Читать книгу The Harvest of Chronos - Mojca Kumerdej - Страница 5

Dark Sounds

The province was beset by catastrophes of a moral, meteorological and medical nature. It was just as in the Old Testament, the populace was starting to realize. After the bitter winter, the snow was melting, which in early March led to rising waters. This was followed by cold rains, and people were hacking and wheezing and spitting out gobs of phlegm. Then there was an unexpected warm spell, and the germs that had spent the winter in idle numbness now revived and attacked people’s bowels, ears, throats and lungs, and did not spare the livestock either. Two years earlier, the oaks had been full of acorns, so the following year the mouse colonies increased, with mice running freely through yards, barns and houses and even scurrying out of drawers and chests, but the year of the mice forecast an even worse torment waiting for the populace this spring – snakes. Overfed on fat mice and rats from the year before, with the first warm rays of the sun they were slithering about between people’s feet – long ones, thick ones, short ones, thin ones – and few could avoid them. Some snakes would strike at any feet they feared might trample them. And certain ones – such was the opinion of more than a few – were biting people out of sheer malice. After all, not only people and – well, we won’t mention who – can be evil; animals can, too, since he whose name is not to be written or spoken can sometimes assume their form.

Even before the real summer starts there will be a brutal heat wave – such was the prediction of both folk wisdom and astro­logy. Fires will break out (but surely not without help?), after which swarms of strange insects, like grasshoppers only bigger, will attack and devour the few crops that have taken root in the fields. The country­side will suffer scarcities, and it will be worse in the towns, where prices will surge. And to ensure that the catastrophes reach biblical proportions, an epidemic of dysentery will break out, with such excruciating stomach pains that some people will even die. And plague will arrive and claim a fifth of the village, and then typhus, putrid fever and again dysentery, and again plague, and meanwhile the Turks will invade and there will be an outbreak of the black pox, and as people from all this misery begin to dance the dance of St Vitus, typhus will reappear, and then plague again …

Maybe all these things really did happen, but probably not all in the space of a year or two. The human mind, looking back at the past, tends to compress events, reshaping them in rich and colourful ways and exaggerating many things. Exaggeration proves particularly useful when it is good to justify some past action. And as for what is good, well, the populace are experts in such matters. Common sense tells them clearly what is and isn’t good, especially when the deed marks the boundary between life and death, when it cuts into a body. Plainly, there was no other choice; it’s better for everyone this way – these are the usual explanations after such irrevocable actions, some of which are simply erased by human memory. Words like simply and plainly are very convenient for justifying violence, for they reinforce the logic and underscore the inevitability of what was done. And erasing memory is good not bad. Living with too much badness is exhausting and painful for human beings; it can arouse feelings of guilt and unease, which, in turn, can develop into severe anxiety. We should be grateful to the mind of God and the way he structured the human brain: everything is constantly being filtered so the bad things don’t clog our thoughts. Exaggerating, mitigating, erasing, inflating or in some other way transforming events – all this the human mind can do. But the human mind and the mind of God are not the only minds. There is another one, too, one that speaks deceitfully to the populace, seducing them, leading them astray …

‘So how do we know that what we did was right?’ the populace wonders.

‘That we didn’t make a mistake?’

‘That we did what we did because it was the command of God and that we didn’t maybe fall into a trap?’

‘Yes, how do we know when it’s God speaking to us and not perhaps …’

‘Perhaps …?’

‘The other one …’

‘You can tell who is speaking by the voice.’

‘But is it really always possible to tell the two of them apart?’

‘The two of them?’

‘Because sometimes we might believe and be entirely convinced that it’s God speaking to us, when, in fact, it’s …’

‘Who?’

‘His impersonator … the evil-toned … dark-timbred one … who pretends to be what he’s not …’

‘Devout people can tell good from evil!’

‘But can they always? And, if so, how? How did Abraham in the Old Testament, to whom God gave a son in his old age and then commanded him to take his son to Mount Moriah and offer him there as a sacrifice, the way animals are sacrificed – how could Abraham tell that it was God’s voice and not some other’s? How could he seize the knife without hesitating, ready to plunge it into the heart of his son, because that was what God wanted of him?’

‘He who believes is not afraid and does everything God expects of him.’

‘But what if the angel had not stopped his hand at the very last moment and placed a sacrificial animal before him?’

