Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF CORNSPIKE

In Primeval, like everywhere in the world, there are places where matter creates itself, coming into being on its own out of nothing. They are always just small chunks of reality, not essential to the whole, and as a result they are no threat to the balance of the world.

There is a place like that on the embankment by the Wola Road. It looks inconspicuous, like a molehill, like an innocent little graze on the earth’s flesh that never heals. Only Cornspike knows about it and stops on the way to Jeszkotle to watch the world creating itself. There she finds strange things and non-things: a red stone not like any other stone, a piece of gnarled wood, some prickly seeds that later produce some feeble little flowers in her garden, an orange fly, and sometimes just an odour. Cornspike sometimes gets the feeling that the inconspicuous molehill also creates a space, and that the roadside embankment is gradually getting bigger. In this way each year Malak’s field gets bigger, where in complete ignorance he plants potatoes.

Cornspike dreamed up the idea that one day she would find a child there, a little girl, and would take her home to fill the gap left by Ruta. But one autumn the molehill disappeared. For the next few months Cornspike tried to catch empty space in the act of bubbling forth, but nothing happened, so she realised the self-creation outlet had gone off somewhere else.

For a while the fountain in the Taszów market square seemed to be another such place. The fountain produced noises, whispers and rustles, and sometimes a sort of jelly-like substance was found in its water, matted balls of hair, and the green parts of a large plant. People realised the fountain was haunted, so they demolished it and built a parking lot.

And of course there is a place in Primeval, as everywhere in the world, where reality rolls up and leaks from the world like air from a balloon. It appeared in the fields beyond the Hill just after the war, since when it has been growing more and more distinctly. A crater has formed in the ground, which sucks down yellow sand, tufts of grass, and field stones into nowhere.