Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF SQUIRE POPIELSKI

In 1946 Squire Popielski was still living in the manor house, though everyone knew it wouldn’t last much longer. His wife had taken the children to Kraków and was now to-ing and fro-ing, getting ready to move out.

The squire didn’t seem to care what was going on around him. He was playing the Game. He spent days and nights in the library. He slept on a couch. He didn’t change his clothes or shave. When his wife went off to the children, he didn’t eat, sometimes for three or four days. He didn’t open the windows, he didn’t speak, he didn’t go for walks, he didn’t even go downstairs. Once or twice people from the district administration came to see him about the nationalisation. They had briefcases full of writs and official stamps. They banged on the door and pulled at the bell. Then he went up to the window, looked at them from above, and rubbed his hands.

“It all fits,” he said in a hoarse voice unaccustomed to speaking. “I’m moving onto the next square.”

Sometimes Squire Popielski needed his books.

The Game required him to find various bits of information, but he had no trouble with that – he could find it all in his own library. As dreams played a crucial role in the Game, Squire Popielski taught himself to dream to order. More than that, he gradually gained control of his dreams, doing in them what he wanted, completely differently from in life. He consciously dreamed on the prescribed topic, and at once just as consciously awoke on the other side, as if he had gone through a hole in the fence. It took him a while to come to his senses, and then he began to act.

And so the Game gave him everything he needed, and even more. Why should he have to leave the library?

Meanwhile, the officials from the district administration took away his forests, clearings, arable land, ponds, and meadows. They sent a letter in which he was informed, as a citizen of the young socialist state, that the brickworks, sawmill, distillery, and water mill no longer belonged to him. Nor in the end did the manor house. They were polite, they even set out a deadline for handing over his property. First his wife cried, then she prayed, and finally she began to pack their things. She looked like a votive candle, she was so thin and wax-pale. Suddenly gone white, her hair shone in the gloom of the manor house with a cold, equally pale light.

Squire Popielski’s wife bore no grudge against her husband for going mad. She was worried that she would have to decide on her own what could be taken and what left behind. When the first vehicle drove up, however, Squire Popielski, pale and unshaven, came downstairs with two suitcases in his hands. He refused to show what he had in them.

His wife ran upstairs and spent a while scanning the library with a keen eye. She did not think anything was missing. There were no empty spaces on the shelves, not a single painting or ornament had been moved, nothing. She summoned the removal men, and they threw the books into cardboard boxes any old how. Then, to be quicker, they started scooping them off the shelves in entire rows. The books spread their flightless wings and torpidly fell in a heap. When they ran out of boxes, they left it at that, took the full boxes and went. Only later did it turn out that they had taken everything from A to L.

Meanwhile Squire Popielski was standing by the car, enjoying inhaling the fresh air, which intoxicated him after months of being shut indoors. He felt like laughing, rejoicing, dancing – the oxygen blazed in his thick, sluggish blood and dilated his clogged arteries.

“Everything is exactly as it should be,” he told his wife in the car as they were driving along the Highway towards the Kielce road. “Everything that’s happening is turning out well.”

Then he added something else that made the driver, and the removal men, and his wife give each other meaningful looks:

“The eight of clubs has been shot dead.”