Primeval and Other Times (16 page)

They left one cow for Michał and tied one to the cart. Izydor led all the rest out of the barn and took the halters off their necks. They didn’t want to go, so Paweł picked up a stick and whacked them on the rumps. Then Ivan Mukta gave a long whistle and the startled cows set off at a trot across Stasia Papuga’s vegetable patches into the fields. Later they saw them from the cart, standing there, stupefied by their unexpected freedom. Misia cried the whole way.

The cart drove off the Highway into the forest, and its wheels fitted into the ruts carved out by the carts of those who had driven this way earlier. Misia walked after the cart, leading the children. By the road there were masses of chanterelles and ceps growing. Now and then she stopped, knelt down, and pulled mushrooms from the ground along with moss and turf.

“You have to leave the foot, a bit of the foot in the ground,” worried Izydor. “Otherwise they’ll never grow back again.”

“Too bad,” said Misia.

The nights were warm, so they slept on the ground, on quilts brought from home. The men spent all day making dugouts and chopping wood. As in the village, the women cooked and lent each other salt for the potatoes.

The Boskis took up residence between some big pine trees. There were diapers hung out to dry on their branches. Next to the Boskis the Malak sisters had their quarters. The younger one’s husband had joined the Home Army. The older one’s had joined the “Little Andrews” resistance fighters. Paweł and Izydor built the women a dugout.

Without any verbal agreement, the villagers arranged themselves just as they lived in Primeval. They even left an empty space between the Krasnys and Cherubin. In Primeval, Florentynka’s house stands there.

One day at the beginning of September, Cornspike and her daughter came to this forest settlement. The girl was evidently sick. She could hardly drag her feet along. She was bruised and had a high temperature. Paweł Boski, who performed the duties of a doctor in the forest, went up to them with his bag, in which he had iodine, bandages, pills for diarrhoea, and sulfamide powder, but Cornspike wouldn’t let him come near her daughter. She asked the women for hot water and brewed herbs for her. Misia gave them a blanket. It looked as if Cornspike wanted to stay with them, so the men cobbled together a home for her in the ground.

In the evening, when the forest was silent, everyone sat by glimmering bonfires and listened. Sometimes the night flared up, as if a storm were raging nearby. Then they heard a low, terrifying rumble, muffled by the forest.

There were brave people who went to the village, for the potatoes that were ripening in the small home gardens, for flour, or simply because they couldn’t stand living in uncertainty. Old Mrs Serafin, who no longer cared about life, went most often. Sometimes one of her daughters-in-law went with her, and it was from one of them that Misia heard:

“You haven’t got a house any more. There’s just a heap of rubble left.”

THE TIME OF THE BAD MAN

Ever since the people from Primeval had run away into the forest and lived there in dugout shelters, the Bad Man could find no place for himself in the forest. People were pushing in everywhere, into every grove, into every clearing. They were digging up peat and looking for mushrooms and nuts. They wandered to one side of their hurriedly established camps to relieve themselves straight onto a strawberry bush or fresh grass. On warmer evenings he could hear them copulating in the bushes. He watched in amazement as they built miserable shelters, and was surprised how much time it took them.

Now he spent all day long watching them, and the longer he looked at them, the more he feared and hated them. They were noisy and deceitful. They never stopped moving their mouths, spouting noises that made no sense. It wasn’t weeping, or shouting, or purring with satisfaction. Their speech didn’t mean anything. Everywhere they left their tracks and their smells behind them. They were insolent and incautious. When the ominous booming noises came, and the sky was coloured red at night, they fell into panic and despair, they didn’t know where to run or where to hide. He could smell their fear. They stank like a rat when it fell into the Bad Man’s trap.

The smells that surrounded them irritated the Bad Man. But among them there were also pleasant, though new odours: the smell of roast meat, boiled potatoes, milk, sheepskins and furs, the smell of coffee made of chicory, ashes, and rye. There were also terrible smells, not animal, but purely human: of grey soap, carbolic, lye, paper, weapons, grease, and sulphur.

