Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  ‘You seem good,’ he says. ‘You look good.’

  ‘I am,’ she says.

  ‘How was your trip? How many hours is it?’

  She tells him about her layovers, about the airports. She tries to figure out the hours, but nothing works out right: time apparently expanded when you flew from east to west. She describes her home to him, and the view of the bay. She tells him about the opossums, and about her son going to Guatemala for a year to teach English in a rural school. About her parents, who had died in quick succession, fulfilled, grey-haired, telling secrets to each other in Polish. About her husband, who performs complicated neurological operations.

  ‘You kill animals, don’t you?’ he asks suddenly.

  She is startled. She looks at him. And then she understands.

  ‘It’s hard,’ she says, ‘but it has to be done. Water?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Why?’ he says.

  She makes a vague gesture with her hand. Of impatience. It’s obvious why. Because people had introduced domesticated animals to the island that were previously unknown to the native ecosystem. Some had been brought in out of carelessness, a long time ago, over two hundred years ago, while others seemed to have come ashore through no fault of anyone, just by escaping. Rabbits. Opossums and weasels farmed for their fur. Plants had slipped out of people’s gardens – just recently she’d seen clumps of blood-red geraniums on the side of the road. Garlic had got away and turned feral in the wilderness. Its flowers had faded somewhat – who knew, maybe after thousands of years it was making some sort of local mutation of its own here. People like her worked hard to keep the island from being contaminated by the rest of the world; to keep random seeds from sneaking out from random pockets and landing in the island’s soil; to keep foreign fungi from banana peels brought in from knocking down the whole ecosystem. And on their shoes, on the soles of their hiking boots, to keep any other undesirable immigrants from getting through – bacteria, insects, algae. It’s a battle that must be waged, though of course it’s been doomed from the start. You have to make peace with the fact that in the end there won’t be individual ecosystems. The world all sloshed together in a single sludge.

  But you have to enforce customs regulations. You’re not allowed to bring any biological substances onto the island; seeds require a special permit.

  She notices he is listening attentively. But is this topic appropriate to this type of encounter? she thinks, and then gets quiet.

  ‘Tell me, tell me,’ he says.

  She straightens his pyjamas, which had fallen open at his chest, revealing a blanched section of skin with a couple of grey hairs.

  ‘Look, this is my husband. These are my kids,’ she said, reaching for her purse, pulling out her wallet, where in a transparent compartment she keeps her pictures. She shows him her children. He can’t move his head, so she raises it slightly for him. He smiles.

  ‘Had you been here before?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘But I’ve been in Europe, for different conferences. Well, three.’

  ‘And you didn’t feel like coming back?’

  She thinks for a moment.

  ‘I had so much going on in my life, you know, with school, and then the kids, and then work. We built this house on the ocean,’ she starts to say, but in her mind she hears the voice of her father, saying how the country was only suited to small mammals and insects, moths. ‘I guess I just forgot about it,’ she concludes.

  ‘Do you know how to do it?’ he asks after a longer pause.

  ‘I do,’ she says.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Whenever you want.’

  With evident strain he turns to face the window.

  ‘As soon as possible,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, and he looks at her as though he’s just told her he loves her.

  As she leaves an old, overfed dog comes up and sniffs her. His sister is standing in the snow, on the porch, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Smoke?’ she says.

  She knows this is an invitation to talk, and to her own surprise, she accepts a cigarette. It’s very slender, mentholated. She is staggered by her first drag.

  ‘He’s on morphine patches, that’s why he’s not fully conscious,’ says the woman. ‘Was it a long trip for you?’

  And she realizes that he hadn’t told his sister. So she doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘No, no. We worked together for a while,’ she says without hesitation; she’d never had the slightest suspicion she was capable of lying. ‘I’m a foreign correspondent,’ she adds quickly, wanting to come up with something to explain her accent, which sounds foreign after all this time.

