Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

  He started going to the local library again, and borrowed whole bagfuls of books, because he realised that lots of things in fours had already been recorded.

  In the library there were many books with Squire Popielski’s beautiful bookplates – above a heap of stones rose a bird with outspread wings, quite like an eagle. The bird’s claws were resting on the letters FENIX. Above the bird ran the inscription: “Ex libris Felix Popielski.”

  Izydor borrowed nothing but books with the FENIX, and this sign became the hallmark of a good book. Unfortunately, he soon realised that the entire collection of books only began at L. On none of the shelves did he find authors with surnames from A to K. So he read Lao-tzu, Leibniz, Lenin, Loyola, Lucian, Martial, Marx, Meyrink, Mickiewicz, Nietszche, Origenes, Paracelsus, Parmenides, Plato, Plotinus, Poe, Porfirius, Prus, Quevedo, Rousseau, Schiller, Shakespeare, Sienkiewicz, Slowacki, Spencer, Spinoza, Suetonius, Swedenborg, Towiański, Tacitus, Tertulian, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Verne, Virgil, and Voltaire. And the more he read, the more he missed the authors from A to K: Augustine, Andersen, Aristotle, Avicenna, Blake, Chesterton, Clement, Dante, Darwin, Diogenes Laertius, Eckhart, Eriugen, Euclid, Freud, Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, Heine, Hegel, Hoffmann, Homer, Hölderlin, Hugo, and Jung. He also read an encyclopaedia at home, though it made him no wiser or better. But he did have more and more to write down in his tables.

  Some foursomes were obvious – he only had to be observant:

  Sour Sweet Bitter Salty,

  or:

  Roots Stem Flower Fruit,

  or:

  Green Red Blue Yellow,

  or:

  Left Up Right Down.

  And also:

  Eye Ear Nose Mouth.

  He found lots of these things in fours in the Bible. Some of them seemed more primitive, older, and these gave rise to others. He felt as if before his very eyes the foursomes were multiplying and duplicating into infinity. Finally he began to suspect that infinity itself must be fourfold, like the name of God:

  Y H W H

  The four prophets of the Old Testament:

  Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel Daniel.

  The four rivers of Eden:

  Pison Gihon Tigris Euphrates.

  The faces of the cherubim:

  Man Lion Ox Eagle.

  The four Evangelists:

  Matthew Mark Luke John.

  The four cardinal virtues:

  Courage Justice Prudence Restraint.

  The four horsemen of the Apocalypse:

  Conquest Murder Famine Death.

  The four elements according to Aristotle:

  Earth Water Air Fire.

  The four aspects of consciousness:

  Perception Sensation Thought Intuition.

  The four kingdoms in the Kabbalah:

  Mineral Plant Animal Human.

  The four aspects of time:

  Space Past Present Future.

  The four alchemic ingredients:

  Salt Sulphur Nitrogen Mercury.

  The four alchemic processes:

  Coagulatio Solutio Sublimatio Calcinatio.

  The four letters of the holy syllable:

  A O U M.

  The four kabbalistic sephirot:

  Mercy Beauty Strength Rule.

  The four states of existence:

  Life Dying and death The time after death Rebirth.

  The four states of consciousness:

  Lethargy Deep sleep Shallow sleep Waking.

  The four qualities of creation:

  Permanence Fluidity Volatility Light.

  The four human capacities according to Galen:

  Physical Aesthetic Intellectual Moral and spiritual.

  The four basic operations of algebra:

  Addition Subtraction Multiplication Division.

  The four dimensions:

  Width Length Height Time.

  The four states of concentration:

  Solid Liquid Gas Plasma.

  The four bases that construct DNA:

  T A G C

  The four humours according to Hippocrates:

  Phlegmatic Melancholic Sanguine Choleric.

  And still the list was not complete. It could never be complete, because then the world would end. So thought Izydor. He also thought he had come upon the trail of an order that is in force throughout the universe, a special divine alphabet.

