Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

  Michał shrugged.

  Finally they began to bring in the furniture. Old Boski made most of it, but there were also pieces brought by horse and cart from Kielce, such as a large grandfather clock, a dresser for the living room, and a round oak table with carved legs.

  Misia’s eyes grew sad when she looked at the house’s surroundings – flat, grey earth covered in dry grass of the kind that grows on fallow ground. So Michał bought a lot of trees for Misia. And in the course of a single day around the house he established something that would one day be an orchard, with apple trees, pears, plums, and walnuts. At the very centre of the orchard he planted twin rennet apples, the tree that grows the fruit that tempted Eve.

  THE TIME OF MRS PAPUGA

  Stasia Boska lived alone with her father after her mother’s death, and after her sisters had gone to live with their husbands and Paweł had married Misia.

  It was hard living with old Boski. He was always dissatisfied and quick tempered. Sometimes he thrashed her with something heavy if she was late with his dinner. Then Stasia would go among the currants, crouch among the bushes and cry. She tried to cry quietly, to avoid enraging her father even more.

  When Boski found out from his son that Michał Niebieski had bought land to build a house for his daughter, he couldn’t sleep. A few days later he scraped together all his savings and bought some land too, right next to Michał’s.

  He decided to build a house there for Stasia. He spent a long time thinking about it, as he sat on the manor house roof. “If Michał Niebieski can put up a house for his daughter, why can’t I, Boski, do the same?” he reflected. “Why shouldn’t I build a house, too?”

  And Boski started building a house.

  He marked out a rectangle on the ground with a stick, and next day began to dig the foundations. Squire Popielski gave him a holiday. It was the first holiday old Boski had ever had. Then Boski fetched large and smaller rocks from the neighbourhood, white chunks of limestone that he arranged evenly in the excavated pits. It took a month. Paweł came to see Boski and lamented over the excavated pits.

  “What are you doing, Papa? Where will you get the money? Don’t make a fool of yourself by building some henhouse under my nose.”

  “Big-headed already, are you? I’m building your sister a house.”

  Paweł knew there was no way of convincing his father, so finally he fetched the planks for him by horse and cart.

  Now the houses were rising almost in parallel. One was big and shapely, with large windows and spacious rooms. The other was small, pressed to the ground, hunched, with tiny windows. One stood on an open space, with the forest and River behind it. The other was wedged in between the Highway and the Wola Road, hidden in the currant bushes and wild lilac.

  While Boski was busy building the house, Stasia had more peace. By noon she had to feed the animals, and then she got down to making the dinner. First she went to the field, and from the sandy earth she dug up some potatoes. She dreamed she might find treasure under the bushes, jewels wrapped in a rag or a tin full of dollars. Later on as she peeled the small potatoes, she would imagine she was a healer, the potatoes were the sick people who had come to her, and she was removing their illness and cleansing their bodies of all foul matter. Then as she tossed the peeled potatoes into the boiling water she would imagine she was brewing an elixir of beauty, and as soon as she drank it, her life would change once and for all. Some doctor or lawyer from Kielce would see her on the Highway, shower her in gifts and fall in love with her like a princess.

  That was why making the dinner took so long.

  Imagining is essentially creative; it is a bridge reconciling matter and spirit. Especially when it is done intensely and often. Then the image turns into a drop of matter, and joins the currents of life. Sometimes along the way something in it gets distorted and changes. Therefore, if they are strong enough, all human desires come true – but not always entirely as expected.

  One day, when Stasia went outside to pour away the dirty water, she saw a strange man. And it was just as in her dreams. He came up to her and asked the way to Kielce, and she replied. A few hours later he came back and ran into Stasia again, this time with a yoke across her shoulders, so he helped her and they talked for longer. He was not actually a lawyer or a doctor, but a postal worker, employed to install the telephone line from Kielce to Taszów. Stasia found him jolly and self-confident. He arranged to meet her for a walk on Wednesday and for some fun on Saturday. And the amazing thing was that old Boski liked him. The newcomer was called Papuga.

