“Watch out, they’re poisonous,” Izydor warned her, but Ruta laughed.
She showed Izydor various amanitas, not just red ones, but white, greenish, or the kind that imitate other mushrooms, horse mushrooms for example.
“My Mama eats them.”
“You’re lying, they’re deadly poison,” said Izydor resentfully.
“They don’t hurt my Mama. I’ll be able to eat them one day, too.”
“All right, all right. Watch out for the white ones. They’re the worst.”
Ruta’s courage impressed Izydor. But just looking at the mushrooms wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to know more about them. In Misia’s cookbook he found a whole chapter devoted to them. On one page there were drawings of edible mushrooms, and on another inedible and poisonous ones. Next time he took the book to the forest under his sweater and showed Ruta the drawings. She didn’t believe it.
“Read what’s written here,” he said, pointing to the caption under the amanita. “Amanita muscaria. Fly agaric.”
“How do you know that’s written there?”
“I put the letters together.”
“What’s that letter?”
“A.”
“A? Is that all? Just a?”
“That’s em.”
“Em.”
“And that sort of half em is en.”
“Teach me to read, Izydor.”
So Izydor taught Ruta to read. First from Misia’s cookbook, then he brought an old calendar. Ruta quickly caught on to learning, but she also got bored quickly. By the autumn Izydor had taught her almost as much as he knew himself.
One day, as he was waiting for her in the milkcap copse, leafing through the calendar, a large shadow fell across the white pages. Izydor looked up and was horrified. There behind Ruta stood her mother. She was bare-footed and large.
“Don’t be afraid of me. I know you very well,” she said.
Izydor didn’t reply.
“You’re a clever boy.” She knelt down beside him and touched his head. “You have a good heart. You’ll go far in your journeys.”
Swiftly and surely she pulled him towards her and hugged him to her breast. Izydor was paralysed by numbness or fear, and stopped thinking, as if he had fallen asleep.
Then Ruta’s mother went away. Ruta poked in the earth with a stick.
“She likes you. She’s always asking about you.”
“About me?”
“You have no idea how strong she is. She can lift huge stones.”
“No woman can be stronger than a man,” said Izydor, who had woken up now.
“She knows all the secrets.”
“If she were how you say she is, you wouldn’t be living in a tumbledown cottage in the forest, but on the market square in Jeszkotle. You’d go about in shoes and dresses, you’d have hats and rings. Then she’d really be important.”
Ruta lowered her head.
“I’ll show you something, though it’s a secret.”
They went beyond Wydymacz, passed the young oak wood, and were walking through a birch copse. Izydor had never been here before. They must have been very far from home.
Suddenly Ruta stopped.
“It’s here.”
Izydor looked about in surprise. There were birch trees growing around them. The wind was rustling in their slender branches.
“This is the boundary of Primeval,” said Ruta, stretching her hand out ahead.
Izydor didn’t understand.
“This is where Primeval ends, there’s nothing beyond here.”
“What do you mean? What about Wola, Taszów, and Kielce? The road to Kielce must be somewhere near here.”
“There’s no Kielce, and Wola and Taszów belong to Primeval. This is where it all ends.”
Izydor burst out laughing and spun on his heel.
“What sort of nonsense are you talking? Some people go to Kielce, you know. My father goes there. They brought Misia’s furniture from Kielce. Paweł’s been to Kielce. My father’s been to Russia.”
“They all just thought they were there. They set off on a journey, they reach the boundary, and here they come to a standstill. Maybe they dream they’re travelling onwards, that Kielce or Russia are there. My mother once showed me some of those who looked like they’d turned to stone. They stand on the road to Kielce. They don’t move, their eyes are open and they look terrible. As if they’re dead. Then, after a while, they wake up and go home, and they take their dreams for memories. That’s what really happens.”
“Now I’ll show you something!” cried Izydor.
He stepped back a few paces and started running towards the spot where, according to Ruta, the boundary ran. Then he suddenly stopped. He himself did not know why. Something here wasn’t right. He stretched his hands out ahead of him, and his fingertips disappeared.
Izydor felt as if he had split inside into two different boys. One of them was standing with his hands held out ahead, and they clearly lacked any fingertips. The other boy was next to him, and couldn’t see the first boy, or moreover his lack of fingers. Izydor was both boys at once.
“Izydor,” said Ruta. “Let’s go home.”
He came to and put his hands in his pockets. Gradually his duality disappeared. They set off for home.
“The boundary runs just beyond Taszów, beyond Wola, and beyond the Kotuszów tollbooth. But no one knows exactly. The boundary can give birth to ready-made people, and we think they’ve come from somewhere. What I find most frightening is that it’s impossible to get out of here. As if we’re sitting in a pot.”
Izydor didn’t say a word the whole way. Only when they came onto the Highway did he say:
“We could pack a rucksack, take some food, and set off along the boundary to investigate it. Maybe there’s a hole somewhere.”
Ruta jumped over an anthill and turned back to the forest.
“Don’t worry about it, Izydor. What do we need any other worlds for?”
Izydor saw her dress flashing among the trees, and then the girl vanished.
THE TIME OF GOD
It is strange that God, who is beyond the limits of time, manifests Himself within time and its transformations. If you don’t know “where” God is – and people sometimes ask such questions – you have to look at everything that changes and moves, that doesn’t fit into a shape, that fluctuates and disappears: the surface of the sea, the dances of the sun’s corona, earthquakes, the continental drift, snows melting and glaciers moving, rivers flowing to the sea, seeds germinating, the wind that sculpts mountains, a foetus developing in its mother’s belly, wrinkles near the eyes, a body decaying in the grave, wines maturing, or mushrooms growing after a rain.
God is present in every process. God is vibrating in every transformation. Now He is there, now there is less of Him, but sometimes He is not there at all, because God manifests Himself even in the fact that He is not there.
People – who themselves are in fact a process – are afraid of whatever is impermanent and always changing, which is why they have invented something that doesn’t exist – invariability, and recognised that whatever is eternal and unchanging is perfect. So they have ascribed invariability to God, and that was how they lost the ability to understand Him.
In the summer of 1939 God was in everything all around, so rare and unusual things happened.
At the beginning of time God created all possible things, but He Himself is the God of impossible things, things that either do not happen at all, or happen very rarely.