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.
THE TIME OF THE VIRIGN MARY OF JESZKOTLE
Enclosed in the icon’s decorative frame, the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle had a limited view of the church. She hung in a side nave, so she couldn’t see the altar, or the stoup at the entrance. A pillar shielded her view of the pulpit. All she could see were the people arriving – individuals who dropped in at the church to pray, or else whole strings of them as they glided up to the altar for communion. During mass she saw dozens of people’s profiles – men’s and women’s, old people’s and children’s.
The Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle was the pure will to provide help for the sick and the weak. She was a strength inscribed into the icon by a divine miracle. When people turned their faces towards her, when they moved their lips, pressed their hands to their bellies or folded them at the level of their hearts, the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle gave them strength and the power to recover. She gave to it everyone without exception, not out of mercy, but because that was her nature – to give the power to recover to those who needed it. What happened thereafter was for the people to decide. Some allowed this strength to take effect within them, and those ones got better. Then they came back with votive offerings, miniatures of the healed parts of the body cast in silver, copper, or even gold, and with beads and necklaces with which they decked the icon.
Others let the power trickle out of them, as out of a leaking vessel, and it soaked into the ground. And then they lost their faith in miracles.
So it was with Squire Popielski, who appeared before the icon of the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle. She saw him kneel down and try to pray. But he couldn’t, so he stood up angrily and looked at the valuable votive offerings and the bright colours of the holy painting. The Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle saw that he was greatly in need of good, helpful strength for his body and soul. And she gave it to him, she filled him with it and immersed him in it. But Squire Popielski was as watertight as a crystal ball, so the good strength flowed off him onto the cold church floor and set the church in a gentle, barely palpable tremble.
THE TIME OF MICHAŁ
Michał came back in the summer of 1919. It was a miracle, because in a world where war has pushed every kind of law beyond its limits, miracles often occur.
Michał spent three months getting home. The place he had set off from was on virtually the other side of the globe – Vladivostok, a city on the coast of a foreign sea. So he had broken free of the ruler of the East, the king of chaos, but as whatever exists beyond the boundaries of Primeval is blurred and fluid as a dream, Michał was no longer thinking of that as he stepped onto the bridge.
He was sick, emaciated, and dirty. His face was covered in black stubble, and there were swarms of lice revelling in his hair. The threadbare uniform of a beaten army hung on him as on a stick, without a single button. Michał had swapped the shining buttons with the imperial eagle for bread. He also had a fever, diarrhoea, and the tormenting feeling that the world he had set out from no longer existed. Hope came back to him as he stood on the bridge and saw the Black and White Rivers merging together in a never-ending wedding. The rivers were still there, the bridge was still there, and so was the stone-crushing heat.
From the bridge Michał saw the white mill and the red geraniums in the windows.
Outside the mill a child was playing, a little girl with thick plaits. She must have been three or four years old. White hens were earnestly tripping around her. A woman’s hands opened the window. “The worst is going to happen,” thought Michał. Reflected in the moving windowpane, the sun dazzled him for a moment. Michał headed for the mill.
He slept all day and all night, and in his sleep he counted all the days of the past five years. His tired, fuddled mind lost its way and wandered in the labyrinths of sleep, so Michał had to start his count all over again. During this time Genowefa took a close look at the uniform, stiff with dust, touched the sweat-soaked collar, and plunged her hands in the pockets that smelled of tobacco. She caressed the buckles of the rucksack but did not dare to open it. Then the uniform hung on the fence, so that everyone who walked past the mill was bound to see it.
Michał awoke the next day at dawn and examined the sleeping child. He gave precise names to what he saw:
“She has thick, brown hair. She has dark eyebrows, a dark complexion, small ears, a small nose, all children have small noses, her hands are plump and childish, but you can see the fingernails, they’re round.”