Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

  In the thirty-eighth year of his life Squire Popielski felt as if he had discovered sex. It was wild, crazy sex, like modern art, like Maria Szer. By the bed in her studio stood an enormous mirror, which reflected the entire transformation of Maria Szer and Squire Popielski into a woman and a man. It reflected the rumpled bedding and the sheepskins, and the naked bodies smeared in paint, and the grimaces on their faces, and their naked breasts, and their bellies, and their backs with smudged lipstick streaks.

  On his way back to the manor from Kraków in his new car, Squire Popielski would elaborate plans to escape to Brazil, or to Africa with his Maria, but once he crossed the threshold he was happy to find everything in its place, safe and permanent, reliable.

  After six months of madness Maria Szer informed him that she was leaving for America. She said everything was new there, full of vigour and energy, and that there you could create your own life, like a futurist painting. After her departure Squire Popielski caught a strange illness with lots of symptoms, which to simplify matters was called arthritis. For a month he lay in bed, where he could surrender to suffering in peace.

  He lay there for a month, not so much out of pain or weakness, as because the facts he had been trying to forget for the past few years were back – that the world was ending, and reality was disintegrating like rotten wood, matter was being eaten away from underneath by mould, it was happening quite senselessly and was meaningless. The squire’s body had given up – it too was disintegrating. The same thing had happened to his will. The time between making a decision and taking action kept bloating and becoming unendurable. Squire Popielski’s throat was swollen and stifled. It all meant that he was still alive, that various processes were still going on in his body, his blood was flowing, and his heart was beating. “It has caught up with me,” thought the squire, and from his bed he tried to fix his vision on something, but his vision had become sticky: it wandered about the furniture, landing on them like a fly. Plip! It landed on a pile of books that the squire had had brought to him but hadn’t read. Plip! a bottle of medicine. Plip! a stain on the wall. Plip! the view of the sky through the window. He found it tiring to look into people’s faces. They seemed so mobile, so volatile. It took a lot of vigilance to look into them, but Squire Popielski didn’t have the strength for vigilance, so he averted his gaze.

  Squire Popielski had a crushing, ghastly feeling that the world, and everything that was good and bad in it, was passing him by: love, sex, money, thrills, distant voyages, beautiful pictures, intelligent books, wonderful people – all this was gliding past. The squire’s time was slipping away. Then in sudden despair he felt a desire to break free and rush off somewhere. But where, and what for? He fell onto the pillows and choked back his unwept tears.

  And once again the spring brought him some hope of salvation. Once he had started to walk, admittedly on a cane, he stood by his favourite pond and asked himself the first question: Where do I come from? He stirred anxiously. Where did I come from, where is my beginning? He went home and made an effort to force himself to read – about the ancient world and prehistory, about excavations and Cretan culture. About anthropology and heraldry. But all this knowledge took him nowhere, so he asked himself a second question: What can a person actually know? And what are the benefits of acquired knowledge? And can you know something fully? He thought and thought, and on Saturdays he discussed the matter with Pelski, who came to play bridge. Nothing resulted from these discussions and reflections. With time he no longer felt like opening his mouth. He knew what Pelski would say, and he knew what he himself would say. He felt as if they were always talking about the same thing, repeating their questions, as if they were playing roles, like moths coming closer to a lamp and then shying away from the obvious truth that might burn them. So finally he asked himself a third question: What should a person achieve, how should he live, what should he do, and what not? He read Machiavelli’s The Prince, and books by Thoreau, Kropotkin, and Kotarbinski. All summer he read so much that he hardly ever left his room. Worried by this, one evening his wife went up to his desk and said:

  “They say that rabbi from Jeszkotle is a healer. I went to see him and I asked him to come and visit us. He agreed.”

  The squire smiled, disarmed by his wife’s naivety.

