Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

  When they left for Kraków, the Popielskis were poor as church mice. They lived by selling the silver with aching hearts. The Popielskis’ large family, scattered about the entire world, helped their cousins a bit, as much as it was possible to provide them with some dollars or some gold. Squire Popielski was accused of collaborating with the Germans, for having traded in wood with them. He spent a few months in prison, but eventually he was released in view of his psychological problems, which the bribed psychiatrist exaggerated a little, but not much.

  Then Squire Popielski spent days on end pacing from wall to wall in the cramped flat on Salwator Hill, and doggedly trying to lay out his Game on the only table. But his wife gave him such a look that he put it all back in its box and set off at once on one of his never-ending walks around the apartment.

  Time went by, and the squire’s wife left a little room in her prayers to thank it for passing, for continuing to move and, by doing so, introducing changes into people’s lives. The family, the entire large Popielski family once again gradually gathered its strength and opened some small businesses in Kraków. Within the scope of an unwritten family agreement, Squire Popielski was assigned to overseeing shoe production, and specifically, the soles for the shoes. He supervised the work of a small plant, where a press imported from the West turned out plastic bases for sandals. At first he did it very reluctantly, but then the whole enterprise drew him in and, as usual for the squire, absorbed him totally. It fascinated him that an amorphous, indefinite substance could be given various shapes. He even began enthusiastically experimenting. He succeeded in making a completely transparent substance, and then gave it various shades and colours. And he turned out to have a good feel for the spirit of the times in the sphere of ladies’ shoes – his plastic knee boots with shiny uppers sold like hot cakes.

  “My father even set up a small laboratory. He was the sort of person who, whatever he did, did it with heart and soul, giving it absolute priority. In this respect he was unbearable. He behaved as if those soles and boots of his were going to save humanity. He kept playing around with test tubes and distillations, brewing and heating things.

  “Finally because of all those chemical experiments of his he contracted a skin disease, maybe from burns or radiation. In any case, he looked dreadful. The skin flaked off him in whole pieces. The doctors said it was a type of skin cancer. We took him to the family in France, to the best doctors, but there’s no cure for skin cancer, not here nor there. Or at least in those days there wasn’t. The strangest thing was the way he regarded his illness, which we already knew at the time was fatal. ‘I’m moulting,’ he used to say, looking very pleased with himself, proud as Punch.”

  “He was a strange man,” said Misia.

  “But he wasn’t a madman,” Miss Popielska quickly added. “He had a restless soul. I think he suffered a shock because of the war and having to leave the manor. The world changed so greatly after the war. He couldn’t find his place in it, so he died. He was conscious and cheerful to the very end. I couldn’t understand that, I thought he’d got all confused because of the pain. You know, he suffered terribly, eventually the cancer attacked his entire body, but he kept repeating like a child that he was moulting.”

  Misia sighed and drank the remains of her coffee. At the bottom of the glass the brown lava of grounds had gone cold, and glints of sunlight were dancing on its surface.

  “He gave instructions to be buried with that strange box, and in the whirl of preparations for the funeral we forgot about it … I have terrible pangs of conscience because we failed to carry out his wishes. After the funeral, Mama and I looked inside it, and do you know what we found? A bit of old cloth, a wooden die, and some little figures, of animals, people, and objects, like children’s toys. And a tattered little book, some sort of incomprehensible nonsense. Mama and I tipped it out onto the table, and we couldn’t believe these playthings were so valuable to him. I remember them as if it were yesterday: tiny brass figures of women and men, little animals, little trees, little houses, little manors, miniature objects, oh, tiny books the size of a little fingernail, for example, a coffee grinder with a handle, a red letterbox, a yoke with buckets – all precisely made …”

  “And what did you do with it?” asked Misia.

  “At first it all lay in the drawer where we keep the photo albums. Then the children played with it. It must still be in the house somewhere, maybe among the building blocks? I don’t know, I must ask … I still feel guilty that we didn’t put it in his coffin.”

  Miss Popielska chewed her lip, and her eyes glazed over again.

  “I understand him,” said Misia after a pause. “I used to have a special drawer where all the most important things were kept.”

  “But you were a child then. And he was a grown man.”

  “We have Izydor …”

  “Maybe every normal family has to have a sort of normality safety valve, someone who takes upon himself all those little bits of madness we carry inside us.”

  “Izydor isn’t what he looks like,” said Misia.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean anything bad by that … My father wasn’t a lunatic either. Or maybe he was?”

  Misia quickly denied it.

  “What I fear most of all, Misia, is that his eccentricity could be hereditary and could happen to one of my children. But I take care of them. They’re learning English, and I want to send them to the family in France to see a bit of the world. I’d like them to get good degrees – information technology, or economics, somewhere in the West, some practical specialities that give you something. They swim, they play tennis, they’re interested in art and literature … See for yourself, they’re normal, healthy children.”

  Misia followed Miss Popielska’s gaze and saw the squire’s grandchildren, who had just come back from the river. They were wearing colourful bathrobes, and they were holding snorkelling gear. They noisily pushed their way through the garden gate.

