Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  That night in the quiet of their minds ideas germinate, grow like plants, mature in the blink of an eye – soon they will flower and bear fruit. In the morning a messenger sets out on horseback with a humble plea to the sultan to recall this small kingdom no one ever remembers; the council of the elders has risen up, for the good of the righteous, those devoted to Allah, to rid themselves of their current inept ruler – the image of the plunging sword has crystallized – and requests armed support against the heathens on their way from the West, numerous as the grains of sand in the desert.

  And that same night the ruler’s mother digs him out from under leathers and carpets, from among the bodies of the children he sleeps in bed with; she shakes him out of his slumber and tells him to get dressed.

  ‘Everything is ready, the camels are waiting, two of your steeds have been saddled, and to their saddles rolled-up tents are bound.’

  Her son moans, groans – how will he get by in the desert without bowls and plates, without coal stoves, without carpets to lie down on with the little ones? Without his toilet, without the view from the window onto the square and the fountains with their crystal-clear water.

  ‘You will be killed,’ whispers his mother, and a vertical wrinkle slices like a dagger down her forehead. Her whisper is reptilian – the hiss of a sage snake at the well. ‘Get up!’

  From behind a few of the walls now you can hear tripping steps, his wives having already packed their possessions – the younger ones more, the older ones less, not to give any reason for displeasure. Just modest bundles, only valuable scarves, necklaces, bracelets. Now they squat at the door, outside the curtain, waiting to be sent for, and since it’s taking too long, they look with impatience out the window, where to the east over the desert a pink moon is already rising. They do not see the enormity of the desert, which licks with rough tongue the stairs to the palace, since their windows only look onto the inner courtyard.

  ‘The branch on which your ancestors pitched their tent was the axis of the world. Its centre. Wherever you pitch your tent will become your kingdom,’ says his mother, pushing him towards the exit. She would never have dared to touch him in such a way before, but now with this gesture she indicates to him that in just these past few hours he has ceased to be the ruler of this saffron state.

  ‘Which wives will you take with you?’ she asks, and for a long time he does not give a reply, just pulling the children in – boys and girls, angel cubs, their naked skinny bodies covered by the night; the oldest boy can’t be more than ten years old, the youngest girl, four.

  Wives? There will be no wives, not the older ones, nor the younger ones; they were fine for the palace. He never particularly needed them, he slept with them for the same reason he forced himself to look upon the bearded mugs of his advisors every morning. Penetrating their ample haunches, their fleshy nooks, never brought him too much pleasure. He was disgusted by their hairy armpits and the bulge of their breasts. Which is why he always took care not to spill even a single drop of his precious seed into those miserable receptacles, so that not a single drop of life would be wasted.

  He was, however, certain that by withholding all his fluids, and thanks to the little bodies of the children he drew strength from as he slept, thanks to their sweet breaths on his face, he would someday be immortal.

  ‘We will take the children, my little ones, these dozen angels, let’s get them dressed. You help them,’ he says to his mother.

  ‘You fool,’ she hisses, ‘you want to take the children? We won’t last even a day with them in the desert. Can’t you hear the rustles and whispers approaching? We don’t have a moment to lose. You will take other children in the place where we end up, more of them. Leave these, they will be fine.’

  But seeing his determination, she lets out a furious sob and stands in the doorway with her arms outstretched. Her son goes over to her; now they evaluate each other with their eyes. The children have them surrounded in a semicircle, some holding onto the bottom of his kaftan. Their gaze is calm, indifferent.

  ‘It’s them or me,’ his mother blurts, and when these words emerge from between her lips, when she sees them from the outside, she tries to snatch them back, with her tongue, but it’s too late. She cannot catch them.

  In one fell swoop her son has struck a fist into her stomach, in the place that years before was his first home, that soft chamber, lined with red and crimson. In his fist he holds a knife. The woman lurches forward, and from the wrinkle in her forehead darkness pours across her face.

