Somersault into the Cabbage Stone Age
Berit Petolai
It was my great great great grandmother who made that brave somersault.
And I am grateful to her for that.
We all are.
I cannot define my present moment of being with any year. There is no importance in numbering and sorting any more. Counting and wiping numbers together in a heap should remain the playground of children casting dice in a sunspot. Time has another dimension now. We have let time free like a wild horse from its tether. Did it gallop away when free, did it start kicking angrily? No. It became tame. Cooled down. Snorted once, splattering foam, inclined its head and looked around searchingly, then walked to lay down under the shade of our big limetree. Time became free of stress, there was no need for headstalls any more. Days and years and months strictly in a row along the timeline did not bridle everything any more. Beginnings. Ends. What for? It is peaceful here now. A quiet course, a brisk gust of wind to fly along with. It is different now. True, there are alternating light and darkness, day and night still exist, there are the seasons and there is growing up. This mystery and magic should not be taken away, no. The high starry March night still becomes a light morning of birdsong in spring. And the warm summer night still runs its course together with those wandering through it mildly into a languid summer day where a sudden rain will coax the small ones outside and makes those more grown-up seek for shelter inside. Again and again autumn grows into winter and after winter resurgence begins again. The limetree towering in the yard keeps growing its annual rings like it is the habit of trees. But nobody hastens to count them or, God forbid, to cut the tree in order to look under the bark and follow the rings with a finger around the tree’s sentient heart. And if the tree should crash down in a storm – we can always jump back into the moment when it hadn’t happened yet. To lay down under the tree and stay there, say, on a hot day in July, nose all full of the sweet smell of the lime blossoms and the hum of bees in the ears. A broken tree need not remain broken, it has an opportunity to keep growing in its own growing cycle.
But still, I couldn’t answer the question about the new time we’re having now, bringing forth some kind of numeration. Because I don’t remember at what number the enumeration snapped, try as I might. To come here and stay, we had to let this fall into oblivion. One needed peace. And the time needed peace. And we finally found that peace through a somersault. Years don’t exist any more. No-one even understands such a definition. Time in that sense does not exist, it has been forgotten. Time now flows in another way – it means a peaceful wandering along endless landscapes, coming from inside us. One can run along his or her own age like along a staircase, stopping on this or another step. Time has become a snail with a mottled shell and the beginning of the spiral staircase with its sounding texture is at the same time its end and vice versa, making what happens in the shell move in circles. I’m not going to explain it all completely. I couldn’t do it. Trying to embrace everything with some present name, I can simply say that … we now roll in the cabbage stone age.
How did we come here? My great great great grandmother – it is her I wanted to tell you about. Why did she one windy spring evening make that whirring somersault that brought her and her family an opportunity to flow into a completely new form of being. She was a small woman with a nose like a beak of a bird, moving in the yard with a brisk step, sometimes holding children by hand, sometimes carrying something either in hand or on her back. A basket with mushrooms, a striped tomcat whom she had found somewhere in the village. Messages taken from the letterbox. Day’s work. Night doings. Anxiety and heartbreak. The load of those grew year by year, although you tried to shake them off like a wet dog and get free of them like burrs from your sleeve. Nothing doing, said the small woman to herself and straightened her back as her shoulders were sagging under the weight, although the annual rings under her bark (which at the time were still counted like strawberries strung on a blade of grass) had not reached the coarser layers. There was still youth and daring, there was love and several pairs of small feet drumming on the floors of the house. Life in this Northern part of the world has many beautiful moments to offer and the small woman with a nose like a beak of a bird knew how to pick lightness from every day to shine on your soul landscapes and to give strength, but still, still a disturbing rumbling noise had started to sound which by and by wanted to swallow everything that was a healing nectar for human heart. When you stepped out of the door in the evening to listen to the blackbird’s whistle on top of the birch tree, an even rumbling sound coming from somewhere above cut into the wonderful primeval moment. It was like a big military aircraft was approaching from the highest layers of the heavens, tearing the fluffy clouds into shreds flapping in the wind. Or was it coming from under the ground? The roots of the trees curled with fright and ants in the deeper courses of their anthills started bustling to the earth. And the small woman who was standing on her doorstep and wanted to take in the simple and deep beauty of the evening, felt that the disturber had crawled very near stretching its tentacles around everything one could earlier find support for one’s soul landscapes filling you with lightness, growing hope and belief in a new day in you. The disturbing thing was dark and silent, but its message was so loud and disconcerting that it threatened to break everything under its bulging shadow. The easy morning laughs with children, the evening talks on the village road, the blossoming buds on the lilac tree, the straight and lithe lines of goose flocks back from their travels in the glowing spring skies, the expectations of tomorrow and the gentle dreams – all that simple and at the same time immensely wonderful people had become used to, that she also loved and held dear, started shakily faltering with that rumbling. The small woman noticed and felt that and so did the others. The rumble crept gradually into their ears and from there into their blood. The more