Primeval and Other Times (7 page)

Secondly, the most valuable object in the house, as far as Misia was concerned, was in here – the “moonstone,” as she called it. Her father had once found it in a field, and he said it was different from all normal stones. It was almost perfectly round, and there were tiny crumbs of something very shiny embedded in its surface. It looked like a Christmas tree decoration. Misia would put it to her ear and wait for a sound, a sign from the stone. But the stone from heaven was silent.

Thirdly, there was an old thermometer with a broken mercury tube inside, so the mercury could move freely about the thermometer, not restricted by any scale, regardless of the temperature. One time it would stretch out in a stream, and then freeze, rolled in a ball like a frightened animal. One time it would look black, and another time it would be black, silvery, and white all at once. Misia loved playing with the thermometer with the mercury shut inside it. She thought the mercury was a living creature. She called it Sparky. Whenever she opened the drawer she said softly:

“Hello, Sparky.”

Fourthly, old, broken, unfashionable costume jewellery was thrown into the drawer, all those trashy purchases no one can resist: a snapped chain whose gold paint has come off, exposing the grey metal, a fine filigree brooch made of horn, depicting Cinderella, with the birds helping her to pick the peas out of the ashes. Between pieces of paper shone the glassy stones of forgotten rings from the fair, earring clasps, and glass beads of various shapes. Misia marvelled at their simple, useless beauty. She would look into the window through the green eye of the ring, and the world became different. Beautiful. She could never decide what sort of world she would prefer to live in: green, ruby, blue, or yellow.

Fifthly, among the other things in here lay a switchblade, hidden from children. Misia was afraid of the knife, though sometimes she imagined she could use it. In defence of her father, for instance, if someone tried to do him harm. The knife looked innocent. It had a dark red ebonite handle, in which the blade was treacherously concealed. Misia had once seen her father release it with barely a flick of his finger. The mere “click” it gave sounded like an attack and made Misia shudder. That was why she reckoned she shouldn’t even touch the knife by accident. She left it in its place, deep in the right-hand corner of the drawer, under the holy pictures.

Sixthly, on top of the knife lay some small holy pictures collected over the years, which the priest used to hand out to the children on his way round the parish. All of them showed either the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle or the little Lord Jesus in a skimpy shirt, grazing a lamb. The Lord Jesus was chubby and had fair curly hair. Misia loved this sort of Lord Jesus. One of the pictures showed a bearded God the Father sprawling on a blue throne. God was holding a broken staff, and for a long time Misia didn’t know what it was. Then she realised that this Lord God was holding a thunderbolt, and began to be afraid of Him.

There was a little medallion knocking around among the pictures. It wasn’t an ordinary medallion. It was made out of a kopeck. On one side the image of the Virgin Mary had been die-cast, and on the other an eagle was spreading its wings.

Seventhly, there were some small, neatly shaped pig bones rattling about in the drawer that were used to play a throwing game. Misia kept an eye on her mother whenever she made aspic out of pig’s feet to make sure she didn’t throw away the bones. The shapely little bones had to be cleaned properly, then dried out on the stove. Misia liked holding them in her hand – they were light, and they looked so similar to each other, just the same, even from different pigs. How can it be, wondered Misia, that all the pigs that are killed for Christmas or Easter, all the pigs in the world have exactly the same little dice bones inside them? Sometimes Misia imagined the live pigs, and felt sorry for them. At least there was a bright side to their death – the dice bones were left after them.

Eighthly, old, used Volta batteries were stored in the drawer. At first Misia didn’t touch them at all, just like the switchblade. Her father said they might still be charged with energy. But the notion of energy shut inside a small, flat box was extremely appealing. It reminded her of the mercury trapped in the thermometer. Though you could see the mercury, but not this energy. What did energy look like? Misia took a battery and weighed it in her hand for a while. Energy was heavy. There must be a lot of energy in such a little box. It must be packed in there like a cabbage for pickling, and pressed down with a fingertip. Then Misia touched the yellow wire with her tongue and felt a gentle tingling – it was the remains of the invisible electrical energy coming out of the battery.

Ninthly, Misia found various medicines in the drawer, and knew it was absolutely forbidden to put them in her mouth. Mama’s tablets were in there, and Papa’s ointment. Misia had particular respect for her Mama’s white pills in a small paper bag. Before Mama took them, she was angry and irritated, and suffered from headaches. But afterwards, once she had swallowed them, she calmed down and began to play patience.

And yes, tenthly there were cards in there for playing patience and rummy. On one side they all looked the same – a green plant design, but when Misia turned them over, a gallery of portraits was revealed. She spent hours examining the faces of the kings and queens. She tried to fathom the relationships between them. She suspected that as soon as the drawer was closed they started holding long conversations with each other, maybe even quarrelling about their imaginary kingdoms. She liked the Queen of Spades the best. She thought her the most beautiful and the saddest. The Queen of Spades had a bad husband. The Queen of Spades didn’t have any friends. She was very lonely. Misia always looked for her in her mother’s patience rows. She also looked for her whenever Mama told fortunes. But Mama spent too long staring at the laid-out cards. Misia got bored when there was nothing happening on the table, and then she went back to rummaging in the drawer, inside which lay the entire world.

THE TIME OF CORNSPIKE

In Cornspike’s cottage in Wydymacz there lived a snake, an owl, and a kite. These creatures never got in each other’s way. The snake lived by the hearth in the kitchen, and Cornspike put out a bowl of milk for him there. The owl sat in the loft, in an alcove where a window had been bricked in. He looked like a statuette. The kite kept to the roof beams, at the highest point in the house, but his real home was the sky.

Cornspike took longest to tame the snake. Every day she put out milk for him, gradually moving the bowl closer to the inside of the house. One day the snake crawled up to her feet. She picked him up, and she won him over with her warm skin, which smelled of grass and milk. The snake wound around her arm, and his golden pupils gazed into Cornspike’s clear eyes. She gave him the name Goldie.

Goldie fell in love with Cornspike. Her warm skin heated the snake’s cold heart and cold body. He desired her odours and the velvet touch of her skin, with which nothing on earth could compare. Whenever Cornspike picked him up, he felt as if he, a common reptile, were changing into something completely different, into something extremely important. As gifts he brought her the mice he hunted, lovely milky pebbles from the riverside, and bits of bark. Once he brought her an apple, and the woman raised it to her face, laughing, and her laughter was fragrant with abundance.

“You tempter,” she would say to him endearingly.

Sometimes she threw him a piece of her clothing, and then Goldie would wind his way into the dress and savour the remains of Cornspike’s aroma. He would wait for her on every path, wherever she went, following her every move. During the day she let him lie on her bed. She carried him round her neck like a silver chain, tied him around her hips and wore him instead of a bracelet, and at night, as she slept, he watched her dreams and furtively licked her ears.

Goldie suffered when the woman made love with the Bad Man. He could sense that the Bad Man was alien to both people and animals. At those times he burrowed in the leaves or looked the sun straight in the eye. Goldie’s guardian angel lived in the sun. Snakes’ guardian angels are dragons.

One day Cornspike went through the meadows to pick herbs by the River with the snake around her neck. There she ran into the parish priest. The priest saw them and recoiled in terror.

“You sorceress!” he cried, waving his stick. “Keep away from Primeval and Jeszkotle, and my parishioners. Do you go walking about with the devil around your neck? Haven’t you heard what the Scriptures say? What the Lord God said to the serpent? ‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, she shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bite her heel.’ ”

Cornspike burst out laughing and raised her skirt, showing her naked underbelly.

“Get away! Get away, Satan!” cried the priest and crossed himself several times.

In the summer of 1927 a sprig of masterwort grew in front of Cornspike’s cottage. Cornspike observed it from the moment it put a thick, fat, stiff shoot out of the earth. She watched as it slowly developed its large leaves. It grew all summer, from day to day, and from hour to hour, until it reached the roof of the cottage and opened its ample canopies above it.

“What now, my fine fellow?” Cornspike said to it ironically. “You’ve pushed yourself so far, you’ve climbed so high into the sky that now your seeds are going to germinate in the thatch, not in the ground.”

The masterwort was about two metres high and had such mighty leaves that they took away the sunlight from the plants around it. Towards the end of summer no other plant was capable of growing beside it. On Saint Michael’s Day it bloomed, and for a few hot nights Cornspike could not sleep for the bittersweet aroma that pervaded the air. The sharp edges of the plant’s mighty, sinewy body bounced off the silver moonlit sky. Sometimes a breeze rustled in the canopies, and the overblown flowers showered down. The rustling noises alerted Cornspike to raise herself on an elbow and listen closely to the plant living. The whole room was full of seductive aromas.

And one night, when Cornspike had finally fallen asleep, a young man with fair hair stood before her. He was tall and powerfully built. His arms and thighs looked as if they were made of polished wood. The glow of the moon illuminated him.

“I’ve been watching you through the window,” he said.

“I know. The smell of you disturbs the senses.”

The young man came inside the room and stretched both hands out to Cornspike. She snuggled in between them and pressed her face to the hard, powerful chest. He lifted her slightly so that their mouths could find each other. From under half-closed eyelids Cornspike saw his face – it was rough like the stem of a plant.

“I have desired you all summer,” she said into a mouth tasting of sweets, candied fruits, and the earth when rain is going to fall.

“And I you.”

They lay down on the floor and brushed against each other like grasses. Then the masterwort planted Cornspike on his hips and took root in her rhythmically, deeper and deeper, pervading her entire body, penetrating its inner recesses, and drinking up its juices. He drank from her until morning, when the sky became grey and the birds began to sing. Then a shudder shook the masterwort, and his hard body froze still, like timber. The canopies began to rustle and dry, prickly seeds showered down on Cornspike’s naked, exhausted body. Then the fair-haired youth went back outside, and Cornspike spent all day picking the aromatic grains from her hair.

THE TIME OF MICHAŁ

Misia had always been lovely, from the first time he saw her outside the house, playing in the sand. He fell in love with her at once. She fitted perfectly in the small devastated space in his soul. He gave her the coffee grinder he had brought from the East as a war trophy. With the grinder he surrendered himself into the little girl’s hands, to be able to start everything anew.

He watched as she grew, as her first teeth fell out, and in their place new ones appeared – white, too large for her little mouth. With sensuous pleasure he watched the nightly unplaiting of her braids and the slow, sleepy motions of her hairbrush. Misia’s hair was at first chestnut, then dark brown, and it always had red lights, like blood, like fire. Michał wouldn’t let it be cut, even when, matted with sweat, it stuck to her pillow during illness. That was the time the doctor from Jeszkotle said Misia might not survive. Michał fainted. He slipped off his chair and fell on the floor. It was clear what Michał’s body was saying by this fall – if Misia died, he would die, too. Just like that, literally, without a doubt.

Michał didn’t know how to express what he felt. It seemed to him that anyone who loves is constantly giving. So he was always giving her little surprises, seeking out shiny stones for her in the river, carving little pipes out of willow, blowing eggs, folding birds out of paper, and buying toys in Kielce – he did whatever might please a little girl. But he cared most of all about big things, of the kind that are permanent, and also beautiful, of the kind time communes with, rather than man. These things were meant to stop time for his love forever. And to stop time for Misia forever. Thanks to them, their love would be eternal.

If Michał had been a powerful ruler, he would have constructed a huge building for Misia on a mountaintop, beautiful and indestructible. But Michał was just an ordinary miller, so he bought Misia clothes and toys, and made her paper birds.

She had the most dresses of all the children in the neighbourhood. She looked as beautiful as the young ladies from the manor house. She had real dolls, bought in Kielce, dolls that blinked, and when turned on their backs they let out a squeal that was meant to sound like a baby crying. She had a wooden pram for them, two prams even – one was made out of a dismantled kennel. She had a two-storey doll’s house and several teddy bears. Wherever Michał went, he always thought of Misia, and always missed her. He never raised his voice to her.

“If you’d only smack her on the bottom once,” said Genowefa peevishly.