  There’s no time to lose. Gog and Magog load the children onto the camels, the smaller ones in baskets, like birds. They attach the valuables, precious materials rolled up in coarse linen, to disguise them, and as the tiniest sliver of the sun first grazes the horizon, they are on the road. At first the desert lavishes them with lengthy shadows slipping from dune to dune, leaving a trail only visible to the initiated eye. In time this shade will be reduced until finally it disappears completely, when the caravan is able to attain the immortality it seeks.

  ANOTHER OF MENCHU’S TALES

  A certain nomadic tribe lived for years in the desert between Christian and Muslim settlements, so they learned a lot. In times of famine, drought or threat they were obliged to seek refuge among their settled neighbours. First they would send a messenger who would observe the customs of the settlement from behind the brushwood and, based on the sounds, smells and costumes, determined whether the village was Muslim or Christian. The messenger would return with this information to his tribe, and then they would take out of their panniers the requisite props and head out into the oases, posing as fellow believers. They were never refused help.

  Menchu swore that she was telling me the truth.

  CLEOPATRAS

  I rode a bus along with about a dozen fully veiled women. Through the slits in their garments you could only see their eyes – and I was astounded by the care and beauty of their make-up. They were the eyes of Cleopatras. The women gracefully drank bottled water with the aid of straws; the straws would disappear into the folds of the black material and find, somewhere within it, the women’s hypothetical lips. They’d just put on a movie up front, intended to improve our commute – on the screen was Lara Croft. Now all of us women looked on in fascination as that lithe girl with the gleaming arms and thighs felled soldiers who were all armed to the teeth.

  A VERY LONG QUARTER OF AN HOUR

  On the plane between 8.45 and 9 a.m. To my mind, it took an hour, or even longer.

  APULEIUS THE DONKEY

  A donkey breeder confided his story to me.

  The deal with donkeys is that they are a rather costly investment, returns are slow and it takes a lot of work. Outside high season, when there are no tourists, you have to be able to finance their food and take care of their coats – they have to be kept neat. This dark brown one is a male, the father of a whole family. His name is Apuleius – that’s what one tourist lady called him. That one over there is called Jean-Jacques, although it’s a female, and that lightest one is Jean-Paul. I have a few more on the other side of the house. Now, in the off-season, only two are working. But when the morning traffic starts I bring them out here, before the tour buses arrive.

  The worst are the Americans – most of them are overweight. Oftentimes they’re too heavy even for Apuleius. They weigh twice as much as other people. The donkey is an intelligent animal, it can evaluate weight right away, and it will often start to get upset just seeing them come off their tour bus, all overheated, big sweat stains on their shirts, and those trousers they wear that only reach their knees. I get the sense the donkeys can tell them apart by their smell. So they’ve got problems with them even when their dimensions turn out to be all right. The donkey will start kicking and making a fuss, blatantly trying to get out of working.

  But my donkeys are good, I brought them up myself. It’s important to us that our clients leave here with fond memories. I’m not a Christian myself, but I understand that fo
r them this is the pinnacle of their excursion. They come here to get on my donkeys to tour the place where a gentleman named John baptized their prophet with water from the river. How do they know it was this spot here? Apparently it’s written down that way in their holy book.

  MEDIA PRESENTERS

  There was an attack this morning. One person was killed and several wounded. The body has since been removed. The police surrounded the place with red-and-white plastic tape past which you could see enormous bloodstains on the ground; flies circled above them. A motorcycle lay on the ground, and near it a pool of petrol turning opalescent; beside it a plastic bag of fruit, tangerines tossed out, dirty, grimy; further on some rags, a sandal, a baseball cap of indeterminate colour, part of a mobile phone – where the screen had been now gaped a hole.

  People clustered over the tape and looked on in horror. They spoke infrequently, in half-whispers.

