Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

“Paweł, you don’t have to chew porridge,” Misia pointed out to him.

  Izydor couldn’t care less about either the Party or going to church. Now he needed time for thinking, remembering Ruta, for reading, for learning German, for writing letters, collecting stamps, staring at his skylight, and gradually, idly sensing the order of the universe.

  THE TIME OF MRS PAPUGA

  Old Boski had built a house, but he hadn’t dug a well, and so Stasia Papuga had to go next door to her brother for water. She put a wooden yoke on her shoulders and attached buckets to it. As she walked along, the buckets creaked steadily.

  Mrs Papuga drew water from the well and took a furtive look around the yard. She saw bedding hung out to air – the limp bodies of plump eiderdowns cast across poles. “I’d hate to have eiderdowns like that,” she thought. “They’re too warm and the feathers fall to the bottom. I prefer my nice light blankets with the linen covers.” Cold water spilled from the buckets onto her bare feet. “I wouldn’t like to have such large windows either. How much cleaning they must need! Or net curtains – you can’t see anything through them. I wouldn’t want that many children, and high-heeled shoes are bad for your feet.”

  Misia must have heard the yoke creaking, because she came out onto the steps and invited Stasia inside. Stasia put the buckets down on the concrete and went into the Boskis’ kitchen, where it always smelled of burnt milk and dinner. She sat on a small table by the stove, never on a chair. Misia shooed away the children and ran under the stairs.

  She always brought something useful out of there: trousers for Janek, a little sweater or some shoes Antek had grown out of. Stasia had to alter Misia’s hand-me-downs, because they were too small for her. But she liked sewing in bed when she woke up. So she added gores, gussets, and frills, and unstitched all the tucks.

  Misia treated Stasia to Turkish coffee.

  The coffee was well made and had a thick skin on which the sugar sat for a moment before sinking to the bottom. Stasia couldn’t take her eyes off Misia’s nimble fingers as she tipped coffee beans into the grinder and then turned the handle. Finally the grinder’s little drawer was full, and the aroma of freshly ground coffee floated about the kitchen. She liked the smell, but she found the actual coffee bitter and unpalatable. So she tipped a few spoonfuls of sugar into her glass until the sweetness overcame the bitterness. From the corner of her eye she watched the way Misia savoured the coffee, stirred it with her spoon, picked up the glass in two fingers and raised it to her lips. And then she did the same.

  They talked about children, kitchen gardens and cooking. But there were times when Misia was inquisitive, too.

  “How do you live without a man?”

  “I’ve got Janek, haven’t I?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Stasia didn’t know what to say. She stirred her coffee.

  “Living without a man is bad,” she thought that evening in bed. Stasia’s breasts and belly wanted to cuddle up to a man’s body, solid and smelling of work in the sunshine. Stasia rolled up a pillow and hugged it as if it were another body, and fell asleep like that.

  There were no shops in Primeval. All the shopping was done in Jeszkotle, and Stasia had an idea. She borrowed a hundred zlotys from Misia and bought several bottles of vodka and some chocolate. And then it just took off on its own. There was always someone needing a half litre in the evening. Sometimes on a Sunday someone felt like having a drink with a neighbour under a lime tree. The people from Primeval soon learned that Stasia Papuga had a bottle or two, and would sell it for not much more than in the shop. They would also buy some chocolate for the wife, so she wouldn’t be annoyed.

  In this way Stasia got a business going. At first Paweł resented her for it, but then he started sending Witek to her for vodka himself.

  “You know what the penalty for that is?” he asked her, frowning, but Stasia was sure that if, God forbid, something were to happen, her brother had acquaintances, and he wouldn’t let her come to harm.

  She soon started going to Jeszkotle for goods two or three times a week. She also widened the range. She had baking powder and vanilla – things any housewife might suddenly run out of while doing the Saturday baking. She had various brands of cigarettes, oil and vinegar, and after a year when she bought herself a refrigerator, she started bringing home butter and margarine, too. She kept it all in the annex which, like everything, her father had built. There stood the refrigerator, and a couch on which Stasia slept, a tiled stove, a table, and some shelves behind a curtain of faded calico. Ever since Janek left to go to school in Silesia she hadn’t used the main room.

