Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

  “Hi-hitla!”

  Kurt gave them some sweets. The soldiers on guard duty smiled.

  At the beginning of 1943 Captain Gropius was sent to the Eastern Front. He clearly hadn’t been saying his evening prayers. Kurt was promoted, but he wasn’t at all pleased. Promotion was a dangerous thing now – it distanced you from home. It was harder and harder to get supplies, and every day Kurt travelled around the local villages with a unit of men. In the voice of Captain Gropius he said:

  “Confiscation for the needs of the Wehrmacht!” and took away whatever could be taken.

  His men helped the SS troops to pacify the Jews from Jeszkotle. Kurt oversaw the loading onto trucks. He was sorry, though he knew they were going to a place that was better for them. He found it unpleasant when they had to seek out Jewish runaways in cellars and attics, chase terror-crazed women around the common and tear their children from their arms. He gave orders to shoot at them, because there was no other way. He fired, too; he didn’t wriggle out of it. The Jews refused to board the trucks, they ran away and shouted. He preferred not to dwell on it. After all, there was a war on. In the evenings he prayed “that I won’t have to go east from here, that I can stay here to the end of the war. God, make it so they don’t take me to the Eastern Front.” And God heeded his prayers.

  In the spring of 1944 Kurt received an order to transfer everything to Kotuszów, one village further west, one village nearer home. It was said that the Bolsheviks were coming, though Kurt couldn’t believe it. Then, once they had all their belongings packed on trucks, Kurt survived a Russian raid, when the German garrisons at Taszów were bombarded. Several bombs hit the ponds. One hit the barn belonging to the old woman with the dogs. The maddened dogs went running around the Hill. Kurt’s soldiers started shooting. Kurt didn’t try to stop them. It wasn’t them shooting. It was their terror, in a foreign country, and their homesickness. It was their fear of death. Infuriated by terror, the dogs lunged at the loaded trucks and bit the rubber tires. The soldiers aimed at them straight between the eyes. The force of the shots sent the dogs’ bodies flying, and it looked as if they were turning somersaults. Splashes of dark blood appeared as they did back flips in slow motion. Kurt saw his familiar old lady run out of her house and try to drag away the live dogs. She picked up the wounded ones and carried them to the orchard. Her grey apron abruptly went red. She was shouting something that Kurt couldn’t understand. As the commander he should have stopped the stupid shooting, but the sudden thought possessed him that here he was witnessing the end of the world, and that he belonged to the angels that have to cleanse the world of dirt and sin. That something had to end, in order for something new to begin. That it was dreadful, but it had to be like that. That there was no turning back, that this world was condemned to death.

  And then Kurt shot the old woman, who had always smiled at him in greeting, toothlessly and in silence.

  The troops from the entire district assembled in Kotuszów. They occupied any buildings that had survived the air raids and built an observation point. Now Kurt’s task was the observation of Primeval. As a result, despite the move, Kurt was still in the village.

  Now he saw Primeval from a certain distance, above the line of the forest and the river, as a community of scattered cottages. He also had a fairly precise view of the new house by the forest, where the fair-haired children lived.

  In late summer Kurt saw the Bolsheviks through his binoculars. The size of peas, their vehicles were gliding along ominously in total silence. Kurt thought it looked like an invasion of small, lethally dangerous insects. He shuddered.

  From August to the next January he watched Primeval several times a day. In this time he came to know every tree, every path, and every house. He could see the lime trees on the Highway and Maybug Hill, the meadows, the forest, and the copses. He could see people abandoning the village on carts and disappearing beyond the wall of the forest. He could see single, nighttime robbers, who looked like werewolves from a distance. He could see how day by day, hour by hour, the Bolsheviks were amassing more and more troops and equipment. Sometimes they fired at each other, not to do any harm – the time had not yet come – but to remind each other of their presence.

