Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF MRS PAPUGA

Every Monday Stasia Papuga went off to the market in Taszów. On Mondays the buses were so packed that they went past the stop in the forest. So Stasia stood on the roadside verge and stopped cars. First Syrenkas and Warszawas, then big and small Fiats. She clambered awkwardly inside, and her chat with the driver always started the same way:

“Do you know Paweł Boski?”

Sometimes they did.

“He’s my brother. He’s an inspector.”

The driver would turn round and look at her suspiciously, so she’d repeat:

“I’m Paweł Boski’s sister.”

They couldn’t believe it.

In her old age Stasia had grown fat and had shrunk. Her nose, always prominent anyway, had got even bigger, and her eyes had lost their shine. Her feet were always swollen, and so she wore men’s sandals. Only two of her lovely teeth were left. Time had not been kind to Stasia Papuga, and it was not surprising the drivers refused to believe she was Inspector Boski’s sister.

One day, on just such a busy market Monday, she was knocked down by a car. She lost her hearing. A constant roaring in her head drowned out the sounds of the world. Sometimes voices appeared in the roaring, or snatches of music, but Stasia didn’t know where they were from – whether they were coming through to her from the outside, or flowing from inside her. She would listen to them intently as she darned socks and endlessly altered Misia’s hand-me-downs.

In the evenings she liked going to the Boskis’. Especially in summer there was something going on there. The vacationers lived upstairs. The children and grandchildren came. They would put up a table in the orchard under the apple trees and drink vodka. Paweł would get out his fiddle, and at once his children would fetch their instruments: Antek would get his accordion, Adelka – before she left – her violin, Witek his double bass, and Lila and Maja the guitar and flute. Paweł would give the signal with his bow and they would all start moving their fingers in rhythm, nodding and tapping out the beat with their feet. They always began with In the Trenches of Manchuria. She recognised the music from their faces. As they played In the Trenches of Manchuria, Michał Niebieski would briefly appear in the children’s features. “Can it be possible,” she wondered, “that the dead live on in the bodies of their grandchildren?” And would she, too, live on like that in the faces of Janek’s children?

Stasia missed her son, who after finishing school had stayed on in Silesia. He rarely came to visit, and had inherited his father’s trait of telling Stasia to wait and wait for him. In early summer she fixed up a room for him, but he never wanted to stay for long, not for the whole vacation like Paweł’s children. He always left after a few days and forgot to take the fruit syrup she had spent all year making for him. But he did take the money his mother earned selling vodka.

She would accompany him to the bus stop on the Kielce road. At the crossroads lay a stone. Stasia picked up the stone and asked:

“Put your hand here. I’ll have it as a memento of you.”

Janek looked around nervously, then allowed the imprint of his hand to remain under the stone at the crossroads for a year. Then, at Christmas and Easter, letters came from him that always started the same way: “At the start of my letter I can report that I am in good health, and I wish you the same.”

His wishes had no force. As he wrote he must have been thinking about something else. One winter Stasia suddenly fell ill, and before the ambulance had managed to force its way through the snowdrifts, she died.

Janek came with some delay, when the grave was being filled in and everyone had already gone their ways. He went to his mother’s house and spent a long time looking at the things. All those jars of fruit syrup, the calico curtains, crocheted bedspreads, and little boxes made out of the postcards he had sent his mother for holidays and namedays probably had no value for him. The furniture left by grandfather Boski was coarse and wouldn’t have matched any high-gloss units at all. The cups had chipped rims and broken handles. Snow was pushing its way inside the annex through cracks in the door. Janek locked up the house and went to give it to his uncle.

“I don’t want the house or anything that comes from Primeval,” he told Paweł.

As he went back down the Highway to the bus stop, he stopped at the stone, and after a moment’s hesitation did the same thing as every year. This time he pressed his hand deep into the chill, half-frozen ground and kept it there until his fingers went numb with cold.