Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  Her terrace looks out over vast meadows, and past these the azure waters of the bay; the rising tide plays with colours, mixes them, varnishes the waves with a silver sheen. She always goes out onto the terrace in the evenings after dinner – a hangover from when she used to smoke. She stands there and watches people engaged in all manner of pleasure and delight. If you painted it, it would look like a joyful, sunny, and perhaps slightly childish Brueghel. A southern Brueghel. People flew kites – one was in the shape of a big, bright fish, whose long, slender fins floated in the air with the grace of a veiltail. Another was a panda bear, an enormous oval that rose high above the people’s tiny little figures. Another is a white sail that pulls its owner’s short cart along the ground. Think of all the uses you can get out of a kite! Think how helpful the wind is. How good.

  People play with dogs, throwing them colourful little balls. The dogs retrieve them with boundless enthusiasm. Itsy-bitsy figures run and ride bikes and rollerskate and play volleyball and badminton and practise yoga. Along the nearby highway glide cars with trailers, and on them boats, catamarans, bicycles, mobile homes. There is a light breeze, the sun is shining, little birds scuffle over some forgotten crumbs beneath a tree.

  This is how she understands it: life on this planet gets developed by some powerful force contained in every atom of organic matter. It’s a force there is no physical evidence of, for the time being – you can’t catch it on even the most precise microscopic images, nor in photographs of the atomic spectrum. It’s a thing that consists in bursting open, thrusting forward, in constantly going beyond what it is. That is the engine that drives changes, a blind and powerful energy. To ascribe goals or intentions to it is to misunderstand. Darwin read this energy as well as he could, but he still read it wrong. Competition shmompetition. The more experienced a biologist you become, the longer and harder you look at the complex structures and connections in the biosystem, the stronger your hunch that all animate things cooperate in this growth and bursting, supporting one another. Living organisms give themselves to one another, permit one another to make use of them. If rivalry exists, it is a localized phenomenon, an upsetting of the balance. It is true that tree branches jostle one another out of the way to reach the light, their roots collide in the race to a water source, animals eat each other, but there is in all this a kind of accord, it’s just an accord that men find frightening. It might appear that we are actors in a great bodily theatre, as though those wars we wage were merely civil wars. This – what other word to use? – lives, has a million traits and qualities, so that everything is contained within it, and there is nothing that might lie outside of it, all death is part of life, and in some sense there is no death. There are no errors. There are no guilty parties and no innocents, either, no merits, no sins, no good or evil; whoever thought up those notions led humankind astray.

  She went back into the bedroom and read his letter, which had just arrived, announced by an electronic ping, and suddenly she recalls all the despair this person, this letter-writer had provoked in her, long, long ago. Despair at leaving while he stayed. He came to the train station back then, but she doesn’t remember him standing on the platform, although she knows she’d carefully preserved that image once – but all she can remember now is the movement of the train and the flashes of a wintry Warsaw as they slipped faster and faster away, and the words ‘never again’, and the conviction they had triggered. Now it sounds so sentimental, and to tell the truth, she can’t understand that pain. It was a good pain, like menstrual pain. A thing reaches completion, an internal process is finalized, eliminating all that is unnecessary. That’s why it hurts, but it’s just the pain of purging.

  For some time they wrote letters to one another; his letters came in light blue envelopes with stamps the colour of whole-wheat bread. Their plan, of course, was for him to someday make it to where she was. But, of course, he never made it; how could she ever have believed he would? There were reasons, all of which seem vague now, and even incomprehensible – no passport, politics, the abyss of the winters, which you could get stuck in as though you’d fallen into a crevasse and couldn’t move again.

  Just before she’d come here she’d suddenly been battered by waves of a strange nostalgia. Strange because it had to do with things that were too trivial to really be missed: the water that collects in puddles in the holes in the pavements, the shades of neon left in that water by stray drops of petrol; the heavy, creaky old doors to the dark stairwells. She also missed the glazed earthenware plates with the brown band with the Społem co-op logo on it that they used at the cafeteria to serve lazy pierogi with melted butter and sugar sprinkled on top. But then with time that nostalgia had seeped into the new land like spilled milk, not leaving any trace. She graduated, and she got a fellowship. She travelled around the world, and she got married to the man she’s still with now. They had twins, who will soon have their own children. So it would appear that memory is a drawer stuffed with papers – some of them are totally useless, those one-time documents like dry cleaning tickets and the proofs of purchase of winter boots or a toaster long since gone. But then there are other reusable ones, testaments not to events but to whole processes: a child’s vaccination booklet, her student ID like a tiny passport, its pages half-filled with stamps from each term, her school diploma, a certificate of completion from a dressmaking course.

