more natural event than life. The Paxi llus i nvolutus, before being
labelled in the modern guides as poisonous, was a tasty mushroom. Vhole generations have eaten i t , because i t grows everywhere. When I was a child it was gathered in a separate
basket so that it could be cooked for a long time and the liquid
poured off. Now they say it kills you slowly, attacking the kidneys, accumulating somewhere in the intestine to do its harm.
So by eating these mushrooms you will end up both alive and
dead simultaneously, a certain percentage alive and a certain
percentage dead. It is hard to say at what point one passes into
the other. For some reason people attach great weight to this
one, brief moment of either-or.
Lurid boletus in wine and sour cream
about a kilo of lurid boletus
four tablespoonfuls of butter
a quarter of a glass of dry white wine (the Czech sort with
the sunflower on the label is best)
a pinch of pepper and a pinch of hot paprika
salt
a glass of sour cream
half a glass of grated Tatra Highlands sheep's milk cheese
Fry the mushrooms in butter for five minutes. Add the
wine and simmer for three more minutes. Then add the
pepper, paprika and salt, pour in the sour cream, add the
cheese and mix. Serve on toas� or with potatoes.
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
1 75
T h e h e a t w a v e
During the heatwave Marta sat outside her house in the sun all
afternoon, watching our house from her little bench. She went
on wearing the same old cardigan; her skin must have been hot
and sweaty underneath it. A border guard's motorbike lay up in
the mountain pass, under an elder bush. Beside it the border
guard, with binoculars instead of eyes, was looking at Marta
and us. H igher still, a hawk was hovering in the cloudless,
motionless sky - we call it the Holy Ghost, because it moves the
way the Holy Ghost must move, effortlessly and omnisciently. I t
was staring a t the border guard, who was looking a t Marta, who
was looking at us. The whole blazing hot month Marta saw the
same thing.
All day we sat out on the wooden terrace. As soon as the sun
emerged from behind the apple trees we got almost completely
undressed and presented our white bodies to the sky. We
smeared our skin with sun cream , stretched our legs ou t on
extra little chairs and aimed our faces at the sun. Around noon
we'd disappear inside for a coffee break, and then lie out in the
sun again.
Thank goodness clouds exist to give their skin some brief
respite, Marta was probably thinking.
In the afternoon our skin went red, so Vhatsisname, passing
by on his way to Nowa Ruda as usual, advised us for the
umpteenth time to rub ourselves with sour milk.
Marta could see our lips moving, because while lying down
we chatted, without even looking at each other. The sun made
us idly garble our words. But what can you say when a hall of
fire is busy forming beneath your eyelids? Our lips kept
moving, and sometimes the wind brought Marta scraps of
words. She knew we were suffering. She could sec how one of
1 76
O l g a To k a r c z u k
us would stand up from time to time and go through the cool
hall to the other side of the house, where there was still a strip
of shade. We would stand there in solitude, one at a time, while
our lips, not in the habit of keeping still, hung open, and our
unemployed jaws went on swaying like an abandoned swing.
Our back terrace was the waiting-room, the resti ng-place,
where there was no thinking or talking. There our skin cooled
down, our dazzled eyesight recovered, and time returned to its
rhythm. This lasted for a while, and then we would go back into
the sunshine.
Wo rd s
We spent the evening drinking the Czech wine with the sunflower on the label and talking about names. Who was the guy who spent his nights changing German place names into Polish
ones? Sometimes he had a flash of poetic genius, and at other
times an awful word-inventing hangover. He did the naming
from the start, he created this rugged, mountainous world. He
made Nieroda out of Vogelsberg, he patriotically rechristened
Gotschenberg with the name Polish Mountain, he turned the
melancholy sounding Flucht i nto the banal Rz�dzina, but
changed Magdal-Felsen into B6gdal. Why Kirchberg should
have become Cerekwica, and Pfeifferberg Swistak we'll never
guess.
But then words and things do form a symbiotic relationship,
like mushrooms and birch trees. Words grow on things, and
only then are they ripe in meaning, ready to be spoken aloud.
Only then can you play with them like a ripe apple, sniff them,
taste them, and lick their surface before snapping them in half
and inspecting their bashful, succulent insides.
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
1 77
People are like words in this way too - they cannot live \ithout
being attached to a place, because only then do they become real.
Maybe this is what Marta meant when she said something
that struck me as odd at the time: 'If you find your place you'll
be immortal.'
