Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  From this arm, Your own doctor let my father’s blood. These remains labelled with my father’s name were once a living man. I often wonder – every night it keeps me from falling peacefully asleep – what the real reason is for such cruel treatment of my father’s corpse (may he rest in peace).

  Can it be that it is simply the colour of his skin? Dark? Black? Would a white-skinned man who wound up in some exotic locale be treated the same – be stuffed and exhibited to the curiosity of passers-by? Is it sufficient for another human being to be different, be it outwardly or inwardly and be it in any way, for him to be stripped of the rights and customs ordinarily afforded to man? Were those rights conceived and created merely for people who were identical to one another? But the world is full of diversity. Many miles to the south there are people who are different from those who settled the North. And in the East, there are people who are different from those in the West. What is the point of a law that applies only to some? The law should be observed for everyone without exception wherever our ships and our money are able to take us. Would Your Majesty stuff a courtier if he were white? A person of the absolute lowest position has the right to a funeral. By refusing my father that right, are you then denying his very humanity?

  I think that those who govern us do not aim to govern our souls, as is commonly thought. The ‘soul’ is a concept that is hard to understand or identify with these days. If God is – may I be forgiven this bile – the One who wound up the clock, the Clockmaker, or, in fact, the spirit of nature, appearing in its hazy way and completely impersonal, then the notion of ‘soul’ becomes uncomfortable, embarrassing. What sort of ruler would reign by means of something so ephemeral and indefinite?

  What sort of enlightened ruler would wish for power over something whose existence has not been proven in a laboratory? There is no doubt, Your Majesty, that real human power can only affect the human body – and that is precisely how it is exercised. The establishment of countries and of the boundaries between them demands of the human body that it remain in a clearly delineated space; the existence of visas and passports holds in check the body’s natural desire to roam and to move around. The ruler who sets up taxes has his sway over what his subjects will eat, what they shall sleep on, and whether they’ll wear linen or silk.

  You determine, too, which bodies will be important, and which less so. Nourishment shall be divided unevenly by the mother’s milk-filled breasts. The child from the palace atop the hill will suckle till it’s satiated, while the child from the village in the valley will just lap up what’s left. And when you declare war, in so doing you are hurling thousands of human bodies into pools of blood.

  To rule over the body is to truly be king of both life and death, which is greater than being the emperor of even the greatest country. So now I write to You accordingly, as to life and death’s lessee, as to a tyrant and usurper, and I no longer request but demand. Give me back my father’s body, so that I may bury him. I will follow you, my Lord, like a voice from the darkness, even when I die I will never let You be, never cease to whisper.

  Josefine Soliman von Feuchtersleben

  THINGS NOT MADE BY HUMAN HANDS

  After seeing the sarira relics exhibition I can say that I’m no longer much surprised by things not made by human hands. These include the tomes that appear spontaneously in the damp of mountain caves and let themselves be found every once in a while by righteous humans, who then ceremoniously transfer them to temples. Also, icons with gods’ faces. All you have to do is leave a clean wooden board with a primed surface outside and wait. Sometimes in the night a divine face might appear on it, look out from beneath it, flow out of deepest darkness, from the very waterlogged foundations of the world. Because maybe we live in an enormous camera obscura, just enclosed in a dark box, and as soon as a small opening can be made, as soon as some needle makes it through to us, an image from the outside hits with a ray of light and leaves its trace on the inner, light-sensitive surface of the world.

  It is said that one particular Buddha statue appeared on its own, perfect, made out of the best metal. It only had to have the soil removed from it. It represents a sitting Buddha resting its head in its hands. This Buddha is smiling a little bit, to himself, with a hint of irony, like someone who’s just heard a subtle joke. A joke in which the punch line comes not in the final sentence, but in the breath of the person telling it.

  PURITY OF BLOOD

  A certain island-dwelling woman from the other hemisphere, whom I met in a hotel in Prague, told me the following:

  People have always slogged around with them millions of bacteria, viruses and diseases; there’s no way to stop it. But we can at least try. After the worldwide panic over mad cow disease some countries introduced new legislation. Any of the residents of her island who went away to Europe could no longer donate blood; it might be said that according to the law they suffered from lifelong contamination. And this would now be her case – she would never be able to give blood now. This was the price of her trip, not included in the cost of the ticket. Lost purity. Lost honour.

  I asked her if it was worth it, if it made sense to sacrifice the purity of her blood for the pleasure of looking around a few cities, churches and museums.

  She answered seriously that all things have a price.

  KUNSTKAMMER

  Each of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim, this time I immediately recognized the sensitive hand of Charlotta. In the oblong jar, with a lid that looked like a sculpture, there floated a small fetus with closed eyes hanging from two horse hairs. Its little feet touched the dyed-red remains of the bed at the bottom of the jar. On the jar’s shale lid a little underwater still life – everything evoking the marine, even the protagonist of this exhibit, the fetus. We all come from water. Which is no doubt why Charlotta adorned this one with seashells, starfish, corals and sponges, and at its centre, a dried-out seahorse – a hippocampus.

