Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

  “Watch out, they’re poisonous,” Izydor warned her, but Ruta laughed.

  She showed Izydor various amanitas, not just red ones, but white, greenish, or the kind that imitate other mushrooms, horse mushrooms for example.

  “My Mama eats them.”

  “You’re lying, they’re deadly poison,” said Izydor resentfully.

  “They don’t hurt my Mama. I’ll be able to eat them one day, too.”

  “All right, all right. Watch out for the white ones. They’re the worst.”

  Ruta’s courage impressed Izydor. But just looking at the mushrooms wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to know more about them. In Misia’s cookbook he found a whole chapter devoted to them. On one page there were drawings of edible mushrooms, and on another inedible and poisonous ones. Next time he took the book to the forest under his sweater and showed Ruta the drawings. She didn’t believe it.

  “Read what’s written here,” he said, pointing to the caption under the amanita. “Amanita muscaria. Fly agaric.”

  “How do you know that’s written there?”

  “I put the letters together.”

  “What’s that letter?”

  “A.”

  “A? Is that all? Just a?”

  “That’s em.”

  “Em.”

  “And that sort of half em is en.”

  “Teach me to read, Izydor.”

  So Izydor taught Ruta to read. First from Misia’s cookbook, then he brought an old calendar. Ruta quickly caught on to learning, but she also got bored quickly. By the autumn Izydor had taught her almost as much as he knew himself.

  One day, as he was waiting for her in the milkcap copse, leafing through the calendar, a large shadow fell across the white pages. Izydor looked up and was horrified. There behind Ruta stood her mother. She was bare-footed and large.

  “Don’t be afraid of me. I know you very well,” she said.

  Izydor didn’t reply.

  “You’re a clever boy.” She knelt down beside him and touched his head. “You have a good heart. You’ll go far in your journeys.”

  Swiftly and surely she pulled him towards her and hugged him to her breast. Izydor was paralysed by numbness or fear, and stopped thinking, as if he had fallen asleep.

  Then Ruta’s mother went away. Ruta poked in the earth with a stick.

  “She likes you. She’s always asking about you.”

  “About me?”

  “You have no idea how strong she is. She can lift huge stones.”

  “No woman can be stronger than a man,” said Izydor, who had woken up now.

  “She knows all the secrets.”

  “If she were how you say she is, you wouldn’t be living in a tumbledown cottage in the forest, but on the market square in Jeszkotle. You’d go about in shoes and dresses, you’d have hats and rings. Then she’d really be important.”

  Ruta lowered her head.

  “I’ll show you something, though it’s a secret.”

  They went beyond Wydymacz, passed the young oak wood, and were walking through a birch copse. Izydor had never been here before. They must have been very far from home.

  Suddenly Ruta stopped.

  “It’s here.”

  Izydor looked about in surprise. There were birch trees growing around them. The wind was rustling in their slender branches.

  “This is the boundary of Primeval,” said Ruta, stretching her hand out ahead.

  Izydor didn’t understand.

  “This is where Primeval ends, there’s nothing beyond here.”

  “What do you mean? What about Wola, Taszów, and Kielce? The road to Kielce must be somewhere near here.”

  “There’s no Kielce, and Wola and Taszów belong to Primeval. This is where it all ends.”

  Izydor burst out laughing and spun on his heel.

  “What sort of nonsense are you talking? Some people go to Kielce, you know. My father goes there. They brought Misia’s furniture from Kielce. Paweł’s been to Kielce. My father’s been to Russia.”

  “They all just thought they were there. They set off on a journey, they reach the boundary, and here they come to a standstill. Maybe they dream they’re travelling onwards, that Kielce or Russia are there. My mother once showed me some of those who looked like they’d turned to stone. They stand on the road to Kielce. They don’t move, their eyes are open and they look terrible. As if they’re dead. Then, after a while, they wake up and go home, and they take their dreams for memories. That’s what really happens.”

  “Now I’ll show you something!” cried Izydor.

