She suddenly felt weak at the words “insecticide powder.” She thought of the gas the Germans were using that made people’s eyes burst. Do cockroaches feel the same when you sprinkle them with Szenbert’s powder? She had to take several deep breaths to stop herself from vomiting.
“Yes, Madam?” said a young, heavily pregnant woman in a sing-song voice. She glanced at Genowefa’s belly and smiled.
Genowefa asked for some kerosene, matches, soap and a new scrubbing brush. She drew her finger along the sharp bristles.
“I’m going to do some cleaning for the holidays. I’m going to scrub the floors, wash the curtains and scour the oven.”
“We have a holiday coming too, the Dedication of the Temple. You’re from Primeval, aren’t you, Madam? From the mill? I know you.”
“Now we know each other. When’s your baby due?”
“In February.”
“Mine too.”
Mrs Szenbert began to arrange bars of grey soap on the counter.
“Have you ever wondered why we silly girls are giving birth when there’s a war on?”
“Surely God…”
“God, God… He’s just a good accountant with an eye on the debit as well as the credit column. There has to be a balance. One life is wasted, another is born… Expecting a son, I shouldn’t doubt?”
Genowefa picked up her basket.
“I need a daughter, because my husband’s gone to the war and a boy grows up badly without a father.”
Mrs Szenbert came out from behind the counter and saw Genowefa to the door.
“We all need daughters. If we all started having daughters at once there’d be peace on earth.”
They both burst out laughing.
THE TIME OF MISIA’S ANGEL
The angel saw Misia’s birth in an entirely different way from Kucmerka the midwife. An angel generally sees everything in a different way. Angels perceive the world not through the physical forms which it keeps producing and then destroying, but through the meaning and soul of those forms.
The angel assigned to Misia by God saw an aching, caved-in body, rippling into being like a strip of cloth – it was Genowefa’s body as she gave birth to Misia. And the angel saw Misia as a fresh, bright, empty space, in which a bewildered, half conscious soul was just about to appear. When the child opened her eyes, the guardian angel thanked the Almighty. Then the angel’s gaze and the human’s gaze met for the first time, and the angel shuddered as only a bodiless angel can.
The angel received Misia into this world behind the midwife’s back: it cleared a space for her to live in, showed her to the other angels and to the Almighty, and its incorporeal lips whispered: “Look, look, this is my sweet little soul.” It was filled with unusual, angelic tenderness, loving sympathy – that is the only feeling angels harbour. For the Creator has not given them instincts, emotions or needs. If they did have them, they would not be spiritual creatures. The only instinct angels have is the instinct for sympathy. The only feeling angels have is infinite sympathy, heavy as the firmament.
Now the angel could see Kucmerka washing the child in warm water and drying her with a soft flannel. Then it gazed into Genowefa’s eyes, reddened with effort.
The angel observed events like flowing water. It wasn’t interested in them as such, they didn’t intrigue it, because it knew where they were flowing from and to, it knew their start and finish. It could see the current of events that were like and unlike each other, close to each other in time and distant, resulting one from another or completely independent of each other. But that meant nothing to it either.
For an angel, events are something like a dream, or a film with no beginning or end. Angels are unable to get involved in them, they don’t need them for anything. A human being learns from the world, learns from events, learns knowledge about the world and about himself, is reflected in events, defines his own limits and potential, and names things for himself. An angel doesn’t have to source anything from the outside, but has knowledge through itself, it contains everything there is to know about the world and about itself within itself – that is how God has made it.
An angel doesn’t have an intellect like the human one, it doesn’t draw conclusions or make judgements. It doesn’t think logically. To some people an angel would seem stupid. But from the start an angel carries within it the fruit of the tree of knowledge, pure wisdom that can only be enriched by simple intuition. It is a mind devoid of reasoning, and so devoid of mistakes and the fear they produce, an intellect without the prejudices that come from erroneous perception. But like all other things created by God, angels are volatile. That explains why Misia’s angel was so often not there when she needed it.
When it wasn’t there, Misia’s angel would turn its gaze away from the terrestrial world and look at the other angels and other worlds, higher and lower, assigned to each thing on Earth, each animal and plant. It could see the vast ladder of existences, the extraordinary structure and the Eight Worlds contained within it, and it could see the Creator embroiled in creation. But anyone who thought Misia’s angel was gazing at the countenance of the Lord would be wrong. The angel could see more than a man, but not everything.
Mentally returning to other worlds, the angel had difficulty focusing attention on Misia’s world, which, like the world of other people and animals, was dark and full of suffering, like a murky pond overgrown with duckweed.
THE TIME OF CORNSPIKE
The barefoot girl to whom Genowefa gave a kopeck was Cornspike.
Cornspike turned up in Primeval in July or August. People gave her this name because she gathered ears of corn left over after the harvest and roasted them for herself over a fire. Then in autumn she stole potatoes, and once the fields were empty in November, she spent her time at the inn. Sometimes someone stood her a shot of vodka, sometimes she got a slice of bread and lard. But people are unwilling to give something for nothing, for free, especially at an inn, so Cornspike started whoring. A little tipsy and warmed up by the vodka, she would go outside with the men and give herself to them for a ring of sausage. And as she was the only woman in the district who was young and easy, the men hung around her like dogs.
Cornspike was big and buxom. She had fair hair and a fair complexion that the sun hadn’t ruined. She brazenly looked everyone straight in the face, even the priest. She had green eyes, one of which wandered slightly to the side. The men who took Cornspike in the bushes always felt uneasy afterwards. They’d button up their flies and go back into the fug inside the tavern with flushed faces. Cornspike never wanted to lie on her back in an honest way. She’d say: “Why should I lie underneath you? I’m your equal.”
She preferred to lean against a tree or the wooden wall of the inn and fling her skirt over her shoulders. Her bottom would shine in the darkness like the moon.
This was how Cornspike learned the world.
There are two kinds of learning, from the inside and from the outside. The first is regarded as the best, or even the only kind. And so people learn through distant journeys, watching, reading, universities and lectures – they learn from what is happening outside them. Man is a stupid creature who has to learn. So he tacks knowledge onto himself, he gathers it like a bee, gaining more and more of it, putting it to use and processing it. But the thing inside that is “stupid” and needs learning doesn’t change.