A single season can completely upend everything you used to take for granted—at least, that’s how it often feels when you’re young. This week’s short story, “Childhood”, by Maria Karpińska and translated by Jonathan Baines, depicts one such formative period. Over the course of a summer vacation, a boy is increasingly caught up in the escapades of his magnetic new friend, who sweetly conceals her taste for cruelty. Together, the children dream of apocalypse. If chaos were to invade the pastoral setting of childhood, what form would it take? Karpińska’s piece quietly hints at the looming shadows of global crises, cast over those who are too young to make sense of them.
As a child I loved the steady rhythm of trains. It sent me to sleep. The whole family, laden with provisions and luggage in extraordinary quantities, would board the train and within a quarter of an hour I’d be asleep. I’d settle down on a pile of suitcases, or on my mother’s generous thighs, and drift off, lulled by the rattling of the wheels.
It was high summer. The trees outside the window were such a luscious green, that you could sink your teeth into it, and it would dribble down your chin. The picture postcard quality of the season had not yet been spoiled by the heat. Cottages were scattered here and there. The scene was peaceful, idyllic. Everything was blurred around the edges, smudged with dirt, like a windowpane smeared with the grease of a hundred different hands, imperfectly cleaned up by Polish State Railways.
And who should step into this picture, but a wee girl. That’s how everyone referred to her. I can still hear my mother saying, “There’ll be a wee girl there. You’ll get along.” We were on the train then, too, on our way to see my uncle’s family, or some in-laws, I don’t recall. I’d never met the people we stayed with and I haven’t seen them since. I don’t know what the thinking was behind that trip, but then one’s childhood is packed with events for which one receives no explanation, things happening for no reason and with no goal in view, coming to pass abruptly, with no introduction. A blissful world of ignorance with no decisions to be made.
The phrase ‘wee girl’ appealed to me. There was something song-like and cheerful about it, free from care. The bounce of a trampoline, the lightness of a swing. But the idea of spending the holidays with a girl did not appeal to me. I was at the age when whole hours can be spent imagining that a stick is a machine-gun or a sword, but the idea that a girl might just be a person like anybody else is beyond comprehension.
Apparently people make a judgement in the first fifteen seconds of an encounter. If that’s true, then that holiday should have been a nightmare, because Anielka—her name was Anielka—made a nightmarish first impression on me. She had two mousey plaits and a dress with bows at the shoulders. Her arms and legs were long and skinny. She was so thin that her knees and elbows looked like unnatural protuberances. She wasn’t unwell, though. It was just a passing phase and in time she would fill out and gain weight. She had large eyes, a slightly snub nose, and her face was extremely grown-up and serious, although she was only eight years old.
“We’re going to play with a little bally wally,” she announced. It annoyed me, this way of speaking. I didn’t know then that Anielka treated all her nouns like this and that adults, when they were talking to her, would start to adopt this same, strange approach, as if Anielka was a member of a different species surrounded by adorable bears and pink balloons, only able to speak in this super-cute manner.
It quickly dawned on me that, in spite of the polite, well-wrought sentences Anielka came out with talking to adults, she was a cruel person, who even took delight in her own cruelty. The game with the little bally wally was simply a matter of her beating me up. Me, a boy three years older than her, given a good, sound beating. Beaten to a pulp. I remember it was just as she smashed the hard ball into my face for the sixth time, with such strength that I would never have expected in a child so frail as Anielka, that I stopped looking at her with the mixture of contempt and indulgence I had brought to her at first, and began to admire her. Over the course of those two sultry months, my admiration grew until, just as it was time to leave, it reached its apogee.
Anielka invented new games for us daily, all of which involved the maiming of the innocent creatures we encountered on our rounds. If none were to be had, I was the one who got maimed. My new friend seemed the very image of naivety and purity, but she whooped with wild delight and satisfaction at the suffering of the kittens that she insisted I place in the highest stork’s nest in the neighbourhood. When she inspected the eyes of frogs, strung up by their back legs on a branch, their eyes bursting from their sockets, she gave a cackle of joy that sent a chill down my spine. “Make a frog-chain!” she demanded. Swallowing my tears, I listened obediently and in silence fashioned a wreath from the frogs’ skinny legs, confusingly reminiscent of Anielka’s own. I followed all her orders. I contributed to the unimaginable suffering of innocent creatures. In doing so, I risked my own health, if not my life. All I can say in my defence is that, more than once, when Anielka had gone for her tea or to help her parents, I returned to the scene of the crime and set the animals free. They were usually on the point of death. I told myself it was the least I could do for them.