‘The fact that the angel did stop the Abraham’s hand and put the ram before him proves that this was the voice of God.’

‘That might be comforting in hindsight, but at the time, when you hear such a dreadful command and everything is still open and there’s an endless gaping void in front of you … What if the void really is empty and there’s no meaning in it at all?’

‘Where there is faith, there can be no meaningless void!’

‘But to kill a child? What sort of God can demand of a father his son’s death …’

‘If not a God who was able to send even his own son to his death?

*

‘Quiet! Let’s not impose on creation by trying to understand more than we need to, more than we are meant to. Let’s not undermine the plans of God with doubt and inappropriate questions! Some things are beyond us, beyond our understanding, and can only be accepted!’

‘But how can we know for sure what God wants from us? That he wants anything from us? How can we know that the voice that speaks to us is not our own madness?’

‘We know because we believe! That’s all there is to it! For all that we are and for all that we have, we must be thankful to God. Without him we would not exist, we who are created in God’s image …’

‘That’s well and good, but there are some – not many to be sure – but some who believe that the mind of God is not necessary for us to exist. That we are what we are, in all our sad imperfection, because the cold laws of nature have spewed us forth – the laws of nature, which care nothing for man and have no conception of God or anything else and which, like automatons out of control, keep creating and grinding on in a void. And while we may believe that we are created in the image of God, in fact, we are nothing but grains poured into this mad machinery, of no more importance than animals or water or stones or stars. For there are some who are able to live without God, who neither dread nor fear the idea of a world that grinds on without meaning from beginning to end. And one fine day, these people say, which, in fact, won’t be fine but bitter, the end will come and the machinery stop, because this is what the laws of nature want. Or, even worse, whether they want it or not, they will keep on mindlessly crushing the grains until they themselves

collapse and disappear, with the world in tow, just as they once arose out of nothing …’

‘Utterly impossible! Something cannot arise out of nothing and vanish into nothing. It can’t! It can’t! It can’t! There is no nature without God! God created nature, and nothing in nature happens that he himself has not ordained!’

‘What about miracles?’

‘Miracles are God’s way of revealing his greatness to us, by inflating nature and giving it a little twist.’

‘But what if there are no miracles and these are merely natural phenomena that seem strange to us because we don’t fully comprehend them?’

‘What if … but … yet … still … All these speculations – none of it gets you anywhere!’

‘But some people live with the absence of meaning … are able to live …’

‘But not for long! Because we will find them; we will ferret them out. And then we’ll see how they sing and dance that tune of theirs in Spanish boots!’

‘But what if the only reason we have God is because we’re afraid? And it’s only out of fear that we prattle on about how he created us, how he watches over us? And we do everything in his name because we dread the thing that might well be the truth, namely, that it doesn’t matter if we are good or evil, that it makes no difference at all whether we exist or don’t exist?’

‘Silence! If you’re going to blather on about this, keep your voice down. The walls have enormous ears with falcon-sharp eyes attached to them. It’s best to ponder these things in silence …”

In silence … now let us think without speaking:

All thoughts we ponder deep in our minds and say nothing because we are afraid. We are afraid of the Creator, and even more afraid that there is no Creator and that all the stories about God are inventions by which our masters oppress us and, mainly, by which we oppress ourselves. We are afraid of everything – of nature, God, the count, the prince, the emperor, all those bishops and vicars, visitations, faith commissions, preachers, Leapers, Founders and mercenaries, as well as the Turks, natural and supernatural catastrophes and ominous astrological forecasts; we are afraid of foreigners, we are afraid of each other, we are afraid of our very selves …

And now let us think and again speak out loud:

Worst of all is when you do everything, and do it exactly as God commands, and he still pays no attention to you. You ask, you beg, you grovel before him, but he just seems to close his eyes and shut his ears, and meanwhile some new misfortune befalls you and you haven’t even recovered from the last one. And when there’s a new cata­strophe on the horizon, meant not just for you but for those closest to you, too, good fortune steers well clear, while those other people, who commit outrages against God’s law, live in peace and stuff their faces, since, for reasons we can’t comprehend, life delivers the biggest and juiciest cuts to their table. And we keep waiting and waiting, wondering what’s going on and understanding nothing. Why do bad things happen to us, who are neither responsible nor guilty? Why does sickness spare them, who are the embodiment of human evil (if it really is human) and instead attacks a good husband and father, who toils from morning till night to feed his family? Why does it ambush the mother whose dried-out breasts are suckling her tenth child – a child that like six children before him will probably breathe his last not long after breathing his first? Why? Why do these things happen to us, who are just and honest, but to certain others never at all?

