Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF SQUIRE POPIELSKI

Squire Popielski had a good time for business. Every year he acquired one more fish pond. The carp in these ponds were huge and fat. When their time came, they crowded into the net of their own accord. The squire loved to walk along the dikes, circling right round them, gazing into the water, and then into the sky. The abundance of fish soothed his nerves, and the ponds allowed him to get a grip on the sense of it all. The more ponds, the more sense. Busy with the ponds, Squire Popielski’s mind had a lot to do: he had to plan, ponder, count, create, and devise. He could think about the ponds the whole time, and then his mind didn’t wander off into cold, dark areas that dragged him down like a quagmire.

In the evenings the squire devoted his time to his family. His wife, as slim and fragile as a reed, would shower him in a hail of problems, trivial and unimportant, as it seemed to him. About the servants, the banquet, the children’s school, the car, money, the shelter. In the evening she sat with him in the living room and drowned the music from the radio with her monotonous voice. Once the squire had been happy when she massaged his back. Now once an hour his wife’s slender fingers turned a page of the book she had been reading for a year. The children were growing, and the squire knew less and less about them. The presence of his oldest daughter, with her disdainfully pouting lips, made him feel uncomfortable, as if she were someone alien, or even hostile to him. His son had become reticent and timid, and never sat on his knees or tugged his moustache any more. His youngest son, the pampered favourite, tended to be wayward and had fits of rage.

In 1931 the Popielskis and their children went to Italy. On returning from the holiday Squire Popielski knew he had found his passion – in art. He started collecting albums about painting, and then spent more and more time in Kraków, where he bought pictures. Moreover, he often invited artists to the manor, held discussions with them, and drank. At dawn he would take the entire company to his ponds and show them the olive-green hulks of the enormous carp.

The next year Squire Popielski fell violently in love with Maria Szer, a young painter from Kraków, a representative of futurism. As happens in sudden loves, meaningful coincidences started appearing in his life, chance common acquaintances, and the necessity for sudden journeys. Thanks to Maria Szer, Squire Popielski fell in love with modern art. His lover was like futurism: full of energy, crazy, though in certain matters stone cold sober. She had a body like a statue – smooth and hard. Strands of her fair hair stuck to her brow as she worked on an enormous canvas. She was the opposite of the squire’s wife. Beside her, his wife was like an eighteenth-century classical landscape: full of details, harmonious, and painfully static.

In the thirty-eighth year of his life Squire Popielski felt as if he had discovered sex. It was wild, crazy sex, like modern art, like Maria Szer. By the bed in her studio stood an enormous mirror, which reflected the entire transformation of Maria Szer and Squire Popielski into a woman and a man. It reflected the rumpled bedding and the sheepskins, and the naked bodies smeared in paint, and the grimaces on their faces, and their naked breasts, and their bellies, and their backs with smudged lipstick streaks.

On his way back to the manor from Kraków in his new car, Squire Popielski would elaborate plans to escape to Brazil, or to Africa with his Maria, but once he crossed the threshold he was happy to find everything in its place, safe and permanent, reliable.

After six months of madness Maria Szer informed him that she was leaving for America. She said everything was new there, full of vigour and energy, and that there you could create your own life, like a futurist painting. After her departure Squire Popielski caught a strange illness with lots of symptoms, which to simplify matters was called arthritis. For a month he lay in bed, where he could surrender to suffering in peace.

He lay there for a month, not so much out of pain or weakness, as because the facts he had been trying to forget for the past few years were back – that the world was ending, and reality was disintegrating like rotten wood, matter was being eaten away from underneath by mould, it was happening quite senselessly and was meaningless. The squire’s body had given up – it too was disintegrating. The same thing had happened to his will. The time between making a decision and taking action kept bloating and becoming unendurable. Squire Popielski’s throat was swollen and stifled. It all meant that he was still alive, that various processes were still going on in his body, his blood was flowing, and his heart was beating. “It has caught up with me,” thought the squire, and from his bed he tried to fix his vision on something, but his vision had become sticky: it wandered about the furniture, landing on them like a fly. Plip! It landed on a pile of books that the squire had had brought to him but hadn’t read. Plip! a bottle of medicine. Plip! a stain on the wall. Plip! the view of the sky through the window. He found it tiring to look into people’s faces. They seemed so mobile, so volatile. It took a lot of vigilance to look into them, but Squire Popielski didn’t have the strength for vigilance, so he averted his gaze.

