Primeval and Other Times

by Olga Tokarczuk

He shakily went up to her and hit her in the face. She fell down. He knelt beside her and tried to get inside her, but his flaccid manhood refused to obey him.

  “I hate you,” she drawled through her teeth and spat in his face.

  “Very good. Hatred is just as strong as love.”

  She managed to wriggle out from under his drunken bulk. She locked herself in the bedroom. Soon after, the pot of stew hit the door. Ruta took no notice of the blood flowing from her split lip. She tried on dresses in front of the mirror.

  All night the aroma of cardamom seeped through cracks into her room. The furs and lipsticks smelled of it. It was the aroma of distant journeys and exotic Brazil. Ruta couldn’t sleep. Once she had tried on all the dresses and matched all the shoes and hats to them, she pulled out two suitcases from under the bed and put all her most valuable things in them: two expensive fur coats, a silver fox collar, a box of jewellery, and the newspaper featuring Brazil. She dressed warmly, picked up her cases, and quietly, on tiptoes, crossed the dining room, where Ukleja lay sprawled on the sofa, snoring.

  She came out past Taszów and reached the Kielce road. She had a hard time wading through the snow for a few kilometres, dragging the suitcases, until finally in the darkness she recognised the spot where there was a way into the forest. The wind rose, and a snow shower began.

  Ruta walked to the border of Primeval, turned around, stood facing north and found in herself the feeling that makes it possible to pass through all borders, locks, and gates. For a while she savoured it inside her. Then the snowstorm really took hold, and Ruta walked into it with her entire being.

  THE TIME OF THE GAME

  When the Player finally finds the way out into the Fifth World, wonders what to do next, and seeks help in the instruction manual, Ignis fatuus, or an instructive game for one player, he finds the following story:

  In the Fifth World God talks to Himself whenever He is particularly beset by loneliness.

  He takes pleasure in watching people, especially one of them named Job. “If I were to take away everything he has, all the foundations of his confidence, if I were to strip him of all his goods, layer by layer, would he still be the man he is now? Wouldn’t he start to curse and blaspheme against Me? Would he respect Me and love Me in spite of all?”

  God gazes at Job from on high and tells Himself: “Definitely not. He only esteems Me because I bestow goods on him. I’ll take away everything I have given him.”

  And God strips Job like an onion. And He weeps over him in sympathy. First He deprives Job of every possession he had: his house, land, herd of goats, labourers, groves, and woods. Then He takes away every person he loved: his children, women, closest friends, and relatives. Finally He removes everything that made Job the man he was: his physical health, mental health, habits and special interests.

  Now He looks upon His work, and has to narrow His divine eyes. Job is shining with the same light that makes God glow. Or Job’s brilliance may be even greater, because God has to narrow His divine eyes. Terrified, He hurriedly returns everything to Job in turn, and even gives him some extra new goods. He institutes money for their exchange, and along with the money safes and banks, He gives beautiful objects, fashions, wishes, and desires. And constant fear. He showers all this on Job, until gradually his light begins to fade and finally vanishes.

  THE TIME OF LILA AND MAJA

  The girls were born the year Michał died of heart disease in Taszów hospital, and Adelka started going to high school. She resented them for being born. She could not sit and read to her heart’s content, as she wanted to. Instead, her mother’s shaking voice would call her from the kitchen and ask her to help.

  Those were lean years, like the prewar jackets with frayed seams that were worn now instead of an overcoat, poor, like pantries where there is never anything but a pot of lard and a few jars of honey.

  Adelka could remember the night her mother gave birth to the twins and wept. Her grandfather, already ill then, sat by her bed.

  “I’m almost forty. How am I going to bring up two little girls?”

  “The same as the other children,” he had said.