  The police waited on giving site clearance because a journalist from one of the important stations was supposed to come and do a story. Supposedly he particularly wanted to get those bloodstains on camera. Supposedly he was already on his way.

  ATATÜRK’S REFORMS

  One day, in the evening, when I was already lying in bed after a whole day of walking around, looking and listening, I remembered Aleksandra and her reports. I suddenly began to miss her. I imagined that she might be in the same city, that she was sleeping with her bag beside her bed, in the silver halo of her hair. The Fair Apostle, Aleksandra the Just. I found her address in my backpack and wrote her an Infamy that I had learned of here.

  When Atatürk was carrying out his intrepid reforms, in the 1920s, Istanbul was a city filled with half-wild stray dogs. A specific breed of them even developed – a mid-sized dog, with short hair, a light-coloured coat, white or cream-coloured or a patchy blend of those two colours. The dogs lived around the docks, between the cafés and restaurants, on the streets and squares. By night they went hunting in the city; they scrabbled, they dug through the rubbish. Unwanted, they returned to their old natural behaviours – they grouped together in packs, electing leaders like wolves and jackals.

  But it was very important to Atatürk that Turkey be made a civilized country. Over the course of a couple of days, special forces caught thousands of the dogs, who were transported to nearby islands that were uninhabited, without flora. They were set free. Denied fresh water and any kind of food, they fed on one another for three or four weeks while the residents of Istanbul, especially owners of homes with balconies overlooking the Bosphorus, or people going to the fish restaurants along the waterfront, heard the howling from out there, and were then tormented by the waves of the disgusting stench.

  During the night more and more proofs of human wrongdoing came to my mind, until I was drenched in sweat. For example, that puppy that froze to death because it had been given an overturned tin bath tub for a kennel.

  KALI YUGA

  ‘The world is getting darker and darker,’ the two men sitting next to me agreed. As far as I had understood, they were flying to Montreal for a conference that would be attended by oceanographers and geophysicists. Apparently since the sixties incident solar radiation has fallen by four per cent. The average rate of light on the planet going out is around 1.4 per cent per decade. The phenomenon is not pronounced enough for us to be able to detect it ourselves, but it has been noted by radiometers. Radiometers have shown, for example, that the amount of incident radiation reaching the USSR from 1960-1987 actually decreased by one-fifth.

  What is the reason for the darkening? It isn’t known exactly. It is supposed that it has to do with air pollution, soot and aerosols.

  I fell asleep and saw a frightening vision: an enormous cloud appearing from beyond the horizon – evidence of a great, eternal war taking place in the distance, ruthless and cruel; destroying the world. But it’s okay, we are on – for now – a fortunate island: azure sea and clear blue sky. Beneath our feet warm sand and the protruding cubes of shells.

  But this is the island of Bikini. Everything will die soon, be burned, be lost, in the best case scenario undergo a monstrous mutation. Those who survive will give birth to child monsters, twins conjoined at the head, one brain in a double body, two hearts in one rib cage. Additional senses will appear: the feeling of lack, the taste of absence, the ability for particular precognition. Knowing what won’t happen. Being able to smell what doesn’t exist.

  The dark red glow grows, the sky turns brown, it gets darker and darker.

  WAX MODEL COLLECTIONS

  Each of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim. This time in wax.

  Vienna, the Josephinum: a collection of anatomic wax figures, recently renovated. On this rainy summer day another traveller besides me had wound up here – a middle-aged man, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, his hair completely grey – but he was only interested in one model, to which he dedicated a quarter of an hour, then disappeared, a mysterious smile on his lips.

  I myself was planning to stay longer. I’d equipped myself with a notebook and a camera – I even had caffeinated sweets in my pockets, and a chocolate bar.

  Slowly, so as not to miss out on any of the exhibition, I took tiny steps among the glass cabinets.

