Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  The child doesn’t protest. He must be intrigued.

  There’s no one in the waiting room; a towering woman around the age of fifty appears almost immediately and ushers them into her office. The room is bright and pleasant – in the middle of it there’s a large, soft, colourful rug with toys and blocks on top. Then there’s a couch and two armchairs, a desk and an office chair. The child sits down cautiously on the edge of the couch, but his eyes wander over to the toys. The woman smiles and offers Kunicki her hand, greeting the boy, too. She talks to the child like she wants to make it very clear she’s not paying attention to the father. So he speaks first, preempting whatever questions she might ask.

  ‘My son has had trouble sleeping for some time,’ he lies. ‘He’s become anxious and –’

  The woman doesn’t let him finish. ‘First let’s play,’ she says. This sounds ridiculous, and Kunicki wonders if she’s going to be playing around with him too. In his surprise he stands stock-still.

  ‘How old are you?’ the woman asks the child. The child holds up three fingers.

  ‘He turned three in April,’ says Kunicki.

  She sits down on the rug, near the boy, and hands him some blocks; she says, ‘Your dad’s going to go sit out there for a little while and read, and we’re going to play, like this.’

  ‘No!’ says the child, jumping up and running over to the father. Kunicki gets it. He convinces the child to stay.

  ‘The door can stay open,’ the woman assures him.

  He presses gently on the door without shutting it all the way. Kunicki sits in the waiting room and listens to their voices, but they’re hard to hear, he can’t tell what they’re saying. He had been expecting a lot of questions, he had even brought the little booklet with the child’s records, which he reads to himself now: birth at full term, spontaneous labour, Apgar score of 10, vaccinations, weight 3750 grams (8.3 pounds), length 57 centimetres (22.4 inches). We speak of grown-ups being ‘tall’, but a child is ‘long’. He takes a glossy magazine from the table and opens it mechanically, happening immediately upon ads for new books. He goes through the titles and compares prices. He feels a pleasant rush of adrenaline: his are cheaper.

  ‘Can you clarify what’s wrong, please? What you’re talking about?’ says the woman.

  Kunicki feels embarrassed. What’s he supposed to say, that his wife and child just up and disappeared, that they weren’t there for three days, for forty-nine hours – he knows exactly how long it was. And he doesn’t know where they were. He’s always known everything there was to know about them, and now the most important thing is unknown to him. And then, for a split second, he imagines he says, ‘Please, you have to help me. Please just hypnotize him and get access to those forty-nine hours, minute by minute. I have to know.’

  And she – that towering woman, standing straight as an arrow – comes up so close to him that he can smell the antiseptic scent of her jumper – that’s what nurses smelled of in his childhood – and takes his hand in her big, warm hands and holds him to her breast.

  It doesn’t happen this way, though. Kunicki lies: ‘He’s just been restless lately, he wakes up in the night, cries. We went on holiday in August, to Croatia, to the island of Vis. I thought maybe something had happened, something we weren’t aware of, maybe something had scared him…’

  He can tell she doesn’t believe him. She picks up a ballpoint pen and plays with it. She speaks with an enchanting, warm smile. ‘You have here a very intelligent child with above-average social skills. Sometimes these things just mean the child is going through a normal developmental phase. Don’t let him watch too much TV. But to me there’s nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with him.’

  Then she looks at him with concern, or so he thinks.

  As they’re walking out, as the child finishes up his bye-byes to the woman, Kunicki begins to consider her a bitch. Her smile strikes him as insincere. She’s hiding something, too. She hasn’t told him everything. He now realizes he should never have gone to a woman. Don’t they have men child psychologists in this city? Or have women established some kind of monopoly on children? Women are never really clear; you can never tell upon first inspection if they’re weak or strong, how they’re going to behave, what they want; you have to stay on your guard. He thinks of the pen she was holding in her hand. A yellow Bic, just like the one in the picture he got out of the purse.

  It’s Tuesday, she has the day off. He’s been agitated since early, he can’t sleep, he pretends he’s not watching her morning meandering, from the bedroom to the bathroom, from the kitchen to the entrance and then back to the bathroom. The child emits a quick, impatient cry, probably when she’s tying his shoes. The sound of her spraying on her deodorant. The whistle of the kettle.

