Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF OLD BOSKI

Old Boski spent his entire life on the manor house roof. The manor house was large, and its roof enormous – full of slants, slopes, and edges. And entirely covered in beautiful wooden shingle. If you were to straighten out the manor house roof and spread it on the ground, it would cover the entire field that Boski owned.

Boski left the cultivation of this land to his wife and children – he had three girls and a boy, Paweł, handsome and capable. Each morning Old Boski went up onto the roof and replaced the rotting or mouldering shingles. His work had no end. Nor did it have a beginning, because Boski did not start from a specific spot and did not move in a specific direction. On his knees he examined the wooden roof metre by metre, shifting here and there.

At noon his wife brought him his dinner in a double pot. In one container there was rye soup, in the other potatoes, or buckwheat with fried crackling and buttermilk, or cabbage and potatoes. Old Boski didn’t come down for dinner. He was handed the double pot on a rope in the bucket in which the wooden shingles went up.

Boski ate, and as he chewed he looked at the world around him. From the manor roof he saw meadows, the Black River, the roofs of Primeval, and tiny human figures, so small and fragile that Old Boski fancied blowing on them and sweeping them off the world like refuse. At this thought he would stuff another helping of food into his mouth, and on his weather-beaten face a grimace would appear that may have been a smile. Boski liked this moment of each day, when he imagined people being blown about in all directions. Sometimes he imagined it slightly differently: his breath became a hurricane, tearing the roofs off houses, knocking over trees and cutting down orchards. Water would flood into the plains, and people would hurry to build boats to save themselves and their property. Craters would appear in the earth, from which pure fire would burst forth. Steam would blast into the sky from the battle between fire and water. Everything would shake in its foundations and finally cave in like the roof of an old house. People would stop mattering – Boski would destroy the entire world.

He swallowed his mouthful and sighed. The vision evaporated. Now he rolled himself a cigarette and looked closer, at the manor courtyard, the park and the moat, the swans and the pond. He would stare at the carriages driving up, and later the cars. From the roof he saw ladies’ hats and gentlemen’s bald patches, he saw the squire coming home from a horseback ride and the squire’s wife, who always took tiny little steps. He saw the young lady, fragile and delicate, and her dogs, which inspired terror in the village. He saw the eternal traffic of lots of people, their greeting and parting gestures and facial expressions, people coming in and going out, talking to each other and listening.

But what did they matter to him? He would finish smoking his roll-up, and his gaze would stubbornly return to the wooden shingles, to settle on them like a freshwater mussel, to savour and feed on them. And at once he would be thinking how to trim and cut them – and so his dinner break came to an end.

His wife would fetch the double pot, which he let down on the rope, and go home across the meadows to Primeval.