Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF GENOWEFA

Genowefa’s body had frozen solid like a clay pot scorched in the embers. It was propped in a Bath chair. Now it was at the mercy of others. It was put to bed, washed, sat up, and taken out onto the porch.

Genowefa’s body was one thing, and Genowefa was another. She was stuck inside it, trapped and deafened. She could only move the tips of her fingers and her face, but she could no longer smile or cry. Her words, hoarse and angular, fell from her mouth like pebbles. Words like these had no power. Sometimes she tried to scold Adelka, who was hitting Antek, but her granddaughter didn’t take much notice of her threats. Antek took refuge in his grandmother’s skirts, and Genowefa could do nothing to hide him or even hug him. She watched helplessly as the bigger, stronger Adelka pulled her brother’s hair, and she felt a burst of anger that immediately died away, however, because it had no chance of finding any sort of outlet.

Misia talked to her mother a lot. She moved her chair from near the door to the warm stove tiles and prattled on. Genowefa didn’t listen very carefully. The things her daughter talked about bored her. She was less and less curious about who was left and who had perished, she didn’t care about the masses being said, Misia’s girlfriends from Jeszkotle, new ways of bottling peas, the radio news that Misia always commented on, her nonsensical doubts and questions. Genowefa preferred to focus on what Misia was doing and what was happening in the house. So she saw her daughter’s belly growing for the third time, the miniature snowfall of flour that fell from the pastry board to the floor as Misia kneaded dough for noodles, a fly drowning in the milk, a poker left on the hotplate that had gone red-hot, the hens trying to pull out bootlaces in the hall. This was the concrete, tangible life that was drifting away from her day by day. Genowefa saw that Misia couldn’t cope with the large house they had given her. So she dug a few sentences out of herself and persuaded her daughter to take on a girl to help. Misia brought home Ruta.

Ruta had grown into a beautiful girl. Genowefa’s heart ached as she looked at her. She watched out for the moments when both of them, Misia and Ruta, were standing next to each other – then she compared them. And – had no one noticed? – they were so alike. Two versions of the same thing. One was smaller and darker, the other taller and fuller. One had chestnut-brown eyes and hair, the other’s were honey-coloured. Apart from that, everything was just the same. Or so it seemed to Genowefa.

She watched Ruta washing the floors, shredding large heads of cabbage, and grating cheese in a mixing bowl. And the longer she looked at her, the more certain she was. Sometimes, when they were doing the laundry or cleaning the house, and Michał was busy, Misia told the children to take Granny to the forest. The children took the chair outside carefully, and then, past the lilac, once they were no longer visible from the house, they raced down the Highway, pushing the chair that carried Genowefa’s stiff, majestic body. They would leave her, with windswept hair and a hand fallen helplessly over the armrest, while they ran into clearings looking for mushrooms or strawberries.

On one such day, from the corner of her eye Genowefa saw Cornspike coming out of the forest and onto the Highway. Genowefa could not move her head, so she waited. Cornspike came up to her and curiously walked right round the chair. She knelt down before Genowefa and peered into her face. For a while they eyed each other. Cornspike no longer resembled the girl who had walked through the snow barefoot. She had become stout and even bigger. Her thick plaits were white now.

“You switched my child for yours,” said Genowefa.

Cornspike burst out laughing and took her lifeless hand in her warm palm.

“You took the girl and left me the boy. Ruta is my daughter.”

“All young women are the daughters of older women. Anyway, you don’t need daughters or sons any more.”

“I’m paralysed. I can’t move.”

Cornspike raised Genowefa’s lifeless hand and kissed it.

“Get up and walk,” she said.

“No,” whispered Genowefa and, without feeling her own movement, shook her head.

Cornspike laughed and set off towards Primeval.

After this encounter Genowefa lost the desire to speak. She just said “yes” or “no.” One time she heard Paweł whispering to Misia that the paralysis was attacking her mind, too. “Let them think that,” she thought. “The paralysis is attacking my mind, but even so I still exist somewhere.”

After breakfast Michał took Genowefa outside. He set the chair on the grass by the fence, and sat down on a bench. He took out a cigarette paper and spent a long time crumbling tobacco in his fingers. Genowefa gazed ahead of her at the Highway, staring at the smooth cobblestones that looked like the tops of thousands of heads of people buried in the ground.

“Aren’t you cold?” asked Michał.

She shook her head.

Then Michał finished his cigarette and walked away. Genowefa remained in her chair, gazing at Mrs Papuga’s garden, at the sandy field road that wound its way between splashes of green and yellow. Then she looked at her own feet, knees, hips – they were just as far away and just as much not part of her as the sand, fields, and gardens. Her body was a broken figurine made of fragile human material.

She was surprised she could still move her fingers, that she still had feeling in the tips of her pale hands, which had known no work for months. She laid those hands on her insensible knees and fumbled with the folds of her skirt. “I am a body,” she said to herself. And in Genowefa’s body, like cancer, like mould, the image of killing people was growing. Killing involves taking away the right to move, as after all, life is motion. A killed body has stopped moving. A person is a body. And everything a person experiences has its beginning and end in the body.

One day Genowefa said to Michał:

“I feel cold.”

He brought her a woollen shawl and gloves. She moved her fingers, but she couldn’t feel them any more, so she didn’t know if they were moving or not. When she looked up at the Highway, she saw the dead returning. They were heading down the Highway from Czernica to Jeszkotle in a large procession, like the pilgrimage to Częstochowa. But pilgrimages always involve a hubbub, monotonous songs, mournful litanies, and boot-soles shuffling over the stones. Here silence reigned.

There were thousands of them. They were marching in uneven, broken ranks. They walked in icy silence, at a rapid pace. They were grey, as if deprived of blood.

Genowefa sought Eli among them and the Szenberts’ daughter with the baby in her arms, but the dead were moving too fast for her to look at them closely. Only later did she see the Serafins’ son, and that was only because he was walking nearest to her. He had a huge, brown hole in his forehead.

“Franek,” she whispered.

He turned his head and, without slowing his pace, glanced at her. He stretched out a hand to her. His lips were moving, but Genowefa couldn’t hear any words.

She saw them all day, until evening, and the procession did not dwindle. They still went gliding past when she closed her eyes. She knew God was watching them, too. She could see His face – it was black, terrible, covered in scars.