  After dusk he drew maps and transferred Primeval to paper. He enjoyed doing it, because, amazingly, he was starting to miss Primeval. He even thought of how, once the world was cleansed of all the mess, he could fetch his two women and settle here, farm carp and run the mill.

  As God could read Kurt’s thoughts like a map and was in the habit of fulfilling his wishes, He allowed him to stay in Primeval forever. He set aside for him one of those single, random bullets that they say are carried by God.

  Before the people from Primeval dared to bury the corpses left after the January offensive, spring had set in, and so no one recognised Kurt in the decaying corpse of a German soldier. He was buried in an alder grove right by the priest’s meadows and lies there to this day.

  THE TIME OF GENOWEFA

  Genowefa was washing her white linen in the Black River. Her hands were going numb with cold. She raised them high towards the sun. Between her fingers she could see Jeszkotle. She saw four army trucks drive past Saint Roch’s chapel and enter the market square. Then they disappeared behind the chestnut trees by the church. As she plunged her hands into the water again, she heard shots. The current tore the sheet from her grip as the single shots changed into a rattle, and Genowefa’s heart began to pound. She ran along the riverbank, chasing the drifting white cloth, until it disappeared around a bend.

  A cloud of smoke appeared over Jeszkotle. Genowefa stood helplessly on the spot, which was equidistant to her home, to the bucket full of linen, and to burning Jeszkotle. She thought of Misia and the children. Her mouth went dry as she ran to fetch the bucket.

  “Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle, Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle …” she repeated over and over, glancing in despair at the church on the other side of the river. It was still there as before.

  The trucks drove onto the common land. Soldiers poured out of one and formed a double file. Then the others appeared, their tarpaulin covers flapping. A column of people emerged from the shadow of the chestnut trees. They were running, stumbling and getting up, carrying suitcases and pushing barrows. The soldiers started pushing the people into the vehicles. It was all happening so quickly that Genowefa couldn’t comprehend the events she was witnessing. She raised a hand to her eyes because the setting sun was dazzling her, and only then did she see old Szlomo in an unbuttoned gabardine, the Gertzes’ and Kindels’ fair-haired children, Mrs Szenbert in a sky-blue dress, her daughter carrying a baby, and the little rabbi, who was being held up by the arms. And she saw Eli, as clear as day, holding his son by the hand. And then there was some confusion and the crowd broke through the line of soldiers. People started running in all directions, and those who were already in the trucks jumped out of them. From the corner of her eye Genowefa saw fire emerging from the barrels, then at once she was deafened by the thunder of multiple bursts of machine-gun fire. The figure of a man, from which she had not dropped her gaze, staggered and fell, just like others, like most of the others. Genowefa dropped the bucket and waded into the river. The current tugged at her skirt and tried to trip her feet. The machine guns fell silent, as if they were exhausted.

  Once Genowefa was on the other bank of the Black River, one loaded truck was already driving towards the road. People were silently getting into another one. She saw them giving each other a helping hand. One of the soldiers was finishing off the people lying there with single shots. The next truck set off.

  A figure got up from the ground and tried to run towards the river. Genowefa knew at once that it was Rachela, the Szenberts’ daughter, Misia’s friend. She was carrying a baby. One of the soldiers knelt down and unhurriedly aimed at the girl. She tried to dodge awkwardly. The soldier fired and Rachela stopped. For a moment she rocked sideways, and then fell. Genowefa watched as the soldier ran up to her and tur
ned her on her back with his foot. Then he fired into the white bunting and went back to the trucks.

  Genowefa’s legs gave way beneath her, so she had to kneel down.

  Once the trucks had driven off, she struggled to get up and walk across the common land. Her legs were heavy, like stone, refusing to obey her. Her wet skirt kept dragging her to the ground.

  Eli was lying nestled into the grass. For the first time in many years Genowefa saw him close up once more. She sat down beside him, and never stood on her own legs again.