  In the next letter she got from him, he wrote that although he was in the hospital now, they’d said they’d let him out for Christmas, and he wouldn’t go back after that. They’d already done everything they could, scanned everything they could, diagnosed it all. So now he’d be at home, and he lived outside of Warsaw, in the country, and there was snow, and severe cold all over Europe, with people even freezing to death. He also gave her the name of his illness, but in Polish, so she had no idea what it was, because she just didn’t know the Polish name for it. ‘Do you remember our promise?’ he wrote. ‘Do you remember that last night before you left? We were sitting in the park, on the grass, it was very hot, it was June, we’d already aced all our exams, and the city, after being heated all day long, now gave off a warmth mixed with the scent of concrete, like it was sweating. Do you remember? You’d brought a bottle of vodka, but we couldn’t finish it. We promised we would see each other. That no matter what happened, we would meet again. And there was one other thing. Do you remember?’

  She remembered, of course.

  He’d had a little pocket knife with a bone handle that had had the corkscrew he’d just used to open the bottle (because back then vodka bottles had had corks, too, and wax seals), and now with the sharp part of the corkscrew he dug into his hand – if she remembered right, it had been a long cut between his index finger and his thumb – and she had taken that curly metal blade from him and done the same to herself. Then they touched these bloodstains together, applying one scratch to another. This youthful romantic gesture was called blood brotherhood, and it must have come from some movie that had been popular then, or maybe a book, maybe one of Karl May’s series on the Apache chief.

  Now she inspected her palms, the left and then the right, because she couldn’t remember which one it was, but of course she turned up nothing. Time commemorated other kinds of wounds.

  Of course she remembered that June night – with age, memory starts to slowly open its holographic chasms, one day pulling out the next, easily, as though on a string, and from days to hours, minutes. Immobile images move, first slowly, repeating over and over those same moments, and it’s like extracting ancient skeletons from sand: at first you see a single bone, but a brush soon uncovers more, until finally the whole complex structure is on display, the joints and articulations that comprise the construction that supports the body of time.

  From Poland they’d gone to Sweden first. It was 1970, and she was nineteen. Within two years they’d realized that Sweden was too close, that the Baltic Sea brought in certain fluids, nostalgias, miasmas, a kind of unpleasant air. Her father
was a good dentist, and her mother a dental hygienist – the kinds of people needed all around the world. Just multiply the population count by the number of teeth they’d have, then you’d know your chances. And the further away the better.

  She’d responded to this message, too, reaffirming in surprise that strange promise. And by the next morning she’d already received his reply, as though he’d been waiting impatiently all along, the contents of his next message saved somewhere on his desktop, ready to copy and paste.

  ‘Imagine, if you can, constant pain and progressive paralysis that goes one step further every single day. But even that could be borne, if not for the knowledge that past that pain there is nothing, no redress due, and that every hour will be worse than the one before it, which means you’re headed into truly unfathomable depths, into a kind of hell made up of hallucinations, with ten circles of suffering. And you don’t get anyone to guide you through it, nobody to take you by the hand and explain what’s going on – because there is no explanation, no set of punishments or rewards.’

  And the next letter, where he complained that it was horrendously difficult for him to write even just clichés: ‘You know that here there can be no question of anything of the kind. Our tradition’s not conducive to that line of thought, and that’s exacerbated further by the innate disinclination to any type of reflection on the part of my (could they still be yours, too?) compatriots. It’s typically attributed to our painful history, for history was always unkind to us – as soon as things started to go well, they’d always come crashing down again, and so it became sort of established that we’d be wary of the world, and scared, that we’d have faith in the saving power of ironclad rules but also want to break the very rules we came up with.

  ‘My situation is as follows: I’m divorced, and I’m not in any contact with my wife – my sister’s taking care of me, but she would never carry out my request. I don’t have children, which I greatly regret – it’s precisely for these types of things you have to have them, if for nothing else. I am, unfortunately, a public figure, and an unpopular one at that. No doctor would dare to help me. During one of the many political skirmishes in which I was involved I got discredited, and I don’t have what you would call a good name now, I know that, and I couldn’t care less. I’d get the occasional visitor in the hospital from time to time, but I suspect it wasn’t out of any real desire to see me, or out of sympathy (this is what I think), but rather – even if they weren’t fully aware of it – to get some closure. So this is what’s become of him! And they’d shake their heads by my bedside. I get that, it’s a human emotion. I myself am certainly not particularly pure of heart. I messed up a lot of things in my life. I’ve only really got one thing going for me, which is that I’ve always been organized. And I’d like to take full advantage of that now.’

  She had trouble understanding his Polish – she’d forgotten a lot of words completely. She didn’t know, for example, what ‘osoba publiczna’ meant, she’d had to think about it, though then she’d figured out it must be ‘public figure’. But what did he mean by ‘messed up’? That he’d made a mess out of things? That he’d harmed himself?

  She tried to picture him writing that letter, if he was sitting up or lying down, and what he looked like, if he was in pyjamas, but his image in her head stayed just an outline, not filled in, an empty shape she could look through and see the way out to the meadows and the bay. After this long letter she took out the cardboard box where she kept her old pictures from Poland, and in the end she found him – a young boy, his hairstyle proper, the shadow of his youthful facial hair, in funny-looking glasses and some sort of highlander’s stretched-out jumper, with a hand up around his face – he must have been saying something when this black and white picture was taken.