  But the entire burden of bringing up this double trouble fell on Adelka. Her mother had lots of other things to do – the cooking, the laundry, and cleaning the yard. Her father only appeared in the evenings. They spoke to each other angrily, as if they couldn’t bear the sight of each other, as if they suddenly hated each other. He would go straight down into the cellar, where he illegally tanned hides. That was how they survived. So after coming home from school Adelka had to fetch the pram and take the girls for a walk. Then she and her mother fed them and changed them, and in the evening she helped her mother to give them a bath. Only once she had watched to see they were asleep could she finally sit down to read. So when they fell ill with scarlet fever she thought it would be better for everyone if they died.

  They lay in their little double bed unconscious with fever – identical, two-fold child suffering. The doctor came and said they must be wrapped in wet sheets to bring the fever down. Then he packed his bag and left. At the garden gate he told Paweł that he could find antibiotics on the black market. The word sounded miraculous, like a magic potion from a fairy tale, so Paweł got on his motorbike. In Taszów he learned that Stalin had died.

  He waded through the melting snow to Ukleja’s house, but he didn’t find anyone there. So he went to the marketplace, to the district committee, to look for Widyna. The assistant’s eyes were swollen from crying, and she told him the secretary wasn’t receiving. She refused to let him go further inside. So Paweł went back outside, and looked around the town helplessly. “Whoever has already died and whoever is yet to die, Taszów is full of death,” he thought. Then he decided he should just go and drink some vodka. Right away, at once. His legs took him of their own accord to the “Cosy Corner” restaurant. There he went straight up to the bar, where Basia was flaunting her wasp waist and enormous breasts. She had pinned a piece of lace in her thick hair.

  Paweł wanted to go behind the counter and cuddle up to her fragrant cleavage. She poured him a double vodka.

  “You’ve heard what happened?” she asked.

  He knocked back the vodka in one gulp, and Basia offered him a plate of herring in sour cream.

  “I need antibiotics. Penicillin. Do you know what that is?”

  “Who’s sick?”

  “My daughters.”

  Basia emerged from behind the counter and threw her coat over her shoulders. She led him along the back streets downhill, to the river, and in among some small cottages where the Jews used to live. Her strong legs in their nylon stockings hopped across the soggy piles of horse manure. She stopped outside one of these cottages and told him to wait. A minute later she came back and named a sum of money. It was staggeringly high. Paweł gave her a roll of banknotes. Soon he was holding a small cardboard box. The only words he understood of the message on the lid were, “Made in the United States.”

  “When are you coming to see me?” she asked as he got on his motorbike.

  “Not now,” he said and kissed her on the lips.

  That evening the girls’ temperature dropped, and next day they were well. Misia prayed to the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle, Queen of Antibiotics, for this sudden recovery. In the night, once she had checked to see if their foreheads were cool, she slid under Paweł’s quilt and cuddled up to him as close as she could.

  THE TIME OF LIME TREES

  There are lime trees lining the Highway leading from Jeszkotle to the Kielce road. They looked the same at the beginning, and they will look the same at the end. They have thick trunks and roots that reach deep into the earth, where they meet the foundations of everything that lives. In winter their mighty boughs cast sharp shadows onto the snow and measure the hours of the short day. In spring the lime trees put out millions of green leaves that bring sunlight down to the earth. In summer their fragrant flowers attract swarms of insects. In autumn the lime trees
add red and brown to the whole of Primeval.

  Like all plants, the lime trees live an eternal dream, whose origin lies in the tree’s seeds. The dream does not grow or develop along with it, but is always exactly the same. The trees are trapped in space, but not in time. They are liberated from time by their dream, which is eternal. Feelings do not grow in it, as they do in animals’ dreams, nor do images appear in it, as they do in people’s dreams.

  Trees live thanks to matter, by absorbing juices that flow from deep in the ground and by turning their leaves to the sunlight. The tree’s soul rests after going through many existences. The tree only experiences the world thanks to matter. For a tree, a storm is a warm-and-cold, idle-and-violent stream. When it gathers, the whole world becomes a storm. For the tree there is no world before or after the storm.

