Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk Read Free Book Online Page A

among the peasants, prodding the sacks and whipping the horse. Next day only Serafin with his broken finger came to work. Once again the angry priest drove his chaise round the entire village, but it turned out the workmen either weren’t at home, or had been laid low by illness.
    That was a day when the priest hated all the peasants from Primeval – they were lazy, indolent, and greedy for money. He ardently excused himself before the Lord for this feeling unworthy of His servant. Again he asked God for advice. “Raise their wages,” God told him, “give them fifteen groszy for a day’s work, and even though you won’t have any profit from this year’s hay, you will make up the loss next year.” This was wise council. The work went ahead.
    First of all, sand was brought on carts from beyond Górka, then the sand was loaded into jute sacks and the river was lined with them like a dressing, as if it were wounded. Only then was it all covered in earth, and grass was sown on top.
    The parish priest joyfully examined his own work. Now the river was completely separated from the meadow. The river could not see the meadow. The meadow could not see the river.
    The river no longer tried to tear free of its appointed place. It flowed along peaceful and pensive, impenetrable to the human gaze. Along its banks the meadows went green, and then flowered with dandelions.
    In the priest’s meadows the flowers never stop praying. All those Saint Margaret’s daisies and Saint Roch’s bluebells pray, and so do the common yellow dandelions. Constant prayer makes the bodies of the dandelions become less and less material, less and less yellow, less and less solid, until in June they change into subtle seed clocks. Then God, moved by their piety, sends warm winds that take the seed-clock souls of the dandelions up to heaven.
    The same warm winds brought the rains on Saint John’s Day. The river swelled centimetre by centimetre. The parish priest could not sleep or eat. He ran along the weir and the meadows by the river and watched. He measured the water level with a stick and muttered curses and prayers. The river took no notice of him. It flowed in a broad channel, whirled in eddies and washed up against the insecure banks. On the twenty-seventh of June the priest’s meadows started soaking up water. The parish priest ran along the new embankment with his stick and watched in despair as the water easily got into the chinks, rose along paths known only to itself, and penetrated the embankment. The next night the waters of the Black River destroyed the sand dyke and flooded the meadows, as every year.
    On Sunday from the pulpit the priest compared the river’s exploits to the work of Satan, saying that every day, hour by hour, just like the water, Satan puts pressure on a man’s soul. That in this way a man is forced to make a constant effort to put up barriers. That the slightest neglect of daily religious duties weakens the barrier and that the tenacity of the tempter is comparable with the tenacity of the water. That sin trickles, flows and drips onto the wings of the soul, and the enormity of evil keeps flooding a man until he falls into its whirlpools and goes to the bottom.
    After this sermon the priest went on feeling agitated for a long time, and could not sleep. He could not sleep for hatred of the Black River. He told himself it is impossible to hate a river, a stream of turbid water, not even a plant, not an animal, just a geographical feature. How was it possible for him, a priest, to feel something so absurd? To hate a river.
    And yet it was hatred. The priest wasn’t even bothered about the sodden hay, but he was bothered by the mindlessness and blunt obstinacy of the Black River, its impalpability, selfishness and limitless vacuity. When he thought about it like that, hot blood pulsed in his temples and ran round his body faster. It began to carry him away. He would get up and dress, regardless of the time of night,