  He stepped back a few paces and started running towards the spot where, according to Ruta, the boundary ran. Then he suddenly stopped. He himself did not know why. Something here wasn’t right. He stretched his hands out ahead of him, and his fingertips disappeared.

  Izydor felt as if he had split inside into two different boys. One of them was standing with his hands held out ahead, and they clearly lacked any fingertips. The other boy was next to him, and couldn’t see the first boy, or moreover his lack of fingers. Izydor was both boys at once.

  “Izydor,” said Ruta. “Let’s go home.”

  He came to and put his hands in his pockets. Gradually his duality disappeared. They set off for home.

  “The boundary runs just beyond Taszów, beyond Wola, and beyond the Kotuszów tollbooth. But no one knows exactly. The boundary can give birth to ready-made people, and we think they’ve come from somewhere. What I find most frightening is that it’s impossible to get out of here. As if we’re sitting in a pot.”

  Izydor didn’t say a word the whole way. Only when they came onto the Highway did he say:

  “We could pack a rucksack, take some food, and set off along the boundary to investigate it. Maybe there’s a hole somewhere.”

  Ruta jumped over an anthill and turned back to the forest.

  “Don’t worry about it, Izydor. What do we need any other worlds for?”

  Izydor saw her dress flashing among the trees, and then the girl vanished.

  THE TIME OF GOD

  It is strange that God, who is beyond the limits of time, manifests Himself within time and its transformations. If you don’t know “where” God is – and people sometimes ask such questions – you have to look at everything that changes and moves, that doesn’t fit into a shape, that fluctuates and disappears: the surface of the sea, the dances of the sun’s corona, earthquakes, the continental drift, snows melting and glaciers moving, rivers flowing to the sea, seeds germinating, the wind that sculpts mountains, a foetus developing in its mother’s belly, wrinkles near the eyes, a body decaying in the grave, wines maturing, or mushrooms growing after a rain.

  God is present in every process. God is vibrating in every transformation. Now He is there, now there is less of Him, but sometimes He is not there at all, because God manifests Himself even in the fact that He is not there.

  People – who themselves are in fact a process – are afraid of whatever is impermanent and always changing, which is why they have invented something that doesn’t exist – invariability, and recognised that whatever is eternal and unchanging is perfect. So they have ascribed invariability to God, and that was how they lost the ability to understand Him.

  In the summer of 1939 God was in everything all around, so rare and unusual things happened.

  At the beginning of time God created all possible things, but He Himself is the God of impossible things, things that either do not happen at all, or happen very rarely.

  God appeared in blueberries the size of plums that ripened in the sun just below Cornspike’s house. Cornspike picked the ripest one, wiped the dark blue skin on her handkerchief, and saw another world reflected in it. The sky there was dark, almost black, the sun was hazy and distant, the forests looked like clusters of bare sticks driven into the earth, and the Earth, drunken and reeling, was suffering from holes. People were slipping off it into a black abyss. Cornspike ate the ominous blueberry and tasted
its sour flavour on her tongue. She realised she must stock up for the winter, storing more food than ever before.

  Now every morning Cornspike dragged Ruta from bed at dawn, and together they went to the forest and brought all sorts of riches home from it – baskets of mushrooms, churns of strawberries and blueberries, young hazelnuts, bilberries, dogwood, barberry, bird cherry, elderberry, hawthorn and sea-buckthorn. They spent days drying it all in the sun and the shade, and watched anxiously to see if the sun was still shining as before.

  God also worried Cornspike physically. He was present within her breasts, which suddenly and miraculously filled with milk. When people found out about it, they secretly came to Cornspike and placed sick parts of their bodies under her nipples, and she squirted a white stream on them. The milk cured young Krasny’s eye infection, the warts on Franek Serafin’s hands, Florentynka’s ulcer, and a skin rash on a Jewish child from Jeszkotle.

  Everyone who was cured was killed during the war. That is how God manifests Himself.