  With time, tracking down things in fours changed Izydor’s mind. In every single thing, in even the most insignificant phenomenon he saw four parts, four stages, four processes. He saw foursomes following on from one another, multiplying into eights and sixteens, the constant transformation of the fourfold algebra of life. The blossoming apple tree in the orchard no longer existed for him, but a fourfold, cohesive structure consisting of roots, trunk, leaves, and flowers. And, curiously – the foursome was immortal – in autumn instead of flowers there were fruits. Izydor had to think hard about the fact that in winter only the trunk and roots were left. He discovered the law of reducibility of foursomes to twosomes – the twosome is a period of rest for the foursome. The foursome became a twosome when it was asleep, like a tree in winter.

  Things that did not immediately reveal their inner fourfold structure presented Izydor with a challenge. One time he was watching Witek, who was trying to break in a young horse. The horse bucked and threw him to the ground. Izydor thought the configuration popularly known as “a man on a horse” only appeared to have two elements outwardly. Indeed, principally there is a man, and a horse. There is also a third whole, namely a man on a horse. So where is the fourth element?

  It is the centaur, something more than a man and a horse, it is a man and a horse in one, the child of a man and a horse, a man and a goat, Izydor suddenly realised, and once again felt the same, long forgotten anxiety that Ivan Mukta had once left him with.

  THE TIME OF MISIA

  For ages Misia refused to cut her long grey hair. Whenever Lila and Maja came, they brought special dye with them and over an evening they restored her hair’s original colour. They had an eye for colour – they chose exactly the right one.

  One day something suddenly happened to her, and she had her hair cut. As the dyed chestnut curls fell to the floor, Misia looked in the mirror and realised she was an old woman.

  In spring she wrote back to the young squire’s daughter to say she wasn’t taking holiday guests, not this year, nor the next. Paweł tried to protest, but she wouldn’t listen to him. At night she would wake up as her heart suddenly began to pound and her pulse to race. Her hands and feet became swollen. She looked at her feet, and didn’t recognise them. “I used to have slender fingers and fine ankles. My calves tensed when I walked in high heels,” she thought.

  In summer, when the children came home, all except Adelka, they took her to the doctor. She had high blood pressure. She had to take pills and was not allowed to drink coffee.

  “What’s life without coffee?” muttered Misia, taking her grinder from the sideboard.

  “Mama, you’re like a child,” said Maja, taking the grinder out of her hands.

  Next day Witek bought a large tin of decaffeinated coffee at the hard-currency shop. She pretended to like it, but once she was alone, she ground some precious, rationed real coffee beans and made herself a glass of it. With a skin, just as she liked it. She sat at the kitchen window and gazed at the orchard. She could hear the rustle of the tall grass – there was no one left to mow it under the trees. From the window she could see the Black River, the priest’s meadows, and beyond them Jeszkotle, where people were always building new houses out of white breeze blocks. The world was no longer as pretty as it used to be.

  One day, as she was drinking her coffee, some people came to see Paweł. She found out that Paweł had hired them to build a family tomb.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about it?” she asked.

  “I wanted to give you a surprise.”

  On Sunday they went to look at the deep excavation. Misia didn’t like the s
pot – next to old Boski’s and Stasia Papuga’s grave.

  “Why isn’t it next to my parents?” she asked.

  Paweł shrugged.

  “Why, why, why,” he mocked her. “It’s too cramped there.”

  Misia remembered how she and Izydor had once divided her marital bed.

  As they were on the way home, she cast a glance at the inscription at the graveyard exit.

  “God sees. Time escapes. Death pursues. Eternity waits,” she read.

  The year that ensued was troubled. Paweł would switch on the radio in the kitchen and the three of them, including Izydor, listened to the reports. They didn’t understand much of it. In summer the children and grandchildren came. Not all of them, as Antek hadn’t got leave. They sat in the garden until late at night, drinking currant wine and discussing politics. Misia cast involuntary glances at the garden gate and waited for Adelka.

