When she awoke, she saw the child beside her – shrunken and dead. She tried to set it to her breast. Her breast was bigger than it, painfully alive. There were flies circling above it.
All afternoon Cornspike tried hard to encourage the dead child to suck. Towards evening the pain returned and Cornspike delivered the afterbirth. Then she fell asleep again. In her dream she fed the child not on milk but on water from the Black River. The child was an incubus that sits on a person’s chest and sucks the life out of him. It wanted blood. Cornspike’s dream was becoming more and more disturbed and oppressive, but she couldn’t wake up from it. In it a woman appeared, as large as a tree. Cornspike could see her perfectly, every detail of her face, her hairstyle and her clothing. She had curly black hair, like a Jew, and a wonderfully expressive face. Cornspike found her beautiful. She desired her with her entire body, but it wasn’t the desire she already knew, from the bottom of her belly, from between her legs; it flowed from somewhere inside her body, from a point above her belly, close to her heart. The mighty woman leaned over Cornspike and stroked her cheek. Cornspike looked into her eyes at close range, and saw in them something she had never known before and had never even thought existed. “You are mine,” said the enormous woman, and caressed Cornspike’s neck and swollen breasts. Wherever her fingers touched Cornspike, her body became blessed and immortal. Cornspike surrendered entirely to this touch, spot after spot. Then the large woman took Cornspike in her arms and cuddled her to her breast. Cornspike’s cracked lips found the nipple. It smelled of animal fur, camomile and rue. Cornspike drank and drank.
A thunderbolt crashed into her dream and all of a sudden she saw that she was still lying in the ruined cottage on the burdock leaves. There was greyness all around her. She didn’t know if it was dawn or dusk. For the second time lightning struck somewhere very close by, and seconds later a downpour tumbled from the sky that drowned out the next peal of thunder. Water poured through the leaking roof beams and washed the blood and sweat off Cornspike, cooled her burning body, watered and fed her. Cornspike drank water straight from the sky.
When the sun emerged, she crawled out in front of the cottage and began to dig a hole, then pulled some tangled roots from the ground. The ground was soft and yielding, as if wanting to help her with the burial. She laid the baby’s body in the uneven hole.
She spent a long time smoothing the ground over the grave, and when she raised her eyes and looked around, everything was different. It was no longer a world consisting of objects, of things, phenomena that exist alongside each other. Now what Cornspike saw had become one single mass, one great animal or one great person, who took on many forms, to burgeon, to die and be born again. Everything around Cornspike was one single body, and her body was a part of this great body – enormous, omnipotent, unimaginably mighty. In every movement, in every sound its power showed through, which by sheer will could create something out of nothing and change something into nothing.
Cornspike’s head began to spin and she leaned back against a low ruined wall. Simply looking intoxicated her like vodka, muddled her head and aroused laughter somewhere in her belly. Everything seemed just the same as ever: beyond the small green meadow bisected by the sandy road was the pine forest, with hazel bushes growing densely along its edges. A light breeze was stirring the grass and leaves, a grasshopper was singing somewhere and flies were buzzing. Nothing more. And yet now Cornspike could see how the grasshopper was joined to the sky, and what was keeping the hazel bushes by the forest path. She could see more than that too. She could see the force that pervades everything, she could understand how it works. She could see the contours of other worlds and other times, stretched out above and below ours. She could also see things that cannot be described in words.
THE TIME OF THE BAD MAN
The Bad Man appeared in the forests of Primeval before the war, though there may have been someone like him living in those woods forever.
First, in spring they found the half decomposed body of Bronek Malak in Wodenica, whom everyone thought had gone to America. The police came from Taszów, examined the site and took the body away on a cart. The policemen came to Primeval several times more, but nothing happened as a result. No murderer was found. Then someone dropped a hint that he had seen a stranger in the forest. He was naked, and hairy like a monkey, flitting among the trees. Then others remembered that they had found strange tracks and marks in the forest too – a footprint on a sandy path, a hole dug in the ground, discarded animal carcasses. Someone had heard howling in the forest, a half-human, half-animal wail.
So people began to tell stories of where the Bad Man came from. They said that before the Bad Man became the Bad Man, he was an ordinary peasant who committed a terrible crime, though no one knew exactly what.
Regardless of what the crime was about, his conscience gnawed at him and wouldn’t allow him a moment’s rest, and so, tormented by its voice, he ran away from himself, until he found solace in the woods. He trudged about the forest and finally lost his way. He thought he saw the sun dancing in the sky, and that was what made him lose direction. He reckoned the road north would definitely take him somewhere. But then he lost faith in the road north and headed east, believing that to the east the forest would finally end. But as he was going east, he was overcome by doubts again. He stopped in confusion, unsure of his direction. So he changed his plan and decided to go south, but he lost faith in the road south too, and duly headed west. Then it turned out he had returned to the spot he had started from – at the very centre of the great forest. So on the fourth day he lost faith in all the points of the compass. On the fifth day he stopped trusting his own reason. On the sixth day he forgot where he had come from and why he had come to the forest, and on the seventh day he forgot his own name.
And ever since he had become like the animals in the forest. He lived on berries and mushrooms, then started hunting small animals. Each successive day wiped larger and larger pieces from his memory – the Bad Man’s mind was becoming smoother and smoother. He forgot words, because he didn’t use them. He forgot how he was to pray each evening. He forgot how to kindle a fire and how to make use of it. How to do up the buttons on his coat and how to lace his boots. He forgot the songs he had known since childhood, and then his entire childhood. He forgot the faces of the people dearest to him, his mother, wife and children, he forgot the taste of cheese, roast meat, potatoes and potato soup.
This forgetting went on for many years, and finally the Bad Man was nothing like the man who had come to the forest any more. The Bad Man was not himself, and had forgotten what it meant to be himself. Hair started growing on his body, and from eating raw meat his teeth became strong and white, like an animal’s teeth. Now his throat emitted hoarse noises and grunts.
One day the Bad Man saw an old fellow in the forest gathering brushwood and felt the human being was alien to him, revolting even, so he ran up to the old man and killed him. Another time he attacked a peasant driving a carthorse. He killed him and the horse. He devoured the horse, but didn’t touch the man – a dead person was even more repulsive than a live one. Then he killed Bronek Malak.