Only then does it fall to Earth, and is immediately clothed in a body. Human, animal or vegetable.
That’s the way it is.
I was released the next day, before those unfortunate forty-eight hours had elapsed. All three of them came to fetch me, and I threw myself into their arms as if I had been in another world for years and years. Dizzy had a cry, while Good News and Oddball sat stiffly in the back of the car. They were plainly horrified by what had happened, far more than I was, and in the end I was the one who had to comfort them. I asked Dizzy to stop at the shop, and we bought ice cream.
But on the whole, from the time of my brief stay in custody I became very absent-minded. I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that the policemen had searched my house, and from then on I sensed their presence everywhere – they’d rummaged in the drawers, in the wardrobes and the desk. They hadn’t found anything, for what could they have found? But order had been disturbed, peace destroyed. I drifted about the house, incapable of any work. I kept talking to myself, and realised that there was something wrong with me. My large windows attracted me – I stood in them, unable to tear my gaze from what I could see – rippling russet grasses, their dance in the invisible wind, the instigators of that motion. And shimmering patches of green in all shades too. I’d become pensive and would be lost in thought for hours at a time. I put down my keys in the garage, for instance, and couldn’t find them for a week. I burned the kettle. I’d take vegetables out of the freezer and only rediscover them once they were shrivelled and past their best. From the corner of my eye I could see how much movement there was in my house – people coming and going, from the boiler room upstairs and into the garden, then back again. My Little Girls running joyfully through the hall. Mummy sitting on the terrace drinking tea. I could hear the clink of the teaspoon striking the cup and her long, sad sighs. It only went quiet when Dizzy came; and he was almost always with Good News, as long as she didn’t have a delivery of goods the next day.
When my pains intensified, one day Dizzy called for an ambulance. Apparently I had to go to hospital. It was a good time for an ambulance to come – August, the road was hard and dry, the weather was beautiful and – praise the planets – I had had my morning shower and my feet were nice and clean.
Now I was lying in the ward, strangely empty, with open windows, through which came aromas from the allotments – of ripe tomatoes, dry grasses, burning stalks. The Sun had entered Virgo, who was starting her autumn tidying and was already stocking up for the winter.
They came to see me, of course, but nothing makes me feel more uncomfortable than being visited in hospital. I really don’t know what to do with myself. Every conversation in this unpleasant place becomes unnatural and forced. I hope they didn’t think badly of me for telling them to go home.
Ali the dermatologist often came and sat on my bed. He’d drop in from the next ward, bringing me well-thumbed magazines. I told him about my bridge in Syria (I wonder if it’s still there?), and he told me about his work with itinerant tribes in the desert. For some time he had been a doctor for nomads, and had travelled with them, examining and treating them. Always on the move. He himself was a nomad. He had never stayed at any hospital for more than two years before something had suddenly started to make him itch and feel restless, so he’d try for another job in another place. The patients who had overcome all sorts of prejudices and finally come to trust him would be abandoned – one day a sign would appear on the door of his consulting room to say that Doctor Ali was no longer there. Naturally, his roving lifestyle and his ethnic origin doomed him to the interest of various special services – as a result his phone was always bugged. Or so at least he claimed.
‘Do you have any Ailments of your own?’ I once asked him.
Oh yes, he did. Every winter he suffered from depression, and the room at the workers’ hostel that the local authority had assigned him deepened his melancholy even more. He had one valuable object that he had acquired through years of work – it was a large lamp that emitted rays similar to sunlight, and was thus designed to raise the spirits. He often spent the evening exposing his face to this artificial Sun, while mentally wandering the deserts of Libya or Syria, or perhaps Iraq.
I wondered what his Horoscope was like. But I was too sick to do the calculations. This time I was in a bad way. I lay in a darkened room, suffering from a severe light allergy; my skin was red and blistered, stinging as if it were being slashed by tiny scalpels.
‘You must avoid Sunlight,’ he warned me. ‘I’ve never seen skin like yours before – you are crated for life underground.’
He laughed, because for him it was unimaginable – he was entirely geared towards the Sun, like a sunflower. Whereas I was like white chicory, a potato sprout – I should spend the rest of my life in the boiler room.
I admired him for the fact that – so he said – he only ever owned as many things as he could pack into two cases at the drop of a hat, in less than an hour. I resolved to learn this skill from him. I promised myself that as soon as I came out, I’d practise. A backpack and a laptop, that should suffice for any Person. Like this, wherever he ended up, Ali was at home.
