Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF IZYDOR

When Paweł took Izydor to the old people’s home, he tried to explain the whole situation clearly to the nun who received him:

“He may not be all that old, but he is ailing, and also handicapped. Despite being a sanitation inspector,” – Paweł put special stress on the word “inspector” – “and knowing about many things, I could not guarantee him proper care.”

Izydor willingly agreed to the move. From here he had less of a distance to the graveyard, where his mother, father, and now Misia lay. He was glad Paweł hadn’t managed to finish the tomb, and that Misia was buried with their parents. Every day after breakfast he got dressed and went to sit by them for a while.

But time flows differently in an old people’s home from anywhere else; its stream is thinner. From one month to the next Izydor lost strength, and finally he gave up the graveyard visits.

“I think I’m sick,” he told Sister Aniela, who took care of him. “I think I’m going to die.”

“But Izydor, you’re still young and full of strength,” she said, trying to cheer him up.

“I am old,” he insisted.

He felt disappointed. He thought old age was going to open that third eye, which makes it possible to see right through everything, and to understand how the world works. But nothing became clear to him. Instead his bones ached and he couldn’t sleep. No one came to visit him, neither the dead nor the living. At night he saw his images – Ruta just as he remembered her, and the geometrical visions – empty spaces with angular and oval shapes in them. More and more often these images seemed faded and blurred, and the shapes were twisted and inferior, as if they were aging along with him.

He no longer had the strength to work on his tables. He still dragged himself out of bed and roamed around the building to see his four points of the compass, and that took him all day. The old people’s home had not been built honestly and didn’t have windows facing north, as if its builders were trying to deny this fourth, darkest side of the world, to avoid upsetting the residents. So Izydor had to go out onto the terrace and lean over the railing. Then, around the corner of the building he could see the endless dark woods and the ribbon of the road. The winter completely deprived him of this view because the terraces were locked shut then. So he sat in an armchair in the so-called day room, where the television murmured non-stop, as he tried to forget about the north.

He learned how to forget, and forgetting brought him relief. It was simpler than he had ever expected it to be. It was enough not to think about the woods and the river for one single day, not to think about his mother and Misia combing her chestnut hair, it was enough not to think about the house and the attic with four windows, and the next day those images were paler and paler, more and more faded.

Finally Izydor could no longer walk. Despite all the antibiotics and irradiation, his bones and joints went stiff and refused to move at all. He was put to bed in an isolation ward, and there he gradually died.

Dying involved the systematic disintegration of what had been Izydor. It was a very rapid, irreversible process, self-perfecting and marvellously effective. Like deleting unnecessary information from the computer where the accounts were done at the old people’s home.

First to disappear were the ideas, thoughts and abstract concepts that Izydor had made such an effort to acquire in the course of his life. All of a sudden the things in fours disappeared:

And finally:

Then his favourite places faded, then the faces of those he loved best, then their names, and finally whole people yielded to oblivion. Next Izydor’s emotions disappeared – some very old thrills (when Misia had her first child), some despair (when Ruta left), some joy (when the letter from her came), certainty (when he discovered the fourfold nature of things), fear (when he and Ivan Mukta were shot at), pride (when he got money from the post office), and many, many others. And finally, at the very end, when Sister Aniela said: “He has died,” the open spaces that Izydor had inside him began to roll up, spaces that were neither earthly nor celestial – they fell apart into tiny pieces, caved in on each other and vanished forever. It was an image of destruction more terrible than any other, worse than war, fires, stars exploding or black holes imploding.

That was when Cornspike appeared at the old people’s home.

“You’re too late. He’s dead,” Sister Aniela told her.

Cornspike didn’t answer. She sat down by Izydor’s bed. She touched his neck. Izydor’s body wasn’t breathing any more, his heart wasn’t beating inside it, but it was still warm. Cornspike leaned over Izydor and said into his ear:

“Go, and don’t stop in any of the worlds. And don’t be tempted to come back again.”

She sat by Izydor’s body until they took it away. Then she remained at his bedside all night and all day, mumbling continually. She only went when she was sure Izydor had gone forever.