Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

  After breakfast Michał took Genowefa outside. He set the chair on the grass by the fence, and sat down on a bench. He took out a cigarette paper and spent a long time crumbling tobacco in his fingers. Genowefa gazed ahead of her at the Highway, staring at the smooth cobblestones that looked like the tops of thousands of heads of people buried in the ground.

  “Aren’t you cold?” asked Michał.

  She shook her head.

  Then Michał finished his cigarette and walked away. Genowefa remained in her chair, gazing at Mrs Papuga’s garden, at the sandy field road that wound its way between splashes of green and yellow. Then she looked at her own feet, knees, hips – they were just as far away and just as much not part of her as the sand, fields, and gardens. Her body was a broken figurine made of fragile human material.

  She was surprised she could still move her fingers, that she still had feeling in the tips of her pale hands, which had known no work for months. She laid those hands on her insensible knees and fumbled with the folds of her skirt. “I am a body,” she said to herself. And in Genowefa’s body, like cancer, like mould, the image of killing people was growing. Killing involves taking away the right to move, as after all, life is motion. A killed body has stopped moving. A person is a body. And everything a person experiences has its beginning and end in the body.

  One day Genowefa said to Michał:

  “I feel cold.”

  He brought her a woollen shawl and gloves. She moved her fingers, but she couldn’t feel them any more, so she didn’t know if they were moving or not. When she looked up at the Highway, she saw the dead returning. They were heading down the Highway from Czernica to Jeszkotle in a large procession, like the pilgrimage to Częstochowa. But pilgrimages always involve a hubbub, monotonous songs, mournful litanies, and boot-soles shuffling over the stones. Here silence reigned.

  There were thousands of them. They were marching in uneven, broken ranks. They walked in icy silence, at a rapid pace. They were grey, as if deprived of blood.

  Genowefa sought Eli among them and the Szenberts’ daughter with the baby in her arms, but the dead were moving too fast for her to look at them closely. Only later did she see the Serafins’ son, and that was only because he was walking nearest to her. He had a huge, brown hole in his forehead.

  “Franek,” she whispered.

  He turned his head and, without slowing his pace, glanced at her. He stretched out a hand to her. His lips were moving, but Genowefa couldn’t hear any words.

  She saw them all day, until evening, and the procession did not dwindle. They still went gliding past when she closed her eyes. She knew God was watching them, too. She could see His face – it was black, terrible, covered in scars.

  THE TIME OF SQUIRE POPIELSKI

  In 1946 Squire Popielski was still living in the manor house, though everyone knew it wouldn’t last much longer. His wife had taken the children to Kraków and was now to-ing and fro-ing, getting ready to move out.

  The squire didn’t seem to care what was going on around him. He was playing the Game. He spent days and nights in the library. He slept on a couch. He didn’t change his clothes or shave. When his wife went off to the children, he didn’t eat, sometimes for three or four days. He didn’t open the windows, he didn’t speak, he didn’t go for walks, he didn’t even go downstairs. Once or twice people from the district administration came to see him about the nationalisation. They had briefcases full of writs and official stamps. They banged on the door and pulled at the bell. Then he went up to the window, looked at them from above, and rubbed his hands.

  “It all fits,” he said in a hoarse voice unaccustomed to speaking. “I’m moving onto the next square.”

  Sometimes Squire Popielski needed his books.

  The Game required him to find various bits of information, but he had no trouble with that – he could find it all in his own library. As dreams played a crucial role in the Game, Squire Popielski taught himself to dream to order. More than that, he gradually gained control of his dreams, doing in them what he wanted, completely differently from in life. He consciously dreamed on the prescribed topic, and at once just as consciously awoke on the other side, as if he had gone through a hole in the fence. It took him a while to come to his senses, and then he began to act.

  And so the Game gave him everything he needed, and even more. Why should he have to leave the library?

  Meanwhile, the officials from the district administration took away his forests, clearings, arable land, ponds, and meadows. They sent a letter in which he was informed, as a citizen of the young socialist state, that the brickworks, sawmill, distillery, and water mill no longer belonged to him. Nor in the end did the manor house. They were polite, they even set out a deadline for handing over his property. First his wife cried, then she prayed, and finally she began to pack their things. She looked like a votive candle, she was so thin and wax-pale. Suddenly gone white, her hair shone in the gloom of the manor house with a cold, equally pale light.

  Squire Popielski’s wife bore no grudge against her husband for going mad. She was worried that she would have to decide on her own what could be taken and what left behind. When the first vehicle drove up, however, Squire Popielski, pale and unshaven, came downstairs with two suitcases in his hands. He refused to show what he had in them.

  His wife ran upstairs and spent a while scanning the library with a keen eye. She did not think anything was missing. There were no empty spaces on the shelves, not a single painting or ornament had been moved, nothing. She summoned the removal men, and they threw the books into cardboard boxes any old how. Then, to be quicker, they started scooping them off the shelves in entire rows. The books spread their flightless wings and torpidly fell in a heap. When they ran out of boxes, they left it at that, took the full boxes and went. Only later did it turn out that they had taken everything from A to L.

