Olga Tokarczuk - Primeval and Other Times

Eighthly, old, used Volta batteries were stored in the drawer. At first Misia didn’t touch them at all, just like the switchblade. Her father said they might still be charged with energy. But the notion of energy shut inside a small, flat box was extremely appealing. It reminded her of the mercury trapped in the thermometer. Though you could see the mercury, but not this energy. What did energy look like? Misia took a battery and weighed it in her hand for a while. Energy was heavy. There must be a lot of energy in such a little box. It must be packed in there like a cabbage for pickling, and pressed down with a fingertip. Then Misia touched the yellow wire with her tongue and felt a gentle tingling – it was the remains of the invisible electrical energy coming out of the battery.

Ninthly, Misia found various medicines in the drawer, and knew it was absolutely forbidden to put them in her mouth. Mama’s tablets were in there, and Papa’s ointment. Misia had particular respect for her Mama’s white pills in a small paper bag. Before Mama took them, she was angry and irritated, and suffered from headaches. But afterwards, once she had swallowed them, she calmed down and began to play patience.

And yes, tenthly there were cards in there for playing patience and rummy. On one side they all looked the same – a green plant design, but when Misia turned them over, a gallery of portraits was revealed. She spent hours examining the faces of the kings and queens. She tried to fathom the relationships between them. She suspected that as soon as the drawer was closed they started holding long conversations with each other, maybe even quarrelling about their imaginary kingdoms. She liked the Queen of Spades the best. She thought her the most beautiful and the saddest. The Queen of Spades had a bad husband. The Queen of Spades didn’t have any friends. She was very lonely. Misia always looked for her in her mother’s patience rows. She also looked for her whenever Mama told fortunes. But Mama spent too long staring at the laid-out cards. Misia got bored when there was nothing happening on the table, and then she went back to rummaging in the drawer, inside which lay the entire world.

In Cornspike’s cottage in Wydymacz there lived a snake, an owl, and a kite. These creatures never got in each other’s way. The snake lived by the hearth in the kitchen, and Cornspike put out a bowl of milk for him there. The owl sat in the loft, in an alcove where a window had been bricked in. He looked like a statuette. The kite kept to the roof beams, at the highest point in the house, but his real home was the sky.

Cornspike took longest to tame the snake. Every day she put out milk for him, gradually moving the bowl closer to the inside of the house. One day the snake crawled up to her feet. She picked him up, and she won him over with her warm skin, which smelled of grass and milk. The snake wound around her arm, and his golden pupils gazed into Cornspike’s clear eyes. She gave him the name Goldie.

Goldie fell in love with Cornspike. Her warm skin heated the snake’s cold heart and cold body. He desired her odours and the velvet touch of her skin, with which nothing on earth could compare. Whenever Cornspike picked him up, he felt as if he, a common reptile, were changing into something completely different, into something extremely important. As gifts he brought her the mice he hunted, lovely milky pebbles from the riverside, and bits of bark. Once he brought her an apple, and the woman raised it to her face, laughing, and her laughter was fragrant with abundance.

“You tempter,” she would say to him endearingly.

Sometimes she threw him a piece of her clothing, and then Goldie would wind his way into the dress and savour the remains of Cornspike’s aroma. He would wait for her on every path, wherever she went, following her every move. During the day she let him lie on her bed. She carried him round her neck like a silver chain, tied him around her hips and wore him instead of a bracelet, and at night, as she slept, he watched her dreams and furtively licked her ears.

Goldie suffered when the woman made love with the Bad Man. He could sense that the Bad Man was alien to both people and animals. At those times he burrowed in the leaves or looked the sun straight in the eye. Goldie’s guardian angel lived in the sun. Snakes’ guardian angels are dragons.

One day Cornspike went through the meadows to pick herbs by the River with the snake around her neck. There she ran into the parish priest. The priest saw them and recoiled in terror.

“You sorceress!” he cried, waving his stick. “Keep away from Primeval and Jeszkotle, and my parishioners. Do you go walking about with the devil around your neck? Haven’t you heard what the Scriptures say? What the Lord God said to the serpent? ‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, she shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bite her heel.’ ”

Cornspike burst out laughing and raised her skirt, showing her naked underbelly.

“Get away! Get away, Satan!” cried the priest and crossed himself several times.

In the summer of 1927 a sprig of masterwort grew in front of Cornspike’s cottage. Cornspike observed it from the moment it put a thick, fat, stiff shoot out of the earth. She watched as it slowly developed its large leaves. It grew all summer, from day to day, and from hour to hour, until it reached the roof of the cottage and opened its ample canopies above it.

“What now, my fine fellow?” Cornspike said to it ironically. “You’ve pushed yourself so far, you’ve climbed so high into the sky that now your seeds are going to germinate in the thatch, not in the ground.”

The masterwort was about two metres high and had such mighty leaves that they took away the sunlight from the plants around it. Towards the end of summer no other plant was capable of growing beside it. On Saint Michael’s Day it bloomed, and for a few hot nights Cornspike could not sleep for the bittersweet aroma that pervaded the air. The sharp edges of the plant’s mighty, sinewy body bounced off the silver moonlit sky. Sometimes a breeze rustled in the canopies, and the overblown flowers showered down. The rustling noises alerted Cornspike to raise herself on an elbow and listen closely to the plant living. The whole room was full of seductive aromas.

And one night, when Cornspike had finally fallen asleep, a young man with fair hair stood before her. He was tall and powerfully built. His arms and thighs looked as if they were made of polished wood. The glow of the moon illuminated him.

“I’ve been watching you through the window,” he said.

“I know. The smell of you disturbs the senses.”

The young man came inside the room and stretched both hands out to Cornspike. She snuggled in between them and pressed her face to the hard, powerful chest. He lifted her slightly so that their mouths could find each other. From under half-closed eyelids Cornspike saw his face – it was rough like the stem of a plant.

“I have desired you all summer,” she said into a mouth tasting of sweets, candied fruits, and the earth when rain is going to fall.

“And I you.”

They lay down on the floor and brushed against each other like grasses. Then the masterwort planted Cornspike on his hips and took root in her rhythmically, deeper and deeper, pervading her entire body, penetrating its inner recesses, and drinking up its juices. He drank from her until morning, when the sky became grey and the birds began to sing. Then a shudder shook the masterwort, and his hard body froze still, like timber. The canopies began to rustle and dry, prickly seeds showered down on Cornspike’s naked, exhausted body. Then the fair-haired youth went back outside, and Cornspike spent all day picking the aromatic grains from her hair.