  “Everything will be fine,” said Miss Popielska. “The world is different now from how it once was. Better, bigger, brighter. There are inoculations against illnesses, there are no wars, people live longer … Don’t you think so, too?”

  Misia stared into her glass full of coffee grounds and shook her head.

  THE TIME OF THE GAME

  In the Seventh World the descendants of the first people wandered together from country to country, until they reached an extremely beautiful valley. “Come on,” they said, “let’s build ourselves a city and a tower reaching the sky, so that we can become a single nation and not let God break us up.” And at once they got down to work, carrying stones and using tar instead of mortar. A vast city was built, in the middle of which a tower rose, until it was so high that from its top you could see what is beyond the Eight Worlds. Sometimes, when the sky was clear, the people working at the highest point raised their hands to their eyes to stop the sun from blinding them, and saw the feet of God and the outlines of the body of a great snake devouring time.

  Some of them tried to reach even higher with sticks.

  God looked at them and thought in alarm: “As long as they remain a single people speaking a single language they’ll be able to do everything, anything that comes into their heads … So I’ll mix up their languages, shut them inside themselves and make it so one cannot understand another. Then they’ll turn against each other and give Me peace.” And that was what God did.

  People were scattered in all directions, and became enemies to each other. But the memory of what they had seen remained inside them. And he who has once seen the world’s borders will suffer his imprisonment most painfully of all.

  THE TIME OF MRS PAPUGA

  Every Monday Stasia Papuga went off to the market in Taszów. On Mondays the buses were so packed that they went past the stop in the forest. So Stasia stood on the roadside verge and stopped cars. First Syrenkas and Warszawas, then big and small Fiats. She clambered awkwardly inside, and her chat with the driver always started the
same way:

  “Do you know Paweł Boski?”

  Sometimes they did.

  “He’s my brother. He’s an inspector.”

  The driver would turn round and look at her suspiciously, so she’d repeat:

  “I’m Paweł Boski’s sister.”

  They couldn’t believe it.

  In her old age Stasia had grown fat and had shrunk. Her nose, always prominent anyway, had got even bigger, and her eyes had lost their shine. Her feet were always swollen, and so she wore men’s sandals. Only two of her lovely teeth were left. Time had not been kind to Stasia Papuga, and it was not surprising the drivers refused to believe she was Inspector Boski’s sister.

  One day, on just such a busy market Monday, she was knocked down by a car. She lost her hearing. A constant roaring in her head drowned out the sounds of the world. Sometimes voices appeared in the roaring, or snatches of music, but Stasia didn’t know where they were from – whether they were coming through to her from the outside, or flowing from inside her. She would listen to them intently as she darned socks and endlessly altered Misia’s hand-me-downs.

  In the evenings she liked going to the Boskis’. Especially in summer there was something going on there. The vacationers lived upstairs. The children and grandchildren came. They would put up a table in the orchard under the apple trees and drink vodka. Paweł would get out his fiddle, and at once his children would fetch their instruments: Antek would get his accordion, Adelka – before she left – her violin, Witek his double bass, and Lila and Maja the guitar and flute. Paweł would give the signal with his bow and they would all start moving their fingers in rhythm, nodding and tapping out the beat with their feet. They always began with In the Trenches of Manchuria. She recognised the music from their faces. As they played In the Trenches of Manchuria, Michał Niebieski would briefly appear in the children’s features. “Can it be possible,” she wondered, “that the dead live on in the bodies of their grandchildren?” And would she, too, live on like that in the faces of Janek’s children?

  Stasia missed her son, who after finishing school had stayed on in Silesia. He rarely came to visit, and had inherited his father’s trait of telling Stasia to wait and wait for him. In early summer she fixed up a room for him, but he never wanted to stay for long, not for the whole vacation like Paweł’s children. He always left after a few days and forgot to take the fruit syrup she had spent all year making for him. But he did take the money his mother earned selling vodka.

  She would accompany him to the bus stop on the Kielce road. At the crossroads lay a stone. Stasia picked up the stone and asked:

  “Put your hand here. I’ll have it as a memento of you.”

  Janek looked around nervously, then allowed the imprint of his hand to remain under the stone at the crossroads for a year. Then, at Christmas and Easter, letters came from him that always started the same way: “At the start of my letter I can report that I am in good health, and I wish you the same.”

  His wishes had no force. As he wrote he must have been thinking about something else. One winter Stasia suddenly fell ill, and before the ambulance had managed to force its way through the snowdrifts, she died.

  Janek came with some delay, when the grave was being filled in and everyone had already gone their ways. He went to his mother’s house and spent a long time looking at the things. All those jars of fruit syrup, the calico curtains, crocheted bedspreads, and little boxes made out of the postcards he had sent his mother for holidays and namedays probably had no value for him. The furniture left by grandfather Boski was coarse and wouldn’t have matched any high-gloss units at all. The cups had chipped rims and broken handles. Snow was pushing its way inside the annex through cracks in the door. Janek locked up the house and went to give it to his uncle.

  “I don’t want the house or anything that comes from Primeval,” he told Paweł.

  As he went back down the Highway to the bus stop, he stopped at the stone, and after a moment’s hesitation did the same thing as every year. This time he pressed his hand deep into the chill, half-frozen ground and kept it there until his fingers went numb with cold.