  Meanwhile Squire Popielski was standing by the car, enjoying inhaling the fresh air, which intoxicated him after months of being shut indoors. He felt like laughing, rejoicing, dancing – the oxygen blazed in his thick, sluggish blood and dilated his clogged arteries.

  “Everything is exactly as it should be,” he told his wife in the car as they were driving along the Highway towards the Kielce road. “Everything that’s happening is turning out well.”

  Then he added something else that made the driver, and the removal men, and his wife give each other meaningful looks:

  “The eight of clubs has been shot dead.”

  THE TIME OF THE GAME

  In the book entitled Ignis fatuus, or an instructive game for one player, which is the instruction manual for the Game, the description of the Fourth World includes the following story:

  God created the Fourth World in a passion that brought Him relief in His divine suffering.

  When He created man, He came to His senses – such an impression did he make on Him. So He stopped creating the world any further – for could there have been anything more perfect? – and now, in His divine time, He admired His own work. The deeper God’s vision reached into the human inside, the more ardently God’s love for man intensified.

  But man proved ungrateful – he was busy cultivating the land and begetting children, and took no notice of God. Then in His divine mind arose sorrow, from which darkness seeped.

  God’s love for man was unrequited.

  Divine love, like any other, can be oppressive. Meanwhile man matured and decided to free himself from his importunate lover. “Let me leave,” he said. “Let me get to know the world in my own way and give me provisions for the journey.”

  “You won’t manage without me,” God told man. “Don’t go.”

  “Oh, come on,” said man, and regretfully God leaned the branch of an apple tree towards him.

  God was left alone and He pined. He dreamed that it was He who had driven man out of paradise, so painful was the thought that He had been abandoned.

  “Come back to me. The world is terrible and
it can kill you. Look at the earthquakes, the volcanic eruptions, the fires and the floods,” He thundered from the rain clouds.

  “Oh, come on, I’ll manage,” man replied, and was gone.

  THE TIME OF PAWEŁ

  “You have to live,” said Paweł. “You have to bring up children, earn a living, keep on studying and climbing upwards.”

  And so he did.

  He and Aba Kozienicki, who had survived the concentration camp, went back to trading in timber. They bought a forest for felling and organised the cutting and transport of the wood. Paweł bought a motorbike and drove around the district in search of orders. He got himself a pigskin briefcase in which he kept a receipt book and several copying pencils.

  As business was going quite well and there was a steady stream of cash flowing into his pocket, Paweł decided to continue his education. Studying to be a doctor was no longer very realistic, but he could still improve his qualifications as a health worker and paramedic. Now he spent his evenings fathoming the mysteries of how flies multiplied and the complex sequences in the life of tapeworms. He studied the vitamin content in nutritional products and the ways illnesses spread, such as tuberculosis and typhoid. Over several years of courses and training he became convinced that medicine and hygiene, once liberated from the power of ignorance and superstition, would be capable of transforming human life, and the Polish village would change into an oasis of sterilised pots and yards disinfected with Lysol. So Paweł was the first in the district to devote one room in his house to a bathroom and medical treatment room in one. It was spotlessly clean in there, with an enamelled bathtub, scrubbed taps, a metal waste bin with a lid, glass containers for cotton wool and wadding, and a glazed cabinet with a padlock, in which he kept all his medicines and medical instruments. Once he had finished the next course, he had nursing qualifications, and now in this room he gave people injections, without forgetting at the same time to give them a short lecture on the subject of everyday hygiene.

  Then the business with Aba collapsed, because the forests were nationalised. Aba went away. He came to say goodbye. They embraced like brothers. Paweł Boski realised that a new stage in his life was beginning and that from now on he must manage on his own, on top of that in completely new conditions. He could not keep a family merely on giving injections.

  So he packed all his certificates into his leather briefcase and rode his motorbike to Taszów to look for work. He found it at the health centre, which was the district kingdom of sterilisation and stool samples. From then on, especially after joining the Party, he gradually and irrevocably began to gain promotion.

  His job involved travelling on his noisy motorbike around the neighbouring villages and inspecting the cleanliness in shops, restaurants, and bars. In all these places, his appearance, with his leather briefcase full of documents and test tubes for excrement, was regarded like the coming of a rider of the Apocalypse. If he wanted, Paweł could have any shop or eatery closed down. He was important. He was given presents, treated to vodka and the freshest jellied pig’s feet.

  This was how he met Ukleja, who was the owner of a cake shop in Taszów and several other, less official businesses. Whereas Ukleja introduced Paweł to the world of secretaries and lawyers, drinking sprees and hunting, willing busty barmaids and alcohol, which provided the courage to get as much out of life as possible.

  In this way, Ukleja took the place vacated by Aba Kozienicki, the place assigned in the life of every man for a friend and guide, without whom a man would be just a lonely, misunderstood warrior in a world of chaos and darkness, which creeps out from every corner the moment his back is turned.