  From then on Stasia’s life started taking a different course. She bloomed. She spent time in Jeszkotle and went shopping at Szenbert’s, and everyone saw Papuga driving her there in a chaise. In the autumn of 1937 Stasia fell pregnant, and at Christmas they were married and she became Mrs Papuga. The modest wedding reception was held in the one room of the newly completed cottage. The next day old Boski put up a wooden wall across the room, and in this way he divided the house in two.

  In the summer Stasia gave birth to a son. By now the telephone line went far beyond the boundaries of Primeval. Papuga only appeared on Sundays, when he was tired and demanding. His wife’s endearments irritated him, and he was annoyed at having to wait so long for his dinner. Then he only came every other Sunday, and at All Saints he didn’t turn up at all. He said he had to visit his parents’ graves, and Stasia believed him.

  As she waited for him with the Christmas Eve supper, she saw her reflection in the windowpane, which the night had made into a mirror, and realised Papuga had gone for good.

  THE TIME OF MISIA’S ANGEL

  As Misia was giving birth to her first child, the angel showed her Jerusalem.

  Misia was lying in bed in her bedroom between white sheets, amid a scent of floors scrubbed with lye, shielded from the sun by grosgrain lily-pattern curtains. The doctor from Jeszkotle was there, and a nurse, and Genowefa, and Paweł, who kept sterilising all sorts of instruments, and the angel, whom no one could see.

  Everything was muddled in Misia’s head. She was tired. The pains came suddenly, and she couldn’t cope with them. She drifted into a sleep, a half-sleep, a waking dream. She imagined she was as tiny as a coffee bean and was falling into the funnel of a grinder as vast as the manor house. Down she fell into the black abyss, and landed in the grinding machinery. It hurt. Her body was being turned into dust.

  The angel could see Misia’s thoughts and felt for her body, though it could not understand what the pain was really like. So for a brief moment it took Misia’s soul away to a completely different place, and showed her Jerusalem.

  Misia saw vast stretches of a tawny desert that undulated as if it were in motion. In a gentle depression in this sea of sand lay a city. It was circular. Around it there were stone walls, in which stood four gates. The first gate was the Milk Gate, the second Honey, the third Wine, and the fourth Olive Oil. From each gate a single road led into the middle. Along the first oxen were being driven, along the second lions were being led, along the third falcons were being carried, and along the fourth people were walking. Misia found herself in the middle of the city, where on a cobbled marketplace stood the Saviour’s house. She was standing outside his door.

  To her surprise, someone knocked from the inside, and Misia asked: “Who’s there?” “It’s me,” replied a voice. “Come in,” she said. Then the Lord Jesus came out to her and hugged her to his chest. Misia could smell the scent of the cloth in which he was dressed. The Lord Jesus and the entire world loved her.

  But at this point Misia’s angel, who was paying close attention all the time, took her from the arms of the Lord Jesus and threw her back into her child-bearing body. Misia sighed and gave birth to a son.

  the time of cornspike

  During the first autumn full moon Cornspike dug up the roots of herbs – soapwort, comfrey, coriander, chicory, and marshmallow. There were lots of them growing by the ponds in Primeval. So Cornspike would take her daughter with
her, and they would walk by night through the forest and village.

  One day as they were passing Maybug Hill, they saw a hunched female figure surrounded by dogs. The silver moonlight was making the tops of all their heads white.

  Cornspike headed towards the woman, pulling Ruta after her. They went up to the old woman. The dogs began to growl anxiously.

  “Florentynka,” said Cornspike softly.

  The woman turned to face them. Her eyes were faded, as if rinsed out. Her face was like a shrivelled apple. A skinny grey plait lay on her thin shoulders.

  They sat on the ground next to the old woman. They started gazing, as she was, at the great, round, self-satisfied face of the moon.

  “He took my children, he fooled my old man, and now he’s muddled my senses,” complained Florentynka.

  Cornspike sighed heavily and stared into the face of the moon.

  One of the dogs suddenly began to howl.

