Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  ‘What?’ murmurs the man, still asleep, falling back into his pillow.

  ‘Nothing. Petya.’

  She turns on a little lamp in the child’s room and right away sees his eyes. They’re wide open, looking at her from inside the painstaking black cavities the light carves into his face. She puts her hand to his forehead, instinctively, as always. His forehead isn’t hot, but it is sweaty, clammy to the touch. Carefully she pulls the boy up into a sitting position and massages his back. Her son’s head falls onto her shoulder; Annushka can smell his sweat, recognizing pain in it, a thing she’s learned to do: Petya smells different when he is in pain.

  ‘Can you make it till morning?’ she whispers, softly, but then she quickly realizes what a stupid question it is. Why should he suffer until morning? She reaches for the pills on the nightstand, pops one out and puts it in his mouth. Then a glass of warmish water. The boy drinks, chokes, so a little while later she gives him another sip, with greater caution. The pill will take effect any minute now, so she lays his limp body on its right side, tucking his knees up under his belly, thinking he’ll be most comfortable this way. She lies down beside him on the edge of the bed and rests her head against his bony back, listening to the air turn into breath as it enters his lungs and is released into the night. She waits until this process becomes rhythmic, easy, automatic, and then she rises, gingerly, and tiptoes back to bed. She’d rather sleep in Petya’s room, as she had until her husband had come back. That had been better, her mind had been easier, falling asleep and waking up facing her child. Not folding out that double bed each evening: let it be deserted. But a husband is a husband.

  He’d come back four months earlier, after two years away. He’d come back in civilian clothes, the same ones he’d been wearing when he’d left, now out of fashion, though you could tell they’d barely been worn. She’d smelled them – they hadn’t smelled like anything, maybe very slightly of damp, that smell of stillness, a shut-up storehouse.

  He’d come back different – she’d noticed right away – and so far, he’d stayed different. That first night she’d made an inspection of his body – it was also different, harder, bigger, more muscular, but oddly weak.

  She’d felt the scar on his shoulder and his scalp, his hair obviously getting thinner and grey. His hands had become massive, his fingers thicker, as though from physical labour. She had laid them on her bare breasts, but they’d remained uncertain. She’d tried her own hand at persuading him, but he’d continued to lie there so quietly, breathing so shallowly, that it had made her feel ashamed.

  At night he’d wake up with a kind of hoarse, furious groan, sit up in the dark, and then a moment later get up and go over to the spirits shelf and pour himself a shot. Then his breath would smell like fruit, like apples. And then he’d say, ‘Put your hands on me, touch me.’

  ‘Tell me what it was like there, you’ll feel better, tell me,’ she said, whispering into his ear, tempting with her hot breath.

  But he didn’t tell her anything.

  While she would deal with Petya, he would walk the apartment in his striped pyjamas, drinking strong black coffee, looking out the window onto the apartment blocks. Then he’d look in on the boy, crouching down beside him sometimes, trying to make contact. And then he’d turn on the TV and draw the yellow curtains, making the daylight sickly, dense and fevered. He didn’t get dressed until around noon, when Petya’s nurse was about to come, and even then he didn’t always. Sometimes he’d just close the door. The sound of the TV would grow fainter, become a rankling rumbling, a summons to a newly senseless world.

  The money came in like clockwork, every month. And in fact it was enough – plenty for Petya’s medications, for a better, barely used wheelchair, for a nurse.

  Today Annushka will not be dealing with the boy, she has today off. Her mother-in-law will be here soon, though she doesn’t know which of them she’s really coming to watch, her son or her grandson, which of them she’ll fuss the most over. She’ll lay her plaid plastic bag down by the door and extract from it her nylon housecoat and her slippers – her home uniform. She’ll look in on her son, ask him a question, and he’ll respond, without taking his eyes off the TV: yes or no. Nothing else, no point waiting, so she’ll go to her grandson. He needs to be washed and fed; his sheets, drenched in sweat and urine, need to be changed; he needs his medications. Then the laundry needs to be put in, and their lunch needs to be made.

  Then she’ll spend time with the child; if the weather’s nice, the boy can be taken out onto the balcony, not that there is much to see from there – just apartment blocks like great grey coral reefs in a dried-up ocean, populated by industrious organisms, their ocean bed the hazy horizon of the gigantic metropolis, Moscow. But the boy always looks up at the sky, hovering over the underbellies of the clouds, following them for a while, until they drift out of view.

  Annushka is grateful to her mother-in-law for this one day a week. As she heads out the door she gives her a quick kiss on her soft, velvety cheek. That’s all the time they spend together, always at the door, and then she’ll rush down the stairs, feeling lighter and lighter the further she descends. She has the whole day ahead of her. Not that she will spend it on herself, of course. She has many things to take care of. She’ll pay the bills, go grocery shopping, pick up Petya’s prescriptions, visit the cemetery, and then finally she’ll go all the way to the other end of this inhuman city so she can sit in the encroaching darkness and burst into tears. Everything takes forever because there are traffic jams everywhere, and crushed between people she watches through the windowpanes of the bus as the gigantic cars with tinted windows glide effortlessly ahead, invested with some diabolical power, while the rest of them are at a standstill. She looks out at the squares filled with young people, at the mobile bazaars selling cheap Chinese goods. She always transfers at Kievsky Station, where she passes by all sorts of people as they make their way up and out from the underground platforms. But there is no one who attracts her attention, no one who terrifies her like this bizarre figure standing by the exit, against a backdrop of makeshift fences concealing the dug-up foundations of some construction under way, fences pasted over so densely with advertisements that they seem to be screaming.

  That woman’s orbit is the strip of untamed land between the wall and the just-lain pavement blocks; in this way she bears witness to the uninterrupted procession of people, receives that parade of tired and hurrying pedestrians whom she tends to catch still in the middle of their journeys from work to home or vice versa – now they’ll switch their modes of transport, change from metro to bus.

  She’s dressed differently from all of them – she’s wearing a plethora of things: trousers, and over them several skirts, but arranged so that each sticks out from below the next, in layers; and the same on top – multiple shirts, sheepskins, vests. And over everything a grey quilted drill coat, the height of refined simplicity, an echo of a distant eastern monastery or a labour camp. Combined these layers makes some aesthetic sense, and Annushka even likes it; it strikes her that the colours have been carefully selected, though it isn’t clear if the selection is a human one or rather the haute couture of entropy – fading colours, fraying and falling apart.

  But the strangest thing is the woman’s head – tightly wrapped in a scrap of material, pressed together by a warm hat with ear flaps – and her hidden face; all you can see is her mouth as it emits a ceaseless stream of curses. The sight of this is so upsetting that Annushka never tries to understand the meanings these curses might contain. And now, too, as she passes by her, Annushka speeds up, fearful that this woman might latch onto her. That in the rush of those furious words, Annushka might even hear her own name.

  It’s pleasant December weather, the pavements are dry, cleared of snow, and her shoes are comfortable. Annushka doesn’t get on the bus, instead crossing the bridge and then promenading along the multi-lane highway, feeling like she’s walking down the shore of an immense river with n
o bridges. She enjoys this promenade, won’t cry until she gets to her church, in the dark corner where she always kneels and remains in that uncomfortable position until she’s lost sensation in her legs, until she’s attained the stage that comes after the stiffening and shooting pains – the stage of nothingness. But now she throws her purse over her shoulder and holds on tightly to the plastic bag that holds the plastic flowers for the cemetery. She tries not to think about anything, and least of all about the place she’s come from. She’s approaching the most elegant neighbourhood of the city, so there are things for her to look at – it’s full of shops here, where smooth, slender mannequins indifferently exhibit the most expensive clothing. Annushka pauses to look at a purse sewn from a million beads, embellished with tulle and lace: a kind of miracle. Finally she reaches the specialized pharmacy, where she will have to wait. But she’ll receive the necessary medications. Futile medications, which only barely relieve her son’s symptoms.

