Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

  “The postmaster is very pleased with you. He says you’re our best customer.”

  Izydor froze, with his copying pencil poised above a complaint form.

  “How come? I’m always exposing the post office to losses. But it’s all in keeping with the law, I don’t do anything wrong …”

  “Oh, Izydor, you don’t understand a thing.” Sliding her chair forward with a scraping noise, the woman leaned halfway out of the window. “The post office earns money because of you. That’s why the postmaster is pleased there’s someone like you at our office. You see, the way the contracts between countries work, for every lost international letter the postal services of both countries pay half the cost each. We pay you in zlotys, and they pay in marks. We convert those marks for you according to the state exchange rate, all in keeping with the rules. We make a profit, and so do you. Nor does anyone lose by it either. Well, aren’t you pleased?”

  Izydor nodded half-heartedly.

  “Yes.”

  The clerk backed away again. She took Izydor’s complaint form and began to stamp it automatically.

  When he got home, there was a black car outside the house. Misia was waiting for him in the doorway. Her face was grey and immobile. At once Izydor realised something terrible had happened.

  “These gentlemen have come to see you,” said Misia in a wooden tone.

  Two men were sitting at the table in the living room wearing light raincoats and hats. It was about the letters.

  “To whom do you write letters?” asked one of the men, and lit a cigarette.

  “Well, to tourist firms.”

  “That sounds like spying.”

  “What on earth would I have to spy on? Thank God, when I saw the car I thought something had happened to the chil-dren …”

  The men exchanged glances, and the one with the cigarette gave Izydor an ominous look.

  “Why do you need so many colour magazines?” asked the other one out of the blue.

  “I’m interested in the world.”

  “You’re interested in the world … What are you so interested in the world for? Do you know what you can get for spying?”

  The man drew his hand swiftly across his neck.

  “Your throat cut?” asked Izydor in terror.

  “Why don’t you work? What do you live off? What’s your occupation?”

  Izydor felt his hands sweating and began to stammer.

  “I wanted to join the monastery, but they wouldn’t take me. I help my sister and my brother-in-law. I chop wood, I play with the children. Maybe I’ll get a pension …”

  “He’s got a screw loose,” muttered the man with the cigarette. “Where do you send letters to? To Radio Free Europe, perhaps?”

  “Only to car firms or travel agencies …”

  “What was your connection with Ukleja’s wife?”

  It took Izydor a while to realise they meant Ruta.

  “You could say everything and nothing.”

  “Leave out the philosophy.”

  “We were born on the same day and I wanted to marry her … but she left.”

  “Do you know where she is now?”

  “No. Do you?” asked Izydor hopefully.

  “None of your business. I’m asking the questions.”

  “Gentlemen, I’m innocent. The Polish Post Office is pleased with me. They’ve just told me that.”

  The men got up and headed for the exit. One of them turned around again and said:

  “Just remember you’re under observation.”

  A few days later Izydor received a crumpled, soiled letter with foreign stamps of a kind he had never seen before. On impulse he glanced at the sender’s name and read: “Amanita Muscaria.”

  These words seemed strangely familiar. “Maybe it’s a German company,” he thought.

  But the letter was from Ruta. He guessed as soon as he saw the clumsy, childish handwriting. “Dear Izek,” she wrote, “I am far, far away, in Brazil. Sometimes I can’t sleep because I miss you all so much. And sometimes I don’t think about you at all. I have a lot to do here. I live in an enormous city full of colourful people. How is your health? I hope my mama is well too. I miss her very much, but I know she couldn’t live here. I have everything I wanted. Don’t send anyone my love, not even my mother. Better they forget about me quickly. Amanita Muscaria.”

  Izydor had a sleepless night. He lay staring at the ceiling as images and odours came back to him from the days when Ruta was still here. He remembered her every word, every gesture. One by one he brought them back to mind. When the sun’s rays reached the eastern window in the roof, tears rolled from Izydor’s eyes. Then he sat up and looked for an address: on the envelope, on the piece of paper, even under the stamp and in its intricate drawing. But he couldn’t find one.

