Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  A cab driver with darker skin carefully arranges her bag in the boot. Several of his gestures strike her as unnecessary, and overly intimate: as he lays down her suitcase, for instance, she thinks she seems him giving it a tender caress.

  ‘Going on a trip, are we?’ he says, smiling, revealing his big white teeth.

  She confirms that she is. He smiles even wider, via the discreet intermediary of the rearview mirror.

  ‘To Europe,’ she adds, and the taxi driver expresses his awe with a sound that was half exclamation and half sigh.

  They go along the bay; the tide is just going out, and the water slowly discloses its stony, mussel-strewn bottom. The sun is blinding, and very hot. You had to be careful of your skin. Now she thinks forlornly of her plants in the garden and wonders if her husband will really water them like he said he would; she thinks of her mandarin oranges and wonders if they’ll make it to when she gets back – if so, she’ll make marmalade – and she thinks of her figs that have just begun to ripen and of her herbs that had been exiled to the driest place in the garden, where the soil is almost rock, though they seem to like it there, because this year the tarragon had attained unprecedented proportions. Even the clothes she hangs to dry above the garden return suffused with its brisk, tart scent.

  ‘Ten,’ the taxi driver says.

  She pays him.

  In that local airport, she shows her ticket at the counter and takes her luggage up to customs. She’s left with just her backpack, and she heads straight for her plane; sleepy people are already being loaded onto it, with children, with dogs, with plastic bags brimming over with provisions.

  As the little plane that will transport her to the main airport becomes aloft she sees a view so beautiful that for a moment she is overwhelmed by a kind of elation. ‘Elation’, a funny, lofty word, originally meaning ‘to be raised up’, and now here she is literally being lifted up into the clouds. These islands, the sandy beaches are as much a part of her as her own hands and feet; the sea that winds up into foaming coils at the shores, scraps of ships and boats, the gentle, undulating shoreline, the green insides of the islands all belong to her. Godzone, that’s what the island’s inhabitants call it. It’s where God came to settle down, bringing with him all the beauty in the world. Now he gives that beauty out, for free, to everybody on the island, requesting nothing in return.

  At the big airport she goes to the toilet to wash her face. She watches the edgy little line to use the free computer for a while. Travellers pause here for a moment to let people near and far know they are here. It occurred to her that even she might go up to one of those screens, type in the name of her server, and then her address, and check who might have written to her, too – but she knows what she will find: nothing of note. Something about the project she’s working on now, jokes from a friend in Australia, perhaps a rare email from one of her kids. The sender of the messages that had given rise to this expedition had been silent for some time.

  She’s surprised by all the safety rites; she hasn’t flown for quite a while. They scan both her and her backpack. They confiscate her nail clippers, and she laments the loss, because she’d liked them, and had been using them for years. The airport officials attempt to evaluate, with their expert gaze, who among the passengers might be armed with an explosive, gazing particularly at those with darker skin and at the girls wearing headscarves, who are chipper and twittering. It would seem that the world where she is heading, standing right on the border of it now, just behind the yellow line, is governed by a different set of rules, and that its grim and angry rumbles reach all the way here.

  After passport control she makes incidental purchases at the duty-free shop. She finds her gate – nine – and sits down facing it and tries to read.

  The plane takes off painlessly, on time; so once more the miracle has happened, of a machine as big as a building slipping gracefully out of Earth’s grasp, soaring gently up and up.

  After the plastic airplane food everyone begins to get ready for bed. Just a few with headphones over their ears are watching a movie about the fantastic voyage of several brave scientists reduced in some sort of ‘accelerator’ to the size of bacteria, now headed into a patient’s body. She watches the screen without headphones, loves the spectacular photography – settings that resemble the bottom of the ocean, the crimson corridors of blood vessels, the pulse of constricting arteries, and inside these the bellicose lymphocytes like visitors from outer space, and the gentle, concave blood cells, innocent little sheep. A flight attendant passes discreetly down the aisle with water, a single slice of lemon for the whole jug. She drinks a cup.

  When it rained it flooded the park paths, washing them out and collecting the fine light sand; you could write on them with the end of a stick – these undulating bands cried out for inscription. You could draw squares on them for hopscotch and princesses in hoop skirts with tiny waists, and then a few years later riddles and confessions and the romantic algebra of all those M + B = GL, which meant that a Marek or a Maciek loved a Basia or a Bożena, while GL stood for ‘Great Love’. This always happens when she flies: she gets a bird’s eye view of her whole life, of particular moments that you’d think on the ground had been completely forgotten. The banal mechanism of the flashback, mechanical reminiscence.

  When she first got the email, she couldn’t figure out who it could be from, who was hiding behind that name and how come they addressed her so informally. This amnesia lasted several seconds – she ought to be ashamed. On the surface, as she later realized, it was just a Christmas greeting. It arrived in the middle of December, as the season’s first heat waves were just rolling in. But it clearly went beyond the ordinary phrases people say at the holidays. It struck her as a kind of crying out on the other side of a speaking tube, far-off, muffled, indistinct. She didn’t understand all of it, and some sentences unsettled her, like the one about how ‘life seems like a disgusting habit we lost control over a long time ago’. ‘Did you ever give up smoking?’ he’d added. Yes, she’d given it up. And it had been hard.

