Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF SQUIRE POPIELSKI

Squire Popielski was losing his faith. He hadn’t stopped believing in God, but God and all the rest of it were becoming rather flat and expressionless, like the etchings in his Bible.

For the squire, everything seemed to be all right when the Pelskis came by from Kotuszów, when he played whist in the evenings, when he had conversations about art, when he visited his cellars and pruned the roses. Everything was all right when the wardrobes smelled of lavender, when he sat at his oak desk with his pen with the gold holder in his hand, and in the evening his wife massaged his tired shoulders. But as soon as he went out, drove away from home somewhere, even to the dirty marketplace in Jeszkotle or the local villages, he entirely lost his physical immunity to the world.

He saw the crumbling houses, rotting fences, and time-worn stones cobbling the main street, and thought: “I was born too late, the world is coming to an end. It’s all over.” His head ached and his sight was growing weak – to the squire it all seemed darker, his feet were frozen and an indeterminate pain ran right through him. Everything was empty and hopeless. And there was no helping it. He would go home to his manor house and hide in his study – that stopped the world from collapsing for a while.

But the world collapsed anyway. The squire discovered this for himself when he saw his cellars on returning after his hasty escape from the Cossacks. Everything in them had been destroyed, smashed, chopped, burned, trampled, and spilled. He surveyed the losses as he waded up to his ankles in wine.

“Chaos and destruction, chaos and destruction,” he whispered.

Then he lay down on the bed in his plundered home and wondered: “Where does evil come from in this world? Why does God allow evil to happen, if He is so good? Or maybe God is not good?”

The changes taking place in the country provided a remedy for the squire’s depression.

In 1918 there was a great deal to do, and nothing is as good a cure for grief as activity. For the whole of October the squire gradually geared himself up for social action, until in November the depression left him and he found himself on the other side of it. Now for a change he hardly slept at all and had no time to eat. He ran about the country, made trips to Kraków and saw it as a princess awoken from sleep. He organised elections for the first parliament, founded several associations, two parties, and the Malopolski Union of Fish Pond Owners. In February the next year, when the Small Constitution was enacted, Squire Popielski caught cold and ended up in his room again, in bed, with his head turned towards the window – in other words, in the place where he had started.

His recovery from pneumonia was like coming back from a distant journey. He read a lot and began to write a memoir. He wanted to talk to someone, but everyone around him seemed banal and uninteresting. So he ordered books to be brought up to his bed from the library and ordered new ones by post.

Early in March he went out on his first walk about the park, and saw an ugly, grey world again, full of decay and destruction. National independence didn’t help, nor did the constitution. On a path in the park he saw a red, child’s glove sticking out of the melting snow, and for some strange reason the sight of it sank deep into his memory. Dogged, blind regeneration. The apathy of life and death. The inhuman machinery of life.

Last year’s efforts to rebuild everything anew had come to nothing.

The older Squire Popielski became, the more terrible the world seemed to him. A young man is busy with his own blooming, pushing forwards and extending the boundaries: from his childhood bed to the walls of the room, the house, the park, the city, the country, the world, and then, in his manhood, comes a time of fantasising about something even greater. The turning point occurs at about forty. Youth in its intensity, in its full force, tires itself out. One night or one morning a man crosses a boundary, reaches his peak and takes his first step downwards, towards death. Then the question arises: should he descend proudly with his face turned towards the darkness, or should he turn around towards what was, keep up an appearance and pretend it isn’t darkness, but just that the light in the room has been extinguished?

Meanwhile the sight of the red glove emerging from under the dirty snow convinced the squire that the greatest deception of youth is optimism of any kind, a persistent faith in the idea that something will change or improve, or that there is progress in everything. So now the vessel had broken inside him, full of the despair he had always carried within him like hemlock. The squire looked around him and saw suffering, death and decay, which were as widespread as dirt. He crossed the whole of Jeszkotle and saw the kosher abattoir, the rotten meat on hooks, a frozen beggar outside Szenbert’s shop, a small funeral cortege following a child’s coffin, low clouds over low houses on the marketplace, and the gloom that was invading from all directions, already infesting everything. It was like a gradual, continual self-immolation, in which human destinies, whole lives are thrown into the consuming flames of time.

On his way back to the manor house he passed the church, so he dropped in there, but found nothing inside. He saw an icon of the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle, but there was no God in the church capable of restoring the squire’s hope.