  “I’ll go to her. I’ll save up the money and go to Brazil,” he said out loud to himself.

  Then he thought of an idea that the secret police agents had unwittingly suggested to him. On a piece of paper torn from an exercise book he wrote: “Please send me some brochures. Best wishes, Izydor Niebieski.” On the envelope he wrote the address: “Radio Free Europe, Munich, Germany.”

  The clerk at the post office went pale when she saw this address. Without a word she handed him a form for a registered letter.

  “And a complaint form, too, please,” said Izydor.

  It was a very simple deal. Izydor sent a letter like that once a month. He knew it would not just never reach the addressee, but wouldn’t even leave the boundaries of the county. Every month he received compensation for the letters. Finally he put a blank sheet of paper in the envelope. There was no point asking for brochures any more. This was extra income, which Izydor put aside in an old unrra tea tin – for a ticket to Brazil.

  The next spring the secret police agents in raincoats took Izydor off to Taszów. They shone a lamp in his eyes.

  “The code,” said one of them.

  “What’s a ‘code’?” asked Izydor.

  The other one slapped him in the face.

  “Give us the code. How do you code the information?”

  “What information?” asked Izydor.

  He was hit in the face again, harder this time. He could taste blood on his lips.

  “We’ve checked every word, every square centimetre of the letter and envelope by all available methods. We’ve peeled the paper apart. We’ve checked the stamps. We’ve enlarged each one several dozen times. We’ve examined their serration and the composition of the glue under a microscope. We have analysed every letter, every comma and full stop …”

  “We haven’t found anything,” said the other one, the one who had hit him.

  “There’s no code there,” said Izydor quietly, wiping his bleeding nose with a handkerchief.

  Both men burst out laughing.

  “All right then,” the first one began. “Let’s agree to start again from the beginning. We won’t do anything to you. We’ll write in our report that you’re not entirely normal. Everyone thinks of you like that anyway. And we’ll let you go home. And in exchange you’ll tell us how it all works. Where did we go wrong?”

  “There’s nothing there.”

  The other man was more nervous. He brought his face close to Izydor’s. He stank of cigarettes.

  “Listen, wise guy. You’ve sent twenty-six letters to Radio Free Europe. There were blank pieces of paper in most of them. You’ve been playing with fire. And now you’ve gone too far.”

  “Just tell us how you coded them. And that’ll be it. Then you’ll go home.”

  Izydor sighed.

  “I can see it’s very important to you, but I really don’t know how to help you. There weren’t any codes there. They were just blank sheets of paper, nothing more.”

  Then the second secret policeman jumped up from his chair and punched Izydor in the face. Izydor slid off his chair and lost consciousness.

  “He’s a loony,” said the first one.

  “Reme
mber, pal, we’re never going to let you alone,” drawled the second, rubbing his fist.

  Izydor was kept under arrest for forty-eight hours. Then a guard came for him, and without a word opened the door to let him out.

  All week Izydor didn’t come down from his attic. He counted the money in the tin and found he had a real fortune there. In any case, he didn’t know how much a ticket to Brazil might cost.

  “That’s enough of the letters,” he told Misia when he came down into the kitchen. She smiled at him and breathed a sigh of relief.

  THE TIME OF DOLLY

  The time of animals is always the present.

  Dolly is a shaggy, red-haired dog. She has brown eyes that sometimes shine black. Dolly loves Misia best of all, so she always tries to have Misia within range of sight. Then everything is in its place. Dolly follows Misia to the well, into the garden, and goes out with her onto the Highway to take a look at the world. She never lets Misia out of her eyes’ embrace.

