Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  Kunicki looks on with envy. He’d like to leave the shadows and join in with them. He’s never experienced that intensity. He is more familiar with the north, where masculine society is shyer. But here in the south, where wine and sunshine open bodies up faster and more shamelessly, this dance becomes really real. After only an hour the first body pushes back from the table and holds on to the armrests of the chair.

  Kunicki’s back is slapped by the warm paw of the night-time breeze, which pushes him toward the tables as though urging him on: ‘Come on, come on now.’ He would like to join in, wherever it is they are going. He would like for them to take him along.

  He goes back down the unlit side of the boulevard to his little hotel, making sure not to cross the line of darkness. Before entering the stuffy, narrow stairwell, he takes in some air and stands still for a moment. Then he climbs the stairs, feeling out for each step in the darkness, and he falls instantly into bed with all his clothes on, on his stomach, with his arms thrown out to either side, as though someone had shot him in the back, as though for a moment he had contemplated that bullet, and then died.

  He gets up after a few hours – two, three, because it’s still dark, and blindly he goes back down to the car. The alarm whoops, and the car flashes understandingly, like it’s been lonely. Kunicki takes their bags out of the boot at random. He carries their suitcases up the stairs and tosses them onto the floor in the kitchen and the bedroom. Two suitcases and a ton of packages, bags, baskets, including the one with their food for the road, a set of flippers in a plastic sack, masks, an umbrella, beach mats, and a box with the wines they had bought on the island, and ajvar, that spread made of red pepper they’d liked so much, and then some jars of olive oil. He turns on all the lights and sits now in this mess. Then he takes her purse and delicately empties out its contents onto the kitchen table. He sits there and takes in that pile of pathetic things as though this were a complicated game of pick-up sticks and his was the next move – extracting one stick without moving any of the others. After a moment’s hesitation, he picks up a lipstick and removes its cap. Dark red, almost new. She hadn’t used it often. He smells it. It has a nice aroma, hard to say of what exactly. He becomes bolder, taking every single object and putting it aside. Her passport, old, with the blue cover – she’s much younger in the picture, with long hair, loose, and bangs. Her signature on the last page is blurry – they often get held up at the border. A little black notebook, shut with a rubber band. He opens it and flips through – notes, a drawing of a jacket, a column of numbers, the card for a bistro in Polanica, in the back a phone number, a lock of hair, of dark hair, not even a lock, just a few dozen individual hairs. He puts it aside. Then he examines it all more closely. A cosmetics bag made of exotic Indian fabric, containing a dark green pencil, a compact almost out of powder, waterproof green mascara, a plastic pencil sharpener, lip gloss, tweezers, a blackened little torn-off chain. He also comes upon a ticket to a museum in Trogir, and on the back of it a foreign word; he brings the little piece of paper up to his eyes and manages to make out:καιρóς, which he thinks is K-A-I-R-O-S, although he’s not sure, and he doesn’t know what that would be. It’s full of sand at the bottom.

  There’s her mobile phone, which is almost dead. He checks her recent call log – his own number comes up, mostly, but there are others, too, he doesn’t know who they would be, two or three of them. There’s only one text in her inbox – from him, from when they’d gotten lost in Trogir. I’m by the fountain on the main square. Her sent messages folder is empty. He returns to the main menu, and a kind of pattern lights up for a moment on the screen and then goes out.

  There’s an open pack of sanitary napkins. A pencil, two pens, one a yellow Bic and the other with ‘Hotel Mercure’ written on the side. Pocket change, Polish and Euro cents. Her wallet, with Croatian bills in it – not many – and ten Polish zlotys. Her visa card. A little orange notepad, dirtied at the edges. A copper pin with some antique-looking pattern, seemingly broken. Two Kopiko sweets. A camera, digital, with a black case. A peg. A white paper clip. A golden gum wrapper. Crumbs. Sand.

  He lays it all neatly on the black matte countertop, every thing equidistant from every other thing. He goes up to the sink and drinks some water. He goes back to the table and lights a cigarette. Then he starts taking pictures with her camera, each object on its own. He photographs slowly, solemnly, zooming in as much as possible, with flash. His only regret is that the little camera can’t take a picture of itself. It is also evidence, after all. Then he moves into the hallway where the bags and suitcases are standing, and he snaps one image of each of them. But he doesn’t stop there, he unpacks the suitcases and starts photographing every article of clothing, every pair of shoes, every lotion and book. The kid’s toys. He even empties out the dirty clothes from their plastic bag and takes a picture of that shapeless pile as well.

  He comes across a small bottle of rakia and drinks it down in a single gulp, with the camera in his hand still, and then he takes a picture of the empty bottle.