Squire Popielski had a crushing, ghastly feeling that the world, and everything that was good and bad in it, was passing him by: love, sex, money, thrills, distant voyages, beautiful pictures, intelligent books, wonderful people – all this was gliding past. The squire’s time was slipping away. Then in sudden despair he felt a desire to break free and rush off somewhere. But where, and what for? He fell onto the pillows and choked back his unwept tears.

And once again the spring brought him some hope of salvation. Once he had started to walk, admittedly on a cane, he stood by his favourite pond and asked himself the first question: Where do I come from? He stirred anxiously. Where did I come from, where is my beginning? He went home and made an effort to force himself to read – about the ancient world and prehistory, about excavations and Cretan culture. About anthropology and heraldry. But all this knowledge took him nowhere, so he asked himself a second question: What can a person actually know? And what are the benefits of acquired knowledge? And can you know something fully? He thought and thought, and on Saturdays he discussed the matter with Pelski, who came to play bridge. Nothing resulted from these discussions and reflections. With time he no longer felt like opening his mouth. He knew what Pelski would say, and he knew what he himself would say. He felt as if they were always talking about the same thing, repeating their questions, as if they were playing roles, like moths coming closer to a lamp and then shying away from the obvious truth that might burn them. So finally he asked himself a third question: What should a person achieve, how should he live, what should he do, and what not? He read Machiavelli’s The Prince, and books by Thoreau, Kropotkin, and Kotarbinski. All summer he read so much that he hardly ever left his room. Worried by this, one evening his wife went up to his desk and said:

“They say that rabbi from Jeszkotle is a healer. I went to see him and I asked him to come and visit us. He agreed.”

The squire smiled, disarmed by his wife’s naivety.

The conversation did not turn out the way he had imagined it. Along with the rabbi came a young Jew, because the rabbi could not speak Polish. Squire Popielski had no wish to confide his sufferings in this bizarre couple. So he asked the old man his three questions, though to tell the truth, he wasn’t counting on an answer. The young man with sidelocks translated the clear, lucid Polish sentences into the rabbi’s tortuous, throaty language. Then the rabbi surprised the squire.

“You collect questions. That’s good. I have one more, final question for your collection: Where are we heading? What is the goal of time?”

The rabbi stood up. In parting he offered the squire his hand in a very well-bred manner. Moments later he made another strange remark from the doorway, and the boy translated:

“The time for some tribes is coming to an end. Therefore I will give you something that should now become your property.”

The squire was amused by the Jew’s mysterious and solemn tone. For the first time in months he ate his dinner with an appetite and made fun of his wife.

“You’re resorting to all manner of sorcery to cure me of my arthritis. Evidently the best medicine for ailing joints is an old Jew who answers a question with a question.”

For dinner there was carp in aspic.

Next day the boy with sidelocks came to see the squire and brought him a large wooden box. Intrigued, the squire opened it. Inside there were some compartments. In one lay an old book with a Latin title: Ignis fatuus, or an instructive game for one player.

In the next compartment, which was lined in velvet, lay a birch-wood octagonal die. On each face it had a different number of spots, from one to eight. Squire Popielski had never seen a die like this one before. In the remaining compartments lay some little brass figurines of people, animals, and objects. Underneath he found a piece of cloth, folded over and over and frayed at the edges. More and more amazed by this bizarre present, he unfolded the cloth on the floor, until it took up almost the entire empty space between his desk and the bookcases. It was a sort of game, a sort of ludo in the form of a huge, circular labyrinth.