  Dolly doesn’t think how Misia or any other person thinks. In this way there is a huge gulf between Dolly and Misia, because to think you have to swallow time, internalise the past, the present, the future and their constant changes. Time works inside the human mind. It is nowhere to be found on the outside. In Dolly’s small dog’s brain there is no channel, no organ to filter the passage of time. So Dolly lives in the present. That is why when Misia gets dressed and goes out, Dolly thinks she is leaving forever. Every Sunday she goes to church forever. She goes down to the cellar for potatoes forever. When she disappears from Dolly’s field of vision, she disappears forever. Then Dolly’s grief is boundless, she lays her muzzle on the ground and suffers.

  Man harnesses his suffering to time. He suffers as a result of the past and extends his suffering into the future. In this way he creates despair. Dolly only suffers here and now.

  Human thinking is inseparably linked with swallowing time. It is a sort of choking. Dolly perceives the world as static images that some God has painted. For animals, God is a painter. He spreads the world before them in the form of panoramic views. The extent of these crude pictures lies in smells, touches, flavours, and sounds, which contain no meaning. Animals do not need meaning. People sometimes feel something similar when they dream. But when they are awake, people need meaning, because they are prisoners of time. Animals dream incessantly and for nothing. For them, waking up from this dream is death.

  Dolly thrives on images of the world. She takes part in the images that people create with their minds. When Misia says “Let’s go” and sees Dolly wagging her tail, she thinks Dolly can understand words like a person. But Dolly is wagging her tail not at the word, not at the concept, but at the image that has sprouted from Misia’s mind. This image contains the anticipation of movement, and of landscapes that keep changing, grass swaying, the Wola Road leading to the forest, grasshoppers chirruping, and the rushing of the river. As she lies there staring at Misia, Dolly sees the images that a human unwittingly produces. They can be images full of sorrow or anger. Those images are even more distinct, because they pulsate with passion. Then Dolly is defenceless, because she has nothing in her to protect her from getting lost in those alien, gloomy worlds, there are no magic protective rings of identity, there is no “self” supplied with powerful energy. So she is subdued by them. That is why dogs regard man as their master. And why the lowliest man can feel like a hero in his dog’s eyes.

  The ability to experience emotion does not distinguish Dolly from Misia in any way.

  An animal’s emotion is even purer, not clouded by any thoughts.

  Dolly knows that God exists. She perceives Him all the time, and not, like people, just in rare moments. Dolly can smell His odour in the grass, because she is not separated from God by time. That is why Dolly has more trust in the world than any man could ever have. The Lord Jesus had similar trust inside him as he hung upon the cross.

  THE TIME OF POPIELSKI’S GRANDCHILDREN

  Straight after the end of the school year, Squire Popielski’s daughter, the one who used to walk about the park with a large dog, brought her children and her brother’s children to Primeval. Misia fixed up three rooms for them upstairs, and if there was a need, a room downstairs, too. And so at the end of June Paweł Boski’s dream guesthouse began to operate at full steam.

  Squire Popielski’s grandchildren were robust and noisy. They showed no resemblance to their grandfather. And, as always happens in good families, they were all boys, except for one single girl. They were cared for by a nanny, the same one every year. The nanny’s name was Zuzanna.

  The kids spent whole days by the Black River at a place called the Sluice, where young people came from all over the neighbourhood to bathe. Squire Popielski had once put flood-gates on the river to regulate the flow of water into his ponds. Now the ponds no longer existed, but skilful manipulation of the flood-gates made it possible to create a lake in summer and a metre-high waterfall. Grandfather Popielski cannot have imagined he would be giving his grandchildren so much joy.

  The kids came home for lunch, which Misia often served in the garden under the apple trees. After lunch they went back to the river. In the evenings, Zuzanna organised games for them, either cards or “Categories” or anything else, as long as they were quiet. Sometimes Witek, who was not much older than them, made a bonfire for them behind the Hill.

  Every year on Midsummer’s Eve Squire Popielski’s grandchildren headed off to the forest to look for the fern flower that was supposed to bloom that night. This expedition became a ritual, and one year Zuzanna let them go on their own. The squire’s grandchildren took advantage of the opportunity, and so no one would know, they bought a bottle of cheap wine in Jeszkotle. They took sandwiches with them, bottles of orangeade, sweets, and flashlights. They sat on the bench outside the house and waited until it finally got dark. They laughed and were noisy, pleased about their hidden bottle.

