Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF SQUIRE POPIELSKI

God manifested Himself to Squire Popielski through the Game the little rabbi had given him. The squire tried over and over to start the Game, but he found it hard to understand all the bizarre instructions. He took out the little book and read the rules until he knew them just about by heart. To start the Game, you had to throw a one, but every time he tried the squire threw an eight. It was contrary to all the principles of probability, and the squire thought he had been cheated. The strange, eight-sided die could have been distorted. But as he wanted to play honestly, he had to wait until the next day – those were the rules of the Game – to have another throw. And once again he was unsuccessful. This went on all spring. The squire’s amusement changed into impatience. In the unsettled summer of 1939 the stubborn number one finally appeared, and Squire Popielski could breathe again. The Game had started.

Now he needed a lot of spare time, peace and quiet – the Game was absorbing. It demanded concentration even during the day when he wasn’t playing it. In the evenings he shut himself in the library, laid out the board, and spent a long time rolling the eight-sided die in his hands. Or he carried out the Game’s instructions. It annoyed him to be wasting such a lot of time, but he couldn’t stop.

“There’s going to be a war,” said his wife.

“There are no wars in the civilized world,” he replied.

“Indeed, there might not be any in the civilized world, but there is going to be a war here. The Pelskis are leaving for America.”

On hearing the word “America” Squire Popielski fidgeted nervously, but nothing had the same meaning as it had before – before the Game.

In August the squire enrolled for conscription, but he was discharged in view of his state of health. In September they listened to the radio until it started to speak in German. In the night the squire’s wife buried the silver in the park. The squire spent whole nights sitting over the Game.

“They didn’t even fight. They came home. Paweł Boski didn’t even pick up a weapon,” wept the squire’s wife. “We’ve lost, Felix.”

He nodded pensively.

“Felix, we’ve lost the war!”

“Leave me in peace,” he said and went into the library.

Every day the Game revealed something new to him, something he didn’t know and hadn’t sensed. How was it possible?

One of the first instructions was to dream. To move on to the next square, the squire had to dream he was a dog. “How bizarre,” he thought in disgust. But he went to bed, thought about dogs, and that he himself could be a dog. In these visions before falling asleep he imagined himself as a dog, a hound that hunts waterfowl and chases around the common land. But in the night his dreams did what they wanted. It was hard to stop being a man in them. A certain degree of progress appeared with a dream about the ponds. Squire Popielski dreamed he was an olive-green carp. He was swimming in green water, where the sun was nothing but blurred light. He had no wife, he had no manor house, nothing belonged to him and nothing mattered to him. It was a beautiful dream.

That day, when the Germans turned up at his manor house, at dawn the squire finally dreamed he was a dog. He was running about the market square in Jeszkotle looking for something, he himself did not know what. He dug up some food scraps from under Szenbert’s shop and ate them with relish. He was attracted to the smell of horse manure and human faeces in the bushes. Fresh blood smelled like ambrosia.

The squire woke up amazed. “It’s irrational, quite absurd,” he thought, but he was pleased the Game would be able to move onwards.

The Germans were very polite. Captain Gropius and another one. The squire came out of the house to meet them. He tried to keep his distance.

“I understand you,” Captain Gropius interpreted the sour look on his face. “Unfortunately we are here before you as invaders, an occupying force. But we are civilized people.”

They wanted to buy a lot of wood. Squire Popielski said he would take care of supplying the wood, but deep down he had no intention of tearing himself away from the Game. At that the entire conversation between the occupants and the occupied came to an end. The squire went back to the Game. He was glad he had already been a dog, and now he could move onto the next square.

That night the squire dreamed he was reading the instructions for the Game. The words jumped before his sleeping vision, because the part of the squire that was dreaming was not a fluent reader.