  THE TIME OF THINGS IN FOURS

  From year to year Izydor became more and more aware that he would never leave Primeval. He remembered the border in the forest, that invisible wall. That border was for him. Perhaps Ruta knew how to cross it, but he hadn’t the strength or the urge.

  The house had emptied. Only in summer did it come to life because of the holiday guests, and then Izydor didn’t leave his attic at all. He was afraid of strange people. Last winter Ukleja had often come to the Boskis’. He had grown old and even fatter. His face was grey and swollen, and his eyes were bloodshot from vodka. He would sit at the table, and then he looked like a mountain of spoiled meat, and in his croaky voice he would boast endlessly. Izydor hated him.

  Ukleja must have sensed it, and being as generous as the devil himself, he gave Izydor a present – some photographs of Ruta. It was a premeditated present. Ukleja chose only those photographs where Ruta’s naked body, fragmented by weird lighting, was covered by mounds of his great bulk. Only in a few of them was a woman’s face visible – her mouth open, sweaty hair stuck to her cheeks.

  Izydor looked at the photos in silence, then put them on the table and went upstairs.

  “Why did you show him those pictures?” he heard Paweł ask.

  Ukleja roared with laughter.

  From that day Izydor had stopped going downstairs. Misia brought his food up to the attic and sat on the bed beside him. They would both be silent for a while, and then Misia would sigh and go back down to the kitchen.

  He didn’t feel like getting up. It was good to lie and dream. And he kept dreaming of the same thing – enormous spaces filled with geometric shapes, opaque polyhedrons, transparent pyramids, and opalescent cylinders. They floated above a broad plain that could have been called the earth, if it weren’t for the fact that there was no sky above it. Instead there was a large, gaping black hole. Looking at it brought fear into the dream.

  In the dream silence reigned. Even when the mighty solids came into contact with each other, there was no accompanying clash, not a whisper.

  Izydor was not in the dream. There was only a sort of alien observer, a witness to the events of his life who lived inside Izydor, but wasn’t him.

  After this sort of dream Izydor’s head ached and he had to keep fighting back the sobbing that came out of the blue and took up permanent residence in his throat.

  One day Paweł came to see him. He said they would be playing in the garden and he should come down to join them. He looked about the attic appreciatively.

  “You’ve got a nice place up here,” he mumbled.

  Winter accompanied Izydor’s sorrow. Whenever he looked at the bare fields and the damp, grey sky, he was always reminded of the vision he had once seen because of Ivan Mukta, an image of the world without sense or meaning, without God. He blinked in terror, so eager was he to wipe this vision from his mind forever. But, nourished by sorrow, the image had a tendency to grow, seizing his body and soul. More and more often Izydor felt old, and his bones ached whenever the weather changed – the world was persecuting him in every possible way. Izydor didn’t know what to do with himself, or where to hide.

  This went on for several months, until an instinct awoke in him, and Izydor decided to save himself. When he appeared in the kitchen for the first time, Misia burst into tears and spent a long time hugging him to her apron smelling of dinner.

  “You smell like Mama,” he said.

  Now once a day he slowly came down the narrow stairs and absent-mindedly put more twigs on the fire. Misia always had some milk boiling, or some soup, and the safe, familiar smell brought the rejected, empty world back to him. He would fetch himself something to eat and go back upstairs, muttering.

  “You could chop some wood,” Misia would call after him.

  He chopped wood thankfully, filling the entire woodshed with
logs for the fire.

  “You could stop chopping wood,” fumed Misia.

  So he took Ivan’s binoculars out of their box, and from his four windows he surveyed the whole of Primeval. He looked to the east and saw the houses of Taszów on the horizon, and in front of them the woods and meadows by the White River. He saw Mrs Niechcial, who lived in Florentynka’s house, milking her cows in the meadow.

  He looked to the south, at Saint Roch’s chapel and the dairy, and the bridge to town, and a car that had lost its way, and the postman. Then he went across to the west window, where he had a view of Jeszkotle, the Black River, the manor-house roof, the church towers and the ever growing old people’s home. Finally he went to the north-facing window and savoured the stretches of forest that were bisected by the ribbon of the Kielce road. He saw these same landscapes at each season of the year – snowy in winter, green in spring, colourful in summer, and faded in autumn.

  That was when Izydor discovered that most of the things that matter in the world come in fours. He took a sheet of brown parcel paper and drew a table in pencil. The table had four columns. In the first row Izydor wrote:

  West North East South.

  And right after that he added:

  Winter Spring Summer Autumn.

  And he felt as if he had put down the first few words of an extremely important phrase.

  This phrase must have had immense power, because now all Izydor’s senses were focused on tracking down things in fours. He sought them in his attic room, but also in the garden when he was told to weed the cucumbers. He found them in everyday jobs, in objects, in his habits, and in the folk tales he remembered from childhood. He could feel himself recovering, coming out of the undergrowth onto a straight road. Wasn’t everything starting to become clear? Didn’t he just have to put his mind to it a bit to recognise the order that was right before his eyes, if he only bothered to look?