  Squire Popielski’s grandchildren became quiet only in the forest, not because their mood had soured, but because in the darkness the forest seemed vast and scary. Their bold plan was to go to Wodenica, but the darkness put an end to that idea. Wodenica was a haunted place. They would go into an alder grove, where the most ferns grew. They would drink up the wine and smoke a forbidden cigarette, like the boys from Primeval.

  The children walked towards the river in a line, holding each other by the shoulder.

  It was so dark that the hands they stretched out ahead of them loomed in the blackness like barely recognisable smudges. Only the sky seemed clearer than the world enveloped in darkness – like a grand celestial colander with stars for holes.

  The forest was behaving like an animal that keeps people away – it shook dew onto them, sent out a tawny owl, and told a hare to leap up suddenly under their feet.

  The children went into the alder grove and groped in the dark, making themselves a picnic. The burning tips of the cigarettes glowed. The wine, which they drank straight from the bottle for the first time in their lives, gave them courage. Then they ran about in the ferns, until one of them found something shining among them. The alarmed forest began to whisper. The finder summoned the others. He was excited.

  “I think I’ve got it, I think I’ve got it,” he kept saying.

  Among the tangled blackberry bushes, something silver was glittering in the dampness of the fern leaves. The children parted the large leaves with sticks, and by the light of their flashlights they saw a shining empty tin. The disappointed finder picked it up on the end of his stick and tossed it away into the bushes.

  The squire’s grandchildren sat down for a while longer to finish up the wine, and then went back to the road.

  Only then did the empty tin blossom, casting an eerie, silvery brilliance all around it.

  Cornspike saw it, who always gathered herbs on the night of the solstice, but was now too old to have any wishes, and she knew how much trouble you could bring on yourself with the fern flower. So she skirted round it at a dista
nce.

  THE TIME OF SQUIRE POPIELSKI

  “Won’t you take a cup of tea with me, Misia, once you’ve finished?” asked the Popielskis’ daughter, who still had a young girl’s figure.

  Misia stood up straight over the bowls full of dirty dishes and wiped her hands on her apron.

  “Not tea, but I’d love a coffee.”

  They took a tray outside and sat on either side of the table under the apple tree. Lila and Maja finished washing the dishes.

  “It must be hard for you, Misia, to serve so many dinners and wash so many dishes … We’re very grateful to you for all this effort. If it weren’t for you, we’d have nowhere to come to. After all, this is our family neighbourhood.”

  Miss Popielska, who once upon a time, long, long ago, used to run about the meadows with her big dogs, sighed sadly.

  “And if it weren’t for you, we’d never manage to survive on Paweł’s wages. Letting out rooms is my contribution to keeping the family.”

  “You shouldn’t think like that, Misia. After all, a woman works in the home, she bears children, she does the housekeeping, you know best of all …”

  “But she doesn’t earn a living, she doesn’t bring home money.”

  Some wasps flew down to the table and started daintily licking up some chocolate sauce from the gingerbread. They didn’t bother Misia, but Miss Popielska was afraid of them.

  “When I was little, a wasp stung me on the eyelid. I was alone with my father at the time, my mother had gone to Kraków … it may have been 1935, or 1936. My father panicked and ran about the house yelling at me, and then took me somewhere in the car. I can hardly remember, to some Jews in town …”

  Miss Popielska leaned her chin on her hand, and her gaze wandered somewhere among the apple and lime leaves.

  “Squire Popielski … he was a distinguished man,” said Misia.

  Miss Popielska’s hazel eyes glazed over and looked like drops of honeydew. Misia guessed that her private, inner time stream, the kind each person carries inside them, had turned back, and in the empty space between the leaves she was now seeing images of the past.