  When they finally go out, he stands at the door and listens to see whether the lift has come yet. He counts to sixty – the time it will take them to make it downstairs. Fast as he can he slips on his boots and rips the bag off the jacket he’s bought used so she won’t spot him. He shuts the door quietly behind him. As long as he doesn’t have to wait too long for the lift.

  Yep, things couldn’t be going smoother. He darts after her, at a safe distance, in a jacket she couldn’t recognize. He fixes on her back, he wonders if she feels somehow uncomfortable, probably not, because she’s walking quickly, briskly, you might even say joyfully. She and the child both leap over puddles, rather than bypassing them, they leap – why? Where did she get all that energy on a drizzly autumn day like today? Had the coffee kicked in already? The rest of the world seemed slow and sleepy, and she’s more vibrant than usual, her frenetic pink scarf a blot of brilliance against a background of that day; Kunicki hangs on to it like to a straw.

  They finally make it to nursery school. He watches her take leave of the child, but it doesn’t move him in the least. She might be whispering something to him as she embraces him so tenderly, some word, exactly the word Kunicki has been searching for so frantically. If he knew what it was, he could type it into Wikipedia, and that cosmic search engine would in the blink of an eye give him a simple, straightforward answer.

  Now he sees her as she pauses before the crosswalk, awaiting the green light, pulling out her phone and typing in a number. For a moment Kunicki has some hope that his own phone will begin to ring in his pocket, he’s got a different ringtone for her – a cicada, yes, he had assigned her the song of the cicada. Tropical insect. But his pocket remains silent. She crosses the road while she has a brief conversation with someone; she hangs up. Now he has to wait for the light to change, which is dangerous, because she’s actually going around the corner and out of sight, so he immediately, as soon as he can, speeds up his pace, already fearing he’s lost her, already beginning to be angry with himself and with those lights. Oh, to lose her only two hundred metres from home! But there she is; her scarf is floating into the revolving doors of the shop. It’s a big shop, a shopping centre, really, they’ve just opened it, it’s practically empty, so that Kunicki hesitates, whether to go in after her or not, whether or not he will actually be able to hide in between the different displays. But he has to, because the shop has another exit, onto another street, so he puts his hood on – which is perfectly reasonable, it is raining, after all – and enters the shop. He sees her – she’s walking around slowly, as if something were holding her back, and she looks at make-up, at perfume, she stops at a shelf and reaches for something. She holds a bottle of something in her hand. Kunicki rummages through the discounted socks.

  When she moves, lost in thought, to the purses display, Kunicki picks up the bottle. Carolina Herrera, he reads. Should this name be retained or discarded from memory? Something tells him he should retain it. Everything means something, we just don’t know what, he repeats to himself.

  He sees her from a distance – she’s standing in front of a mirror with a red purse on her arm, gazing at her reflection from one and then another angle. Then she goes to the checkout, right to Kunicki. He retre
ats in panic behind the socks shelf, bowing his head. She passes by him. Like a ghost. But then suddenly she turns around like she’s forgotten something, and she looks right at him, hunched over, with his hood pulled down to his forehead. He sees that her eyes are wide with astonishment, he feels her gaze, feels it physically: it works its way over his body, it gropes him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she says. ‘Do you have any idea what you look like?’

  Then her eyes soften, a moment later, a kind of haze comes over them, and she blinks. ‘Jesus,’ she says, ‘what is going on with you? What is wrong?’

  This is weird, this isn’t what Kunicki had expected. He had expected a fight. And then she wraps her arms around him and holds him to her, nestling her face into his bizarre second-hand jacket. A sigh works its way out of Kunicki, a little round ‘Oh,’ he’s not sure whether from surprise at her unexpected behaviour or because all of a sudden he can see himself bursting into tears into her fragrant down jacket.

  It’s only when they’re in the lift that she says, ‘Are you okay?’

  Kunicki says he’s fine, but he knows that they’re headed toward the final confrontation now. Their kitchen will serve as battlefield, and they’ll both take up attack positions – he by the table, she with her back to the window, as always. And he knows he shouldn’t underestimate this important moment, that this is perhaps the last and only possible moment to find out what happened. What the truth is. But he knows, too, that he is treading on a minefield. Every question will be like a bomb. He’s not a coward, and he will not back down in the face of establishing the facts. As the lift rises, he feels like a terrorist with a bomb under his clothes that will explode the second they open the door to their apartment and scatter everything to dust.