sensitive ones suffered the most, their scale of cognition was more receptive, more fragile. The pain receptor between their shoulder blades became disturbed, the nape nerve flinched agonizingly, a gray tremulous net appeared around their hearts that squeezed, hurt and wanted to seize a way ever further, into the most secret ends of their soul landscapes, to the untouched and clean forests of their thoughts, to the deepest core of being human. Fear. Restlessness. Anxiety. Those were by far not feelings unknown to people. That threesome has always been with them, from the beginning of all times. Those three untameable wolf dogs who still had hooked themselves up to humans and were prowling in the darkness around them, always staying out of the glow of their fires, aloof, lounging under the trees. Muzzles vigilant to catch the right moment to dash nearer. Humans had learnt the tricks and commands to tame those beasts and scare them off. Through all times the quest had ever been such. They managed to coexist together in that dangerous way. Sometimes surrendering, sometimes getting up and going on. Because they had got used to that, it had always been so. But now – the three wolf dogs were gone. Instead of those half wild, half tamed beasts had come something bigger, something appalling and paralyzing. A monster who had gathered power in its lair for decades, to attack in a suitable moment, to leach into people’s minds, to poison, to sow confusion and to destroy. Fear. Restlessness. Anxiety. Uncontrollable and unpredictable. It squeezed in through small cracks in the log wall and giant glass windows. Wrecking and ruining on different levels. The endless flood of information that reached people from the flickering world of the luminous screens helped this pest to spread and pass on. That paralyzing muted rumble, so quiet at first like constant pain in the chest, became sneaking a sharp twinge in the vessels, the joints and the lungs. The restlessness made people panting. The anxiety made their hearts flutter. And the fear made them freeze, not daring to take a step for every next step might cause new pain, an unpleasant sensation in body and in mind. It was not possible to flee from the rumble oozing into body and mind from nowhere, it followed you into the house and on your walk outside on the road. Even if you rushed from the sauna to the footbridge and jumped into the pond with a loud splash and there was only burbling in your ears, the rumble very soon reached you again. Made the soft water in the pond searing. And from behind that rumble pictures and images rose. People feared War knocking on their doors. Where that knocking had already happened, muddy boot traces tramped across clean light floors and children’s toys on it; the passing tanks left screaming emptiness behind them. Withering and vandalizing nature, skinning it alive, created great anxiety. In that world, turned upside down, one almost couldn’t see an upright forest, it existed only in the chopped down surrendered form. And the confusion and malice of people – one feeding the other – created anxiety. Why did people always have to feed on one another? On every level, at every opportunity? Why was cruelty constantly able to surpass itself? And make diseases tougher? People were afraid to lose those dear to them. And in the mess of all that fear and anxiety people tended to lose themselves more and more. They broke with a snap and remained laying, annual rings all drying dithering inside them.
One spring evening the small woman with a bird’s nose was standing in her kitchen on a striped rag carpet, the nape of her neck tingling and shoulders drooping with anxiety. When earlier she had carried mint, picked from her garden, a small greenish stone a child had found or a couple of lines scribbled on a piece of paper in the pockets of her jacket, then now her pockets were only full of restlessness, fear and anxiety. And her ears were full of the rumble. The same was the case with her neighbor. And with the others who lived farther. And farther. And farther. It was windy outside, the wind was howling in the kitchen range and made the range door rattle. The woman has always thought of winds as her friends, even now the springtime free and easy hum succeeded in silencing the roaring noise in her ears. To calm her somewhat. The woman was tired, the constant worry had tired her out and burrowed her hollow inside like an old worn out pot. She kneeled in front of the range, head sadly drooping, surrendered. Somewhere, in another room, the children were playing, somewhere all doings waited their turn. But all at once it was terribly hard to look ahead. To imagine even some kind of future was as impossible as to get a fat bumblebee from the bottom of a tall glass bottle. The mouth of the bottle was long and narrow, both the glass and the bumblebee frail. The small woman stayed on her knees and listened to the wind howling in the chimney. Suddenly, staying in that timelessness, she felt a strange warm radiance coming to her from the recess under the range. Something was glowing and ringing there invitingly. Some used paper and a few logs were kept there. The radiation spread from behind them, from the farthest end of the recess. The woman bowed down and felt around in the dark recess. Her hand found a friendly round form – a slightly porous and rugged oval stone was hidden in this dark cavern, so faithful, so inherent, waiting for the time when someone would need it again. The cabbage stone! A kind of being that had been living in this household for several generations. It used to spend the winter in the cabbage barrel on the cellar floor. Then it usually traveled to the larder along with the barrel as the housewife was making sauerkraut now again. When the last of the sauerkraut was taken from the barrel at the winter solstice and the weight of the stone was not needed any more, the housewife took it to the kitchen carefully and put it in the warm recess of the kitchen range. It wouldn’t have been proper to leave the stone behind the door, it was freezing, the stone would feel cold. The children liked the stone and they occasionally went and stroked the stone in its recess. It was warm like a freshly baked loaf of bread and nice to touch with the child’s small hand. The round stone radiated peace and the wise knowledge of old times. How long it had been a part of