  The conversation did not turn out the way he had imagined it. Along with the rabbi came a young Jew, because the rabbi could not speak Polish. Squire Popielski had no wish to confide his sufferings in this bizarre couple. So he asked the old man his three questions, though to tell the truth, he wasn’t counting on an answer. The young man with sidelocks translated the clear, lucid Polish sentences into the rabbi’s tortuous, throaty language. Then the rabbi surprised the squire.

  “You collect questions. That’s good. I have one more, final question for your collection: Where are we heading? What is the goal of time?”

  The rabbi stood up. In parting he offered the squire his hand in a very well-bred manner. Moments later he made another strange remark from the doorway, and the boy translated:

  “The time for some tribes is coming to an end. Therefore I will give you something that should now become your property.”

  The squire was amused by the Jew’s mysterious and solemn tone. For the first time in months he ate his dinner with an appetite and made fun of his wife.

  “You’re resorting to all manner of sorcery to cure me of my arthritis. Evidently the best medicine for ailing joints is an old Jew who answers a question with a question.”

  For dinner there was carp in aspic.

  Next day the boy with sidelocks came to see the squire and brought him a large wooden box. Intrigued, the squire opened it. Inside there were some compartments. In one lay an old book with a Latin title: Ignis fatuus, or an instructive game for one player.

  In the next compartment, which was lined in velvet, lay a birch-wood octagonal die. On each face it had a different number of spots, from one to eight. Squire Popielski had never seen a die like this one before. In the remaining compartments lay some little brass figurines of people, animals, and objects. Underneath he found a piece of cloth, folded over and over and frayed at the edges. More and more amazed by this bizarre present, he unfolded the cloth on the floor, until it took up almost the entire empty space between his desk and the bookcases. It was a sort of game, a sort of ludo in the form of a huge, circular labyrinth.

  THE TIME OF DIPPER THE DROWNED MAN

  The Drowned Man was the soul of a peasant called Dipper. Dipper had drowned in the pond one August, when the vodka he had drunk thinned his blood too much. He was on his way back by cart from Wola when his horses were suddenly startled by moon shadows and overturned the cart. The peasant had fallen into the shallow water, and the horses had gone off in confusion. The water at the edge of the pond was warm, thanks to the August sunshine, and Dipper felt good lying in it. When the warm water got into the drunken Dipper’s lungs, he groaned, but he didn’t sober up.

  Trapped in his drunken body, his intoxicated soul, a soul that hadn’t been absolved, with no map of the road onwards to God, remained like a dog by the body going cold in the bulrushes.

  Such a soul is blind and helpless. It keeps stubbornly returning to the body, because it knows no other form of existence. Yet it pines for the land it comes from, where it once used to be and from which it has been expelled into the material world. It remembers it, reminisces, laments and pines, but it does not know how to get back there. It is carried on waves of despair. Then it abandons the now rotting corpse and tries to find the way on its own. It wanders about crossroads and wayside inns and tries to cadge rides by the highways. It takes on various forms. It enters into animals and things, sometimes even barely conscious people, but it never manages to settle anywhere. In the material world it is an outcast, and nor does the spirit world want it either. For to enter the spirit world it needs a map.

  After this hopeless wandering the soul returns to the body or to the place where it left the body. B
ut for it the cold, dead body is what the charred remains of a house are for a living person. The soul tries to get the dead heart and the dead, lifeless eyelids moving, but it hasn’t enough strength or determination. In keeping with divine order, the dead body says: No. Thus the person’s body becomes a hated home, and the site of the body’s death the soul’s hated prison. The Drowned Man’s soul rustles in the reeds, simulates shadows and sometimes borrows a shape from the mist, thanks to which it tries to make contact with people. It can’t understand why people avoid it, why it strikes terror in them.

  So in its confusion Dipper’s soul thought that it was still Dipper.

  In time, a sort of disappointment and dislike of everything human was born in Dipper’s soul. Some remains of old, human or even animal thoughts were tangled in it, some memories and images. So it believed it would re-enact the moment of disaster, the moment of Dipper’s or someone else’s death, and that this would help it to become free. That was why it wanted so badly to startle some other horses, overturn a cart and drown a person. So from the soul of Dipper the Drowned Man was born.

