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A Brief Note on Time and Place
Mojca Kumerdej’s novel The Harvest of Chronos is set in the year 1600 during the Catholic Counter-Reformation in the territory of what is today the Republic of Slovenia – an intersection of history and geography that may require some context for twenty-first-century readers.
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After all, who says the parish priest is always right? What makes him more right than us? He tells us we’re equal in the eyes of God – well, maybe he’s thinking of the Last Judgement, we can’t say, but we’re not endlessly patient, and we often ask ourselves why we always have to be the poor wretches who get invited to the Creator’s banquet only after death, while in the here and now there are half-eaten legs of veal and pork ribs falling from the count’s overladen table, game meat, too, from game we’re not allowed to just go into the woods and hunt for ourselves, since everything in the woods belongs to the count? And why does everything have to belong to the count? Game, woods, sheep, cows, pigs, fish ponds, quail, and us, too, the populace, while we’re barely surviving hand to mouth, with our empty tables and louse-ridden mattresses, with maybe an ox for working the field, a goat and a sheep – cows are a luxury – and from all of this we are also required to set aside tax payments for the count, the prince, the Church and the emperor? We don’t doubt that such is the will of the secular authorities, but is it the will of God? We’re not so sure about that. And is it our will? Absolutely not! Why can’t we be the ones who live in trepidation of not being able to squeeze ourselves into heaven through the eye of a needle? We’d much rather live with fears like that than worry that one day soon we’ll have nothing to mix in the pot but water and air. We’d even prefer the priest’s position, since he’s well-fed and lives in comfort at our expense. He’s got two farmhands who work the land for him and a housekeeper who, people say, works everything else. The question is whether he will be able to wriggle through heaven’s gates, if only because the eye of God can see even beneath the blankets where the priest likes to dispense indulgences.
So we pay close attention to everything we hear, everything we see. And we see not only with open eyes, but, lying in our beds, we also see beneath the skin, as we sleep and dream. And what we see in our dreams is not by chance. Sometimes a person dreams things they’d never tell another soul, not even the priest in confession – that village blabbermouth least of all! Sometimes a person dreams
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