  THE TIME OF THE MUSHROOM SPAWN

  The mushroom spawn grows under the entire forest, or maybe even under the whole of Primeval. In the earth under the soft forest floor, under the grass and stones, it creates a tangle of slender threads, strings and bundles, which it twines around everything. The threads of the mushroom spawn have great strength and push their way in between every clod of earth, tangle around tree roots and restrain huge boulders in their infinitely gradual onward motion. The mushroom spawn is like mould – cold, white, and delicate – underground lunar lace, damp, hem-stitched mycelia, the world’s slimy umbilical cords. It overgrows meadows and wanders under human roads, climbs the walls of people’s houses, and sometimes in surges of power it imperceptibly attacks their bodies.

  The mushroom spawn is not a plant or an animal. It cannot gain strength from the sun, because its nature is alien to the sun. It is not drawn to the warm and the living, because its nature is neither warm nor alive. The mushroom spawn lives thanks to the fact that it sucks up the remains of juices from whatever dies, whatever is decaying and soaking into the earth. The mushroom spawn is the life of death, the life of decay, the life of whatever has died.

  All year the mushroom spawn bears its cold, wet children, but the ones that come to light in the summer and autumn are the most beautiful. Along human paths, marasmius mushrooms grow on slender legs, near-perfect puffballs and earthballs show white in the grass, and slippery jacks and bracket fungi take crippled trees into their possession. The forest is full of yellow chanterelles, olive-green russulas, and suede boletus.

  The mushroom spawn does not separate or single out its children, it gives them all the strength to grow and the power to spread their spores. To some it gives a scent, to others the capacity to hide from the human eye, yet others have shapes that are breathtaking.

  Deep under the ground, at the very centre of Wodenica, there is a great, white tangled mycelium ball pulsing away, the heart of the mushroom spawn. From here the spawn spreads out to all corners of the world. The forest here is dark and damp. Luxuriant brambles hold the tree stumps prisoner. Everything is covered in lush moss. People instinctively avoid Wodenica, though they don’t know that here, underneath, the heart of the mushroom spawn is beating.

  Of all the people, only Ruta knows about it. She guessed it from the most beautiful amanitas, which grow here every year. The amanitas are the spawn’s guards. Ruta lies down on the ground among them and examines the underside of their foaming, snow-white petticoats.

  Ruta once heard the life of the mushroom spawn. It was an underground rustling that sounded like a dull sigh, and then she could hear the gentle crackle of clumps of earth as the thread of the mycelium pushed its way between them. Ruta heard the spawn’s heartbeat, which happens once every eighty human years.

  Ever since she has been coming to this damp spot in Wodenica, and always lies down on the wet moss. If she lies there for a while, she starts to sense the mushroom spawn in another way, too – because the spawn slows down time. Ruta falls into a waking sleep, and sees everything in a completely different way. She can see individual gusts of wind, the slow and graceful flight of insects, the fluent movements of ants, and particles of light that settle on the surfaces of leaves. All the high-up noises – the warbling of birds, the squealing of animals – change into booming and rumbling, and glide along just above the ground, like mist. Ruta feels as if she has been lying like that for hours, though only a moment has passed. So the mushroom spawn takes time into its possession.

  THE TIME OF IZYDOR

  Ruta was waiting for him under a lime tree. The wind was blowing, and the tree was creaking and moaning.

  “It’s going to rain,” she said instead of a greeting.

  They walked in silence along the Highway, then turned into their forest beyond Wodenica. Izydor walked half a pace behind, stealing a glance at the girl’s naked shoulders. Her skin looked ever so thin, almost transparent. He felt like touching and stroking it.

  “Do you remember how I once showed you the border, ages ago?”

  He nodded.

  “We were going to investigate it one day. Sometimes I don’t believe in the border. It let in the foreigners …”

  “From the scientific point of view that sort of border is impossible.”

  Ruta burst out laughing and grabbed Izydor by the hand
. She pulled him after her among the small pine trees.

  “I’ll show you something else.”

  “What? How many more things do you have to show me? Show me all of them at once.”

  “It can’t be done like that.”

  “Is it alive or dead?”

  “Neither the one nor the other.”

  “Is it an animal?”

  “No.”

  “A plant?”

  “No.”

  Izydor stopped and asked anxiously:

  “A person?”

  Ruta didn’t answer. She let go of his hand.

  “I’m not going,” he said and squatted on the ground.

  “No is no. After all, I’m not forcing you.”

  She knelt down beside him and stared at the trails of big forest ants.

  “Sometimes you’re so clever. And sometimes so stupid.”

  “But more often stupid,” he said sadly.

  “I wanted to show you something strange in the forest. Mama says it’s the centre of Primeval, but you don’t want to go.”

  “All right, let’s go.”

  In the forest they couldn’t hear the wind, and it had gone muggy. Izydor could see tiny drops of sweat on the back of Ruta’s neck.

  “Let’s have a rest,” he said from behind. “Let’s lie down here and rest.”

  “It’s just about to start raining, come on.”

  Izydor lay on the grass and folded his hands under his head.

  “I don’t want to look at the centre of the world. I want to lie here with you. Come here.”

  Ruta hesitated. She walked a few steps away, then came back. Izydor narrowed his eyes, and Ruta changed into a blurred shape. The shape came up to him and sat down on the grass. Izydor stretched out a hand and found Ruta’s leg. He could feel tiny hairs under his fingers.