  THE TIME OF THE SZENBERTS

  The next night Michał woke Paweł, and the two of them went off somewhere. Misia could not go back to sleep. She thought she could hear shots, faraway, anonymous, sinister. Her mother was lying still on the bed with her eyes open. Misia checked to see if she was breathing.

  At dawn the men came back with some people. They led them down to the cellar and locked it.

  “They’ll kill us all,” she said into Paweł’s ear when he came back to bed. “They’ll stand us against the wall and burn down the house.”

  “It’s the Szenberts’ son-in-law and his sister and her children. No one else survived,” he replied.

  In the morning Misia went down to the cellar with some food. She opened the door and said “Good day.” She saw them all: a stout woman, a teenage boy, and a little girl. She didn’t know them. But she knew the Szenberts’ son-in-law, Rachela’s husband. He was standing with his back to her, monotonously banging his head against the wall.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” asked the woman.

  “I don’t know,” replied Misia.

  They lived in the fourth, darkest cellar until Easter. Only once did the woman and her daughter come upstairs to bathe. Misia helped the woman to comb her long black hair. Michał went down to them each evening with food and maps. On the second day of the holiday he took them to Taszów by night.

  A few days later he was standing by the fence with Krasny, the neighbour. They were talking about the Russkies, and the reports that they weren’t far off. Michał didn’t ask about the Krasnys’ son, who was in the partisans. No one spoke about that. Right at the end, Krasny turned around and said:

  “The news is there are some murdered Jews lying by the road to Taszów.”

  THE TIME OF MICHAŁ

  In the summer of 1944 the Russians arrived from Taszów. All day they trailed along the Highway. Everything was covered in dust: their trucks, tanks, guns, wagons, and rifles, their uniforms, hair, and faces – they looked as if they’d emerged from under the ground, as if a fairy-tale army put to sleep in the lands of the ruler of the East had risen again.

  People lined up along the road and joyfully greeted the head of the column. The soldiers’ faces didn’t respond. Their gazes travelled indifferently across the faces of their welcomers. The soldiers had bizarre uniforms, overcoats with ragged hems, from under which there was the occasional flash of a surprising colour – magenta trousers, the black of evening-dress waistcoats, and the gold of trophy watches.

  Michał wheeled Genowefa’s Bath chair onto the porch.

  “Where are the children? Michał, fetch the children,” Genowefa kept mumbling.

  Michał went out beyond the fence and seized Antek and Adelka tightly by the hand. His heart was pounding.

  He was seeing not this, but that other war. Once again the vast stretches of the country he had once crossed appeared before his eyes. It must have been a dream, because only in dreams does everything keep recurring like a refrain. He kept dreaming the same dream, vast, silent and terrible, like columns of troops, like explosions muffled by pain.

  “Granddad, when’s the Polish army coming?” asked Adelka, raising a flag she had made from a stick and a rag.

  He took it away from her and threw it into the lilac tree, then took the children home. He sat down by the kitchen window and gazed at Kotuszów and Papiernia, where the Germans were still stationed. He realised that the Wola Road was now the front line. Exactly.

  Izydor came rushing into the kitchen.

  “Papa, come quickly! Some officers have stopped here and they want to talk to you. Come now!”

  Michał went stiff. He let Izydor lead the way down the front steps. He saw Misia, Genowefa, the Krasnys from next door, and a small group of children from all over Primeval. In the middle stood an open-topped army car with two men sitting in it. A third was talking to Paweł. As usual, Paweł looked as if he understood everything. When he saw his father-in-law, he livened up.

  “This is our father. He knows your language. He fought in your army.”

  “In our army?” said the Russian in amazement.

  Michał saw the man’s face and felt himself flush. His heart was in his throat, beating fast. He knew he had to say something now, but his tongue was tied. He turned it in his mouth like a hot potato, trying to make it form some words, if only the simplest, but he knew nothing, he had forgotten.

  The young officer stared at him in curiosity. The black hem of a tailcoat was sticking out from under his soldier’s greatcoat. A joyful glint appeared in his slanting eyes.