  In the fourfold changes of the seasons the tree is unaware that time exists and that the seasons come in succession. For the tree all four qualities exist at once. Winter is part of summer, and autumn is part of spring. Cold is part of hot, and death is part of birth. Fire is part of water, and earth is part of air.

  To trees people seem eternal – they have always been walking through the shade of the lime trees on the Highway, neither frozen still nor in motion. For trees people exist eternally, but that means just the same as if they had never existed.

  The crash of axes and the rumble of thunder disturb the trees’ eternal dream. What people call their death is just a temporary disruption of the dream. What people call the death of trees involves coming closer to the anxious existence of animals. For the clearer and stronger consciousness becomes, the more fear there is in it. But the trees never reach the kingdom of anxiety occupied by animals and people.

  When a tree dies, its dream that has no meaning or impression is taken over by another tree. That is why trees never die. In ignorance of their own existence, they are liberated from time and death.

  THE TIME OF IZYDOR

  When Ruta left Primeval and it became clear she wasn’t coming back, Izydor decided to enter a monastery.

  There were two monastic orders in Jeszkotle – a women’s and a men’s. The nuns ran an old people’s home. He often saw them taking their shopping home by bicycle. They tended the neglected graves at the cemetery. Their contrasting black-and-white habits stood out against the washed out greyness of the rest of the world.

  The male order was called the Reformers of God. For a long time Izydor watched the sad, bleak building hidden behind a crumbling stone wall before setting off there. He noticed that the same two monks spent the whole time working in the garden. In silence they grew vegetables and white flowers. Only white ones – lilies, snowdrops, anemones, white peonies, and dahlias. One of the monks, who must have been the most important, made trips to the post office and did the shopping. The rest had to be shut in the mysterious interior forever. They devoted themselves to God. That was what Izydor liked best – to be separated from the world, deeply immersed in God. To get to know God, examine the order of the works He created, and finally answer the questions why Ruta had left, why his mother had fallen ill and died, why his father had died, why people and animals were killed in the war, and why God allowed evil and suffering.

  If Izydor were accepted into the order, Paweł would no longer call him a scrounger. He would stop sneering at him and mocking him. Izydor wouldn’t have to keep seeing all the places that reminded him of Ruta.

  He confided his plans to Misia. She burst out laughing.

  “Give it a try,” she said, wiping a child’s bottom.

  Next day he went to Jeszkotle and rang the old-fashioned bell at the monastery door. For a long time nothing happened – maybe it was a test of his patience. Finally, however, the bolt grated and an old man in a dark-grey habit, whom he had never seen before, opened the door to him.

  Izydor said why he had come. The monk was not surprised and did not smile. He nodded and told Izydor to wait. Outside. The door grated shut. A quarter of an hour later it opened again, and Izydor was allowed to come inside. Now the monk led him along corridors, down stairs and up, all the way to a spacious, empty hall, where there was a desk and two chairs. After another ten minutes or so a different monk came into the hall, the one who went to the post office.

  “I’d like to join the order,” declared Izydor.

  “Why?” the monk simply asked.

  Izydor cleared his throat.

  “The woman I wanted to marry has left. My parents have died. I feel lonely and I yearn for God, although I don’t understand Him. I know we could have a closer relationship if I got to know Him better. I’d like to do that by reading books, in foreign languages, on various theories. However, the local library is poorly stocked …” Izydor had to refrain from complaining about the library. “But please do not think I would do nothing but read. I’d like to do something useful, and I know that this order, the Reformers of God, is exactly what I need. I’d like to make change for the better, to redress all manner of evil …”

  The monk interrupted Izydor in mid-sentence.

  “To change the world … you say. That’s very interesting, but unrealistic. The world is impossible to make better or worse. It is bound to remain just as it is.”