This drifter physician reminded me that we should never make ourselves too comfortable in any particular place, in which case I had probably gone too far with my house. Doctor Ali gave me a jalabiya – a white ankle-length shirt, with long sleeves, that buttoned up to the neck. He said the white colour acts as a mirror, reflecting rays of light.
In the second half of August my condition grew so much worse that I was taken to Wrocław for tests, which didn’t really bother me. In a semi-conscious state for days on end, I anxiously fantasised about my sweet peas, worrying that I should be tending the sixth generation, or else the results of my research would cease to be valid and once again we would assume that we don’t inherit our life experience, that all the sciences in the world are a waste of time, and that we’re incapable of learning anything from history. I dreamed that I called Dizzy, but he didn’t answer the phone because my Little Girls had just given birth to children, and there were lots and lots of them on the floor in the hall and the kitchen. They were people, a completely new race of people brought forth by Animals. They were still blind – they hadn’t yet opened their eyes. And I dreamed I was looking for my Little Girls in the big city; in the dream I still had hope, but it was a stupid hope, so painful.
One day the Writer came to see me at the hospital in Wrocław to comfort me politely and to gently inform me that she was selling her house.
‘The place has changed,’ she said, offering me some mushroom pancakes from Agata.
She said she felt bad vibes there, she was afraid at night, and had lost her appetite.
‘It’s impossible to live in a place where things like that happen. Those dreadful murders have brought various minor deceptions and improprieties to light. It turns out I’ve been living among monsters,’ she said fretfully. ‘You are the only honest person in the whole place.’
‘You know what, I was planning to give up caring for the houses next winter anyway,’ I said, confused by the compliment.
‘A wise decision. You’d be better off in a warm country…’
‘Without the Sun,’ I added. ‘Do you know of any such place, apart from the bathroom?’
She ignored my question.
‘There’s already a “for sale” announcement in the paper for my house,’ she said, and paused for thought. ‘Anyway, it was too windy there. I couldn’t bear the constant howling of the wind. It’s impossible to concentrate with something rustling, whistling and murmuring in your ear all the time. Have you noticed how much noise the leaves make on the trees? Especially on the poplars – frankly it’s intolerable. They start in June and they go on shaking until November. It’s a nightmare.’
I had never thought about it.
‘They interrogated me, did you know?’ she said indignantly, suddenly changing the subject.
I wasn’t
at all surprised, because they had interrogated everyone. This case was now their priority. What a ghastly word.
‘And? Were you any help to them?’
‘You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves…And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.’
There was some truth in what she said.
As she was saying goodbye, I rummaged in my things and handed her a deer hoof. As she took off the paper wrapping, her face twisted into a scowl of revulsion.
‘What on earth is this? For the love of God, Mrs Duszejko, what are you giving me?’
‘Please take it. It’s a bit like the Finger of God. It has entirely dehydrated, it doesn’t smell.’
‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ she asked in dismay.
‘Put it to good use.’
She wrapped the trotter up again, hesitated in the doorway, and was gone.
I spent ages pondering what the Grey Lady had said. And I think it tallies with one of my Theories – my belief that the human psyche evolved in order to defend us against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defence system – it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.
So first I came out of prison. Then I came out of hospital. There can be no doubt I was battling with the influences of Saturn. Yet in August it moved far enough to cease to create a negative aspect, and so we spent the rest of the year like a good family. I lay in a darkened room, Oddball tidied and ran the house, while Dizzy and Good News cooked and did the shopping. Once I was feeling better, we made another trip to the Czech Republic, to the extraordinary shop where we visited Honza and his books. We had dinner with him twice, and held our own miniature conference on Blake, without any EU grants or support.
Dizzy found a short video on the internet. It lasts no more than a minute. A handsome Stag attacks a hunter. We see it standing on its hind legs, striking the Man with its front hooves. The hunter falls over, but the Animal doesn’t stop, it stamps on him in a fury, it doesn’t give him a chance to crawl away on his knees. The Man tries to protect his head and to escape from the enraged Animal, but the Stag keeps knocking him down again.
The scene has no end – we don’t know what happened afterwards, either to the hunter or the Stag.
Lying in my dark room, in the middle of the summer, I watched this video over and over again.
XV
SAINT HUBERT
The Bleat the Bark Bellow & Roar
Are Waves that Beat on Heavens Shore.