  ‘God is unjust, unjust and cruel. To torment him,’ says his sister, with a fierce determination on her face. ‘It’s good you came. He’s so alone. There’s a nurse who comes from the clinic in the mornings. She says it would be better to put him back in hospice care, but he doesn’t want that.’

  They extinguish their cigarettes in the snow simultaneously. They don’t so much as hiss as they go out.

  ‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ she says. ‘To say goodbye, because I’ve got to go already.’

  ‘Tomorrow? So soon? He was so happy you were coming… And you only came for two days.’ The woman makes a movement like she wants to grab her hand, as though she wants to add: Please don’t leave us.

  She has to rebook her tickets – she hadn’t thought it would go so quickly. The most important flight, the one from Europe home, can’t be changed now, so as it turns out she has a week to kill. But she decides not to stay here – it’d be better to just go already, and besides, she feels out of place in this snow and this darkness. There are seats available to Amsterdam and London for the following afternoon; she chooses Amsterdam. She’ll be a tourist there for a week.

  She eats dinner by herself, and then she takes a walk down the main street of the Old Town. She looks in the windows of the little shops, which mostly sell souvenirs and amber jewellery she doesn’t care for. And the city itself seems impenetrable, too big and too cold. People move around it all bundled up, their faces half hidden by their collars and their scarves, their lips emitting little clouds of steam. Piles of frozen snow lie on the pavements. She gives up on the idea of visiting the halls where she’d once lived. In fact, everything here repels her. Suddenly she’s utterly baffled by this phenomenon of people actually choosing, of their own free will, to go back and visit the different places of their youths. What is it they think they’re going to find? What is it they have to have validation of – just the fact that they had been there? Or that they’d done the right thing in leaving? Or perhaps they were urged on by some hope that recollecting more precisely these lost places would work with the lightning speed of a zipper to unite the past and future, creating a single stable surface, tooth to tooth, a metal suture.

  And clearly she repels the locals, too, who don’t so much as look at her, overlooking her as they pass. It is as though her childhood dream of being invisible have all come true. A fairy-tale gadget: the hat of invisibility you put on your head to temporarily vanish from everyone else’s view.

  In the last few years she had realized that all you have to do to become invisible is be a woman of a certain age, without any outstanding features: it’s automatic. Not only invisible to men, but also to women, who no longer treat her as competition in anything. It is a new and surprising sensation, how people’s eyes just sort of float right over her face, her cheeks and her nose, not even skimming the surface. They look straight through her, no doubt looking past her at ads and landscapes and schedules. Yes, yes, all signs point to her having become invisible, though now she thinks, too, of all the opportunities that this invisibility might afford – she simply has to learn how she can take them. For example, if something crazy were to happen, nobody on the scene would even remember her having been there, or if th
ey did all they’d say would be, ‘some woman’, or ‘somebody else was over there…’ Men are more ruthless here than women, who sometimes still paid her compliments on things like earrings, if she wore them, while men don’t even try to hide it, never looking at her longer than a second. Just occasionally some child would fixate on her for some unknown reason, making a meticulous and dispassionate examination of her face until finally turning away, towards the future.

  She spends the evening in the sauna at the hotel, and then she falls asleep, too fast, exhausted from jetlag, like a lone card taken out of its deck and shuffled into some other, strange one. She wakes up too early in the morning, seized by fear. She is lying on her back; it’s still dark, and she thinks about her husband saying goodbye to her almost in his sleep. What if she never sees him again? And she pictures leaving her purse on the steps and taking off her clothes and lying down with him the way he likes her to, pressing up against his bare back, her nose against the nape of his neck. She calls. It’s evening there, and he’s just come home from the hospital. She tells him a little bit about the conference. And the weather, how cold it is, how she suspects he wouldn’t make it. She reminds him to water the flowers in the garden, especially the tarragon in the rocky patch. She asks if she’s got any phone calls from her work. Then she takes a shower, makes herself up, and heads down to breakfast, where she is the first to arrive.

  In the little bag with her make-up there is also a vial that looks like a perfume sample. She takes it with her today, picking up a syringe at a pharmacy on her way. It’s actually kind of funny because she can’t remember the bizarre word for syringe, ‘strzykawka’, so instead she says the word for injection, ‘zastrzyk’. They sound so similar.

