touched it, and they all brushed it with an immeasurable quantity of thoughts and emotions. The grinder accepted them, because all kinds of matter have this capacity – to arrest whatever is fleeting and transitory.

  Michał had found it far away in the East, and had hidden it in his army rucksack as a spoil of war. That evening when the soldiers stopped for the night he had sniffed its drawer – it smelled of safety, coffee, home.

  Misia took the grinder outside to the bench in front of the house and turned the handle. Then the grinder ran lightly, as if it were playing with her. Misia watched the world from the bench, and the grinder turned and ground empty space. But one day Genowefa tipped a handful of black beans into it and told it to grind them. Then the handle no longer turned as smoothly. The grinder choked, and slowly, systematically, began to work and to creak. The playing was over. There was so much gravity in the grinder’s work that no one would have dared to stop it now. It became nothing but grinding. And then the grinder, Misia and the whole world were united by the odour of freshly ground coffee.

  If you take a close look at an object, with your eyes closed to avoid being deceived by the appearances that things exude around themselves, if you allow yourself to be mistrustful, you can see their true faces, at least for a moment.

  Things are beings steeped in another reality, where there is no time or motion. Only their surface can be seen. The rest, hidden elsewhere, defines the significance and meaning of each material object. A coffee grinder, for example.

  The grinder is just such a piece of material infused with the concept of grinding.

  Grinders grind, and that is why they exist. But no one knows what the grinder means in general. Perhaps the grinder is a splinter off some total, fundamental law of transformation, a law without which this world could not go round or would be completely different. Perhaps coffee grinders are the axis of reality, around which everything turns and unwinds, perhaps they are more important for the world than people. And perhaps Misia’s one single grinder is the pillar of what is called Primeval.

  THE TIME OF THE PARISH PRIEST

  Late spring was the m
ost loathsome time of year for the parish priest. Around Saint John’s Day, the Black River brazenly flooded his meadows.

  The priest was by nature impetuous and touchy about his dignity, so when he saw something of so little substance, so sluggish, so non-descript and vacuous, so elusive and cowardly taking away his meadows, he was filled with rage.

  With the water, shameless frogs immediately appeared, naked and revolting, always climbing on top of one another and mindlessly copulating, emitting hideous noises as they did so. The devil must have had a voice like that: screeching, wet, hoarse with lust, and trembling with insatiable desire. And with the frogs, water snakes appeared in the priest’s meadows, slithering and writhing in such a vile way that the priest instantly felt unwell. At the very thought that such a long, slimy body might touch his boot he felt a shudder of disgust and a stab of cramp in his stomach. The image of the snake would sink into his memory for a long time after, ravaging his dreams. There were also fish in the flooded areas, and to these the priest had a better attitude. The fish could be eaten, so they were good, God’s gift.

  The river flooded the meadows for at most three short nights. After the invasion it rested, reflecting the sky in itself. It went on lolling about like that for a month. Under the water, all month long the lush grass rotted, and if it was a hot summer, a smell of rot and decay floated over the meadows.

  From Saint John’s Day, every day the priest came to see the black river water flooding Saint Margaret’s daisies, Saint Roch’s bluebells, and Saint Clare’s herbs. Sometimes it seemed to him as if the innocent blue and white heads of the flowers, up to their necks in water, were calling out to him for help. He could hear their reedy little voices, like the tinkling of the hand bells during the Elevation. There was nothing he could do for them. His face went red as he clenched his fists helplessly.

  He prayed. He began with Saint John, patron saint of all waters. But in this prayer the priest often felt that Saint John was not listening to him, that he was more concerned about the equation of day and night and the bonfires lit by the young, about vodka, about the conduct of garlands tossed into the water, and nocturnal rustling in the bushes. He even had a grudge against Saint John, who every year, regularly allowed the Black River to flood his meadows. He was even quite offended by Saint John because of it. So he started praying to God Himself.

  The next year, after the biggest flood, God said to the parish priest: “Separate the river from the meadows. Bring in lots of earth and build a protective embankment to keep the river in its channel.” The priest thanked the Lord and started organising the construction of an embankment. For two weeks he thundered from the pulpit that the river was destroying God’s gifts, and called for a concerted fight against the element in the following order: one man from each homestead would carry earth and build the embankment two days a week. Thursday and Friday were assigned to Primeval, Monday and Tuesday to Jeszkotle, and Wednesday and Saturday to Kotuszów.

  On the first day appointed for Primeval, only two peasants turned up for work, Malak and Cherubin. The enraged priest got in his sprung chaise and drove round all the cottages in Primeval. It turned out Serafin had a broken finger, the young Florian had been conscripted, the Chlipalas had just had a baby, and wiatosz had a hernia.

  So the priest achieved nothing. Feeling discouraged, he went back to the presbytery.

  That evening at prayer he sought God’s advice again. And God replied: “Pay them.” The priest was slightly confused by this answer. As however the parish priest’s God was sometimes very like him, He immediately added: “Give at most ten groszy for a day’s work, because otherwise the game won’t be worth the candle. The entire hay crop isn’t worth more than fifteen zlotys.”