  One other specimen made an impression on me – conjoined twins preserved in Stygian water, and next to it, their dried skeleton. Proof of great economy of material – two specimens with one double body.

  MANO DI CONSTANTINO

  The first thing that caught my eye upon arriving in the Eternal City was the beautiful black salesmen of handbags and wallets. I bought a little red coin purse, because my last one had been stolen in Stockholm. The second thing was the stalls laden with postcards – as a matter of fact you could leave it at that, spending the rest of your time in the shade on the banks of the Tiber, perhaps having a glass of wine later on in one of the expensive little cafés. Postcards of landscapes, panoramas of old ruins, postcards ambitiously prepared so as to show as much as possible on that flat space, are slowly being replaced by photographs focusing on details. This is no doubt a good idea, because they relieve tired minds. There is too much world, so it’s better to concentrate on particulars, rather than the whole.

  Here is a nice detail of a fountain, a little kitten sitting on a Roman ledge, the genitalia of Michelangelo’s David, a stone sculpture’s gigantic foot, a mutilated torso that instantly makes you wonder what face belonged to that body. An individual window on a wall the colour of ochre, and finally – yes – just a hand with its index finger raised up into the sky, monstrous, detached from some incredible whole just here, at the wrist – the hand of the Emperor Constantine.

  I was infected by that postcard. You really have to be careful about what you look at when you’re first starting out! From that point forward I saw hands pointing something out everywhere; I became a slave to that detail, which possessed me.

  The half-naked statue of a warrior, just in a parade helmet and with a pike in one hand; the other pointing out something up above. Two putti with greasy fingers directing others’ attention to the fact that there, above their heads – but what? And more, two women tourists bent over with laughter, their fingers, a group of people in front of an elegant hotel – because Richard Gere and Nicole Kidman had just come out of it �
� and on St Peter’s Square you could see hundreds of those pointing fingers.

  At the Campo di Fiori I saw a woman petrified by the heat next to a tap with water, her finger up against her ear, as though she wanted to remember a melody from her youth and was just beginning to hear the first notes of it.

  And then I noticed an old, sick man in a wheelchair being pushed by two girls. The old man was paralyzed, sticking out of his nose were two little transparent plastic tubes that disappeared into a black backpack. An expression of absolute terror was frozen on his face, and his right hand, with a predatory gnarled finger, was pointing at something that must have been just over his left shoulder.

  MAPPING THE VOID

  James Cook set out on the southern seas to observe the passage of Venus over the solar disk. Venus revealed to him not only its beauty, but also the land that had already been noticed by the Dutchman Tasman. From his notes the sailors already knew it had to be here somewhere. Every day they looked out for it, and every day they made the same mistakes – taking clouds for land. In the evenings they would talk about the mysterious island – that it would certainly be beautiful, given it was in the custody of Venus, but that it had to also have other superior characteristics, being the land of Venus. Everyone had his own fantasy about it.

  The first officer was from Tahiti; he was certain that this land would be like his Hawaii – warm, tropical, sun-drenched, surrounded by long, endless beaches, full of flowers, useful herbs and beautiful women with bare breasts. The captain himself came from Yorkshire (of which he was very proud), and as a matter of fact he wouldn’t have anything against here being like there. He even wondered if maybe lands on the other side of the globe might not be connected by some sort of correspondence, a planetary intimacy, a likeness – if not obvious and trivial, then perhaps manifested in some other, deeper way. The cabin boy, Nils Jung, dreamed of mountains, wanted this land to be mountainous, for them to reach up into the sky and have snow-capped peaks, and between them, for there to be fertile valleys, filled with grazing sheep, and clear streams in which trout swam (he apparently came from Norway).

  And it was his eyes that first spotted New Zealand on 6 October 1769.

  From then on the Endeavour sailed straight ahead, and the sight of land emerged from the clouds, mile by mile. In the evenings an emotional Captain Cook transferred its contours onto paper, drawing maps.

  Over several years of this mapping they had many adventures, which have already been colourfully described. When a crew member mused aloud that such an extraordinary land must be inhabited, the next day they saw smoke over the bush. When they began to fear obstacles in securing provisions on land and to imagine it peopled by valiant savages, that same morning they appeared on the land – scary and frightening. They had tattooed faces, they stuck out their tongues and shook their spears. To definitively demonstrate their advantage and immediately establish a hierarchy, they shot several savages – that’s when the explorers were attacked.

  New Zealand was, it seems, the last land we invented.

  ANOTHER COOK

  In 1841, Thomas set out on foot to a meeting of the Temperance Society – for he was a great advocate of the temperate mind – from his native Loughborough to Leicester, eleven miles removed. With him went several other gentlemen. Along the way, which was long and tiring, this Cook had an idea – it now seems so strange that no one had ever thought of it before, but that is of course the famous simplicity of brilliant ideas – namely, to rent a railway carriage to transport all the travellers together on the next trip.

  A month later he managed to ready his first excursion for several hundred people (it is unknown whether all of them were heading to the Temperance Society, however). And so the first travel agency was born.

  Thomas Cook and James Cook: two of the chefs who cooked up our reality.