  THE TIME OF SQUIRE POPIELSKI

  God manifested Himself to Squire Popielski through the Game the little rabbi had given him. The squire tried over and over to start the Game, but he found it hard to understand all the bizarre instructions. He took out the little book and read the rules until he knew them just about by heart. To start the Game, you had to throw a one, but every time he tried the squire threw an eight. It was contrary to all the principles of probability, and the squire thought he had been cheated. The strange, eight-sided die could have been distorted. But as he wanted to play honestly, he had to wait until the next day – those were the rules of the Game – to have another throw. And once again he was unsuccessful. This went on all spring. The squire’s amusement changed into impatience. In the unsettled summer of 1939 the stubborn number one finally appeared, and Squire Popielski could breathe again. The Game had started.

  Now he needed a lot of spare time, peace and quiet – the Game was absorbing. It demanded concentration even during the day when he wasn’t playing it. In the evenings he shut himself in the library, laid out the board, and spent a long time rolling the eight-sided die in his hands. Or he carried out the Game’s instructions. It annoyed him to be wasting such a lot of time, but he couldn’t stop.

  “There’s going to be a war,” said his wife.

  “There are no wars in the civilized world,” he replied.

  “Indeed, there might not be any in the civilized world, but there is going to be a war here. The Pelskis are leaving for America.”

  On hearing the word “America” Squire Popielski fidgeted nervously, but nothing had the same meaning as it had before – before the Game.

  In August the squire enrolled for conscription, but he was discharged in view of his state of health. In September they listened to the radio until it started to speak in German. In the night the squire’s wife buried the silver in the park. The squire spent whole nights sitting over the Game.

  “They didn’t even fight. They came home. Paweł Boski didn’t even pick up a weapon,” wept the squire’s wife. “We’ve lost, Felix.”

  He nodded pensively.

  “Felix, we’ve lost the war!”

  “Leave me in peace,” he said and went into the library.

  Every day the Game revealed something new to him, something he didn’t know and hadn’t sensed. How was it possible?

  One of the first instructions was to dream. To move on to the next square, the squire had to dream he was a dog. “How bizarre,” he thought in disgust. But he went to bed, thought about dogs, and that he himself could be a dog. In these visions before falling asleep he imagined himself as a dog, a hound that hunts waterfowl and chases around the common land. But in the night his dreams did what they wanted. It was hard to stop being a man in them. A certain degree of progress appeared with a dream about the ponds. Squire Popielski dreamed he was an olive-green carp. He was swimming in green water, where the sun was nothing but blurred light. He had no wife, he had no manor house, nothing belonged to him and nothing mattered to him. It was a beautiful dream.

  That day, when the Germans turned up at his manor house, at dawn the squire finally dreamed he was a dog. He was running about the market square in Jeszkotle looking for something, he himself did not know what. He dug up some food scraps from under Szenbert’s shop and ate them with relish. He was attracted to the smell of horse manure and human faeces in the bushes. Fresh blood smelled like ambrosia.

  The squire woke up amazed. “It’s irrational, quite absurd,” he thought, but he was pleased the Game would be able to move onwards.

  The Germans were very polite. Captain Gropius and another one. The squire came out of the house to meet them. He tried to keep his distance.

  “I understand you,” Captain Gropius interpreted the sour look on his face. “Unfortunately we are here before you as invaders, an occupying force. But we are civilized people.”

  They wanted to buy a lot of wood. Squire Popielski said he would take care of supplying the wood, but deep down he had no intention of tearing himself away from the Game. At that the entire conversation between the occupants and the occupied came to an end. The squire went back to the Game. He was glad he had already been a dog, and now he could move onto the next square.

  That night the squire dreamed he was reading the instructions for the Game. The words jumped before his sleeping vision, because the part of the squire that was dreaming was not a fluent reader.

  The Second World was made by the young God. He did not yet have experience, and so in this world everything is faded and indistinct, and things crumble to dust more quickly. War goes on eternally. People are born, love desperately, and soon die of sudden death, which is everywhere. But the more suffering life brings them, the more they want to live.