E rg o S u m
Ergo Sum o nce ate human flesh. It was early in the spring of
1 943, somewhere between Vorkuta and the small station at
Krasnoye. The five of them had been left behind in a shack by
the railway track because they were supposed to unload the
next lot of wagons, but the train hadn't come. During the night
snow had fallen, even thicker and whiter than the snow that had
already settled. They dug out some twigs and scraps of grass
from under the snow and ate them. They scraped old lichen
from the shack's wooden planks. Luckily there was forest all
around them and they had the fire to warm their bodies, because
there was nothing left to warm them from the inside .
Ergo couldn't remember the names of his companions; he
had managed to forget them, but he had never been able to
forget the face of the man who froze and whose flesh he ate. The
man must have frozen to death in the night, because in the
morning he was lying curled up by the smouldering campfire
with a singed boot, as if he had stuck his foot in the fire to
remind himself that he was alive as he was dying. Or maybe his
foot fell into the fire after his death. He was balding and had reddish stubble. Ergo remembered that his pale lips exposed gums rotten with scurvy.
Ergo Sum's father was a village school master \'ho lived ncar
Boryslaw. He had a very ordinary name, Vincenty Sum, but in a
1 78
O l g a To k a r c z u k
fit of suspiciously good humour had given his son the name
Ergo. Ergo Sum sounded grand, he thought. Later he regretted
that he hadn't given his son two first names, it would have been
more aristocratic and civilized, it would have been a sign that
Wincenty Sum and his children belonged to the West.
Ergo Sum studi
ed history and classical literature at university
in Lw6w. He was twenty-four when the Soviets invaded and he
was transported to Siberia.
The man who had frozen to death lay rolled in a ball, covered
with a blanket, with the singed boot sticking out from under it.
His cap had slipped off, revealing his bald patch. His face had
human features, but was no longer human. Without a word they
carried him out behind the shack and laid him in a snowdrift.
Snowflakes were falling from the sky like sand - small, sharp
and aggressive. A few hours later they had covered up all traces.
Yet Ergo Sum kept thinking about the frozen man and could still
see that singed boot before his eyes. He tried to remember what
the man had said and done, what his voice was like, but he had
forgotten, just as if the man in the singed boot had never been
there with them. They drank warmed-up melted snow and didn't
speak to one another. A blizzard had blown up, and there was
howling and creaking all around them. The snow came pouring
through chinks in the walls, forming symmetrical white cones,
as if it were a live creature paying them a visit, or a being from
outer space that had chosen to spend the night on Earth. In the
morning everyone was still alive. One of them went outside and
came straight back in. 'He's been buried. I can't see him any
more. We'll never find him again,' he said in despair.
They leaped from their seats and went out into the snow to
look for the body, which had suddenly become extremely valuable and desirable. That's how Ergo felt about it - he needed it, he longed for it, he didn't care �bout the thoughts at the back of
H o u s e o f 0 a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
l 79
his mind - for example there were some Latin verses hanging
about in his head, from Virgil or Ovid, he wasn't sure which.
Atque ita semineces partim ferventibus artus mollit aquis, partim
subiecto torruit igni. * They stabbed away at the white hulk of
snow with sticks, but having failed to find anything they began
to scrape the snow aside with their hands, kicking holes in it,
until finally it was Ergo who saw the singed boot and started
wildly shrieking with joy, Tve got him! I've got him ! '
They dragged the body u p against the wall of the shack and
covered it with some planks and branches, then went back
inside and drank warm snow again, because they were half
frozen. Later one of them went out and fetched some frozen
scraps of meat that he threw into the water. It wasn't Ergo Sum,
no, that he remembered perfectly - the first time it was someone
else. The scraps of meat thawed out in the water and then boiled
for a short time - or rather they Ooated limply in the kettle. pale
and scrawny. There was no smell, just steam rising from the
poL One of them refused to cat, but that wasn't Ergo either. At
first Ergo held the meat in his mouth because it was hard and
half raw and he couldn't swallow it. He had to exercise his
willpower in order to swallow those scraps. just imagine it's
ordinary meat, he said to himself, like in soup. Only then did he
manage to swallow it, but at once sat very still, as if he had
swallowed a time bomb. In the evening the man who hadn't
eaten told them they might get an allergy because their immune
systems weren't adapted to consuming that sort of protein. l ie
was a biologist or something of the kind.
'Shut up!' they said.
*
Translawrs rwcc: · . . . and so the half-dead limbs. in pan he hol lrd i n
water. and in pan roasteu w i t h n rc underneath
·
. . . (O,·iu . . lcrwnorl'hoscs .
l l . 22H-9).