  So once again the priest drove his chaise to Primeval and hired several brawny peasants to build the embankment. He took on Józek Chlipala, whose son had just been born, Serafin with his broken finger, and two more farmhands.

  They only had one cart, so the work went slowly. The priest was worried the spring weather would foil his plans. He urged the peasants on as much as he could. He, too, rolled up his cassock but, mindful of his good leather boots, he just ran among the peasants, prodding the sacks and whipping the horse. Next day only Serafin with his broken finger came to work. Once again the angry priest drove his chaise round the entire village, but it turned out the workmen either weren’t at home, or had been laid low by illness.

  That was a day when the priest hated all the peasants from Primeval – they were lazy, indolent, and greedy for money. He ardently excused himself before the Lord for this feeling unworthy of His servant. Again he asked God for advice. “Raise their wages,” God told him, “give them fifteen groszy for a day’s work, and even though you won’t have any profit from this year’s hay, you will make up the loss next year.” This was wise council. The work went ahead.

  First of all, sand was brought on carts from beyond Górka, then the sand was loaded into jute sacks and the river was lined with them like a dressing, as if it were wounded. Only then was it all covered in earth, and grass was sown on top.

  The parish priest joyfully examined his own work. Now the river was completely separated from the meadow. The river could not see the meadow. The meadow could not see the river.

  The river no longer tried to tear free of its appointed place. It flowed along peaceful and pensive, impenetrable to the human gaze. Along its banks the meadows went green, and then flowered with dandelions.

  In the priest’s meadows the flowers never stop praying. All those Saint Margaret’s daisies and Saint Roch’s bluebells pray, and so do the common yellow dandelions. Constant prayer makes the bodies of the dandelions become less and less material, less and less yellow, less and less solid, until in June they change into subtle seed clocks. Then God, moved by their piety, sends warm winds that take the seed-clock souls of the dandelions up to heaven.

  The same warm winds brought the rains on Saint John’s Day. The river swelled centimetre by centimetre. The parish priest could not sleep or eat. He ran along the weir and the meadows by the river and watched. He measured the water level with a stick and muttered curses and prayers. The river took no notice of him. It flowed in a broad channel, whirled in eddies and washed up against the insecure banks. On the twenty-seventh of June the priest’s meadows started soaking up water. The parish priest ran along the new embankment with his stick and watched in despair as the water easily got into the chinks, rose along paths known only to itself, and penetrated the embankment. The next night the waters of the Black River destroyed the sand dyke and flooded the meadows, as every year.

  On Sunday from the pulpit the priest compared the river’s exploits to the work of Satan, saying that every day, hour by hour, just like the water, Satan puts pressure on a man’s soul. That in this way a man is forced to make a constant effort to put up barriers. That the slightest neglect of daily religious duties weakens the barrier and that the tenacity of the tempter is comparable with the tenacity of the water. That sin trickles, flows and drips onto the wings of the soul, and the enormity of evil keeps flooding a man until he falls into its whirlpools and goes to the bottom.

  After this sermon the priest went on feeling agitated for a long time, and could not sleep. He could not sleep for hatred of the Black River. He told himself it is impossible to hate a river, a stream of turbid water, not even a plant, not an animal, just a geographical feature. How was it possible for him, a priest, to feel something so absurd? To hate a river.

  And yet it was hatred. The priest wasn’t even bothered about the sodden hay, but he was bothered by the mindlessness and blunt obstinacy of the Black River, its impalpability, selfishness and limitless vacuity. When he thought about it like that, hot blood pulsed in his temples and ran round his body faster. It began to carry him away. He would get up and dress, regardless of the time of night, and then leave the presbytery and go into the meadows. The cold wind sobered him up. He smiled to himself and said: “How can I get angry
at a river, a common dip in the ground? A river is just a river, nothing more.” But once he was standing on its bank, it all came back. He was filled with disgust, revulsion, and rage. He would gladly have buried it in earth, from its source to its mouth. And he looked around to make sure no one could see him, then tore off an alder branch and lashed the shameless, rounded hulk of the river.

  THE TIME OF ELI

  “Go away. If I see you, I can’t sleep,” Genowefa told him.

  “And if I don’t see you, I can’t live.”

  She gazed at him with her light grey eyes and again he felt her touch the very centre of his soul with that look of hers. She put down her buckets and brushed a strand of hair from her brow.

  “Bring the buckets and come down to the river with me.”

  “What will your husband say?”

  “He’s at the manor.”

  “What will the workmen say?”

  “You’re helping me.”

  Eli grabbed the buckets and followed her down the stony track.

  “You’ve grown into a man,” said Genowefa without turning round.

  “Do you think about me when we don’t see each other?”

  “I think about you whenever you think about me. Every day. I dream about you.”

  “Oh God, why don’t you end it?” Eli abruptly put the buckets down on the path. “What sin have I or my fathers committed? Why must I suffer so?”

  Genowefa stopped and looked at her feet.

  “Don’t blaspheme, Eli.”

  For a while they said nothing. Eli picked up the buckets and they went onwards. The path widened, so now they could walk abreast of each other.

  “We won’t be seeing each other any more, Eli. I’m pregnant. I’m going to have the child in autumn.”

  “It ought to be my child.”

  “It has all become clear and sorted itself out …”