  It’s already light out when he sets off in his car for Vis. He has the dried-out sandwiches she’d made for the road. The butter had all melted in the heat, soaking into the bread, leaving a glistening layer of oil, and the cheese was hard now and half-transparent like plastic. He eats two of them as he leaves Komiža; he wipes his hands off on his trousers. He goes slowly, carefully, keeping track of either side of the road, of everything he drives by, keeping in mind he has alcohol in his blood. But he feels dependable as a machine, strong as an engine. He doesn’t look back, although he knows that behind him the ocean is growing, metre by metre. The air is so pure that you can probably see all the way to Italy from the highest point on the island. For now he stops in the coves and scans their surroundings, every scrap of paper, every piece of rubbish. He also has Branko’s binoculars – that way he surveys the slopes. He sees rocky rises covered in scorched mulch, faded grass; he sees immortal blackberry bushes, darkened by the sun, clinging onto the rocks with their long shoots. Spent, wild olive trees with twisted-up trunks, little stone walls from before the vineyards had been abandoned.

  After an hour or so he heads up into Vis, slow, like a police patrol. He passes the little supermarket where they’d got their groceries – mostly wine – and then he’s in town.

  The ferry has already docked at the quay. It’s huge, as big as a building, a floating block. Poseidon. Its great doors are agape already, and a line of cars and people half asleep has formed and is about to begin to advance. Kunicki stands by the rail and checks out the people buying tickets. Some of them are backpackers, including a pretty girl in a brightly coloured turban; he looks at her because he can’t look away. Standing next to her there is a tall guy with Scandinavian handsomeness. There are women with children, probably locals, no luggage; a guy in a suit with a briefcase. There’s a couple – she is nestled up into his chest, eyes closed, like she’s trying to top off an interrupted night’s sleep. And several cars – one of them loaded up to the gills, with German plates, and two Italian ones. And the island’s vans, going off for bread, vegetables, mail. The island must survive somehow. Kunicki peeks discreetly into the cars.

  The line begins to move, the ferry swallowing up people and cars, no one protesting, like a herd of calves. A group of French people on motorbikes pulls up, five of them, and they’re the last on, disappearing with the same submissiveness into the jaws of the Poseidon.

  Kunicki waits until the doors shut with that mechanical groan. The man selling tickets slams down his window and steps outside to smoke a cigarette. Both men are witnesses to the ferry’s sudden fuss and distancing from the shore.

  He says he’s looking for a woman and a child, takes her passport out and sticks it in his face.

  The ticket seller squints down at the picture in the passport. He says something in Croatian along the lines of: ‘The police already asked us about her. Nobody saw her here.’ He takes a drag off his cigarette and adds,
‘It’s not a big island, we’d remember.’

  Suddenly he claps Kunicki on the shoulder as though they were old pals.

  ‘Coffee?’ and he nods at the little café that’s just opened by the port.

  Sure, coffee. Why not?

  Kunicki sits at the little table, and in a moment the ticket seller comes up again with a double espresso. They drink in silence.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says the ticket seller. ‘There’s no way to lose somebody here.’ He says something more and holds his hands out, fingers splayed, palm furrowed with thick lines, as Kunicki slowly translates his Croatian into Polish: ‘We all stand out like sore thumbs,’ or something like it.

  The ticket seller brings Kunicki a roll with a cutlet and some lettuce. He walks off, leaving Kunicki alone with his unfinished coffee. Once he’s gone, a short sob escapes Kunicki; it’s like a big bite of bread, and he swallows it. It tastes like nothing.

  The image of the sore thumb lingers in his mind. To whom do we stand out? Who is it that’s supposed to be looking at them, at this island in the sea, following the threads of paved roads from port to port, at the couple of thousand people, locals and tourists, melting in the heat, staying in motion? Satellite images flash through his mind – they say you can make out the writing on a matchbox with them. Is that possible? Then you must also be able to tell from up there that he’s beginning to go bald. The great cool sky filled with the movable eyes of restless satellites.

  He goes back to the car via the small cemetery near the church. All the graves face the sea, like in an amphitheatre, so the dead observe the slow, repetitive rhythm of the port. Perhaps the white ferry cheers them, perhaps they even take it for an archangel escorting souls in that passage through the air.

  Kunicki notices a few names that crop up again and again. The people here must be like the local cats, keeping to themselves, circulating among a couple of families and rarely leaving that circle. He only stops once – he sees a small gravestone with just two rows of letters:

  Zorka 9 II 21 – 17 II 54

  Srečan 29 I 54 – 17 VII 54

  For a moment he searches these dates for an algebraic order, they look like a cipher. A mother and a son. A tragedy captured in dates, written out in stages. A relay.

  And here is the end of the city already. He is tired, the heat has reached its zenith, and now sweat floods his eyes. As he climbs back up into the heart of the island in the car, he sees how the sharp sun transforms it into the most inhospitable place on earth. The heat ticks like a time bomb.