  Primeval does not exist. It has not even come into being, because hordes of starving troops are constantly trailing from east to west across the land where someone might have founded it. Nothing has a name. The earth is full of bomb holes, both rivers, sick and wounded, churn their turbid water, and it is hard to tell them apart. Stones fall apart in the fingers of hungry children.

  In this world Cain met Abel in the field and said: “There is no law and no judge! There is no world beyond, no reward for the righteous and no punishment for the evildoers. This world was not created in good grace, it is not governed by sympathy. For why was your sacrifice accepted and mine rejected?” Abel replied: “Mine was accepted because I love God, and yours was rejected because you hate Him. People like you should not exist at all.” And Abel killed Cain.

  THE TIME OF KURT

  Kurt saw Primeval from the lorry that brought the Wehrmacht soldiers. For Kurt, Primeval was no different from the other foreign villages they had passed in this foreign, enemy country. And the villages were not much different from the ones he knew from his holidays. They may have had narrower streets, poorer houses, funny lopsided wooden fences, and whitewashed walls. Kurt was no expert on villages. He came from a big city and he missed it. He had left his wife and daughter in the city.

  They did not try to set up billets in the peasant houses. They requisitioned Cherubin’s orchard and started building themselves wooden barracks. One of them was going to house the kitchen, which Kurt ran. Captain Gropius took him by jeep to Jeszkotle and the manor house, to Kotuszów and the neighbouring villages. They bought wood, cows, and eggs for prices they set themselves – very low, or else they didn’t pay at all. This was when Kurt saw the defeated enemy country close up, came eye to eye with it. He saw baskets of eggs brought out of cubbyholes, with streaks of hen’s droppings on the creamy-white shells, and the hostile, malevolent glances of the peasants. He saw ungainly, scrawny cows and admired the affection with which they were tended. He saw hens scratching in heaps of manure, apples dried in attics, round loaves baked once a month, bare-foot, blue-eyed children whose shrill voices reminded him of his daughter. But it was all alien to him. Maybe because of the primitive, harsh language
they spoke here, maybe because the facial features were strange. Sometimes, when Captain Gropius sighed and said this entire country should be razed to the ground and a new order built on this spot, Kurt thought the captain was right. It would be cleaner and nicer here. At other times, the unbearable thought occurred to him that he should go home and leave these stretches of sandy ground, these people, cows, and baskets of eggs in peace. At night he dreamed of his wife’s smooth, fair body, and in the dream everything smelled safe and familiar, completely different from here.

  “Look, Kurt,” said Captain Gropius, when they went on their next expedition for supplies. “Look what a big work force there is here, what a lot of space and land. Look at these stout rivers of theirs. You could set up hydroelectric power stations instead of these primitive mills, bring in power lines, build factories and get them to work at last. Look at them, Kurt, they’re not so bad after all. I even like the Slavs. Do you know that the name of this race comes from the Latin word sclavus, a servant? This is a nation with servility in its blood …”

  Kurt wasn’t listening to him properly. He was feeling homesick.

  They took everything they could lay their hands on. Some-times when they entered a cottage, Kurt got the impression the people there had only just finished hiding the food. Then Captain Gropius would draw his pistol and shout angrily:

  “Confiscation for the needs of the Wehrmacht!”

  At such moments Kurt felt like a thief.

  In the evenings he would pray “that I won’t have to go further east. That I can stay here, and then take the same road home. That the war will end.”

  Gradually Kurt got used to this foreign land. He knew more or less where each farmer lived, and even acquired a taste for their peculiar names, as he had for the local carp. As he liked animals, he had all the kitchen leftovers taken to their neighbour’s house – she was a skinny old woman with at least a dozen emaciated dogs. Eventually he got the old woman to greet him by smiling at him toothlessly and in silence. The children from the last, new house by the forest also came to see him. The boy was a little older than the girl. They both had very fair hair, almost white, like his daughter’s. The little girl raised a chubby arm and mumbled: