Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ she said.

  She told him to take a seat in the living room and disappeared for a few minutes. The doctor flushed out of anxiety – he felt as though he had caught her in the bathroom, as though he’d walked in on her cutting her nails. This encounter with her nearly naked old body, with her feet, her wet hair – it threw him off completely. But she didn’t seem to be bothered by it at all. She came back after a while in light-coloured trousers and a T-shirt, a fine-boned woman, with flabby arm muscles, her skin teeming with moles and birthmarks, ruffling her still-damp hair with her hand. This wasn’t how he had imagined her. He’d thought the wife of someone like Mole would be different. Different how? Taller, more modest, distinguished. In a silk blouse with a jabot and a carved cameo at her neck. Someone who didn’t swim in the sea.

  She sat down across from him, rolled up her trouser legs and slid a bowl of chocolates towards him. She took one, too, and as she ate she sucked in her cheeks. He looked at her, she had bags under her eyes, hypothyroidism or perhaps just a flabbiness in the musculus orbicularis oculi.

  ‘So it’s you,’ she said. ‘Could you please remind me exactly what you do?’

  He hurriedly swallowed his chocolate whole – it didn’t matter, he’d grab another one. He told her who he was again and talked a little bit about his work and publications. He reminded her of his History of Conservation, which had been published recently and which he had included in the dossier he’d sent her. He praised her husband. He said that Professor Mole had engineered a veritable revolution in the field of anatomy. She watched him attentively with her blue eyes, with a slight, content smile, which he might have taken as friendly or as ironic. Despite her first name, there was nothing exotic about her. He suddenly thought that maybe this wasn’t her, that maybe he was speaking with the cook, or the maid. As he finished with his background, he wrung his hands nervously, although he would have liked to keep himself from displaying such obvious evidence of nerves; he felt bedraggled in the shirt he’d worn to travel, and she leaped up, as though reading his mind.

  ‘I’ll show you your room. It’s this way.’

  She guided him up the stairs onto the dark second floor and pointed to a door. She went in first and pulled back the red curtains. The windows gave onto the sea, the sun lit the room up orange.

  ‘You can get settled in while I make us something to eat. You must be tired. Are you tired? How was your flight?’

  He gave an off-handed answer.

  ‘I’ll be downstairs,’ she said and left.

  He wasn’t quite sure how it had happened – this woman of average height in her light-coloured trousers and stretched-out T-shirt had with some imperceptible gesture, perhaps just by her eyebrows, arranged anew the whole space and all the doctor’s expectations and fantasies. She had rid him of the whole of his long and tiring journey and prepared speeches, possible scenarios. She had introduced something of her own. She was the one who dictated the conditions. The doctor gave into it without batting an eyelash. Resigned, he took a quick shower, changed his clothes and went downstairs.

  For dinner she served a salad with croutons made of dark bread and baked vegetables. So she was a vegetarian. It was a good thing he’d had that fish at the station. She sat opposite him with her elbows on the table, crumbling what was left of the croutons with her fingertips, and she talked about healthy food, about the harmfulness of flour and sugar, about the nearby organic farms where she bought her vegetables, milk and maple syrup, which she used instead of sugar. But the wine was good. Blau, unused to alcohol and tired, felt drunk after two glasses. Each subsequent sentence would form in his head, but she always got there first. By the end of the bottle she had told him the story of her husband’s death. A motorboat collision.

  ‘He was only sixty-seven years old. There was nothing they could do about the body. Completely mutilated.’

  He thought she would burst into tears now, but she just took another crouton and crumbled it onto the scant remains of her salad.

  ‘He was not prepared for death, but who is?’ she mused. ‘But I know that he would want a successor who was worthy of him, someone who is not merely competent, but also works with passion, like him. He was a loner, you know that, I’m sure. He left no will, gave no instructions. Should I donate his specimens to a museum? Several museums have already inquired. Do you know of any respectable institution? There’s so much bad energy around plastinates now, but of course today, in order to do something, it’s not as though you have to cut down the bodies off the gallows,’ she sighed, and shaped a few leaves of her salad into a slender roll, which she slipped into her mouth. ‘But I know he would want a successor. Some of his projects are only barely begun; I try to keep them going myself, but I don’t have as much energy and enthusiasm as he did… Did you know I am a botanist by training? There is, for example, a problem…’ she started, hesitated. ‘It doesn’t matter, we’ll have time to discuss that later.’

  He nodded, suppressing his curiosity.

  ‘But you deal primarily with historical specimens, is that right?’

  Blau waited until the echo of her words had petered out, then dashed upstairs and raced back with his laptop.

  They pushed back their plates, and after a moment the screen lit up with a cool glow. The doctor panicked for a moment, wondering what he had on his desktop – if he hadn’t left any erotic icons – but he had just cleaned it up recently. He hoped she had read what he had sent her about himself, that she had looked over his books. Now they both leaned into the screen.