  “Well, Father, what’s up with you? What’s up with you?” he said in Russian.

  Michał felt as if all this, the slant-eyed officer, this road, these columns of dusty soldiers, all this had already happened before, that even the “what’s up with you?” had happened before. He felt as if time had gone into a spin. He was seized with horror.

  “My name is Mikhail Jozefovich Niebieski,” he said, his voice trembling, in perfect Russian.

  THE TIME OF IZYDOR

  The young, slant-eyed officer was called Ivan Mukta. He was adjutant to a gloomy lieutenant with blood-shot eyes.

  “The lieutenant likes your house. It’ll be his quarters,” he said cheerfully in Russian, and took the lieutenant’s things into the house. As he did so, he pulled faces that made the children laugh, but not Izydor.

  Izydor took a close look at him and thought here he was seeing someone truly foreign. Although they were evil, the Germans looked the same as the people from Primeval. If it weren’t for the uniforms, it would be impossible to tell them apart. The same went for the Jews from Jeszkotle – maybe they had slightly browner skin and darker eyes. But Ivan Mukta was different, not like anyone. His face was round and chubby, a strange colour – like looking into the stream of the Black River on a sunny day. Ivan’s hair sometimes seemed dark blue, and his lips were like mulberries. Strangest of all were his eyes – narrow as chinks, hidden under elongated eyelids, black and piercing. And no one could have known what they were expressing. Izydor found it hard to look at them.

  Ivan Mukta accommodated his lieutenant in the largest, nicest room on the ground floor, where the clock stood.

  Izydor found a way to watch the Russian – he climbed into the lilac tree and peeped into the room from there. The gloomy lieutenant stared at maps spread out on the table, or sat still, leaning over his plate.

  Whereas Ivan Mukta was everywhere. Once he had given the lieutenant his breakfast and polished his boots, he set about helping Misia in the kitchen: he chopped wood, took food out for the hens, picked currants for jam, played with Adelka, and drew water from the well.

  “It’s very nice of you, Mr Ivan, but I can manage by myself,” said Misia to begin with, but evidently she came to like it.

  Over the first few weeks Ivan Mukta learned to speak Polish.

  Izydor’s most important task was not to lose sight of Ivan Mukta. He watched him the whole time, and was afraid that if he let him out of sight the Russian would become lethally dangerous. He was also worried about Ivan’s advances to Misia. His sister’s life was in danger, so Izydor sought excuses to be in the kitchen. Sometimes Ivan Mukta tried to accost Izydor, but the boy was so affected by this that he slobbered and stammered with redoubled energy.

  “He was born like that,” sighed Misia.

  Ivan Mukta would sit at the table and drink vast amounts of tea. He brought sugar with
him – either loose, or in soiled lumps that he kept in his mouth as he drank the tea. At these times he would tell the most interesting stories. Izydor’s manner displayed complete indifference, but on the other hand the Russian said such interesting things … Izydor had to keep pretending he had something important to do in the kitchen. It was hard to spend a whole hour drinking water or laying the fire. The infinitely resourceful Misia would shove a bowl of potatoes her brother’s way, and put a knife in his hand. One day Izydor drew air into his lungs and spluttered:

  “The Russkies say God doesn’t exist.”

  Ivan Mukta put down his glass and looked at Izydor with those impenetrable eyes of his.

  “It’s not about whether God exists or not. It’s not like that. To believe, or not to believe, that is the question.”

  “I believe God exists,” said Izydor, boldly thrusting out his chin. “If He does, then it matters to me that I believe. If He doesn’t, it doesn’t cost me anything to believe.”

  “You think well,” Ivan Mukta praised him. “But it’s not true that believing costs nothing.”

  Misia started furiously stirring the soup with a wooden spoon and cleared her throat.

  “What about you? What do you think? Does God exist, or not?”

  “It’s like this.” Ivan splayed four fingers at face height, and Izydor thought he winked at him. He put out the first finger.