  For a good couple of days she mulled over that strange letter from a person she’d known more than thirty years ago, and whom she hadn’t seen once since then, whom she had completely forgotten by now, but whom she had, after all, once loved, for two intense years in her youth. She responded politely, in a totally different tone, and from that point forward she got letters back from him on a daily basis.

  These emails took away her peace of mind. They evidently awoke that dormant section of her brain where those years had been stored, parcelled up into images, scraps of dialogues, shreds of smells. Now, on a daily basis, when she drove to work, as soon as she turned on the engine these tapes came on, too, these recordings filmed with whatever camera had been at hand, with faded colours or even black and white, generic scenes, moments, with no logic to them, scattered, out of order, and she had no idea what to do with them. That for instance they walk outside the city limits – the limits of the little town, more like – into the hills, to where the high voltage line runs, and from then on their words are accompanied ceaselessly by a buzzing, like a chord to underscore the significance of this walk, a low monotone, a tension that neither increases nor decreases. They hold hands; this is the era of first kisses, which couldn’t possibly be called anything other than strange.

  Their secondary school was a chilly old building where on two floors classrooms multiplied inside the broad hallways. They all looked more or less the same – three rows of benches, and opposite these, the teacher’s desk. Boards covered in dark green rubber that could be moved up and down. One of the kids would be put in charge of moistening the sponge before each class. On the walls hung black and white portraits of men – it was only in the physics department that you could find the single female face in the whole school, Madame Maria Skłodowska-Curie’s, the sole indication of the equality of the sexes. These rows of faces hanging over the students’ heads were no doubt supposed to remind them that by so
me miracle the school remained within that great family of knowledge and learning, that in spite of its provincialism it was heir to the finest tradition, and it belonged to a world in which everything could be described, explained, proved, demonstrated by examples.

  In her first year there she began to be interested in biology. She’d found an article – maybe her dad had given it to her – on mitochondria. It said that most likely in the remotest past, in the primeval ocean, mitochondria were creatures in their own right before they were intercepted by other single-cell organisms and forced, for the remainder of history, into labouring on behalf of their hosts. Evolution had sanctioned this slavery – and that was how we’d turned out the way we had. That was how it had been described, in those terms: ‘seized’, ‘forced’, ‘slavery’. In truth, she had never been able to come to terms with this. With the hypothesis that in the beginning there’d been violence.

  So she’d already known at school that she wanted to become a biologist, which was why she had studied biology and chemistry with such zeal. In Russian she’d written notes filled with gossip that had been dutifully passed by her classmates beneath the benches to her best friends. In Polish she’d been bored to death, until in year six she had fallen in love with a kid her same age but with a different home room, a kid who had the same name as the author of these emails, and whose face she strove so hard now to call forth. He must have been the reason she’d learned so little about positivism and Young Poland.

  Her daily commute is a pendular voyage along an elegantly curved arc, eight kilometres of coast, there and back, from home to work and vice versa. The sea is ever-present in this journey, and one could say without hesitation that hers is a maritime voyage.

  At work, she’d stop thinking about his emails. She was herself again, and anyway there was no place for hazy recollections here. As soon as she’d pulled out of the driveway at home and merged onto the highway she was always kind of excited at all the things that awaited her in the lab and in her office. And then the familiar solidity of that low, glassy building would readjust her consciousness, and her brain began to work more efficiently, as focused as a well-oiled engine, reliable, the kind that always gets you to your destination.

  She was taking part in a massive programme aimed at eliminating pests like weasels and opossums, which – imprudently introduced into the region by humans – now wreaked havoc among the endemic bird species, feeding mostly off their eggs.

  She worked on a team that tested poisons on these small animals. The poison was injected into the eggs, which were then distributed as bait in special wooden cages throughout forests and in the bush; it had to be fast, humane, and also highly biodegradable, so that the fallen animals didn’t poison insect populations, as well. A crystal clear poison, completely safe for the world, aimed only at the pest, at one chosen organism type, self-neutralizing after completing its mission. The James Bond of ecology.

  This was what she did. She created just this sort of substance, had been working on it for seven whole years.

  Somehow he knew. He must have found it on the internet – everything’s on there somewhere. If you’re not on the internet, it’s almost as though you don’t exist at all. You have to have at least one little mention, even if it’s just in a list of school alumni. And it would have been easy for him to track her down since she never changed her name. So he must have just put her name into Google, and up came several pages: her articles, the courses she taught, and her environmental activism. At first she thought that that was what interested him. And so she innocently let herself be pulled into the exchange.