  As her taxi crosses the city, it slowly dawns on her what the source of her sense of not belonging was: it’s a different city now, in no way reminiscent of the one she’d had still in her head; there’s nothing here for her memory to grab onto. Nothing looks familiar. The houses are too stocky, too squat, the streets too wide, the doors too solid; it’s different cars driving down different streets, plus in the opposite direction of what she’s used to now. Which is why she can’t quite shake the feeling that she’s ended up on the other side of a mirror in some fictional land, where everything is unreal, which somehow also makes everything allowed. There is no one who could grab her hand, no one who could detain her. She moves along these frozen streets like a visitor from another dimension, like some higher being; she has to sort of contract inside herself to even be able to fit. And her only task here is this one mission, obvious and aseptic, a mission of love.

  The cab driver gets a little lost once they get to that little town with the villas, which also have a fairy-tale name: Zalesie Górne, meaning over the hills, and through the woods. She asks him to stop around the corner, at a little bar, and she pays.

  She walks several dozen metres quickly, and then she struggles through all the uncleared snow on the familiar path from the gate to the house. As she opens the gate she knocks off its snowy cap, revealing the address underneath: 1.

  His sister lets her in again. Her eyes are red from crying.

  ‘He’s expecting you,’ she says, and then she disappears, saying, ‘He even asked for a shave.’

  He is lying in fresh bedding, conscious, facing the door – he really has been expecting her. When she sits down on the bed beside him and takes his hands, she notices there was something strange about them: they’re dripping with sweat, even the backs of them. She smiles at him.

  ‘So how’s it going?’ she says.

  ‘OK,’ he says.

  He is lying: it is not going okay.

  ‘Stick that patch on me,’ he says, and he glances over at a flat box lying on his bedside table. ‘I’m in pain. We have to wait until it starts to work. I wasn’t sure when you’d get here, and I wanted to be conscious when you came. I might not have recognized you otherwise. I might think that maybe it wasn’t you. You’re so young and beautiful.’

  She strokes the hollow at his temple. The patch adheres like a second skin, a mercy skin, just above where his kidneys are. She is shaken by the sight of a section of his body, so battered and beleaguered. She bites her lip.

  ‘Will I feel it somehow?’ he asks, but she assures him he didn’t need to worry about that.

  ‘Tell me what you’d like. Would you like to be alone for a minute?’

  He shakes his head. His forehead is dry as parchment paper.

  ‘I don’t want to do confession,’ he says. ‘Just hold my face in your hands.’ He smiles weakly; there is mischief in his smile.

  She does it without hesitation. She feels his thin skin and delicate bones, the cavities of his eyeballs. She feels him pulsing underneath her fingers, trembling, as though tense. The skull, that delicate latticework structure of bone, perfectly solid and strong yet fragile at the same time. Her throat tightens, and it is the first and last time she is close to tears. She knows this contact brings him relief; she can feel it soothing the tremor beneath his skin. Finally she removes her hands, but he stays still, with his eyes closed. Slowly she leans in over him and kisses his forehead.

  ‘I was a good person,’ he whispers, digging into her now with his eyes.

  She assents.

  ‘Tell me a story about something,’ he says.

  Stumped, she clears her throat.

  He prompts her: ‘Tell me what it’s like where you are.’

  So she starts:

  ‘It’s the middle of summer, the lemons on the trees are ripe now…’

  He interrupts: ‘Can you see the ocean from your window?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘When the tide goes out, the water leaves seashells in its wake.’