  As they looked over his work, it seemed to him that she was giving him admiring glances. He noted this to himself – twice. He made a mental note of what had inspired her admiration. She knew her stuff, posing professional questions. The doctor hadn’t expected her to know quite so much. Her skin gave off a slight fragrance of the kind of lotion older women put on their bodies, nice, powdery, innocent. The index finger of her right hand – the one with which she touched the screen – was adorned with a strange ring with the shape of a human eye as its stone. The skin of her hand was already being covered by dark liver spots. Her hands were as ruined by the sun as her face. He thought for a second about what method might help stop the effects of the sun on this thin, corrugated skin.

  Then they moved to armchairs, she brought half a bottle of port from the kitchen and poured out two glasses.

  He asked: ‘Will I get to see the lab?’

  She didn’t answer right away. Perhaps because she had port in her mouth, as she had had the chocolate before. Finally she said: ‘It’s a ways from here.’

  She got up and started clearing the table.

  ‘You can barely keep your eyes open,’ she said.

  He helped her put the plates into the dishwasher, and then with relief he went upstairs, muttering an indistinct ‘good night’ over his shoulder. He sat on the edge of his made bed and then immediately lay down on his side, not having the strength to take off his clothing. He heard her calling the cat on the terrace.

  The next morning he did everything very methodically: he took a long shower, folded up his dirty underwear into a cube and put it inside a bag, unpacked his things and laid them out on a shelf, hanging up his shirts. He shaved, moisturized his face, rubbed his favourite deodorant under his arms, reinforced his greying hair with a little gel. His only hesitation was whether to wear sandals, but he thought it would be better if he continued with his laced-up loafers. Then, in silence (though he wasn’t sure why) he went downstairs. She must have gotten up before him, because on the kitchen counter a toaster was out, and a few crumbs from the bread for toast. As well as a jar of marmalade, a bowl of honey and butter. His breakfast. There was coffee in the French press. He ate some toast standing out on the terrace, looking at the sea, supposing she must have gone to swim again, so she would undoubtedly come from out there. He wanted to see her first, before she saw him. He was the one who kept an eye on others.

  He wondered whethe
r she would agree to take him to the lab. He was very curious. Even if she told him nothing about what was in there, he’d be able to figure out quite a bit from what he’d see.

  Mole’s techniques were a mystery. Blau had come up with a few theories, of course, and might even have been close to solving it. He had seen his specimens in Mainz and then at the University of Florence on the occasion of the International Conference on Tissue Preservation. He could guess how Mole conserved bodies, but he didn’t know the chemical make-up of the fixatives, wasn’t sure how you operated on the tissues with them. Whether you needed to prepare them somehow, give them a pre-treatment. When and how were the chemicals dispensed, what was used in place of the blood?

  How were the internal tissues plastinated?

  However Mole did it (and his wife – of her involvement Blau was more and more certain), his specimens were excellent. The tissues kept their natural colour and a certain plasticity. They were soft, but also sufficiently stiff to lend the body the appropriate shape. In addition they were easy to separate, which had an unlikely pedagogical result – you could take them apart and put them back together. Endless possibilities in terms of travels within the body of the preserved organism. From the perspective of the history of conservation of the body, Mole’s discovery was revolutionary, it had no equal. Von Hagens’ plastination had been the first step in this direction, but at this point it seemed less relevant.

  Again she came out in a towel, this time a pink one, and she was coming not from the sea, but from the bathroom. She shook her wet hair and stood in the kitchen, at the stove, where she was heating milk up for coffee in a metal mug. She moved the netted plunger up and down, slowly, until the milky foam poured out onto the heated ceramic surface with a hiss.

  ‘How did you sleep, doctor? Coffee?’

  Oh, yes, coffee. He accepted his mug gratefully and let her add some foamy milk to it. He listened with feigned interest to her story about the orange cat, who one day, the day their previous orange cat had died, had come to their house – who knew where from – and sat down on the sofa as though he’d always lived here, and then stayed. So they had barely even noticed the difference.

  ‘That’s the strength of life,’ she sighed. ‘As soon as one person departs another being fills the void.’

  Poor Blau – he would have preferred to get right to the matter at hand. He had never been good at small talk, he was bored by topics pronounced for the sake of maintaining a soothing social hum. He simply wanted to finish his coffee and get into the library, and to see where Mole had worked and what he’d read. Did he have Blau’s History of Conservation on his shelves? What routes had taken him to his remarkable discoveries?

  ‘It’s interesting that he, like you, started out by researching Ruysch’s work.’

  Blau knew this, obviously, but he didn’t want to interrupt her.

  ‘In his first published article he demonstrated that Ruysch was trying to conserve whole bodies, by eliminating their natural fluids, if only that had been possible in those days, and replacing them with a mixture of liquid wax, talcum and animal tallow. Then bodies, prepared in this way, just like specimens of parts, would be immersed in a “Stygian water”. It seems the idea never came to fruition because of a lack of glass vessels that would be big enough.’

  She gave him a hurried glance.

  ‘I’ll show you that research,’ she said and moved briskly to wrestle with the sliding door because of the coffee she held in her hand. He helped her, while she held his mug.