  It is hard to sleep on this great, transcontinental airplane. Her ankles swell, and her feet go numb. She dozes off in short spurts, which disorients her even further in terms of time. Can the night really be so long? wonders the lost human body estranged from Earth, from its place, where the sun rises and sets, and the pineal gland, that hidden third eye, conscientiously registers its movement in the sky. Finally it starts to get light out, and the plane’s engines change their tone. From the tenor to which the ear had grown accustomed to lower registers, baritones and basses; finally, faster than she’d expected, the great machine makes its landing, deft and smooth. On the jet bridge as she heads into the airport she can feel how hot the air is here, squeezing in through the cracks, sticky, damp – the lungs rear up, trying to take it in. But fortunately she won’t have to deal with it. Her next flight leaves in almost six hours, and she plans to spend that time here in the airport, napping and nodding off, trying to get her bearings in time. Another twelve-hour flight awaits her next.

  She thought often of the man who had unexpectedly sent her that email. And then more emails, so forming a correspondence brimming with hints and surmises. Such things aren’t written out, but to those with whom you once had an intimate physical relationship a certain kind of loyalty remains in effect, in the end – so she understood. Was that why he had come to her? It was obvious. Losing your virginity is a singular and irreversible event that can never be done over; by virtue of this it somehow becomes momentous, whether you want it to be or not, regardless of whatever ideology. She remembers exactly what it was like: the brief, piercing pain, an incision, a scarification – how astonishing that it had been effected by such a mild, blunt instrument.

  She also recalls the beige-grey buildings around the university, the gloomy pharmacy that always kept the light on, in any weather, in all seasons, and the old brown jars with their contents painstakingly spelled out on the label. The little yellow packages of pills for headaches, six in each, held together with a rubber band. She recalls the pleasant ovoid shape of those telephones, moulded out of hard rubber, most often black or mahogany – they didn’t even have a rotary dial, just a little crank, and their sound was like a little tornado wound up deep within the cable tunnels in order to bring about the voice desired.

  She’s surprised she can see it all so clearly – for the first time in her life. She must be starting to get old, because it seems like it’s in old age that you begin to hear from those little nooks in the brain that have the records of everything that ever happened. She’d never had time before to really think about those types of things, from days gone by; the past was like a smudged streak. Now the movie slows and reveals details – capacious is the human brain. Hers had preserved even her little brown purse, pre-war, which had originally belonged to her mother, with soft sides made out of rubber-lined material, with a beautiful metal clasp that looked like a jewel. On the inside it was smooth and cool to the touch; when you reached inside it seemed like a dead offshoot of time had got stuck there.

  The next plane, the one to Europe, is even larger, with different stories. It flies well-rested, suntanned tourists. They try to stuff their eccentric souvenirs into the overhead bins – a high drum covered in an ethnic pattern, a straw hat, a wooden Buddha. She sits crammed in between two women, in the very centre of the row, in a very uncomfortable place. She rests her head back on her seat, but she knows she won’t be able to sleep.

  They came to do their studies from the same small town, he specializing in philosophy, she biology. They met up every day after classes, both a little frightened of the big city, a little lost. Sometimes they’d smuggle one another into their different dorms; once – now she remembers – he even climbed up to the second floor of hers along the drainpipe. She remembers her room number, too: 321. But university and the city only lasted for a year. She managed to get through end of year exams, and then they left. Her father sold his clinic for a song, lock, stock, and barrel: that dentist’s chair, the metal and glass cabinets, the autoclaves and instruments. By the by, now she wonders, where did all of that end up? In the rubbish heap? Was the off-white paint still peeling off it? Her mother sold the furniture. There was no sadness, no despair – just an unease about getting rid of everything, because after all it meant starting over. They’d both been younger than she was now (though then they’d seemed absolutely elderly to her), and they’d
been ready to embark on a new adventure, anywhere’d be fine: Sweden, Australia, maybe Madagascar – anywhere, just as far as they could get away from their rotten, claustrophobic northern life in that absurd, unfriendly communist country of the late sixties. Her father said it was not a country suited to human beings, though then he spent the rest of his life pining away for it. And she wanted to go, she really wanted it, like any nineteen-year-old – wanted to set out into the world.

  It was not a country suited to human beings, but rather to small mammals, to insects, moths. She’s asleep. The plane is suspended in this clear, frosty air that kills bacteria. Every flight disinfects us. Every night cleanses us completely. She sees a print, though she doesn’t know its title – she remembers it from her childhood: a young woman touches the eyelids of an old man kneeling before her. It’s a print from her father’s study, and she knows where the book was kept, on the bottom right shelf, with the other art books. Now she could shut her eyes and enter that room with the bay windows where you could stand and see the garden. To the right, at eye level, there was the black hard rubber outlet with the little cylinder you had to take between your index finger and your thumb and dial around. It would always put up some resistance before it gave way. The light came on in the chandelier with the five glass shades like calyces, which in turn formed a kind of circling wheel. But that light from the ceiling was faint, and too high up, and she didn’t like it. She preferred to turn on the floor lamp with the yellow shade, which had – although who knew how – blades of grass inside it, and she’d sit beside it in that tattered old chair. As a child she thought that boboks lived inside it, those horrible, not-quite-defined creatures. The book she would now open over her lap was – she remembers – a book of Malczewski. She opens it to the page where the pretty young woman with a scythe is calmly and lovingly shutting the eyes of the old man who kneels before her.