Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF PAWEŁ

Paweł lay on his back and knew he’d never fall asleep now. Outside it was getting grey. His head ached and he was terribly thirsty. But he was too tired and downcast to get up and go to the kitchen. So he brooded on the whole of the previous evening, the big drinking spree, the first few toasts, because he couldn’t remember the rest, Ukleja’s vulgar jokes, the displeased expressions on some of the women’s faces and some of their grievances. And then he considered the fact that he had turned forty, and that the first part of his life was over. He had reached the peak, and now, lying on his back with a monstrous hangover, he was watching time go by. He started recalling other days and other evenings, too, watching them like a film when it is run from end to beginning – ludicrous, funny, and nonsensical, like his life. He could see all the images in detail, but they seemed trivial and meaningless. Like this he saw his entire past, and found nothing in it to be proud of, nothing to gladden him, or stir any kind of positive emotions. In this entire, bizarre tale there was nothing certain or permanent, nothing to get a grip on. There was just an endless struggle, some unfulfilled dreams and unsatisfied desires. “I’ve had no success at all,” he thought. He felt like crying, so he tried, but he must have forgotten how, because he hadn’t cried since childhood. He swallowed thick, bitter saliva and tried to emit a childish sob from his throat and lungs. But nothing came of it, so he cast his mind into the future and forced himself to think about what was going to happen, what he still had to do: a training course and certainly a promotion, the children going to middle school, building an extension for the house and some rooms to let – not just rooms but a boarding house, a holiday cottage for summer vacationers from Kielce and Kraków. For a while he cheered up inside and forgot about his headache, his bone-dry tongue and his suppressed tears. But the dreadful grief came back. He felt as if his future would be the same as his past – various things would happen in it that meant nothing and led nowhere. This idea made him feel fear, because after all that, after the course and the promotion, after the boarding house and the extension, after all sorts of ideas or any kind of activity came death. And Paweł Boski realised that on this sleepless, hung-over night he was staring helplessly at the birth of his own death – that in his life the hour of noon had already struck, and now, gradually, deviously, and imperceptibly the twilight was closing in.

He felt like an abandoned child, like a clod of earth thrown on the roadside verge. He lay on his back in the rough, elusive present, and felt that with every passing second he was dissolving into non-existence.