  “She won’t come,” said Lila.

  In September the house emptied again. For days on end Paweł drove his motorbike around the uncultivated fields and supervised the building of the tomb. Misia called Izydor downstairs, but he refused to come down. Instead he pored over the sheets of brown paper on which he drew his never-ending tables.

  “Promise that if I die first you won’t put him in the old people’s home,” she said to Paweł.

  “I promise.”

  On the first day of autumn Misia ground some real coffee, tipped it into a glass, and poured on boiling water. She took some gingerbread from the sideboard. A wonderful aroma filled the kitchen. She pulled a chair up to the window and drank her coffee in small sips. Then the world exploded in Misia’s head, and tiny shards of it scattered all around. Misia sank to the floor, under the table. The spilled coffee dripped onto her hand. She couldn’t move, so she waited, like an animal caught in a snare, for someone to come and free her.

  She was taken to the hospital in Taszów, where the doctors said she had had a stroke. Every day Paweł came to see her with Izydor and the girls. They sat by her bed and talked to her the whole time, though none of them was sure if Misia could understand. They asked questions, and sometimes she nodded to say “yes” or shook her head to say “no.” Her face had caved in, and her gaze had turned inside and gone dull. They went into the corridor and tried to find out from the doctor what would happen to her, but the doctor looked preoccupied with something else. Red-and-white flags hung in every window of the hospital, and the staff were wearing strike armbands. So they stood at the hospital window and explained this misfortune to each other. Maybe she had hit her head and damaged all those centres, of speech, joie de vivre, interest in life, the will to live. Or maybe something else had happened: she had fallen and taken fright at the thought of her own fragility, at the miraculous fact of being alive, she had taken fright at the idea that she was mortal, and now, before their very eyes, she was dying of fear of death.

  They brought her compote and oranges acquired at vast expense. Gradually they resigned themselves to the idea that Misia would die, that she was going somewhere else. But what they feared most was that in the fervour of dying, the separating of the soul from the body or the fading of the biological structure of the brain, Misia Boska would be gone forever, all her recipes would be gone, all the chicken liver and radish salads, her iced chocolate cakes, her gingerbread, and finally, her thoughts, her words, the events she had taken part in, as ordinary as her life, and yet – each of them was sure of it – lined in darkness and sorrow, because the world is not friendly to mankind, and the only thing to be done is to find a shell for yourself and your loved ones, and stay in there until you are released. As they looked at Misia sitting in bed, with her legs covered by a blanket and her face absent, they wondered what her thoughts were like – whether they were in shreds, ripped up, just like her words, or maybe hidden in the depths of her mind, preserving all their freshness and strength, or perhaps they had changed into pure images, full of colours and depth. They also reckoned on the fact that Misia may have stopped thinking. That would mean the shell was not airtight, and Misia had been struck down by chaos and destruction while still alive.

  Meanwhile, until she died a month later, the whole time Misia saw nothing but the left side of the world, where her guardian angel was waiting for her, who always appeared at truly important moments.

  THE TIME OF PAWEŁ

  As the tomb still wasn’t ready, Paweł buried Misia next to Genowefa and Michał. He thought she ought to like that. He himself was fully occupied with building the tomb, and kept giving the workmen more and more complicated orders, so the work dragged on. That was how Paweł Boski, inspector, kept putting off the time of his own death.

  After the funeral, once the children had left, the house became very quiet. The silence made Paweł feel uneasy. So he switched on the television and watched all the programmes. The national anthem at the end of broadcasting was his cue to go to bed. Only then did Paweł hear that he was not alone.

  Upstairs the floorboards creaked under the trailing, heavy footsteps of Izydor, who never came downstairs any more. His brother-in-law’s presence got on Paweł’s nerves. So one day he went upstairs to his room and encouraged him to go into the old people’s home.

  “You’ll have proper care and hot meals,” he said.

  To his surprise Izydor didn’t argue. The very next day he was packed to go. When Paweł saw the two cardboard cases and the carrier bag full of clothing, he felt pangs of conscience, but only for a moment.