  WHALES, OR: DROWNING IN AIR

  In Australia, everyone in the environs would come out onto the seashore when the news was circulated that yet another disoriented whale had run aground. In shifts, people would charitably ladle water over its delicate skin and try to convince it to go home. Older ladies dressed like hippies would maintain that they knew what they were doing. Apparently all you had to do was say, ‘Go, go, my brother,’ or, if need be, ‘Sister.’ And, with your eyes shut tight, transfer some of your energy into it.

  All day, little tiny figures would mill about the beach, waiting for high tide: let the water take it back. Attempts would be made to fasten nets to boats and drag it out by force. Yet the great beast would soon become dead weight, a body indifferent to living. It’s no surprise people would begin to call it ‘suicide’. A small group of activists would appear in order to argue that animals ought to be allowed to simply die, if they so wished. Why should the act of suicide be the dubious privilege of mankind? Maybe the life of every living being has its own set limits, invisible to the eye, and once those have been crossed, life just runs out, on its own. Let that be taken into consideration for the Declaration of Animal Rights being drafted in Sydney or in Brisbane at just that moment. Dear brothers, we give you the right to choose your death.

  Suspicious shamans would come down to the dying whale and perform rituals over it, followed by amateur photographs and thrill-seekers. A teacher from a village school brought her whole classroom, and the children were tasked with drawing ‘The Whale’s Farewell’.

  Usually it took several days for the whale to die. In that time, the people on the shore became accustomed to the tranquil, magisterial being with its impenetrable will. Someone would name it, usually a human name. The local television station would show up, and the whole country, and the whole world, would take part in the death, thanks to satellite TV. The problem of this individual on the beach would conclude every news broadcast on three continents. Then they’d take the opportunity to talk about global warming and ecology. Scholars would be brought into the studios for debates, and politicians would tack earth-related topics onto their election platforms. Why do whales do this? The ichthyologists and the ecologists all gave different answers.

  A collapsed echolocation system. Water pollution. A thermonuclear bomb at the bottom of the sea that no country would admit to setting off. Could it not be a decision, the kind elephants make? Old age? Disenchantment? As was recently discovered, after all, little distinguishes the whale’s brain from the human’s; a whale’s brain even contains certain areas Homo sapiens lack, in the best, the most developed portion of the frontal lobe.

  In the end, the whale would finish dying, and its body would need to be removed from the beach. The crowds would have dispersed by this time – in fact, no one would be left, except the service people in bright green jackets who would cut the corpse up and load it onto trailers to haul if off somewhere. If there was a cemetery for whales, that’s definitely where they were headed.

  Billy, an orca, drowned in air.

  Everyone inconsolable in their grief.

  Although there have been instances of people managing to save the whales. In response to the great and dedicated efforts of dozens of volunteers, these whales would take deep breaths and head back into the open sea. Their famous fountains could be seen springing joyfully up towards the sky, and then they would dive down into the depths of the ocean. The crowd would break into applause.

  A few weeks later they’d be caught off the coast of Japan, and their gentle, pretty bodies would be turned into dog food.

  GODZONE

  She’s been packing for days. Her things lie in piles on the rug in their room. To get to the bed she steps between them, wading in among the stacks of shirts and underwear and balled-up socks, trousers folded neat along the crease, and a couple of books for the road, the novels everyone’s been talking about that she has not had time to read. And then a heavy jumper and a pair of winter boots, which she’s purchased just for this – she’s about to venture, after all, into the heart of winter.

  They’re just things – soft, inscrutable skins that can be
shed time and time again, protective cases for a brittle body in its fifties, to shield from ultraviolet rays and prying gazes. Indispensible on her long voyage, as well as when she gets there, for her weeks at the ends of the earth. She has set everything out on the floor, guided by a list she spent days making, working on it in rare free moments, knowing already she’d need to go. Once you give your word, you have to keep it.

  As she carefully fills her red suitcase, she acknowledges she doesn’t really need much. With each passing year she’s discovered she needs less. Thus far she’s eliminated skirts, mousse, nail polish and anything else having to do with her nails, earrings, her portable iron. Cigarettes. Just this year she’d discovered she no longer needed pads.

  ‘You don’t have to take me,’ she says to the man who now turns his face to her, still basically asleep. ‘I’ll take a taxi.’

  With the backs of her fingers she brushes his delicate pale eyelids, and she kisses him on the cheek.

  ‘Call me when you get there or I’ll worry sick,’ he mumbles, and then his head drops back down into the pillow. He’d had the night shift at the hospital. There had been some kind of accident; the patient had died.

  She puts on a pair of black trousers and a black linen tunic. She pulls on her boots and slings her purse over her shoulder. Now she’s standing motionless in the hall without even knowing why herself. In her family they used to say that you always had to sit for a minute before heading off on any kind of trip – an old provincial Polish habit – but this little entrance has no place to sit on, no chair. So she stands there and sets her internal clock, her inner chronometer, so to speak, speaking cosmopolitan, that flesh-and-blood timer ticking dully to the rhythm of her human breath. And suddenly she collects herself, grabs the handle of her suitcase in her hand, like a child that got distracted, and she flings open the door. It’s time to go. So she gets going.