Living among the populace are certain individuals, and it’s because of them that you have to be constantly on your guard. Things that apply to ordinary suffering mortals do not apply to them – and for several reasons. First, they suffer less than the majority. Second, the majority suffer precisely because of these individuals, who (and this is the third reason) make the majority suffer simply for their own amusement, doing evil to kill the boredom of their lives as merrily as possible. And meanwhile, honest people suffer because, sadly, by some inexplicable rule, righteousness and suffering go hand in hand, as the ancient Greeks tell us. But the populace knew nothing about the ancient Greeks, since what they needed to know was not much more than working the fields, raising livestock, making handi­crafts and fabricating lots of ideas and theories that would curl their God’s hair. If he had hair, that is, long grey hair, just like his beard, which is the way the populace imagined their God. But he doesn’t have a beard or hair because God is a concept, which is something very few people thought in those days – or rather, God does not have hair or a beard for the simple reason that (and in those days only the very boldest people thought this, in secret) God … simply … does not … exist.

There is no God – nada, as travellers in the past expressed it, who, fleeing the Inquisition in Spain, passed through these parts on their way to the Holy Land, but then they got bogged down in the Ottoman Empire, many of them in Bosnia. Nada was what the mercenary

soldiers said in the Spanish tongue, coming back from the wars in Spain. The local populace, with sidelong glances at all these Spanish speakers, thought they were saying the Slovene word for hope. Nada, nada – always this nada. But it wasn’t hope they meant, but nothing, which is what the Spanish word means. The few people who understood Spanish wondered if some words might not contain the hidden truth of similar-sounding words from other languages. If so, then nada – hope – is pure ordinary nothing, as it fairly often turns out to be in life. And to hope for nothing, therefore, is more realistic than to hope for something, because you won’t be disappointed when your nada proves to be nothing more than a worthless piece of nothing. And nada, nothing, was all that remained to those whom the populace saw as guilty, who found themselves in the grip of the people’s justice.

We have, to be sure, gone somewhat off track, but not astray. What we have said does, in fact, relate to those insidious manipulators

mentioned earlier. The ones who look most innocent are actually the very worst. It is not easy to recognize them, for they disguise themselves in the skin of youth, or maybe the skin of old age, an utterly desiccated, wrinkled skin – since he doesn’t choose the form of his appearance … Oops, we wrote ‘he’ – we are intentionally not writing his name, let alone pronouncing it, lest that pervert think too highly of himself. But if we had to write it – and there are some among us who can, although not many – we would never capitalize it; we’d write it all in lower case, in sloppy handwriting, and do our best to make it a disgusting scrawl … ughhh … aarrgh – he knows somebody is talking about him, he’s kicking and stomping, so from now on we’ll have to be more careful, think more slowly … We should zealously try to humili­ate him with our scrawl. So, unless it’s truly necessary, rather than saying his name, let’s just clear our throats, cough, maybe whistle as we meaningfully roll our eyes, then spit out a juicy one on the ground.

All these catastrophes, all these vermin crawling out of the earth or tumbling from the sky, there must be a reason for them. We don’t believe God would torture us right and left just because he felt like it – that he’d torture us, who every Lord’s Day, even in thick snow or pounding heat, fly off to church – well, not literally fly, since we’re honest folk and don’t keep to hidden ways, let alone fly through the air like the ones we’re talking about. No, our Creator is not, and cannot be, the one putting us through so many torments. We are devout people, so it simply cannot be God who is poisoning our lives so randomly, burdening us with so many terrible afflictions and punish­ments, which, considering the degree of our sinfulness, we do not deserve. We are honest folk who love God – we give to the Church whatever God demands, and what the count wants we give to him, and what the prince wants, the Archduke Ferdinand, we give to him as well, although we also keep something back from all of the above, since they ask too much from us. And besides all these, there is also the emperor above us, who is so far away we can hardly imagine him and we’re only aware of his existence when we must render unto him that which is his. Which mainly means our lives, which the provincial armies throughout the empire enlist and send to war, the causes and purposes of which are unknown to us and don’t really concern us, except when it comes to fighting our land’s hereditary enemy, the Turks, who have been capturing, raping, pillaging and slaughtering us for some two hundred years.