  “He’ll have proper care and hot meals,” he now told himself.

  In November the first snow fell, and after that it kept falling and falling. A smell of damp arose in the house, and Paweł fetched out an electric heater from somewhere, which was hardly able to heat up the living room. The television crackled because of the damp and cold, but it did work. Paweł followed the weather forecasts and watched all the news reports, though he wasn’t at all concerned about them. Some governments changed, some characters appeared and disappeared in the little silver window. Just before the holidays his daughters came and fetched him for Christmas Eve. He told them to take him home on the second day of the holiday, and then he saw that the roof of Stasia’s cottage had collapsed under the weight of snow. Now the snow was falling inside, covering the furniture with a fleecy layer: the empty sideboard, the table, the bed in which old Boski used to sleep, and the bedside cabinet. At first Paweł wanted to save the things from the cold and frost, but then he thought he wouldn’t be able to drag the heavy furniture out on his own. And what did he need it for?

  “Dad, you made a shoddy roof,” he said to the furniture. “Your shingle has rotted. My house is standing.”

  The spring winds knocked over two walls. The living room in Stasia’s cottage changed into a heap of rubble. In summer nettles and dandelions appeared in Stasia’s flower beds, with brightly coloured anemones and peonies blooming despairingly among them. There was a smell of strawberries gone wild. Paweł was astonished to see how quickly decay and destruction progress. As if building houses were contrary to the entire nature of heaven and earth, as if erecting walls and laying stones on top of each other went against the current of time. He found this thought appalling. On television the national anthem stopped and the screen turned to snow. Paweł switched on all the lights and opened the wardrobes.

  He saw neatly folded piles of bedclothes, tablecloths, napkins, and towels. He touched their edges, and suddenly his entire body was filled with longing for Misia. So he took out a pile of duvet covers and buried his face in it. They smelled of soap, cleanliness and order, like Misia, like the world as it used to be. He started taking the entire contents out of the wardrobes: his clothes and Misia’s, piles of cotton vests and pants, bags full of socks, Misia’s underwear, her slips that he knew so well, her smooth stockings, suspender belts and bras, her blouses and sweaters. He took the suits off their hangers (lots of them, including the ones with padded shoulders, could still remember the war), trousers with belts trapped i
n the loops, shirts with stiff collars, dresses and skirts. He spent a long time examining a grey woman’s suit made of thin woollen fabric, and he remembered buying that material, then taking it to the tailor. Misia had demanded wide lapels and inset pockets. He took hats and scarves from the top shelf, and handbags from the bottom shelf. He plunged his hand into their cool, slippery insides, as if gutting a dead animal. A pile of things grew on the floor, cast about in disorder. He thought he should distribute it all to his children. But Adelka had gone. So had Witek. He didn’t even know where they were. Later, however, it occurred to him that only dead people’s clothes are given away, and he was still alive.

  “I’m alive and I don’t feel bad. I’ll manage,” he said to himself and went to fetch his violin out of the grandfather clock. He hadn’t played it for ages.

  He took it outside onto the front steps and began to play, first This Is Our Last Sunday, then In the Trenches of Manchuria. Moths came flying down to the lamp and circled above his head – a moving halo full of tiny wings and feelers. He kept playing until the stiff, dusty strings snapped, one after another.

  THE TIME OF IZYDOR

  When Paweł took Izydor to the old people’s home, he tried to explain the whole situation clearly to the nun who received him:

  “He may not be all that old, but he is ailing, and also handicapped. Despite being a sanitation inspector,” – Paweł put special stress on the word “inspector” – “and knowing about many things, I could not guarantee him proper care.”

  Izydor willingly agreed to the move. From here he had less of a distance to the graveyard, where his mother, father, and now Misia lay. He was glad Paweł hadn’t managed to finish the tomb, and that Misia was buried with their parents. Every day after breakfast he got dressed and went to sit by them for a while.