  The illicit sale of alcohol, as Stasia’s business was called in official language, greatly enriched her social life. Various people came to see her, sometimes even from Jeszkotle and Wola. On Sunday mornings, hung-over forestry workers came on bicycles. Some bought whole half-litre bottles of vodka, others bought quarters, and others asked for a hundred grams on the spot. So Stasia would pour it for them and offer them pickled gherkins for free as a chaser.

  One day a young forester turned up at Stasia’s place in search of vodka. There was a heatwave, so she invited him to sit down and have some fruit juice. He thanked her and immediately downed two glasses.

  “What delicious juice. Do you make it yourself?”

  Stasia said yes, and for some reason her heart began to pound. The forester was a handsome man, though still very young. Too young. He wasn’t tall but he was burly. He had a fine black moustache and lively hazel eyes. She carefully wrapped a bottle for him in newspaper. After that the forester came by again, and once again she gave him some fruit juice. They chatted for a while. And later on, one evening, he knocked as she was getting undressed for bed. He was tipsy. She quickly put on her dress. This time he didn’t want a bottle to take away. He wanted to drink. She poured him a glass of vodka, sat on the edge of the couch and watched him knock it back. He lit a cigarette and looked around the annex. He cleared his throat, as if wanting to say something. Stasia sensed it was an unusual moment. She fetched another glass and filled both to the brim. They picked up the glasses and clinked them together. The forester drank, and shook the last few drops from his glass onto the floor in the traditional way. Then he suddenly put his hand on Stasia’s knee. His mere touch was enough to make her feel so weak that she leaned back and lay supine on the couch. The forester fell on top of her and started kissing her neck. Just then it occurred to Stasia that she was wearing an old, patched and extended bra and some baggy knickers, so as he was kissing her she slipped them both off herself. The forester violently forced his way into her, and those were the finest minutes in Stasia’s life.

  Once it was all over, she was afraid to move underneath him. He got up without looking at her and buttoned his trousers. He muttered something and headed straight for the door. She watched as he struggled with the lock. He left, without even closing the door behind him.

  THE TIME OF IZYDOR

  Ever since he had learned to read and write, Izydor had been fascinated by letters. He collected them in an old shoe box – everything that came to the Boskis’ house. Most of them were official letters, recognisable by the titles “Citizen” or “Comrade” on the envelope. Inside they were full of mysterious abbreviations such as “i.e.,” “etc.” and “e.g.” There were also lots of postcards in the shoe box – black-and-white panoramas of the Tatra mountains, or black-and-white seas, with the same messages every year: “Warmest greetings from Krynica,” or “Best wishes from the High Tatras,” or “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.” Now and then Izydor took out the ever growing collection and saw how the ink was fading, and how the dates were getting funnily distant. What had happened to “Easter 1948”? Or “20 December 1949”? Or “Krynica, August ’51”? What did it mean that they were past and gone? Were they gone in the same way as the views, which are left behind as people travel onwards, but which must still be somewhere and remain there for other people to see? Perhaps time prefers to era
se all trace of itself, reduce the past to dust and destroy it forever?

  Thanks to the cards Izydor discovered stamps. He could not get his head around the fact that they were so small, so fragile and perishable, and yet they contained miniature worlds. “Just like people,” he thought, and carefully unstuck them from letters and postcards over a steaming kettle. He laid the stamps out on newspaper and spent hours examining them. There were animals and distant countries on them, precious stones and fish from faraway seas, ships and aeroplanes, famous people and historical events. Just one thing bothered Izydor – that their subtle drawings were spoiled by the ink from the postmarks. Before he died, his father showed him a fairly simple way to remove the ink. All it took was some egg white and a little patience. It was the most important lesson he ever learned from his father.