this house! It had witnessed so many souls coming and going. Heard wonderful stories and seen unbelievable human fates. It had exemplarily accomplished its responsible task: pressed juice out of cabbages with its calm weight, lain in this sour sauce, silted, become clean, seasoned and achieved in the end exquisite and original stage of saturation. There were stones like that almost in all households, sisters or brothers of it. Those stones had lived many lives, known all ages of the world. Ripened and hatched deep in the earth for hundreds of years. Rolled out of the ice age, been part of some mighty rock, eroded, taken form, grown. Some of them had flown here from the stars. Fallen on the earth with a boom and scattered all over the land like stone pearls. The stones liked warmth in their essence, they waited for the rays of the sun to stroke them and for the touch of the human hand. And there truly came a moment when a human, often a housewife, came to the pile of stones by the field, looking for something, moved and lifted the stones sleeping in the pile, until found a perfect one suitable for using in the cabbage barrel to crown the process of making sauerkraut. Stones for the sauna stove could demonstrate their fiery snappy character. In cabbage stones, however, the quintessence of world history took form; they were at first scrubbed clean of dust with a brush, heated and cooled again as the whole process had to be flawlessly clean. Cabbage, barrel, human hands – and the stone, the cabbage stone. Such a stone remained where it was, with its home and its people. Rolling through generations, finding use again and again. That faithful small round omniscient Buddha, watching, understanding, feeling and divining. With years the sauerkraut fluid and the iridescent clean milk acid had silted into the heart of the stone all that was necessary, completely clean and honest. That stayed and persisted and had therefore mastered the art of timeless course. The unnecessary and the perishable, however, came off and faded away in the sourish fluid. Now the time of that light gray round Cabbage Stone had come in order to bring redemption.
The small woman held the cabbage stone on her knees and stroked it with tender movements like the head of a child. The weight of the stone made her feel safe and confident – yes, she had to do what the stone had just whispered to her in a soft voice. All she needed to do was a somersault on the very same kitchen floor, in the direction of the Cabbage Stone. The woman put the stone just in the middle of the striped rag carpet, bent down for a moment above it and smelt the stone slightly with her beaky nose – the stone had a timeless smell, liberatory, redeeming delicious slightly sour-sweet fragrance and already the woman felt how something left from her shoulder like mildew and started to ferment into nothingness. She called the children to the kitchen and lined them behind her back at the Cabbage Stone, telling them to do exactly what she would do. She left a letter on the table for her husband: coming home, he should do a somersault in the kitchen. Before that, he should instruct their neighbors. Then the small woman stretched herself backwise like a barrel hoop, got off the ground and did a perfect somersault on the rag carpet towards the Cabbage Stone. And then she disappeared like a small milk acid bug into the warm curved bulk of the stone. The children watched all that with wide eyes and being obedient by nature, they did what their mother had told them to do. They somersaulted towards the Cabbage Stone, disappearing under its crust silently and gently. Soon the husband came home, found an empty house and the familiar round stone on the kitchen floor. And a letter on the table. Having passed the message to their neighbors, he thought, whatever, his wife had had strange wishes and suggestions before. And he was also tired, the load on his shoulders seemed especially heavy today. He might do a somersault before going to bed. And he also disappeared into the inviting womb of the stone. This very evening tens of somersaults were done in that village. Cabbage stones had been brought back from deep cellars and sheds, they glowed and flickered warmly and sourishly. Their time had come – the Cabbage Stone time.
How comfortable it is here. No worldly rush and bluster, no fear, no big and small trepidations, the depressive anxiety gone. Humankind has seen enough hardship, having been pounded into a uniform worrying mass like by some huge bludgeon. Now the time has come to drift calmly in a world cleaned by a sourish fluid. In a world seasoned and fermented into a clean milky state. In some sense that life here reminds one of a stronghold of forgotten truths dear to the heart. But it is also something the existent words cannot communicate. Here the language and communication are new, reminding a bystander a quiet chatter or throbbing or a chirrup. There is the ground, the earth, and the grass here. There are forest lakes and the sea lapping on the shores. A sky changing colors, flushing, darkening and adorning itself with stars, sometimes the Northern lights show themselves on the horizon. The whole nature is like we remember it from earlier times. But it is brighter, virginal and going its natural organic course. It is not disturbed, not molested, nobody would dream of it. And it is the same with feelings here, with love. Much resembles the past, our former present. That which feeds our soul landscapes allows the spirit to grow. But the world here lacks all that seems perishable, sour, annoying and mean. Does it sound naive? In fact it sounds like the only possible way. The time of it all simply came to the end when we somersaulted into the Cabbage Stones – into a form of being where time flows differently, where it has calmed down and been set free by the people. With that somersault we also became free. We somersaulted ourselves into the future, into the only thinkable future, as it was enough of the struggling, confusion and anxious fear. The former being and time were swarming, boiling over and had come to the end.
When you see the round cabbage stones rolling quietly whispering towards the woods, don’t stop them. They are leaving into their underground caves to sleep before winter. In the stone, the warm heart of a world is hidden towards which you are on the way.
Translated by Kersti Unt