I was at an age when the idea of being punished for your crimes awakens a deep fear that eats you up from within. Back home I was an altar boy in a nearby parish and I took the question of God’s wrath seriously. Every night, instead of saying the rosary, I buried my face in the pillow and cried buckets of tears. I tortured myself with the thought of the inevitable confession at the end of the summer. I was forever adding new items to the list of crimes that I kept under the mattress. I took it out more than once a day to make new additions with a chewed pencil end. Writing down my sins brought me momentary relief, as if the simple fact of the list allowed me to hope for absolution. After a certain point, however, the length of the list began to trouble me. Every time I had to write down something new, I saw the confessional in my mind’s eye. And I saw myself in there, mumbling through the endless litany of my sins. Finally, one sleepless night, in a helpless moment, I ate the list. I cut it up into tiny pieces first. Maybe I thought that the indigestion brought on by the paper in my stomach would be a kind of penance and would secure forgiveness for at least a couple of my sins. Deep down, however, I believed—and I’m sure of it still—that there is no God who would forgive the things I did that summer.
Apart from inflicting pain, what Anielka really loved to do was set records. Or maybe the two things went hand in hand. When I think about that holiday now, it seems to me that it was one big race from the gate to the front door, from the shop to the lake, from the jetty to a towel hanging off a branch. She counted out my time, mercilessly drawing out the precious seconds. She measured my long jumps with the conscientiousness of the world’s most precise umpire. Disputes were never resolved in my favour. I was seldom able to please her by breaking the ‘record’ that Anielka had set herself, or rather had imagined, though it didn’t occur to me to think about it in those terms at the time. “You’ll break the record if you do a handstand for fifteen minutes,” she said, for instance, and if by some miracle I achieved such a thing, she would immediately lose interest in my achievement and set me a different challenge.
To a call her a wee girl suited her, but only on her own strict terms. She was ready to shrug off this identity the moment it was distorted by the grown-up world, which saw her blue eyes and mousey plaits as evidence of weakness. There was no weakness in her. She created the image of a wee girl and demanded that the world endorse it.
I remember the satisfaction of coming back in the evening after a day of doing battle on all these metaphysical, and indeed all too physical, fronts. I would be drenched in sweat, and sometimes blood as well. Bruised. With a black eye, perhaps, if the ball that Anielka loved to use for dodgeball or piggy-in-the-middle had been hurled directly at my head. She made her way without a care in the world. Sometimes she would skip or, if there was a good stone, kick it along the path. Her dress was always clean, as were her hands, face, and neck. If only because I wouldn’t dare, it never even occurred to me to touch her. But I loved to look at her, the way she walked, with the sun starting to set behind her. The racket of crickets. Clouds of mosquitoes stirring.
On more than one occasion during these journeys back I saw something in her grownup eyes that might have been pride, and that was the warmest look she ever gave me. Then she would say something carelessly, like, “That stone really caught you. You should have dodged it, loser.” But her tone of voice expressed something completely different and I felt as though I knew very well what she really wanted to say. Those few words meant, as I rubbed my battered knees and bruised elbows, that there was no shadow of a doubt: it was worth it this time, too.
When we went indoors, Anielka transformed into a charming wee girl in a little bitty dress (that’s what her mum would say to her) with white flowers. She responded sweetly to every request from her parents: “Yes, Mummy”; “Oh, of course, Daddy.” And I had to come up with a new story to explain how, for God’s sake, I’d managed to twist my ankle again, or scratch my face up. Anielka would ask politely for seconds and never forget to say thank you when they were served out. Sometimes she told her parents a totally bogus story about what we’d been up to that day. She always came out of these tales holier than the Virgin Mary Herself and more charitable than the Good Samaritan. As she spoke, she would occasionally glance in my direction, as if to check that I was appreciating her creativity. I admired it enormously, of course.
I don’t know what I found more enchanting: her strange, wild, rapturous cruelty; the total lack of compromise that saw her set me at naught; the double life she led with the grace and ingenuity of a secret service agent; or that she pulled all this off at the age of eight with a smattering of freckles and two lank plaits. One thing, in any case, is for certain: I was madly in love with her. My love was as strong and unconditional as the love one person bears another can be. You might very well say just what anyone would say, patiently, to an eleven-year-old in love: that he knows nothing about life; that his best years are all ahead of him; that the trivial experiences of childhood are a pale imitation of what awaits him in adult life.
But all that is nonsense. I knew the love of my life that summer when I allowed her wee hands to pull my ears; when I held my breath underwater so long that everything went black; when I was bombarded with eggs that moments earlier, at the orders of a wee girl, I’d stolen from the henhouse next door.
There was one other form of recreation we pursued during the summer Anielka and I spent together. We turned to it when it was too hot for running races or we’d simply grown tired of every kind of violence we could think of. We laid down in the meadow, or more often on the stubble—that’s to say, I would lie down shirtless on the stubble, like a fakir testing his endurance on the cut ends that pushed sharply into my skin. Anielka would lie on a thick blanket right next to me, or in the shade of a nearby tree. Right there, in a setting so much like a fairy tale that it felt unreal, we would imagine the end of the world.