  “I had a dream,” said Cornspike. “The moon knocked at my windows and said: ‘You haven’t got a mother, Cornspike, and your daughter hasn’t got a grandmother, is that right?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. And then he said: ‘In the village there is a good, lonely woman, whom I once wronged, I don’t even know why any more. She hasn’t any children or grandchildren. Go to her and tell her to forgive me. I am old now and I have a weak mind.’ That’s what he said. And then he added: ‘You’ll find her on the Hill, that’s where she curses me, every month when I appear to the world in my complete form.’ Then I asked him: ‘Why do you want her to forgive you? What do you need a human being’s forgiveness for?’ And he replied: ‘Because human suffering carves dark furrows on my face. One day I’ll be extinguished by human pain.’ That’s what he told me, so here I am.”

  Florentynka stared piercingly into Cornspike’s eyes.

  “Is that the truth?”

  “It is. The pure truth.”

  “He wanted me to forgive him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And for you to be my daughter, and her my granddaughter?”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  Florentynka raised her face to the sky and something shone in her pale eyes.

  “Granny, what’s the big dog’s name?” asked little Ruta.

  “Billygoat.”

  “Billygoat?”

  “Yes. Give him a pat.”

  Ruta cautiously held out her hand and put it on the dog’s head.

  “He’s my cousin. He’s very wise,” said Florentynka, and Cornspike saw tears running down her wrinkled cheeks.

  “The moon is just a mask for the sun. He puts it on when he comes out at night to keep an eye on the world. The moon has a short memory, he can’t remember what happened a month ago. He gets everything mixed up. Forgive him, Florentynka.”

  Florentynka sighed deeply.

  “I forgive him. Both he and I are old, why should we have to quarrel?” she said quietly. “I forgive you, you old fool!” she shouted into the sky.

  Cornspike began to laugh, laughing louder and louder, until the dogs woke up and leaped to their feet. Florentynka started laughing, too. She stood up, spread her arms, and raised them into the sky.

  “I forgive you, Moon. I forgive you for all the wrong you have done me!” she cried, loud and shrill.

  Suddenly, from out of nowhere, from over the Black River a breeze sprang up and ruffled the old woman’s grey locks. A light came on in one of the houses and a man’s voice shouted:

  “Shut up, woman! We’re trying to sleep.”

  “So go to sleep, sleep yourselves to death!” shouted Cornspike over her shoulder in reply. “Why on earth were you born if you’re only going to sleep?”

  THE TIME OF RUTA

  “Don’t go to the village, or you’ll get into trouble,” Cornspike would say to her daughter. “Sometimes I think they’re all drunk there – they’re so slow and lumbering. They only liven up when something goes wrong.”

  But Ruta felt drawn to Primeval. There was a mill there, and a miller and his wife, there were poor farmhands, there was Cherubin, who pulled teeth with pincers. There were children running about, just like her. Or at least they looked the same. And there were houses with green shutters, and white linen drying on the fences, which was the whitest thing in Ruta’s world.

  As she walked through the village with her mother, Ruta could feel everyone looking at them. The women shaded their eyes from the sun, and the men furtively spat. Her mother took no notice, but Ruta was afraid of their glances. She tried to keep as close to her mother as she could, squeezing her big hand as tightly as possible.

  In the evenings, in summer, when the bad people were already sitting at home busy with their own affairs, Ruta liked to go to the edge of the village and gaze at the solid grey cottages and the bright smoke from their chimneys. Later, once she had grown a bit, she felt brave enough to creep right up to their windows and peep inside. At the Serafins’ there were always small children crawling about the floorboards. Ruta could watch them for hours, as they stopped over a little bit of wood, tasted it on their tongues, and turned it over in their chubby paws – she watched as they put various objects in their mouths and sucked them, as if it were candy, or crawled under the table and spent ages staring in wonder at the wooden table sky.

  Finally the people would put their children to bed, and then Ruta would inspect all the things they collected: dishes, pots, knives and forks, curtains, holy pictures, clocks, tapestries, flowers in pots, frames with photos, patterned oilskin tablecloths, bedspreads, baskets, all those little objects that make people’s houses unique. She knew all the objects in the village and she knew whom they belonged to. Only Florentynka had white net curtains. The Malaks had a set of nickel cutlery. Young Miss Cherubin crocheted beautiful cushions. At the Serafins’ there was a huge picture on the wall of Jesus teaching from a boat. Only the Boskis had green bedspreads with roses on them, and later, when their house right by the forest was almost ready, they started bringing real treasures into it.