  The Drowned Man chose as his headquarters a forest pond with a dike and a little bridge, and also the entire forest called Wodenica, and the meadows from Papiernia all the way to Wydymacz, where the mist could be especially dense. Mindless and vacant, he roamed his estates. Only sometimes, when he met a man or an animal, was he animated by a sense of anger. Then his enduring took on meaning. He would do his best at any price to cause whatever creature he encountered some evil, lesser or greater, but an evil.

  The Drowned Man was always discovering his own potential anew. At first he thought he was weak and defenceless, that he was something like a flurry of wind, a light haze or a puddle of water. Then he discovered that he could move faster than anyone could imagine, just by thought alone. He thought about a place, and at once he could be there, in a flash. He also discovered that the mist obeyed him, and that he could control it as he wished. He could take strength from it, or a shape, he could move entire clouds of it, block out the sun with it, blur the horizon and extend the night. The Drowned Man realised that he was the King of the Mist, and from then on that was how he started to think of himself – the King of the Mist.

  The King of the Mist felt best under water. For years on end he lay under its surface on a bed of silt and rotting leaves. From under the water he watched the changing seasons and the movements of the sun and the moon. From under the water he saw the rain, the leaves falling in autumn, the dances of summer dragonflies, people bathing, and the orange feet of wild ducks. Sometimes something woke him from this sleep-non-sleep, sometimes not. He never wondered about it. He just endured.

  THE TIME OF OLD BOSKI

  Old Boski spent his entire life on the manor house roof. The manor house was large, and its roof enormous – full of slants, slopes, and edges. And entirely covered in beautiful wooden shingle. If you were to straighten out the manor house roof and spread it on the ground, it would cover the entire field that Boski owned.

  Boski left the cultivation of this land to his wife and children – he had three girls and a boy, Paweł, handsome and capable. Each morning Old Boski went up onto the roof and replaced the rotting or mouldering shingles. His work had no end. Nor did it have a beginning, because Boski did not start from a specific spot and did not move in a specific direction. On his knees he examined the wooden roof metre by metre, shifting here and there.

  At noon his wife brought him his dinner in a double pot. In one container there was rye soup, in the other potatoes, or buckwheat with fried crackling and buttermilk, or cabbage and potatoes. Old Boski didn’t come down for dinner. He was handed the double pot on a rope in the bucket in which the wooden shingles went up.

  Boski ate, and as he chewed he looked at the world around him. From the manor roof he saw meadows, the Black River, the roofs of Primeval, and tiny human figures, so small and fragile that Old Boski fancied blowing on them and sweeping them off the world like refuse. At this thought he would stuff another helping of food into his mouth, and on his weather-beaten face a grimace would appear that may have been a smile. Boski liked this moment of each day, when he imagined people being blown about in all directions. Sometimes he imagined it slightly differently: his breath became a hurricane, tearing the roofs off houses, knocking over trees and cutting down orchards. Water would flood into the plains, and people would hurry to build boats to save themselves and their property. Craters would appear in the earth, from which pure fire would burst forth. Steam would blast into the sky from the battle between fire and water. Everything would shake in its foundations and finally cave in like the roof of an old house. People would stop mattering – Boski would destroy the entire world.

  He swallowed his mouthful and sighed. The vision evaporated. Now he rolled himself a cigarette and looked closer, at the manor courtyard, the park and the moat, the swans and the pond. He would stare at the carriages driving up, and later the cars. From the roof he saw ladies’ hats and gentlemen’s bald patches, he saw the squire coming home from a horseback ride and the squire’s wife, who always took tiny little steps. He saw the young lady, fragile and delicate, and her dogs, which inspired terror in the village. He saw the eternal traffic of lots of people, their greeting and parting gestures and facial expressions, people coming in and going out, talking to each other and listening.

  But what did they matter to him? He would finish smoking his roll-up, and his gaze would stubbornly return to the wooden shingles, to settle on them like a freshwater mussel, to savour and feed on them. And at once he would be thinking how to trim and cut them – and so his dinner break came to an end.