  At the police station he is offered beer, as though the officers hope to hide their helplessness beneath that white foam. ‘No one’s seen them,’ says a massive man, politely turning the fan in Kunicki’s direction.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Kunicki asks, standing in the doorway.

  ‘You ought to get some rest,’ says the officer.

  But Kunicki remains at the station and eavesdrops on all their phone calls, on all the crackling of their walkie-talkies, so full of hidden meanings, until finally Branko comes for him and takes him to lunch. They barely speak. Then he asks to be dropped off at the hotel, he’s weak and lies down in bed fully dressed. He smells his own sweat, the hideous scent of fear.

  He lies there on his back, in his clothes, among the things dumped out of her purse. His eyes attentively probe their constellations, positionings, the directions they point in, the shapes they make. It could all be an omen. There’s a letter to him, in regard to his wife and child, but above all in regard to him. He doesn’t recognize the writing, doesn’t recognize these symbols – it was not a human hand that wrote them, of that he is certain. Their connection to him is obvious, the very fact that he is looking at them important, the fact that he sees them a great mystery: the mystery that he can look, and see – the mystery that he exists.

  EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

  Whenever I set off on any sort of journey I fall off the radar. No one knows where I am. At the point I departed from? Or at the point I’m headed to? Can there be an in-between? Am I like that lost day when you fly east, and that regained night that comes from going west? Am I subject to that much-lauded law of quantum physics that states that a particle may exist in two places at once? Or to a different law that hasn’t been demonstrated and that we haven’t even thought of yet that says that you can doubly not exist in the same place?

  I think there are a lot of people like me. Who aren’t around, who’ve disappeared. They show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigrations officers stamp their passport, or when the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their key. By now they must have become aware of their own instability and dependence upon places, times of day, on language or on a city and its atmosphere. Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness – these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized. Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.

  This opinion is shared by the woman offering me herbal tea from a thermos while we both wait for the bus from the train station to the airport; her hands are hennaed in a complex design made less legible by each passing day. Once we’re on the bus, she sets out her theory of time. She says that sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress toward a goal or destination, rises in percentages. Every moment is unique; no moment can ever be repeated. This idea favours risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things. This is why you’ll never hear them utter words like ‘futile’ or ‘empty’.

  ‘Futile effort, empty account,’ laughs the woman, placing her painted hand on her head. She says the only way to survive in that sort of extended, linear time is to keep your distance, a kind of dance that consists in approaching and retreating, one step forward, one step back, one step to the left, one to the right – easy enough steps to remember. And the bigger the world gets, the more distance you can dance out this way, immigrating out across seven seas, two languages, an entire faith.

  But I take a different view of time. Every traveller’s time is a lot of times in one, quite a wide array. It is island time, archipelagos of order in an ocean of chaos; it is the time produced by the clocks in train stations, everywhere varying; conventional time, mean time, which no one ought to take too seriously. Hours disappear on an airplane aloft, dawn issues fast with afternoon and evening already on its heels. The hectic time of big cities you’re in for just a bit, wanting to fall into the clutches of its evening, and the lazy time of uninhabited prairies seen from the air.

  I also think that the world will fit within, into a groove of the brain, into the pineal gland – it could well be just a lump in the throat, this globe. In fact, you could cough it right up and spit it out.

  AIRPORTS

  Enormous airports assemble us together on the promise of connection with our next flight; it is an order of transferral and of timetables in the service of motion. But even if we had nowhere else to go in the coming couple of days, it would still be worth getting to know these spaces.

  Once they were in the outskirts, supplementing cities, like train stations. But now airports have emancipated themselves, so that today they have a whole identity of their own. Soon we may well say that it’s the cities that supplement the airports, as workplaces and places to sleep. It is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement.

  In what possible way could airports be considered inferior to actual cities, nowadays? They hold conference centres, interesting art exhibits, festivals and product launches. They have garde
ns and promenades; they instruct: at Amsterdam’s Schiphol you can see excellent copies of Rembrandt, and there is an airport in Asia that has a museum of religion – a fabulous idea. We have access to good hotels and a wide variety of restaurants and bars from inside airports. There are little shops and supermarkets and shopping malls where you can not only stock up on provisions for the road, but also on souvenirs, in advance, so as to not waste any time once you get where you are going. There are gyms, places that offer both traditional and Eastern massage, hair stylists and customer service representatives from banks and mobile phone companies. And after satisfying the needs of our bodies, we can move on to spiritual succour at the numerous chapels and meditation spaces offered by airports. Sometimes they host readings and book signings for travellers. Somewhere in my backpack I still have the programme from one such event: ‘The History and Foundations of Travel Psychology’, ‘The Development of Seventeenth-Century Anatomy’.

  Everything is well-lit; moving walkways facilitate the migration of travellers from one terminal to another so they may go, in turn, from one airport to another (sometimes at a distance of some sixteen hours of flight!) while a discreet staff ensures the flawlessness of this great mechanism’s workings.