  Model 59. A six-and-a-half-foot-tall man. Skinned. His body pleasingly woven out of muscles and tendons. Openwork. The first glance brings a shock, no doubt a reflex – the sight of a body missing its skin is in itself painful, it stings, burns, as in childhood when live flesh came peeking out from behind a skinned knee. The model has one arm back, while the right, raised over his head in the graceful motion of an antique sculpture, shields his eyes – as though he were looking into the sun in the distance. We know this gesture from paintings – this is how one looks into the future. Model 59 could also be displayed at the nearby Museum of Art; in fact I don’t know why it’s been sentenced to live out its days in a humiliating Anatomy Museum. It really should appear in the finest art gallery, because it’s doubly a work of art – because of its brilliant execution in wax (this is evidently naturalism’s greatest achievement), but also because of the design of the body itself. Who is its creator?

  Model 60 also presents muscles and tendons, but above all our attention is drawn to the gentle ribbon of the intestines, given perfect proportions here. Their smooth surface reflects the museum’s windows. Only after a moment, stunned, do I realize this is a woman – decked in a strange pendant, a piece of grey fur glued onto the base of the abdomen, containing a somewhat crudely marked oblong slit. Evidently the model’s creator wanted to make absolutely certain that the viewer, presumably inexpert in anatomy, understood that he or she was seeing feminine intestines. Here we have the hirsute stamp, the gender trademark, the female logo. Model 60 presents the circulatory and lymphatic systems as an intestinal halo. Most of the blood vessels rest on the muscles, but some of them are shown as a kind of aerial grid; only here can you see the fractal wonder of those red threads.

  Next there are arms, legs, stomachs and hearts. Each model is laid out carefully on a piece of silk that glimmers in a pearlescent manner. The kidneys grow out of the bladder like two anemones. ‘Lower limb and blood vessels,’ an inscription announces in three languages. The grid of abdominal lymph vessels, lymph nodes, the pins and stars with which an unknown hand has ornamented the monotony of muscles. Lymphatic vessels could be jewellers’ models.

  In the centre of this wax collection rests model 244, the most beautiful of all, the one that so interested the man in the wire-rimmed glasses and that is about to capture my attention, too, for half an hour.

  It is a woman lying down, nearly intact; only in one place has her body been interfered with: her opened stomach shows to pilgrims like ourselves the reproductive system, pressed up against the diaphragm, the uterus under its ovarian cap. Here, too, that fur seal of gender, utterly superfluous. There can certainly be no doubt this one is a woman. The pubis meticulously covered with fake hair, and below, done with great care, the opening of the
vagina, difficult to spot, only for the persistent who don’t hesitate to crouch down next to the small feet with their reddened toes, as that man in glasses did. And I think: it’s a good thing he’s gone, now it’s my turn.

  The woman has light-coloured hair, worn loose, slightly shut eyes and half-parted lips – you can just see the tips of her teeth. On her neck a string of pearls. I am struck by the absolute innocence of her lungs, smooth and silky just beneath the pearls; they obviously never drew smoke from a cigarette. They could be the lungs of an angel. The heart, cut transversely, reveals its dual nature, both chambers lined with the velour of red tissue intended for unvaried motion. The liver wraps around the stomach like a big bloody mouth. Also visible are her kidneys and ureters, which look like a mandrake root resting atop her uterus. The uterus is a muscle very pleasing to the eye – slim and shapely; it’s hard to imagine it travelling around the body and provoking hysteria, as was once believed. There can be no doubt – the organs are packed painstakingly inside the body, preparations for a major journey. So, too, her vagina, cut lengthwise, reveals its secret, the short tunnel that is actually a dead end and appears utterly useless, since it’s not really an entrance into her insides. It ends in a blind chamber.

  Exhausted, I sat down by the window on the hard bench, facing the silent crowd of wax models, and let myself feel overwhelmed. What was the muscle that was squeezing my throat so tight? What was its name? Who thought up the human body, and consequently, who holds its eternal copyright?