One day the Bad Man stood at the edge of the forest and gazed at the village. It was empty, gone cold like carrion. Some of the houses had smashed-in roofs, others had broken windows. There were no birds or dogs in the village. Nothing. This sight pleased the Bad Man. As the people had gone into the forest, the Bad Man went into the village.

THE TIME OF THE GAME

In the little book entitled
Ignis fatuus, or an instructive game for one player
, this is how the description of the Third World begins:

Between Earth and Heaven there are Eight Worlds. They hang motionless in space like eiderdowns hung out to air.

God created the Third World a very long time ago. He started with the seas and volcanoes, and finished with the plants and animals. Yet as there is nothing sublime about creating, just hard work and effort, God grew tired and disheartened. The newly made world seemed boring to Him. The animals couldn’t understand His harmony, they didn’t admire Him or praise Him. They ate and multiplied. They didn’t ask God why He had made the sky blue and the water wet. The hedgehog didn’t wonder at his prickles or the lion at his teeth, the birds didn’t give their wings a second thought.

This world went on for a very long time, and bored God to death. So He went down to Earth and forcibly equipped each animal He met with fingers, hands, faces, soft skin, reason and the capacity to wonder – He changed the animals into people. But the animals didn’t want to be changed into people at all, because people seemed to them as terrible as monsters. So they plotted, caught God, and drowned Him. And that is how it remained.

In the Third World there is no God and no people.

THE TIME OF MISIA

Misia put on two skirts and two sweaters and wrapped her head in a shawl. Silently, to avoid waking anyone, she crept out of the dugout. The forest was muffling the monotonous rumble of distant guns. She took a rucksack and was just about to set off when she saw Adelka. The child came up to her.

“I’m coming with you.”

Misia was cross.

“Go back to the dugout. Right now. I’ll be back in a moment.”

Adelka clutched her skirt tightly and began to cry. Misia hesitated. Then she went back to the dugout for her daughter’s little sheepskin coat.

Once they were standing at the edge of the forest, they thought they could see Primeval. But Primeval wasn’t there. Against the dark sky not the thinnest trail of smoke was visible, there were no lights shining, and no dogs barking. Only in the west, somewhere over Kotuszów, low clouds showed as a brown glow. Misia shuddered and an old dream came back to her, in which it had looked just like this. “I’m dreaming,” she thought. “I’m lying on the bunk in the dugout. I haven’t gone anywhere. This is in my dream.” And then she thought she must have fallen asleep even earlier. It seemed as if she were lying on her new double bed, with Paweł sleeping beside her. There was no war. She was having a long nightmare, about the Germans, the Russians, the front line, the forest, and the dugouts. That helped – Misia stopped feeling afraid and went out onto the Highway. Wet stones on the road crunched under her shoes. Then Misia had a hopeful thought that she had fallen asleep earlier still. Tired of monotonously turning the coffee grinder’s handle, she had fallen asleep on the bench outside the mill. She was only a few years old, and now she was having a child’s dream about adult life and war.

“I want to wake up,” she said aloud.

Adelka looked at her in amazement, and Misia realised that no child would be capable of dreaming the shooting of the Jews, the death of Florentynka, the partisans, what they had done to Ruta, the bombardments, the displacement, or her mother’s paralysis.

She looked upwards: the sky was like the lid of a can, in which God had shut the people.

They passed a dark silhouette, and Misia guessed it was their barn. She stepped onto the verge and stretched out a hand in the darkness. She touched the rough boards of the fence. She heard some faint noises, strange and muffled.

“Someone’s playing the accordion,” said Adelka.

They stood by the gate, and Misia’s heart began to pound. Her house was standing, she could sense it, though she could not see it. She could feel its large, quadrangular mass, she could feel its weight and the way it filled space. Feeling her way, she opened the gate and went onto the porch.

The music was coming from inside. The door from the porch into the hall was boarded up, just as they had left it, so they went to the kitchen entrance. The music became clearly audible. Some-one was playing jaunty songs on the accordion. Misia crossed herself, grabbed Adelka tightly by the hand, and opened the door.