  At a covered stand she buys a bag of pirozhki and eats them sitting on a bench in the square.

  In her little church she finds a lot of tourists. The young priest who normally bustles around the sanctuary like a merchant amidst his wares is busy now, telling the tourists about the history of the building and about iconostasis. In a singsong voice he recites his teachings, the head on his slim, tall body looming over the little crowd, his pretty light beard like an extraordinary halo that’s slipped off his head and slid down to his breast. Annushka backs out: how could she possibly pray and cry in the company of all these tourists? She waits and waits, but then the next group comes in, and so Annushka decides to find another site for her tears – a little further on there is another church, small and old, more often than not closed. She once went in but didn’t like it – she’d been repulsed by the chill and the scent of damp wood.

  But now she isn’t picky, she has to find a place where she can finally cry, a secluded place, but not empty; it has to have the palpable presence of something larger than her, of big outstretched arms trembling with life. Annushka also needs to feel someone’s gaze on her, to feel that her crying is witnessed by someone, to feel it isn’t just addressing a void. It can be eyes painted on wood, always open, eyes that never tire of anything, eternally calm: let those eyes watch her, unblinking.

  She takes three candles and drops a few coins in the tin. The first is for Petya, the second for her reticent husband, the third for her mother-in-law in her non-iron housecoat. She lights them from the other few that burn here and looks around and finds a spot for herself on the right side, in a dark corner, so as not to bother the old women who are praying. She crosses herself sweepingly, commencing in this way the ritual of her tears.

  But when she raises her eyes to pray, another face emerges from the gloom – the vast face of the gloomy icon. It’s a piece of square board hung high, almost right under the dome of the church, and on it the simple features of Christ, painted in shades of brown and grey. The face is dark, against a dark background, with no halo, no crown; only the eyes glow as they stare straight into her, just like she’d wanted. And yet, it wasn’t this type of gaze Annushka had been thinking of – she’d expected gentle eyes filled with love. This gaze, hypnotic, paralyzes her. Under it, Annushka’s body shrinks. He was here just for a moment, floats down from the ceiling from afar, from deepest darkness – that’s God’s place, his hiding spot. He has no need of a body, just the face she must confront now. It’s a penetrating gaze, driving painfully into her head, as though with a screwdriver. Drilling a hole into her brain. It might as well be the face not of the saviour, but rather of a drowned man who didn’t die, shielding himself against omnipresent death under the water instead, who now, due to mysterious currents, has floated up under the surface, conscious, highly aware, saying: look, here I am. But she doesn’t want to look at him. Annushka lowers her eyes, she doesn’t want to know – that God is weak and has lost, that he’s been exiled and that he is creeping around the rubbish heaps of the world, in its fetid depths. There’s no sense in crying. This is not the place for tears. This God won’t help, or support, or encourage, or purify, or save. The gaze of the drowned man bores into her forehead, she hears a murmur, an underground thunder off in the distance, a vibration below the church’s floor.

  It must be because she barely slept last night, because she’s barely eaten anything today – now she feels faint. The tears won’t flow, dry beds where they’re supposed to be.

  She jumps up and walks out. Stiffly, straight to the metro.

  It feels like she has had an experience of some kind, that something’s got into her, making her tense on the inside like a string on a musical instrument, causing her to make a clean sound, inaudible to anyone. A quiet sound, meant just for her body – a short-lived concert in a brittle acoustical shell. She still listens for it anyway, all her attention turned inward, but in her ears there is only the rush of her own blood.

  The stairs go down, and she has the impression that it lasts forever, some people going down, others up. Ordinarily her gaze slips over others’ faces, but now Annushka’s eyes, struck by that sight in the church, can’t manage. Her gaze alights on each and every passerby – and every face is like a slap, hard, stinging. Soon she won’t be able to bear it anymore, she’ll have to cover her eyes like that crazy woman in front of the station, and just like her she’ll begin to shout out curses.

  ‘Have mercy, have mercy,’ she whispers and sinks her fingers into the handrail, which moves faster than the stairs; if Annushka doesn’t let go she’ll fall.