1 80
0 I g a To k a r c z u k
The train still hadn't come, and by now it was absurd to hope
that it would. The tracks had long since vanished beneath the
snow. Gradually the small bushes and the shed were disappearing under it too. Every day they had to make an expedition to the sparse birch forest for wood. They broke off whole branches
with their hands and dragged them over to the shed. In the
night they heard the howling of wolves, distant and terrible. A
thought occurred to Ergo Sum that kept him warm, like the fire:
'It can't be wolves. There's nothing to worry about.' I t was like a
solid wall that grew bigger and bigger, ousting all o ther
thoughts, replicating itself a thousand times over, filling his
entire consciousness. 'Everything's all right. I t's OK.' He had the
same thought when his turn came to fetch meat. He went outside , repeating those words to himself over and over in a sing-song way, like a mantra, combing his thoughts into nice,
straight, disconnected strands. So he no longer saw the man; all
he saw was a distorted angular shape sprinkled with snow. He
cut off some scraps of meat with a knife, right dOvn to the bone.
It was difficult because the knife was blunt and the meat was
frozen hard as stone. Only afterwards did it flash through his
finished a leg. The biologist was so weak that he didn't protest
when they gave him some hot liquid with a few tiny bits of meat
in it, although they weren't at all concerned about his survival.
Now he was just the same as them.
This went on for a week, maybe two. Ergo went on fetching
meat, culling it o ff the bone with the knife and snapping off the
smaller bones, because eventually they had to use those up too.
Soon, thanks to the snow and everything else, it was hard to recognize the source of their supplies any more - it was just a heap of rags, an irregular frozen shape. The biologist only vomited
once, when they began to eat the intestines.
H o u s e o f D a y, H o u s e o f N i g h t
1 8 1
Someone was watching over them, Ergo Sum reckoned,
because the day before the wolf attack they saw human footprints in the birch forest. They followed them a little way and could see that whoever it was had been dragging wood on a
sledge, and that the sledge was being pulled along by a horse.
They went back to the shed in a state of excitement. They prayed
that it wouldn't snow and cover up those tracks from the outside
world. That night, they heard howling from somewhere far away,
then gradually it came nearer, until finally the noise and scuffling was right outside the shed. First the snarling wolves tore apart and ate up their remaining suppl ies, and then, stirred into
a frenzy by fighting over the miserable morsels, they started
pressing against the door and gnawing at the walls. Inside they
got such a big fire going that it scorched the ceiling. I f the night
had gone on an hour longer the shed would never have held out
and they would have ended up in the jaws of the wolves.
But as soon as the sun rose and the wolves had gone they
made a dash for the birch forest, towards the tracks left by the
man , the sledge and the horse. There were three of them,
because in the morning they discovered that the biologist was no
longer alive. Ergo Sum reckoned another lucky thing had happened, and that someone was definitely watching over them,
because they would never have been able to carry the ailing
biologist. They had a long journey ahead of them - no one knew
quite how long, or whether it had an end at all.
All day they walked , through the forest and along the edge of
it, until that evening, several hours after dark, they saw some
lights in the distance. Somewhere behind them the wolves were
howling.
So Ergo Sum and his two companions, whose names he
couldn't remember, were saved . They reached a small hamlet ,
where there were only five houses, ami there they were gi Tn
1 82
O l ga To k a r c z u k
food and warm th, and their frostbiuen hands and feet were
allowed to heal. From there Ergo made it to the Polish troops,
travelled the entire route from Lenino to Berlin and ended up in
Nowa Ruda as the classics teacher at the old secondary school,
where a marble bust of Goethe stood in the hall.
S o r ro w, a n d t h a t fe e l i n g t h a t 's
w o r s e t h a n s o r r o w
These feelings always appeared immediately after Christmas and
gradually grew stronger, until by February he was in a state of
despair. Every year Ergo Sum went back to school after the holidays feeling like a different person. He was tired and sleepy, and his eyes and head ached. The dirty snow looked so dreadful that
it caused him pain. He squinted and felt as if he were shut up
inside a stiff, awkward, incompetent body, stuck inside a stiff,
awkward, incompetent world. The very existence of the children
at school seemed pointless to him - as did all his efforts to teach
them, battling against their innate brainlessness, going blind
marking their tests, going deaf from their shrieks, going grey from
the omnipresent chalk dust, just so they could grow up and go off
to kill each other in the next war, or drink vodka and breed
another lot just like themselves in times of peace. He was teaching
them Virgil, though he was fully aware that they didn't understand
a word of it. He got them to bash away at simple Latin phrases that
became nothing but some foreign words in their mouths. All the
meaning came dribbling out of them and fell into the current of
the dirty, stinking river that flowed doggedly through the town.
No one for a hundred kilometres around understood Virgil, no