The music fell silent. She saw her kitchen plunged in smoke and semi-darkness. There were blankets hanging over the windows. Soldiers were sitting at the table, by the walls, and even on the sideboard. Suddenly one of them aimed his rifle at her. Misia slowly raised her hands.

The gloomy lieutenant stood up from the table. He reached upwards for her hand and shook it in greeting.

“This is our landlady,” he said in Russian, and Misia curtsied awkwardly.

Among the soldiers was Ivan Mukta. His head was bandaged. From him Misia learned that her parents were living in the mill with the cow. Apart from that there was no one left in Primeval. Ivan took Misia upstairs and opened the door into the south-facing room for her. There before her Misia saw the wintry night sky. The south-facing room had ceased to exist, but she found it strangely unimportant. As she had been expecting the loss of the entire house, what did losing just one room mean?

“Mrs Misia,” said Ivan Mukta on the stairs, “you must take your parents away from there and hide in the forest. Straight after your Christmas the front will move. There’s going to be a terrible battle. Don’t tell anyone about it. It’s a military secret.”

“Thank you,” said Misia, and only after a pause did the full horror of his words get through to her. “Oh God, what’ll become of us? How will we manage in the forest in winter? What is this war for, Mr Ivan? Who’s running it? Why are you people going to a certain death and killing others?”

Ivan Mukta gazed at her sadly and didn’t reply.

Misia distributed knives to the tipsy soldiers for peeling potatoes. She fetched some lard that was hidden in the cellar and fried a big bowl of chips. They weren’t familiar with fried potato chips. At first they inspected them mistrustfully, but finally they started to eat them, with increasing relish.

“They don’t believe they’re potatoes,” explained Ivan Mukta.

More bottles of vodka appeared on the table, and the accordion started to play. Misia put Adelka to bed under the stairs, which seemed the safest place.

The presence of a woman excited the soldiers. They began to dance, first on the floor, and then on the table. The rest clapped to the beat of the music. They kept pouring vodka down their throats and were seized by a sudden madness – they stamped, shouted, and banged their rifles against the floor. Then a pale-eyed young officer drew a pistol from its holster and fired several shots into the ceiling. Plaster showered down into their glasses. Deafened, Misia covered her head with her hands. Suddenly it went quiet and Misia could hear herself screaming. From under the stairs the child’s terrified crying joined in with her.

The gloomy lieutenant yelled at the pale-eyed officer and touched his holster. Ivan Mukta knelt down beside Misia.

“Don’t be afraid, Misia. It’s just a bit of fun.”

They let Misia have a whole room. Twice she checked to make sure she had locked the door.

In the morning, when she went to the mill, the pale-eyed officer came up to her and said something apologetically. He showed her the ring on his finger and some documents. Out of nowhere as usual, Ivan Mukta appeared.

“He has a wife and child in Moscow. He says he’s very sorry for yesterday evening. It’s anxiety getting the better of him.”

Misia didn’t know what to do. On sudden impulse she went up to the man and hugged him. His uniform smelled of earth.

“Please try not to get killed, Mr Ivan,” she said to Mukta in parting.

He shook his head and smiled. Now his eyes looked like two dark dashes.

“People like me don’t die.”

Misia smiled.

“So goodbye,” she said.

THE TIME OF MICHAŁ

They were living in the kitchen with the cow. Michał had made it a place to lie down behind the door, where the buckets of water always used to stand. By day he ventured out to the barns for hay, then he fed the cow and threw out her manure. Genowefa watched him from her chair. Twice a day he took a bucket, sat on a stool and milked the animal as best he could. There wasn’t much milk. Just as much as two people need. Michał saved the cream from the milk to take it to the children in the forest one day.

The days were short, as if they were sick and had no strength to keep going to the end. It went dark early, so they sat at the table, on which an oil lamp flickered. They covered the windows with blankets. Michał lit the stove and opened the little door – the fire cheered them up. Genowefa asked him to turn her towards the fire.

“I can’t move. I am dead while still alive. I am a terrible burden to you that you don’t deserve,” she sometimes said in a sepulchral voice that emerged from somewhere deep in her belly.

Michał would reassure her.