  She sees the silent swarm of people going up and down, shoulder to shoulder, packed in. They glide toward their spots as though on tethers, heading somewhere in the suburbs, to a tenth floor, where they can pull the covers over their heads and fall into a sleep made up of scraps of day and night. And in reality in the morning that sleep does not dissolve – those scraps form collages, splotches; some configurations are clever, you could almost say premeditated.

  She sees the brittleness of arms, the fragility of eyelids, the unstable line of people’s lips, readily contorting into grimace; she sees how weak their hands are, how weak their legs – they will not, cannot, carry them to any destination. She sees their hearts, how they beat in time, some faster, some slower, an ordinary mechanical movement, the lungs’ sacs are like dirty plastic bags, you can hear the rustle of exhalations. Their clothes have become transparent, so she watches them wed entropy. Our bodies are poor, dirty, grist – without exception – for the mill.

  The escalators take these beings all straight down into the depths, into the abyss, here are the eyes of the cerberi in the glass booths at the bottom of the stairs, here the fraudulent marble and columns, massive sculptures of demons – some with sickles, others with sheaves of grain. Massive legs like the columns, giants’ shoulders. Tractors – infernal machines towing sharp-toothed instruments of torture that deal the earth never-healing wounds. From all sides cramped groups of people, their hands raised pleadingly in panic, their mouths open to scream. The Last Judgement takes place here, in the depths of the metro, lit by crystal chandeliers that cast dead yellow light. The judges are nowhere to be seen, it’s true, but everywhere you feel their presence. Annushka wants to retreat, run up against the current, but the escalators won’t permit her to, she has to keep going down, she won’t be spared. The mouths of the underground trains will open before her with a hiss and suck her into their gloomy tunnels. But of course the abyss is everywhere, even on the upper floors of the city, even on the tenth and sixteenth floors of the high-rise buildings, at the tops of spires, on the tips of antennas. There is no escape from it. Wasn’t it maybe this the madwoman was screaming about, in between her curses?

  Annushka staggers, leans against a wall. It imprints her wool twill coat with white traces, anointing her.

  She has to get off, it’s dark already, she gets off slightly at random because you can’t see anything out the windows of the bus, frost has already etched silvery tw
igs across them – but she knows the route by heart, she was right. Just a few courtyards – she takes a shortcut – and she’ll be at her building. But she slows, her legs don’t want to take her to her destination, they resist, her steps get smaller and smaller. Annushka stops. She looks up and sees the lights on in her apartment. They must be waiting for her – so she starts up again, but a second later she stops again. The cold wind pierces through her coat, blows apart the bottom, seizes her thighs with its icy fingers. Its touch is like razor blades, like broken glass. Tears fly down her cheeks from the cold, which suits the wind, finally providing it a way to sting her face. Annushka rushes on, towards their stairwell, but when she gets to the door she turns, puts up her collar, and as fast as she can she goes back to where she just came from.

  It’s only warm in the big waiting room at the Kievsky Station or in the bathroom. She stands unable to make her mind up as the patrols pass by her (they always walk with a slow, loose step, moving their legs lightly as though meandering along a seaside boulevard), she pretends to read the timetable; she doesn’t even know why she’s afraid, after all she’s done nothing wrong. And in any case the patrols are interested in something else, unerringly singling out olive-skinned men in leather jackets and women in headscarves from the crowd.

  Annushka walks out in front of the station and sees from afar that shrouded woman still scrambling, her voice hoarse from cursing – in fact, neither it nor the curses themselves are really recognizable now. Good then – after a moment’s hesitation she approaches her calmly and stands in front of her. This throws the woman off for just a second – she must be able to see Annushka through the material that covers her face. Annushka takes another step closer and now stands so near she can smell the woman’s breath – dust and must, old oil. The woman speaks softer and softer until she finally falls silent. Her scrambling turns into rocking, as though she can’t stand still. They stand facing each other for a moment as people pass them by, but indifferently; one person just glances over at them, but they’re in a hurry, their trains will leave at any moment.