Nevertheless, we have worked out methods for determining what is good and just and what isn’t entirely that. On feast days we process around the church, staggering beneath a heavy banner, and venerate especially our Virgin, all the way from when she was not yet a mother but Mary Immaculate (to whom our church is consecrated) to when she became a mother and was finally assumed into heaven. A wooden statue of her, beautifully painted, stands on our main altar, while carved into the side altar is an image where Mary is kneeling before her mother, St Anne, and offering her a large white lily. In December, when it’s cold in our province and our feet are sinking into snow or cold mud, we piously trudge to her shrine and, no matter if the weather is fair or foul, wrap our Virgin in pine needles and worthily venerate her, as good Catholics should, and on all her other feast days, too, we show her great honour. Mary the Queen of May we adorn with lilies of the valley, while she who was assumed into heaven by her son Jesus is presented with large roses. All this we do in humble faith, and we could list many other things, too, so it’s hard to believe that God the Father would treat us like naughty brats. Sure, in a way we can understand that he might as a reminder send us hail or drought or freezing cold, but at most all three in one year. Everything else, however, and almost at the same time – dysentery, rats, snakes, the plague, the black pox, Turks, mice, ice storms, special levies and tributes – no, all these things coming so thick and fast, they can’t be the Creator’s doing. And if not his, then they can only be the doing of someone created by God who later went his own dark way. And he does not do these things alone, oh no, not alone, for in every populace somebody can be found – and it’s usually more than one – who is willing to be his accomplice. Sometimes the entire populace will bow down to him, the way Sodom and Gomorrah did. But not us, we’re not like that, not most of us anyway, although there are a few among us who are different, and not many of these are men, which means that most are women – young, old, some almost children – women who like nothing better than cavorting with him whose name we will not pronounce, since we all know who we’re talking about. They’re the ones you need to keep an eye on, observing their behaviour and habits, listening carefully to how they talk. Do they pronounce their words in a strange way? Do they keep clearing their throat when they speak, make peculiar gestures, purse their lips and wink suspiciously? You need to see what they’re up to when they think nobody is watching. So it’s sometimes a good idea to follow one of them – carefully, of course, so she doesn’t notice that your eyes are glued to her back, and that’s not so simple, since such individuals in particular have extremely sharp senses and are quick to feel it when somebody is watching them from behind and following them. This sort of awareness goes beyond human powers. And how could it be otherwise, when they have the help of somebody whispering in their ear, constantly warning them – which is why they’re able to slink among us like foxes. When bad things happen, sickness or accidents, it’s a good idea, too, to have a look around, go for a stroll at night near their dwellings and see if there’s a light burning inside, peek through a crack in the window, press your ear to the wall and, later, ask the people who live with them a few

questions, incidentally, as it were. Regarding health, for example, or the livestock, or the field: Are the crops doing well or not so well? Is there anything unusual sprouting up? Are they maybe having an exceptionally good yield this year, even though nature has ravaged all the other farms in the area? The family of the individual may not realize that evil resides among them, so if any of their answers seem suspicious, it’s good to give them a hint, to wake them up a bit and get them on our side. Who better than the relatives of the depraved to keep track of the unusual activities and habits of these witches? And witches – vešče we say in our language – is just the right word for them, because at night, when honest folk are asleep, they fly around like moths (which we also call vešče). So it’s for the welfare of the community to check regularly and see if there’s any strange glow coming from a neighbour’s yard or house, any strange barks, noises, commotion, anything that can’t be attributed to people who always cross themselves before the crucifix and light incense on Three Kings’ Day to expel evil from their homes. But what can we do when those other ones are not without power of their own? We can light incense and sprinkle holy water as much as we want, but sometimes nothing seems to work.

