Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF MISIA

Like every person, Misia was born broken into pieces, incomplete, in bits. Everything in her was separate – looking, hearing, understanding, feeling, sensing, and experiencing. Misia’s entire future life would depend on putting it all together into a single whole, and then letting it fall apart.

She needed someone who would stand before her and be a mirror for her, in which she was reflected as a whole.

Misia’s first memory was the sight of the ragged man on the road to the mill. Her father staggered as he walked, and then often cried at night, nestling against her mother’s breasts. So Misia treated him as her equal.

From then on she felt there was no difference between adult and child in anything that really mattered. Child and adult – they were transitory states. Misia watched closely to see how she herself was changing and how the other people around her were changing, but she didn’t know where it was all heading, what the aim of these changes was. In a cardboard box she kept mementoes of herself, her little self and then the bigger one – knitted baby bootees, a tiny cap as if made to fit a fist, not a child’s head, a little linen top, and her first little dress. Then she placed her six-year-old foot next to the knitted bootee and felt a sense of the fascinating laws of time.

Since her father’s return, Misia had started to see the world. Before then everything had been blurred and out of focus. Misia could not remember herself from before her father’s return, as if she hadn’t existed at all. She remembered individual objects. The mill had seemed enormous to her then, a monolithic mass with no beginning or end, no top or bottom. Afterwards she saw the mill differently, with her reason. It had meaning and form. It was the same with other things. Once, when Misia had thought “river,” it had meant something cold and wet. Now she could see that the river flowed to and from somewhere, and that the same river existed before and after the bridge, and that there were other rivers… Scissors – once they were a strange, complicated tool, difficult to make work, which Mama put to magical use. Ever since her father had sat down at the table, Misia could see that the scissors were a simple mechanism with two blades. She made something similar out of two flat sticks. Then for a long time she tried seeing things as they had formerly been again, but her father had changed the world forever.