  “Yes, but you are called reformers, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, you have misunderstood, my dear boy. We have no intention of reforming the world in anybody’s name. We reform God.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “How can you reform God?” asked the surprised Izydor at last.

  “You can. People change. Times change. Cars, satellites … God might sometimes seem … how should I put it, anachronistic, and He is too big, too mighty, and thus a touch indolent as well, to fit people’s imaginations.”

  “I thought God was unchanging.”

  “Each of us is wrong about something essential. That is a purely human trait. Saint Milo, the founder of our order, proved that if God were unchanging, if He came to a standstill, the world would cease to exist.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Izydor with conviction.

  The monk stood up, so Izydor got up, too.

  “Come back to us when you feel the need.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Izydor to Misia when he went into the kitchen.

  Then he lay down on his bed, which stood right in the centre of the attic, just under the skylight. The small rectangle of sky was like a picture, a holy picture that could hang in a church.

  Whenever Izydor saw the sky and the four points of the compass he felt like praying, but the older he got, the harder it was for the words of the familiar prayers to come to his mind. Instead thoughts appeared in his head that made holes in his prayers and tore them to pieces. So he tried to concentrate and imagine the figure of an unchanging God in the starry picture. But his imagination always produced an image that his mind could not accept. Once it was an old man sprawling on a throne with such a cold, severe look on his face that Izydor instantly blinked and drove him out of the skylight frame. Another time God was a sort of wavering, fluttering spirit, so volatile and indefinite as to be unbearable. Sometimes underneath the figure of God there was someone real impersonating him, most often Paweł, and then Izydor lost the desire to pray. He sat on his bed and swung his legs in the air. And then he discovered that what he found difficult about God was God’s gender.

  And then, not without a sense of guilt, he saw Him in the frame of the skylight as a woman, She-God, or whatever She should be called. It brought him relief. He found it far easier to pray to Her than it had ever been before. He spoke to Her as to a mother. This went on for some time, but finally along with his prayers he started feeling a vague anxiety, which expressed itself by sending waves of heat through his body.

  God was a woman, large, powerful, damp, and steaming like the earth in spring. She-God existed somewhere in space, like a storm cloud full of water. Her power was overwhelming, and reminded Izydor of some childhood experience that he feared. Every ti
me he addressed Her, She answered him with a comment that gagged him. He couldn’t go on speaking, the prayer lost any thread it had, any intention. It was impossible to want anything from She-God, it was only possible to imbibe Her, breathe Her, or dissolve in Her.

  One day, when Izydor was staring at his piece of sky, he had a revelation. He realised that God is neither a man nor a woman. He knew it as he uttered the words “O God.” Here lay the solution to the problem of God’s gender. By making it into one word, “Ogod,” it sounded neither masculine or feminine, but neutral, just like “oak tree,” “opal,” “ocean,” “odour,” “oatmeal,” “omen,” “open,” … Izydor excitedly repeated the real divine name that he had discovered, and every time he did, he knew more and more. So Ogod was young, and at the same time had existed since the beginning of the world or even earlier, without cease (because “Ogod” reminded him of “over and over”), it was unique and unrepeatable (“only”), and it was the start and finish of everything (“omega”), though if you tried to find it, it wasn’t there (“n-owhere”). Ogod was full of love and joy, but could also be cruel and dangerous. It contained all the features and attributes that are present in the world, and took on the form of every thing, every event, every time. It created and destroyed, or allowed what It created to destroy itself. It was unpredictable like a child, like someone insane. In a way It was a bit like Ivan Mukta. Ogod existed in such an obvious way that Izydor wondered how he could ever have failed to realise it.

  This discovery brought him genuine relief. Whenever he thought about it, somewhere inside he felt a burst of laughter. Izydor’s soul was chuckling away. He stopped going to church, too, which met with Paweł’s approval.

  “Though I don’t think they’d let you join the Party,” he said one day at breakfast, to dispel any hopes his brother-in-law might have.