Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF MICHAŁ

Michał did not like Paweł. He may have been good looking, but that was all. Whenever Michał looked at his broad shoulders, strong legs in breeches, and shining boots, he felt painfully old and shrunken like a dried-up apple.

Paweł came to their house very often now. He would sit at the table and fold one leg over the other. With her tail tucked under, the bitch Dolly would sniff his polished boots and their tops made of dog skin. He talked about the business he was doing with Kozienicki in the timber trade, about the school for paramedics where he had enrolled, and about his great plans for the future. He looked at Genowefa and smiled the whole time, giving a close, thorough view of his even white teeth. Genowefa was delighted. Paweł brought her small gifts. With a blush on her face she would put the flowers in a vase, as the cellophane rustled on a box of chocolates.

“How naive women are,” thought Michał.

He got the impression that his Misia had been written into Paweł Boski’s ambitious life plans, like an object. With complete calculation: because she was the only daughter, virtually an only child, because Izydor didn’t really count. Because she was going to have a fine dowry, because she was from a wealthier family, because she was so different, elegant, beautifully dressed, delicate.

As if by the way, Michał sometimes spoke in his wife’s and daughter’s presence of old Boski, who had said maybe a hundred or two hundred words in his life and spent all his time on the manor house roof, and of Paweł’s sisters, who were plain and mediocre.

“Old Boski is a decent fellow,” Genowefa would say.

“So what, no one’s responsible for his siblings,” added Misia, looking meaningfully at Izydor. “There’s someone like that in every family.”

Michał would pretend to be reading the newspaper as his daughter dressed up to go dancing with Paweł on Sunday afternoons. She would spend about an hour preening before the mirror. He saw her fill in her eyebrows with her mother’s dark pencil and carefully paint her lips in a furtive way. He saw her standing sideways before the mirror to check the effect of her brassiere, and putting a drop of violet scent behind her ear, her first perfume that she had begged for as a seventeenth birthday present. He said nothing as Genowefa and Izydor looked out of the window after her.

“Paweł has mentioned marriage to me. He said he’d like to propose now,” said Genowefa one such Sunday.

Michał refused even to hear her out.

“No. She’s still too young. Let’s send her to Kielce, to a better school than the one in Taszów.”

“She doesn’t want to study at all. She wants to get married. Can’t you see that?”

Michał shook his head.

“No, no, no. It’s still too soon. What does she want a husband and children for? She should enjoy life… Where are they going to live? Where’s Paweł going to work? He’s still at school too, isn’t he? No, they’ve got to wait.”

“Wait for what? Until they have to get married in a hurry, urgently?”

That was when Michał thought of the house, that he would build his daughter a big, comfortable house on good land. That he would plant an orchard for it and provide it with cellars and a garden. A big house, so Misia would not have to leave, so they could all live there together. There would be enough rooms in it for everyone, and their windows would look out in all four directions. And it would be a house with foundations made of sandstone and walls made of real brick, which would be kept warm from the outside by the best timber. And it would have a ground floor, a first floor, a loft and cellars, a glazed porch, and a balcony for Misia, so she could watch the procession coming across the fields at Corpus Christi from it. In this house Misia would be able to have lots of children. There would also be a servant’s room, because Misia should have domestic help.

Next day he ate his dinner early and went all round Primeval looking for a site for the house. He thought of the Hill. He thought about the common by the White River. All the way he calculated that building such a house would take at least three years, and would delay Misia’s marriage by that time.