  His wife would fetch the double pot, which he let down on the rope, and go home across the meadows to Primeval.

  THE TIME OF PAWEŁ BOSKI

  Old Boski’s son Paweł wanted to be someone “important.” He was afraid that if he didn’t start to take action soon, he would become as “unimportant” as his father and would spend his whole life putting shingles on a roof. So when he turned sixteen, he got out of the house where his ugly sisters reigned supreme and found himself a job in Jeszkotle working for a Jew named Aba Kozienicki, who traded in wood. At first Paweł worked as an ordinary woodcutter and loader, but Aba must have liked him, because he soon entrusted him with the responsible job of marking and grading the tree trunks.

  Even in grading wood Paweł Boski always looked to the future – the past didn’t interest him. The very thought that you could shape the future, and have an influence on what would happen, excited him. Sometimes he wondered how it all comes about. If he had been born in the manor as a Popielski, would he have been the same as he was now? Would he have thought the same way? Would he still have liked Misia, the Niebieskis’ daughter? Would he still have wanted to be a paramedic, or would he have aimed higher – doctor, university professor?

  One thing the young Boski was sure of – knowledge. Knowledge and education were wide open to everyone. Of course it was easier for others, all those Popielskis and such like. And it wasn’t fair. But on the other hand he, too, could learn, though it would take greater effort, because he had to earn a living and help his parents.

  So after work he went to the district library and borrowed books. The district library was poorly stocked. It lacked encyclopaedias and dictionaries. The shelves were full of things like The Kings’ Daughters and Without a Dowry – books for women. At home he hid the library books from his sisters in his bed. He didn’t like them touching his things.

  All three sisters were big, solid, and coarse. Their heads looked small. They had low brows and thick fair hair, like straw. The prettiest of them was Stasia. When she smiled, her white teeth flashed in her tanned face. She was a bit disfigured by her awkward, waddling feet. The middle one, Tosia, was already engaged to a farmer from Kotuszów, and Zosia, large and strong, was supposed to be leaving any day for domestic service in Kielce, the big city. Paweł was glad they were leaving home, though he dislike
d his home as much as he disliked his sisters.

  He hated the dirt that got into the cracks in the old wooden cottage, into the floors and under his fingernails. He hated the stench of cow’s manure that permeated his clothing when he went into the barn. He hated the smell of potatoes being steamed for the pigs – it pervaded the entire house and everything inside it, his hair and skin. He hated the boorish dialect in which his parents spoke and which sometimes pushed its way onto his own tongue. He hated the cloth, the raw wood, the wooden spoons, the holy pictures from the church fête, and his sisters’ fat legs. Sometimes he managed to gather this hatred somewhere in the area of his jaws, and then he felt a great strength in himself. He knew he would have everything he desired, that he would push forwards and no one would be able to stop him.

  THE TIME OF THE GAME

  The labyrinth drawn on the cloth consisted of eight circles, or spheres, called Worlds. The closer to the middle, the denser the labyrinth seemed to be, and the more blind alleys and back streets leading to nowhere there were in it. And vice versa – the outer spheres gave the impression of being brighter and more spacious, and here the paths of the labyrinth seemed wider and less chaotic, as if inviting you to wander. The sphere that represented the centre of the labyrinth – the darkest and most tangled one – was called the First World. By this World someone’s unskilled hand had drawn an arrow in copying pencil and written: “Primeval.” “Why Primeval?” wondered Squire Popielski. “Why not Kotuszów, Jeszkotle, Kielce, Kraków, Paris, or London?” A complex system of little roads, intersections, forks and fields led deviously towards a single passage into the next circular zone, called the Second World. In comparison with the tangle at the centre, here there was a bit more space. Two exits led to the Third World, and Squire Popielski soon realised that in each World there would be twice as many exits as in the previous one. With the tip of his fountain pen he carefully counted all the exits from the final sphere of the labyrinth. There were 128 of them.