  In this way Izydor became the owner of a large collection of pretty decent stamps. Now he could write letters himself, if only he had someone to write to. He thought of Ruta, but every thought of her caused him pain. Ruta was not there, and he couldn’t write her a letter. Like time, Ruta had passed him by and crumbled to dust.

  Sometime around 1962, thanks to Ukleja, a very colourful German magazine full of advertisements ended up at the Boskis’ house. Izydor spent days on end looking at it, and was amazed by all the long, unpronounceable words. In the local library he dug out a pre-war German-Polish dictionary, containing far more German words than just raus, schnell, and Hände hoch, which everyone in Primeval had learned during the war. Then one of the summer vacationers gave Izydor a small dictionary to keep, and Izydor wrote his first letter ever. In German: “Please send me car catalogues and tourist brochures. My name is Izydor Niebieski. This is my address.” He stuck several of his finest stamps on the envelope and made his way to the post office in Jeszkotle. A lady clerk in a shiny black apron took the letter from him, examined the stamps, and placed it in a compartment.

  “That’s it. Thank you,” she said.

  Shifting from one foot to the other, Izydor went on standing at the window.

  “It won’t get lost, will it? It won’t go astray, will it?”

  “If you’re in doubt, send it registered. But it costs more.”

  Izydor stuck on more stamps and spent a long time filling in a form. The clerk gave his letter a number.

  A few weeks later a thick white envelope came, addressed to Izydor. It had foreign, completely different stamps, to which Izydor’s eyes were unaccustomed. Inside there were advertisements for Mercedes-Benz cars and tourist brochures from various travel agencies.

  Never in his life before had Izydor felt so important. And that evening as he looked at his brochures once more, he thought of Ruta again.

  Mercedes-Benz and the German travel agencies gave Izydor so much courage that he started sending several registered letters a month. He also asked Adelka and Antek, who were at boarding schools somewhere beyond Kielce, to bring him all their old stamps. After removing the postmarks he stuck them on his letters. Sometimes he managed to sell some brochures to someone for a small amount. He kept receiving new brochures and new addresses.

  Now he got in touch with German, Swiss, Belgian, and French tourist firms. He was sent colour photos of the Côte d’Azure, folders full of the sombre landscapes of Brittany and crystal-clear views of the Alps. He spent nights on end looking at them in delight, though he knew that for him they only existed on smooth paper smelling of ink. He showed them to Misia and his nieces. Misia said:

  “How beautiful.”

  Then a small thing happened that changed Izydor’s life: a letter got lost.

  It was a registered one that Izydor had sent to a camera company in Hamburg, with a request for brochures, of course. This company always wrote back to him, but this time there was no reply. All night Izydor wondered how his registered letter could have got lost, as a receipt had been made out for it and a number assigned to it. Wasn’t that meant to be a guarantee of indestructibility? Maybe it had been stopped in Poland? Maybe the drunken postman had lost it? Maybe there was a flood, or the train bringing the post had derailed?

  Next morning Izydor went to the post office. The clerk in the black apron advised him to register a complaint. On a form with two carbon copies he filled in the name of the company, and in the box marked “sender” he put his details. He went home, but he couldn’t think about anything else. If letters got lost in the post, it wasn’t the same postal service that he regarded with such admiration. He thought of the post as a mysterious, mighty organisation that had its people in every place on the face of the earth. The post was a powerhouse, the mother of all stamps, the queen of all the navy-blue postmen in the world, the guardian of millions of letters, the Sovereign of Words.

  Two months later, when the psychological wounds inflicted on Izydor by the postal service were starting to heal, an official letter came, in which the Polish Post Office apologised to “Citizen Niebieski Izydor” for the fact that it had failed to find the lost letter. At the same time, the German photography firm declared that it had not received a registered letter from “Citizen Niebieski Izydor,” and so the postal services of both countries felt responsible for the lost letter and were offering “the aggrieved Citizen Niebieski Izydor” compensation of two hundred zlotys. At the same time, the Polish Post Office apologised for the ensuing incident.