  Behind the door was the library – a beautiful spacious room lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. With perfect aim she reached out to one of them and took down a moderately sized bound booklet. Blau leafed through it, giving her to understand that he already knew this text well. In any case, he had never been particularly interested in techniques involving liquids – that was a dead end. The example of the English man, William Berkeley, the fleet admiral Ruysch had embalmed with liquid interested him only insofar as it concerned the problem of rigor mortis. For this was the mystery of the marvellous appearance of that body, described with such delight by his contemporaries. Ruysch had managed to give him a very relaxed aspect, even though he had received the body he was to treat several days after its death, completely stiffened. Apparently he had hired special servants to massage the body patiently, and in so doing, to overcome its rigor mortis.

  But something else entirely grabbed his attention. He handed her back the booklet without moving his gaze away from it.

  By the window there was a big desk, and on the other side of it some glass display cabinets. Specimens! Blau was unable to control his excitement and found himself standing before them without realizing he’d reached them. She seemed annoyed he hadn’t given her time for a slow, museum-like preparation for what he was about to see. He’d got away from her.

  ‘This you might not be so familiar with,’ she said, somewhat grumpily, pointing to the orange cat. It was looking at them peacefully, sitting in a position that suggested an acceptance of existence in this form. The other, live cat followed them into the room now and, as though looking at its reflection in a mirror, gazed at its predecessor.

  ‘Touch him, pick it up,’ the woman in the pink towel encouraged the doctor.

  His fingers trembling, he opened the display case and touched the specimen. It was cold, but not hard. Its coat gave a little bit under Blau’s fingertip. Blau picked it up carefully, holding its chest in one hand and its stomach in the other, as you pick up live cats – and it felt very odd indeed. Because the cat had the same weight as a live cat, and like a live cat, its body reacted to the doctor’s grasp. The impression was almost impossible to believe. He looked at her with an expression on his face that made her laugh, and again she shook her drying hair.

  ‘You see,’ she said, coming to stand next to him, as though the secret of the specimen brought them together, rendered them close. ‘Lay it down and turn it over.’

  He did this carefully, and she reached out and laid her hand on the cat’s stomach.

  Under its own weight the cat’s body stretched out and for a moment lay before them on its back, in a position no live cat would ever assume. Blau touched its soft fur and thought it felt warm, although he knew that was impossible. He noted that its eyes had not been replaced by glass ones, as was usual in such cases; instead, Mole had in some magical way left its real eyes in; they seemed only slightly turbid. He touched an eyelid – it was soft and gave under his finger.

  ‘Some sort of gel,’ he said, more to himself than to her, but she was already pointing him to the slit on the cat’s stomach, which split open after a slight tug and revealed the cat’s whole insides.

  Gently, as though touching the most fragile piece of origami, with just his fingertips he pried apart the abdominal walls of the animal and got into the peritoneum, which also let itself be opened, as though the cat were a book made out of precious, exotic material for which there is no name yet. He saw the sight that had since childhood given him a feeling of happiness and fulfilment – the organs perfectly placed in relation to one another, packed into a divine harmony, their natural colours providing absolute verisimilitude, completing the illusion that here the insides of a living body were opening up, that one was participating in its secret.

  ‘Go ahead and open the rib cage,’ she said, taking a small step back but still hovering over his shoulder. He could smell her breath: coffee and something sweet, stale.

  He went ahead and the fine ribs gave way under the pressure of his fingers. He was actually expecting to see a beating heart, so perfect was the illusion. Instead there was a click, something lit up red, and out came a screeching melody, which Dr Blau later identified as the famous hit by the band Queen, ‘I Want To Live Forever’. He jumped back, frightened, with a blend of fear and disgust, as though he had inadvertently harmed this animal outstretched before him. He held his hands up and out. The woman clapped her hands together and laughed outright now, j
oyously, pleased with the joke, but Blau must have had an overly stern expression on his face because she regained control and put her hand on his back.

  ‘I’m sorry, don’t worry, it’s just his little joke. We didn’t want it to be too sad,’ she said, now fully serious, although her blue eyes were still laughing. ‘I’m sorry.’

  The doctor reciprocated her smile with difficulty, and watched fascinated as the tissues of the specimen slowly, almost imperceptibly, returned to their initial layout.

  She did take him to the lab. They took the car down the gravel road along the beach and went up into some stone buildings. Once there had been a fish processing plant here, back when the port still functioned as such; now they’d been converted into a few large rooms with clean, tiled walls, and doors that opened with the touch of a remote, like garages. They had no windows. She turned on the light and Blau saw two large tables covered in sheet metal as well as several glass cases filled with jars and instruments. Shelves filled with flasks of Jena glass. ‘Papain,’ he read on one of them and was surprised. What had Mole used that enzyme for, what had he used it to break down? ‘Catalase’. Syringes of enormous dimensions for infusing and ordinary small ones, like those used to give people injections. He noted this to himself, not daring to ask. Not yet. A metal bath, a drain in the floor, an interior reminiscent simultaneously of a surgeon’s office and a slaughterhouse. She tightened the dripping tap.