Sometimes it was a common or garden apocalypse. Everything on fire, streams of lava, the screams of the condemned, harried with a trident from pillar to post.
“We forgot about the volcanoes,” said Anielka. We supplied the missing component of our vision, like a little wooden chair popped into a doll’s house, and started again from the beginning.
Sometimes I would go first. I liked to start in an innocent fashion. With the desert, for example. Not a terrifying one, where the heat is unbearable. Rather a cheerful place, with little pools of water under the palm trees, and camels standing by. In that sort of desert the heat does bother you, but you’re delighted to be there nonetheless. You imagine it’s a place that real adventurers have passed through. You’ve got your waterskins with you. Your camels are rested and will be able to walk for hours. You’re ready for the next stage of the journey.
You set off and to begin with you’re really enjoying yourself. You take a good look around. You take out your binoculars. After a certain time, you take out your map to make sure you’re going the right way. Initially, you pour scorn on the hardships attendant upon the journey, but after a couple of hours you come to doubt that it really was a good plan. You start to look over your shoulder. When you’re satisfied that the palm trees behind you are now only specks on the horizon and there’s no point turning back, you feel yourself boiling up in the scorching heat. You didn’t think that the wind could possibly blow as hot as it now is. With every passing second it gets worse. You take your clothes off, though you know that they’re protecting you from the sun. It’s got to the point where you’re past caring. You drink off what’s left of your water. You can’t help yourself. Your camel comes to a standstill and drops his head, exhausted. You can see nothing but sand. You had no idea there was so much sand. You get down and decide to walk, in spite of everything, but when your feet touch the sand, they sink down, as if there’s nothing there to support you. The white grains are just as hot as the wind and they start to burn you. When this blazing substance reaches your face, you have your last glimpse of the world—the dots of the palms on the horizon, your camel, and further off, your home, your town—and it all gets sucked into the sand rushing through an enormous, sweltering hourglass.
“You forgot about the hurricane,” said Anielka.
When it was her turn, she started right in the middle of the apocalypse. She didn’t need any kind of a run-up. In her visions, everything we knew anything about span round in unstoppable chaos. Books, rucksacks, telephones, shoes, watches and forks—everything wheeled through the air at a wild speed, knocking your head as it went by. If you wanted to say something, or you inadvertently opened your mouth, little things would fly in, like pins and paperclips. You’d get scratched. So you keep quiet, with your arms by your sides and your legs straight. You know that if you held your arm out in front of you it would be ripped to pieces by a force you did not want to reckon with. You lie on the ground, curled up into a ball. Your entire will is directed at remaining intact and grounded. You set your weight against the force wrenching you upwards. You can’t see it, but you imagine that the surface of the earth is littered with people like you, making themselves as small as possible. Eventually the whirlwind takes hold of these people, too. The lightest ones first. Children and skinny people. The overweight remain stuck to the ground. A moment later, however, the maelstrom carries them off, too, and now everyone is spinning round in a vortex of chaos. Objects—books, rucksacks, telephones, shoes, watches and forks—they start to collide with each other and with the whirling people. The people crash into each other, over and over again. The noise becomes unbearable. The sound of the collisions drowns out the screaming. If something like that happens, you’ll know that it is the end of the world.
“You forgot about the music,” I said. Then we went to have our tea.
The problem with the music came up more than once. After a certain point, we understood that the end of the world would take place in silence. The objects—not only books, rucksacks, telephones, shoes, watches and forks, but also pianos, saucepans, sledges and lifebuoys—all these objects will smother the people. There won’t be a sound. No breaking glass, no rustling material. It won’t be hot at all. The temperature will be pleasant, neither too cold, nor too warm. People won’t know what to say, so they’ll keep quiet. They’ll just look about themselves in surprise. And then they’ll take their clothes off, fold them up, and lie down on the ground, side by side. They’ll start to place the objects on themselves. They’ll do so in an orderly manner, as is right and proper when the procedure is undertaken by humanity as a whole. It will take a long time, but there will be no hurry. The apocalypse won’t be a matter of days and nights, but of months, maybe years. If you prove to be sufficiently intelligent, you’ll find a comfy spot. You might, for instance, put your hands behind your head, cross your legs. During the first weeks or, if you’re lucky, for longer, the weight of the objects will seem simply insufferable “It could be worse,” you’ll think to yourself from time to time. “It could be worse.” Lying there under the objects you won’t be able to put your finger on what went wrong. It will be too quiet for you to get your thoughts in order.
Translated from the Polish by Jonathan Baines
Maria Karpińska was born in Poland in 1988. She is the author of a collection of short stories entitled Żywopłoty (2020) and the novel Ucichło (2022). Her essays on literature have appeared in a number of Polish magazines.
Jonathan Baines was born in the UK in 1978. He is a literary translator based in Vienna, working from Polish into English. His translation of Sergiusz Piasecki’s novel The Diary of a Red Army Officer (1957) was published in 2023.
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