  That was how Izydor came into possession of a large sum of money. He immediately gave Misia a hundred zlotys, and with the rest he bought himself a stamp album and several sheets of stamps for registered letters.

  Now, whenever there was no answer to a letter, he went to the post office and registered a complaint. If the letter turned up, he had to pay 1 zloty and 50 groszy for the cost of the complaint. That wasn’t much. Meanwhile he was always finding that one of the dozens of letters he sent had got lost – either they had forgotten to deliver it, or the foreign addressees had forgotten they had received it and, baffled by the forms the Polish post had sent them, had answered non, nein, no.

  So Izydor kept receiving money. He became a legitimate member of the family. He was capable of earning a living.

  THE TIME OF CORNSPIKE

  In Primeval, like everywhere in the world, there are places where matter creates itself, coming into being on its own out of nothing. They are always just small chunks of reality, not essential to the whole, and as a result they are no threat to the balance of the world.

  There is a place like that on the embankment by the Wola Road. It looks inconspicuous, like a molehill, like an innocent little graze on the earth’s flesh that never heals. Only Cornspike knows about it and stops on the way to Jeszkotle to watch the world creating itself. There she finds strange things and non-things: a red stone not like any other stone, a piece of gnarled wood, some prickly seeds that later produce some feeble little flowers in her garden, an orange fly, and sometimes just an odour. Cornspike sometimes gets the feeling that the inconspicuous molehill also creates a space, and that the roadside embankment is gradually getting bigger. In this way each year Malak’s field gets bigger, where in complete ignorance he plants potatoes.

  Cornspike dreamed up the idea that one day she would find a child there, a little girl, and would take her home to fill the gap left by Ruta. But one autumn the molehill disappeared. For the next few months Cornspike tried to catch empty space in the act of bubbling forth, but nothing happened, so she realised the self-creation outlet had gone off somewhere else.

  For a while the fountain in the Taszów market square seemed to be another such place. The fountain produced noises, whispers and rustles, and sometimes a sort of jelly-like substance was found in its water, matted balls of hair, and the green parts of a large plant. People realised the fountain was haunted, so they demolished it and built a parking lot.

  And of course there is a place in Primeval, as everywhere in the world, where reality rolls up and leaks from the world like air from a balloon. It appeared in the fields beyond the Hill just after the war, since when it has b
een growing more and more distinctly. A crater has formed in the ground, which sucks down yellow sand, tufts of grass, and field stones into nowhere.

  THE TIME OF THE GAME

  The Instructive game for one player is strange, and so are its rules. Sometimes the player feels as if he has experienced all this before, that he has already played something like it or that he knows the Game from his dreams, or maybe from the books in a local library he visited when he was a child. This is what it says in the instructions about the Sixth World:

  God created the Sixth World by accident, and then went away. He made it any old how, haphazardly. His work was full of holes and mistakes. Nothing was obvious, nothing permanent. Black ran into white and evil sometimes seemed to be good, just as good often looked like evil. So once left to its own devices, the Sixth World began to create itself. Tiny acts of creation appeared out of nowhere in time and space. Matter managed to sprout into things of its own accord. By night objects replicated, stones and veins of metals grew in the ground, and new rivers began to flow in the valleys.

  People learned to create by the force of their own will, and called themselves gods. Now the world was filled with millions of gods. But their will was subordinate to impulse, and so chaos returned to the Sixth World. There was too much of everything, though something new was always coming into being. Time started gathering speed, and people started dying from the effort of trying to make something that did not yet exist.

  Finally God came back and, vexed by all the mess, destroyed the entire creation with a single thought. Now the Sixth World stands empty and silent as a concrete tomb.

  THE TIME OF IZYDOR

  One day, when Izydor went to the post office with a wad of letters, the clerk in the shiny apron suddenly put her face to the window and said: