Primeval and Other Times (20 page)

Paweł pointed at his guest’s full shot glass. They took no notice when the women went back into the kitchen. Ruta sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. Then Izydor, who was lying in wait for her, took the opportunity to bring out his box of stamps and postcards.

“Look,” he said encouragingly.

Ruta picked up the postcards and looked at each one for a while. She blew streams of white smoke from her mouth, and her lipstick left mysterious marks on the cigarette.

“I can give them to you,” said Izydor.

“No. I prefer to look at them at your place, Izek.”

“You’ll have more time in the summer, won’t you?”

Izydor saw that a big tear had settled on Ruta’s stiff, mascara-coated eyelashes. Misia handed her a glass of vodka.

“I’m so unlucky, Misia,” said Ruta, and the tear trapped in her lashes rolled down her cheek.

THE TIME OF ADELKA

Adelka didn’t like her father’s friends, all those men whose clothes stank of cigarettes and dust. The most important of them was Ukleja – surely because he was so big and fat. But even Ukleja was nice and polite and spoke in a less booming voice when Mr Widyna came to see her father.

Widyna was brought by a chauffeur, who then waited all evening outside in his car. Widyna had a green hunter’s uniform and a feather in his hat. He clapped Paweł on the shoulder in greeting and gave Misia’s hand a long, disgusting kiss. Misia told Adelka to look after little Witek while she fetched the best provisions from the larder. The knife flashed in her hand as she sliced dry sausage and ham. Paweł talked of Widyna with pride, saying: “In this day and age it’s good to have such acquaintances.”

These particular acquaintances of her father’s were keen on hunting, and would arrive from the forest laden with hares or pheasants. They would put it all on the table in the hall, and before sitting down to dinner they would knock back half a tumbler of vodka. The house smelled of bigos stew.

Adelka knew that on this sort of evening she would have to play. She also made sure Antek was on hand with his accordion. There was nothing she feared as much as her father when he got angry.

When the time came, her mother told them to fetch their instruments and go into the living room. The men would be smoking cigarettes, and silence would fall. Adelka struck the key note, and then she and Antek began to play together. For
In the Trenches of Manchuria
Paweł fetched his violin and joined their duet. Misia stood in the doorway and watched them proudly.

“I’m buying a double bass for the youngest one,” said Paweł.

Witek hid behind his mother whenever people looked at him.

The whole time she played, Adelka kept thinking about the dead animals on the hall table.

They all had their eyes open. The birds’ eyes looked like glass stones from rings, but the hares’ eyes were terrible somehow. They seemed to follow her every move. The birds lay tied by the legs in bunches, like radishes. The hares lay singly. She looked for bullet wounds in their fur and feathers, but she only occasionally managed to find congealed round scabs. The dead hares’ blood dripped from their noses onto the floor. They had sweet little muzzles similar to a cat’s. Adelka would adjust their heads to make sure they were on the table.

One day, among the shot pheasants she noticed another kind of bird. It was smaller and had beautiful blue feathers. Their colour thrilled her, and she longed to have them. She didn’t yet know what she would do with them, but she knew she wanted them. She carefully pulled out the feathers, one after another, until she was holding a feathery bouquet. She tied it with a white hair ribbon and went to show her mother. In the kitchen she ran straight into her father.

“What’s this? What have you done? Do you know what you’ve done?”

Adelka shrank back against the dresser.

“You’ve plucked Mr Widyna’s jay! And he shot it specially.”

Misia stood next to Paweł, and the guests’ curious heads appeared in the doorway.

Her father grabbed Adelka by the arm with an iron grip and steered her into the living room. He pushed her angrily, so that she stopped in front of Widyna, who was talking to someone.

“What is it?” he asked vacantly. His eyes were cloudy.

“She’s plucked your jay!” cried Paweł.

Adelka held out the bouquet of feathers. Her hands were shaking.

“Give those feathers back to Mr Widyna,” Paweł snapped at her. “Misia, fetch me some peas. We’ll punish her as an example. You have to be tough with children … And keep them on a tight rein.”

Misia reluctantly handed him a bag of peas. Paweł scattered the peas in a corner of the room and told his daughter to kneel down on them. Adelka knelt down, and there was a short silence. She could feel everyone looking at her. She thought she was going to die now.

“To hell with the jay. Pour us a drink, Paweł,” gurgled Widyna in this silence, and the hubbub started up again.

THE TIME OF PAWEŁ

Paweł lay on his back and knew he’d never fall asleep now. Outside it was getting grey. His head ached and he was terribly thirsty. But he was too tired and downcast to get up and go to the kitchen. So he brooded on the whole of the previous evening, the big drinking spree, the first few toasts, because he couldn’t remember the rest, Ukleja’s vulgar jokes, the displeased expressions on some of the women’s faces and some of their grievances. And then he considered the fact that he had turned forty, and that the first part of his life was over. He had reached the peak, and now, lying on his back with a monstrous hangover, he was watching time go by. He started recalling other days and other evenings, too, watching them like a film when it is run from end to beginning – ludicrous, funny, and nonsensical, like his life. He could see all the images in detail, but they seemed trivial and meaningless. Like this he saw his entire past, and found nothing in it to be proud of, nothing to gladden him, or stir any kind of positive emotions. In this entire, bizarre tale there was nothing certain or permanent, nothing to get a grip on. There was just an endless struggle, some unfulfilled dreams and unsatisfied desires. “I’ve had no success at all,” he thought. He felt like crying, so he tried, but he must have forgotten how, because he hadn’t cried since childhood. He swallowed thick, bitter saliva and tried to emit a childish sob from his throat and lungs. But nothing came of it, so he cast his mind into the future and forced himself to think about what was going to happen, what he still had to do: a training course and certainly a promotion, the children going to middle school, building an extension for the house and some rooms to let – not just rooms but a boarding house, a holiday cottage for summer vacationers from Kielce and Kraków. For a while he cheered up inside and forgot about his headache, his bone-dry tongue and his suppressed tears. But the dreadful grief came back. He felt as if his future would be the same as his past – various things would happen in it that meant nothing and led nowhere. This idea made him feel fear, because after all that, after the course and the promotion, after the boarding house and the extension, after all sorts of ideas or any kind of activity came death. And Paweł Boski realised that on this sleepless, hung-over night he was staring helplessly at the birth of his own death – that in his life the hour of noon had already struck, and now, gradually, deviously, and imperceptibly the twilight was closing in.

He felt like an abandoned child, like a clod of earth thrown on the roadside verge. He lay on his back in the rough, elusive present, and felt that with every passing second he was dissolving into non-existence.

THE TIME OF RUTA

Ruta was even ready to love Ukleja. She could treat him like a large, sick animal. But Ukleja didn’t want her love – he wanted power over her.

Sometimes Ruta felt as if the shaggy Bad Man were sitting inside Ukleja – he lay on top of her the same way as the Bad Man lay on her mother. But whereas her mother let it happen with a smile on her face, it made Ruta feel anger and hatred that grew and swelled like dough. Ukleja always fell asleep on top of her afterwards, and his body gave off a stink of alcohol. Ruta would slide out from under it and go into the bathroom. She would fill the bathtub with water and lie in it until the water went cold.

Ukleja would lock Ruta in the house alone. He left lots of good food for her in the kitchen, from the “Cosy Corner” restaurant: cold chicken, pork knuckle, fish in aspic, vegetable salad, egg mayonnaise, herrings in sour cream – whatever there was on the menu. In Ukleja’s house she lacked nothing. She went from room to room, listened to the radio, changed into her dresses, and tried on shoes and hats. She had two wardrobes filled with clothes, a casket full of gold jewellery, about fifteen hats and dozens of pairs of shoes, so she had been given everything she wanted. To begin with she really thought she would be able to walk about the streets of Taszów in these outfits and parade outside the church in the market square, hear the sighs and catch the glances full of admiration. But Ukleja never let her go out alone. She could only go out with him. And he took her to see his pals and lifted her silk skirts to show off her thighs. Or he took her to the Boskis’ house in Primeval, or to play bridge with the lawyers and secretaries, where she got bored and spent hours staring at her nylon stockings.

Then Ukleja took possession of a camera on a stand and some darkroom equipment from a photographer who owed him money. Ruta soon realised what taking photographs involved. The camera stood in the bedroom, and before getting into bed, Ukleja always set the automatic shutter release. Then in the red light of the darkroom Ruta saw Ukleja’s mounds of flesh, his backside, genitals, and fat breasts bulging like a woman’s, covered in black bristles. She also saw herself crushed and fragmented into breasts, thighs, and belly. So when she was left alone, she put on her dresses and stood perfumed and elegant before the eye of the camera lens.

“Click,” said the camera in admiration.

THE TIME OF MISIA

The passage of time worried Misia in May in particular. May abruptly forced its way into its place in the rank of months and burst forth. Everything began to grow and flower – all at once.

Familiar with the early-spring, tawny-grey view from the kitchen window, Misia couldn’t get used to the day-to-day changes in which May abounded. First of all, in just two days, the meadows went green. Then the Black River shone olive-green and let the light into its waters, which from then on assumed different shades daily. The woods at Papiernia went willow-green, then grass-green, and finally darkened and plunged into shadow.

In May Misia’s orchard blossomed, and that was a sign that she could launder all the clothes, curtains, bedding, mats, napkins, and bedspreads that had gone musty over the winter. She stretched washing lines between the blossoming apple trees and filled the pink-and-white orchard with bright colours. The children, hens, and dogs came toddling after her. Sometimes Izydor came, too, but he always talked about things that didn’t interest her.

In the orchard she thought about the fact that it was impossible to stop the trees from blossoming, and that the petals would inevitably fall, while in time the leaves would go brown and then drop. She wasn’t comforted by the thought that next year the same thing would happen again, because she knew it wasn’t true. Next year the trees would be different – bigger, their branches weightier, the grass would be different, and so would the fruits. This blossoming branch would never be repeated. “Hanging out the washing like this will never be repeated,” she thought. “I shall never be repeated.”

She went back into the kitchen and set about making the dinner, but everything she did seemed to her crude and clumsy. The pierogi were shapeless, the dumplings uneven, the pasta thick and coarse. Peeled clean, the potatoes suddenly got eyes that had to be dug out with the tip of a knife.

Misia was just like the orchard, and like everything in the world that is subject to time. After her third child she grew fat, her hair lost its shine and went straight. Now her eyes were the colour of bitter chocolate.

She was pregnant for the fourth time, and for the first time she thought it was too much for her. She didn’t want this child.

A son was born, to whom she gave the name Marek. He was calm and quiet.

From the start he slept right through the night. He only came to life when he saw her breast. Paweł had gone on yet another course, so Michał looked after Misia in her confinement.

“Four children is a lot for you,” he said. “You should be using some sort of protection. After all, Paweł knows a thing or two about it.”

Soon Misia became certain that Paweł went whoring with Ukleja. Perhaps she shouldn’t resent him for that. First of all she had been pregnant – fat and swollen – then in her confinement, which she took badly. But she did resent him.

She knew he was squeezing and screwing all those barmaids, butcher’s shop girls, and waitresses from the restaurants he monitored as a state official. She found lipstick marks and single long hairs on his shirt. She started noticing alien smells on his things. Finally she found an open packet of condoms, which he never used when they made love.

Misia called Izydor upstairs to the bedroom, and together they divided the big double bed in half. She could see that Izydor liked this idea. He even added something of his own to this new arrangement – he put a flowerpot with a big palm tree in the middle of the room between the beds. Michał watched it all from the kitchen as he smoked a cigarette.

When Paweł came home rather tipsy, Misia went up to him with all four children.

“I’ll kill you if you ever do it again,” she said.

He blinked, but didn’t try pretending not to know what was the matter. Then he threw his boots in the corner and laughed merrily.

“I’ll kill you,” repeated Misia so grimly, that the baby in her arms began to cry pitifully.

In late autumn Marek fell sick with whooping cough and died.