  Ruta took a liking to this house. It was the biggest and the most beautiful. It had a sloping roof with a lightning conductor and windows in the roof, it had a real balcony and a glazed porch, and there was also a second, kitchen entrance. Ruta found herself a place to sit in a large lilac tree, from where she could watch the Boskis’ house in the evenings. She saw a soft, new carpet being laid in the biggest room, as gorgeous as the floor of an autumn forest. She was sitting in the lilac when the big grandfather clock was carried in, with its heart swinging this way and that, measuring out the time – the clock must have been a living creature, because it moved of its own accord. She saw the toys belonging to the little boy, Misia’s first son, and then the cradle that was bought for the next child.

  And only once she was familiar with each thing, right down to the smallest object in the Boskis’ new house, did she turn her attention to the boy her own age. The lilac tree wasn’t tall enough to let her see what the boy was doing in his room in the loft. She knew he was Izydor and that he wasn’t like other children. She didn’t know if that was good or bad. He had a big head and his mouth hung open, letting saliva dribble onto his chin. He was as tall and thin as a reed in the pond.

  One evening Izydor caught Ruta by the foot as she sat in the lilac tree. She pulled free of him and ran away. But a few days later she came back, and he was waiting for her. She made room for him next to her among the branches. They sat there all evening and didn’t say a word. Izydor watched life going on in his new home. He saw people moving their lips, without hearing what they were saying. He saw them wandering in confusion from room to room, into the kitchen and into the pantry. He saw little Antek crying soundlessly.

  Ruta and Izydor liked being silent together in the tree.

  Now they started meeting every day. They would disappear from people’s sight. They would go through a hole in the fence into Malak’s field and walk down the Wola Road towards the forest. Ruta picked plants from the roadside verge: carob pods, goo
sefoot, oregano, and sorrel. She shoved them under Izydor’s nose for him to sniff.

  “You can eat this. And this. This one, too.”

  From the road they watched the Black River, a shining fissure right down the middle of the green valley. Then they passed a milkcap copse, dark, smelling of mushrooms, and went into the forest.

  “Let’s not wander off too far,” protested Izydor at first, but then he put himself entirely in Ruta’s hands.

  It was always warm and soft in the forest, like in the velvet-lined box where Michał’s medal was kept. Wherever you lay down, the bed of pine needles on the forest floor would sag gently, making a hollow that fitted the body perfectly. Above was the sky, overtopped by the tips of the pine trees. It was fragrant.

  Ruta had lots of ideas. They played hide-and-seek and tag, pretended to be trees and made various figures out of twigs, sometimes as small as a hand, sometimes large, taking up a patch of the forest. In summer they found whole clearings yellow with chanterelles and examined sedate mushroom families.

  Ruta loved fungi more than plants and animals. She described how the real mushroom kingdom is hidden under the earth, where the sun doesn’t reach. She said that only mushrooms that are condemned to death or exiled from the kingdom as a punishment come out onto the earth’s surface. Here they perish from the sun, at the hand of man, or trodden by animals. The real underground mushroom spawn is immortal.

  In the autumn Ruta’s eyes became yellow and piercing like a bird’s, and then she would go mushroom hunting. She would say even less than usual, and Izydor thought she seemed absent. She knew all the spots where the spawn came out onto the earth’s surface, where it extended its tentacles into the world. When she found a penny bun or a birch bolete, she lay down next to it on the ground and spent a long time examining it before venturing to pick it. But Ruta loved amanitas best of all. She knew all their favourite glades. There were the most amanitas in the birch wood on the other side of the Highway. That year, when the divine presence was especially clearly felt in all Primeval, the amanitas appeared at the beginning of July and covered the birch glades in their red caps. Ruta skipped among them, but being careful not to destroy them. Then she lay down in between them and peeped under their red dresses.