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people’s and children’s.
    The Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle was the pure will to provide help for the sick and the weak. She was a strength inscribed into the icon by a divine miracle. When people turned their faces towards her, when they moved their lips, pressed their hands to their bellies or folded them at the level of their hearts, the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle gave them strength and the power to recover. She gave to it everyone without exception, not out of mercy, but because that was her nature – to give the power to recover to those who needed it. What happened thereafter was for the people to decide. Some allowed this strength to take effect within them, and those ones got better. Then they came back with votive offerings, miniatures of the healed parts of the body cast in silver, copper, or even gold, and with beads and necklaces with which they decked the icon.
    Others let the power trickle out of them, as out of a leaking vessel, and it soaked into the ground. And then they lost their faith in miracles.
    So it was with Squire Popielski, who appeared before the icon of the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle. She saw him kneel down and try to pray. But he couldn’t, so he stood up angrily and looked at the valuable votive offerings and the bright colours of the holy painting. The Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle saw that he was greatly in need of good, helpful strength for his body and soul. And she gave it to him, she filled him with it and immersed him in it. But Squire Popielski was as watertight as a crystal ball, so the good strength flowed off him onto the cold church floor and set the church in a gentle, barely palpable tremble.
     
     
    THE TIME OF MICHAŁ
     
    Michał came back in the summer of 1919. It was a miracle, because in a world where war has pushed every kind of law beyond its limits, miracles often occur.
    Michał spent three months getting home. The place he had set off from was on virtually the other side of the globe – Vladivostok, a city on the coast of a foreign sea. So he had broken free of the ruler of the East, the king of chaos, but as whatever exists beyond the boundaries of Primeval is blurred and fluid as a dream, Michał was no longer thinking of that as he stepped onto the bridge.
    He was sick, emaciated, and dirty. His face was covered in black stubble, and there were swarms of lice revelling in his hair. The threadbare uniform of a beaten army hung on him as on a stick, without a single button. Michał had swapped the shining buttons with the imperial eagle for bread. He also had a fever, diarrhoea, and the tormenting feeling that the world he had set out from no longer existed. Hope came back to him as he stood on the bridge and saw the Black and White Rivers merging together in a never-ending wedding. The rivers were still there, the bridge was still there, and so was the stone-crushing heat.
    From the bridge Michał saw the white mill and the red geraniums in the windows.
    Outside the mill a child was playing, a little girl with thick plaits. She must have been three or four years old. White hens were earnestly tripping around her. A woman’s hands opened the window. “The worst is going to happen,” thought Michał. Reflected in the moving windowpane, the sun dazzled him for a moment. Michał headed for the mill.
    He slept all day and all night, and in his sleep he counted all the days of the past five years. His tired, fuddled mind lost its way and wandered in the labyrinths of sleep, so Michał had to start his count all over again. During this time Genowefa took a close look at the uniform, stiff with dust, touched the sweat-soaked collar, and plunged her hands in the pockets that smelled of tobacco. She caressed the buckles of the rucksack but did not dare to open it. Then the uniform hung on the fence, so that everyone who walked past the mill was bound to see it.
    Michał awoke the next day at dawn and examined the sleeping child. He gave precise names to what he saw:
    “She has