  An instance of synchronicity: a few hours later she got a letter with a picture attached. ‘Writing is harder and harder on me. Please hurry. This is how I look. You should know – although this was taken a year ago.’ A massive man, the grey hair on his head shaved short, his face smooth, his features soft, a little blurred, sitting in some room where the shelves are loaded down with papers – publishing? There was no resemblance between the two photographs; you could be excused for thinking they were two completely different people.

  She didn’t know what kind of illness it was. She enters its Polish name into Google, and she finds out. Aha. In the evening she asked her husband about it. He explained in detail the mechanism of the illness, its in-curability, the progressive degeneration and paralysis.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ he said finally.

  ‘Just curious. A friend of a friend has it,’ she responded evasively, and then, as though in passing, surprising even herself, she brought up a conference in Europe, a last-minute emergency, that she would need to attend.

  At only an hour long, from London to Warsaw, the last flight doesn’t even really count. She almost doesn’t notice it. A lot of young people going home from work. What an odd feeling – everyone speaking Polish so naturally. At first she’s as taken aback as though she’d happened on a bunch of Ancient Greeks. They are all dressed warmly: hats, gloves, scarves, down jackets like the ones you wear when you go skiing – and it is only now that it really sinks in that she’d be landing in the heart of winter.

  A beleaguered body, reminiscent of a single tendon, stretched out on the bed. He doesn’t recognize her when she enters the room, of course. He examines her attentively, knowing it must be her, but he doesn’t really recognize her, or at least that’s what it looks like.

  ‘Greetings,’ she says.

  And he smiles faintly and closes his eyes for a while.

  ‘You’re amazing,’ he says.

  The woman at his bedside, who must be the sister he’d mentioned, makes room for her so she can put her hand on top of his. His hand is bony and ashen; now his blood bears ash, not fire.

  ‘Well, would you looky here,’ says his sister to him. ‘Somebody has a visitor! Look who came to see you.’ And then to her: ‘Would you like to sit?’

  His room looks out onto a snow-covered yard and four enormous pines; at the back there is a fence and a road, and further down real villas; she is stunned by the glamour of their architecture. She remembered it differently. There are columns, verandas, lighted driveways. She hears the wheezing of an engine as a neighbour tries in vain to start his car. There is a slight scent in the air of fire, of the smoke given off by coniferous wood.

  He glances at her and smiles, but only with his lips, whose corners curl up a little while his eyes stay serious. There’s a stand with an IV drip to the left of the bed; his IV protrudes from a blue, swollen vein that seems to be near collapse.

  When his sister leaves, he says, ‘Is it you?’

  She smiles.

  ‘Would you look at that, I came,’ she says: a simple sentence she’d been practising in her head for some time now. And it turns out fine.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think –’ and he swallows like he’s about to cry.

  She’s afraid she’ll be subjected to some uncomfortable scene. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hesitate for one second.’

  ‘You look lovely. Young. Although you did dye your hair,’ he says, trying to lighten things up.

  His lips are cracked. She spots a drinking glass on his bedside table with a straw wrapped in gauze sticking out of it.

  ‘Would you like some water?’

  He nods.

  She wets the gauze in the glass and leans over this prostrate man; he smells sickeningly sweet. His eyes flutter shut as she delicately moistens his lips.

  They try to have a conversation, but they can’t quite pull it off. He keeps shutting his eyes for a few seconds, and she can never tell if he’s still there or if he’s drifted off somewhere. She tries something along the lines of, ‘Remember when…’, but it doesn’t take. When she falls silent he touches her hand and says, ‘Please tell me a story. Please talk.’

  �
��How much longer…’ she tries to find the words. ‘Will this last?’

  He says it could be within weeks.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asks, glancing at the drip.

  He smiles again.

  ‘Super value meal,’ he says. ‘Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Pork chops and cabbage, apple pie and beer for dessert.’

  Quietly she repeats after him the word for ‘cabbage’, ‘kapusta’, a word she had all but forgotten, and it is enough to make her hungry. She takes his hand and rubs his cold fingers carefully. A stranger’s hands, a stranger – there is nothing in him that she knows now. A stranger’s body, a stranger’s voice. She might just as easily be in someone else’s room.

  ‘Do you really recognize me?’ she asks him.

  ‘Of course I do. You haven’t changed that much.’

  But she can tell this isn’t true. She knows he doesn’t recognize her at all. Maybe if they could spend more time together, time for all these different faces, gestures, habits of movement to properly unfold… But what would be the point? She thinks he’s drifted off again for a while now – he’s shut his eyes as though he’s sleeping. She doesn’t disturb him. She watches his ashen face and sunken eyes, his nails that are so white they look like they are made of wax, but carelessly, because the line between them and the skin of his fingers is blurred.

  After a while he comes to again, looking at her as though only a second had passed.

  ‘I found you online a long time ago. I read your articles, although I couldn’t really follow most of them.’ He smiles wanly. ‘All those complicated terms.’

  ‘Did you really read them?’ she asks in surprise.