  But this is a ruse: he hadn’t planned to listen, and for a moment his gaze clouds over, but then its former sharpness is restored. Then he looks out at her from very far away, and then she knows that he is no longer a part of the world where she is. She could not have identified exactly what it was she saw in him – whether fear and panic or precisely the opposite: relief. Faintly he conveys – clumsily, and in a whisper – his gratitude, or something like it, and then he goes to sleep. Then she takes the vial from her purse and fills the syringe up with its contents. She removes the drip from the IV and slowly injects all the droplets of the liquid she has brought. Nothing happens aside from the fact that his breathing stops, suddenly, naturally, as though the movement of his rib cage from before had been an odd anomaly. She runs her hand over his face, reinserts the drip into his IV, and smoothes out the place on the sheets where she’d been sitting. Then she leaves.

  His sister is standing on the porch again, smoking.

  ‘Cigarette?’ she says.

  This time she says no.

  ‘Do you think you’ll be able to visit him again?’ asks the woman. ‘It’s been so important to him that you come.’

  ‘I’m leaving today,’ she says, and as she goes down the stairs, she adds, ‘You take care of yourself.’

  When the plane takes off it switches off her mind. She does not give it a further thought. All those memories now disappear. She spends two days in Amsterdam, which at this time of year is windy and cold and could essentially be reduced to combinations of three colours: white, grey, and black, wandering around museums and spending the evenings at her hotel. As she walks along the main street, she comes upon an anatomy exhibit, with human specimens. Intrigued, she goes inside and spends two hours there, taking in the human body in all its possible permutations, perfectly preserved using the latest techniques. But since she’s in a strange state of mind and very tired, she sees it through a kind of fog, inattentively, just the outlines. She sees nerve endings and the vas deferens that look like exotic plants that had escaped the control of their gardener, bulbs, orchids, lace, embroidery of tissues, meshwork of neuration, slate shards, stamens, antennae and whiskers, racemes, streams, folds, waves, dunes, craters, elevations, mountains, valleys, plateaus, winding blood vessels�
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  In the air, over the ocean, she finds the coloured leaflet for the exhibit in her purse, featuring a human body, without skin, posed like in the sculpture by Rodin: head resting on hand resting on arm resting on knee, body troubled, almost thinking, and although it’s missing its skin and its face (the face turns out to be one of the most superficial characteristics of the whole human form), you can still see that the eyes are oblique, exotic. Then, half asleep, submerged in the dark, discreet rumble of the plane’s engines, she imagines that soon enough, when the technology becomes more affordable, plastination will be available to all. You’ll be able to put up the bodies of your loved ones instead of putting up tombstones, with labels like, ‘So-and-so travelled in this very body for a few years. Then he left it at such-and-such an age.’ As the plane prepares for its descent, she is suddenly seized by fear and panic. And she grips the armrests, hard.

  When finally, exhausted, she gets back to her own country, back onto that beautiful island, the customs officer asks her several routine questions: had she come into contact with any animals where she’d been, had she been in rural areas, might she have been exposed to biological contaminants.

  She pictures herself on that porch, shaking the snow off her boots, pictures that overfed dog running up the stairs and rubbing up against her legs. And she pictures her hands as they opened the vial that looked like a perfume sample. So she says, peacefully, yes.

  The customs official requests that she step aside. And there her heavy winter boots are washed down with a disinfecting agent.

  FEAR NOT

  I gave a ride to a young Serb in the Czech Republic named Nebojša. The whole way he told me stories about the war, to the point that I began to regret that I’d picked him up.

  He said that death marks places like a dog marking its territory. Some people can sense it right away, while others simply start to feel uncomfortable after a time. Every stay in any place betrays the quiet ubiquitousness of the dead. As he said:

  ‘At first you always see what’s alive and vibrant. You’re delighted by nature, by the local church painted in different colours, by the smells and all that. But the longer you’re in a place, the more the charm of those things fades. You wonder who lived here before you came to this home and this room, whose things these are, who scratched the wall above the bed and what tree the sills were cut from. Whose hands built the elaborately decorated fireplace, paved the courtyard? And where are they now? In what form? Whose idea led to these paths around the pond and who had the idea of planting a willow out the window? All the houses, avenues, parks, gardens and streets are permeated with the deaths of others. Once you start feeling this, something starts to pull you elsewhere, you start to think it’s time to move on.’