So why doesn’t our beloved Creator deal with the lot of them in one fell swoop? We ask the priest about this from time to time. If anybody knows who is cavorting with evil, then surely it’s God. Why do we honest people have to suffer to the end of our strength because of them, when the Creator could fry them all with a single look? Why do we have to deal with this, when instead we could be devoting our time to other things, to worshipping God and his Son and venerating the Virgin Mary? We could devote more time to working our fields and raising our animals, or, some of us, to our trades, or the more industrious among us, who sell produce, cloth and other goods to the nearby town, to our commercial enterprises. We could take better care of our children, making sure they are healthy and well-fed, since hungry children are no use at all. This is what we ask our priest, and then, since we ourselves have no book learning, but we’re not dolts either, we wait and wait for the learned man to finally explain the things that are causing us no end of torment.

And our priest looks up at the sky, clears his throat and tells us, ‘God is mysterious and beyond comprehension, even more so for simple folks like you. He alone knows what, if any, plan he has for you. And so, my children, you must be obedient. Not for a moment should you think of looking in rage at the sky and, God forbid, shaking your fist at him, because not even Job, when he complained to God …’ ‘Job? What Job? He’s not from our village!’ we say, glancing at each other, but the priest snaps back, ‘Job from the Old Testament, you stupid peasants, who was a Jew and grumbled at God, but it didn’t help him, not in the least. On the contrary, God sent Job even more misfortunes so he’d come to his senses and prove how strong his faith was. So just you leave God alone. Do what I tell you, obey the Ten Commandments, avoid the seven deadly sins and in general try not to make God angry, since it’s best he doesn’t know that you exist …’

‘What are you saying? Aren’t we part of his creation, too?’

‘Well, at least don’t remind him of your pitiful insignificant lives. Accept what life gives you, in all humility, without complaining or grumbling about it. When you’re hungry, know that there’s a full table waiting for you in heaven, and anyway, an overfed man is no good for anything. When you’re sick, remember that there is neither sickness nor pain on the other side, and when the stench of rot strikes your nostrils, know that death reaps its victims only in this vale of tears, but after death there is everlasting life. So don’t squander your opportunities, lest at the Last Judgement Jesus places you not on his right but on his left, and lest, at the very gates of heaven, St Peter boots some of you into seething cauldrons of scalding-hot fat. And as for the ones you’ve been asking me about, know that the flames of hell are waiting in constant readiness for them, like frothing maws, to grab them after death and burn them to a crisp.’

That’s the sort of thing the parish priest fills our ears with. We ask him something, and he prattles on and on without ever giving us a straight answer. Did we go to school, or did you? we think, looking him up and down and saying nothing. It’s true, we’re simple people and we don’t understand everything. Only a few of us know how to read, and they learned it from a different priest in a different, smaller church, who professes a somewhat different Christian teaching, and, if anyone stays on after the sermon, he tosses on the pew a few copies of Trubar’s Abecedarium and Catechism, and they lick their fingers and move them slowly from letter to letter, and sometimes they sing something, too. And even if most us can’t read or write, we’re very good at arithmetic, which is a practical, useful subject, and anyway, what we know and what we can do is quite enough for us.

The parish priest may be our shepherd and we his flock, but that doesn’t mean we’re just ordinary sheep that the Church, counts, princes, stewards, tax collectors and parish priests can fleece any way they like. We might be meek, but beneath our sheep’s clothing our blood can boil so we start frothing at the mouth, ready to attack. We need to be treated decently, properly, which the authorities don’t understand, and the same is true of our town, which we call our town because it’s the one nearest us and we do a lot of trade there, but the townsfolk just laugh at us and think we’re ignorant yokels. But not only do we know arithmetic, and are quick at it, we’re also quick at making connections between events, things and people and recognizing the root cause and meaning of something. It’s true that in some cases we don’t fully understand the cause, and it can happen that when we’re speculating and looking for connections we make mistakes. But, since we have faith that God forgives our mistakes, we take a lot of things into our own hands without fear and asking God’s forgiveness in advance.

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

horrible things, disgusting things, all of the deadly sins, each of the Ten Commandments broken – even if many of these things would never cross our minds when we’re awake, for we know that just as we watch others, God, too, constantly keeps his eye on us and sees even into our minds, so we are careful not only in our speech and behaviour but also in our thoughts and ruminations. And when we dream such dreams night after night and wake up in the morning not rested but worn out, as if we’d been pummelled all through the night, then it’s good to look around, say a word to someone, ask questions and chat with someone about what might be the cause. That’s how it is and how it was, and that’s how it will always be in our land, where we honest folk live.