My Venus is damaged, or in exile – that’s what you say of a Planet that can’t be found in the sign where it should be. What’s more, Pluto is in a negative aspect to Venus, and in my case Pluto rules the Ascendant. The result of this situation is that I have, as I see it, Lazy Venus syndrome. That’s what I call this Conformity. In this case we’re dealing with a Person whom fortune has gifted generously, but who has entirely failed to use their potential. Such people are bright and intelligent, but don’t apply themselves to their studies, and use their intelligence to play card games or patience instead. They have beautiful bodies, but they destroy them through neglect, poison themselves with harmful substances, and ignore doctors and dentists.
This Venus induces a strange kind of laziness – lifetime opportunities are missed, because you overslept, because you didn’t feel like going, because you were late, because you were neglectful. It’s a tendency to be sybaritic, to live in a state of mild semi-consciousness, to fritter your life away on petty pleasures, to dislike effort and be devoid of any penchant for competition. Long mornings, unopened letters, things put off for later, abandoned projects. A dislike of any authority and a refusal to submit to it, going your own way in a taciturn, idle manner. You could say such people are of no use at all.
Perhaps if I had made an effort, I would have gone back to school in September, but I couldn’t summon the strength to pull myself together. I was sorry the children had lost a whole month’s teaching. But what could I do? I was aching all over.
I couldn’t return to work until October. By then I felt so much better that I organised an English club twice a week, and helped my pupils to make up for the lost lessons. But it was impossible to work normally. In October children started being excused from my lessons because preparations were at full steam for the opening and consecration of a newly built chapel. It was to be consecrated to Hubert on his saint’s day, 3 November. I refused to let the children go. I’d rather they learned a few more English words than the lives of the saints by heart. But the young headmistress intervened.
‘You’re exaggerating. There are certain priorities,’ she said, sounding as if she didn’t believe in what she was saying.
To my mind, the word ‘priority’ is just as ugly as ‘cadaver’ or ‘cohabitee’, but I really didn’t want to quarrel with her, either about excusing the children or about words.
‘Naturally you’ll be at the consecration of the chapel, won’t you?’ she said.
‘I’m not a Catholic.’
‘It doesn’t matter. We’re all Catholics by culture, whether we like it or not. So please come.’
I wasn’t prepared for this particular argument, so I said nothing. The children and I made up for the missing lessons at the afternoon club.
Dizzy was interrogated twice more, and finally was given notice to quit his job by mutual agreement. He was only going to work until the end of the year. He was given some vague justification, staff reductions, cutbacks, the usual excuses. People like Dizzy are always the first to be eliminated. But I think it had something to do with his statements. Was he a suspect? Dizzy wasn’t bothered about it. He had already decided to become a translator. He planned to live off translating Blake’s poetry. How wonderful – to translate from one language to another, and by so doing to bring people closer to one another – what a beautiful idea.
He was also conducting his own enquiry, and no wonder – everyone was anxiously waiting for the Police to make new discoveries, revelations that would put an end to this string of deaths once and for all. For this purpose he even went to see Mrs Innerd and the President’s wife, and tracked the murder victims’ movements as much as he could.
We knew all three had died from a heavy blow to the head, but it wasn’t clear what sort of Tool could have inflicted it. We speculated that it may just have been a piece of wood, a thick branch perhaps, but that would have left specific evidence on the skin. Instead it looked as if a large object with a hard, smooth surface had been used. On top of that, the Police had found trace amounts of Animal blood at the point of impact, probably from a Deer.
‘I was right,’ I insisted once again. ‘It’s the Deer, you see?’
Dizzy was tending towards a Hypothesis that the murders must be to do with settling scores. It was a known fact that the Commandant was on his way back from Innerd’s house that evening, and that Innerd had given him a bribe.
‘Maybe Innerd caught up with him and tried to take back the money, so they tussled, the Commandant fell, then Innerd took fright and dropped the idea of looking for the cash,’ said Dizzy pensively.
‘But who murdered Innerd?’ asked Oddball philosophically.
To tell the truth, I liked the concept of evil people who eliminate each other, in a chain.
‘Hmm, maybe it was the President?’ fantasised Oddball again.
It looked as if the Commandant had been covering up Innerd’s crimes. But whether the President had anything to do with it, we had no idea. If the President killed Innerd, then who
killed the President? The motive of revenge on all three of them was a possibility, and in this case too it was probably to do with business dealings. Could the gossip about the mafia be true? Did the Police have any proof of it? It was highly possible that other policemen were mixed up in these sinister practices too, and that was why the enquiry was making such slow progress.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Page 19