  He props the door open with his leg so that he can slide in his shopping bags first, and then he squeezes in past them. In fact he doesn’t really notice anything out of the ordinary, he turns on the lights and sets out the groceries on the kitchen counter. He pours some water into a glass and sticks a fading bunch of parsley into it. This will bring him to, he thinks, parsley.

  He passes through his own apartment like a ghost, he feels like he could walk through the walls. The rooms are empty. Kunicki is an eye that is figuring out one of those ‘Spot the differences between Picture A and Picture B’ puzzles. And Kunicki looks. There’s no doubt they’re different, the apartment now and the apartment from before. This puzzle would only work for the extremely unobservant. Her coat is gone from the coat rack, and her shawl, and the child’s jacket, the parade of boots (all that remains are his lone flip-flops), and the umbrella.

  The child’s room seems totally deserted; in fact all that’s left is furniture. A single little toy car lies on the rug, like the bits and pieces leftover after an unimaginable cosmic crash. But Kunicki has to know for sure – and so with his hand held out before him he steals into the bedroom, to the wardrobe with the glass in the doors, which he pulls open; they are heavy, and they open begrudgingly, with a sad grumbling. All that’s left is a silk blouse, too fancy to wear. It looks lonely there by itself in the wardrobe. The motion of the doors. Kunicki looks over the empty shelves in the bathroom. His shaving appliances are still there, in the corner. And his battery-powered toothbrush.

  He needs a lot of time to understand what he is seeing. All evening, all night, and even the next morning.

  At around nine he brews himself some potent coffee and then gathers up some of his shaving things, a few shirts from the wardrobe, some trousers, and puts them in a bag. Before he leaves, as he’s about to go out the door, he checks his wallet: I.D., debit cards. Then he runs down to his car. Snow has fallen in the night, so he has to scrape off the windshield. He does so sloppily, by hand. He’s counting on being able to get to Zagreb by nightfall, and to Split by the following day. Meaning tomorrow he sees the sea.

  He heads south, straight as an arrow, towards the Czech border.

  ISLAND SYMMETRIES

  According to travel psychology, the appearance of similarity between any two places is directly proportional to the distance between them. What is nearest seems absolutely dissimilar, totally foreign. Often the most striking similarities are ones we find – according to travel psychology – clear on the other side of the world.

  Particularly interesting is the phenomenon of island symmetries. Unfathomable, unexplained, it is a phenomenon that would seem to merit its own monograph. Gotland and Rhodes, Iceland and New Zealand. Viewed without its partner, each of these islands appears incomplete, imperfect. The naked limestone cliffs on Rhodes are only complete when they meet the moss-coated cliffs of Gotland; the sun’s blinding glare is rendered real only in contrast with the golden softness of a northern afternoon. Medieval city walls can take one of two forms: dramatic or melancholic. This is well known to the Swedish tourists on Rhodes, who have established a kind of informal colony, unreported to the U.N.

  AIR-SICKNESS BAGS

  On a plane from Warsaw to Amsterdam I was playing with a paper bag without realizing it; then I looked and saw it had been written on:

  ‘10/12/2006: Striking out for Ireland. Final destination Belfast. Students of the Rzeszów Institute of Technology.’

  The inscription, in pen, was visible on the bottom of the bag, in the empty space between the official print which repeated the same thing in multiple languages: ‘air-sickness bag... sac pour mal de l’air... Spuckbeutel... bolsa de mareo.’ Between these words some human hand wrote in those other few words with the ‘1’ at the beginning, as though their author hesitated for a moment about whether or not to leave behind this anonymous expression of anxiety. Did they think the inscription on the bag would find a reader? That I would in this way bear witness to someone else’s journey?

  I was moved by this one-sided act of communication, and I wondered whose hand had written it, how their eyes had looked as they had guided that hand along the line of pre-printed text. I wondered if it was working out for them there, in Belfast, for those students from Rzeszów. As a matter of fact I wanted on some other plane in the future to find an answer to my question. I wanted them to write: ‘It went fine. We’re going back to Poland now.’ But I know that writing on bags is something people do only out of anxiety and uncertainty. Neither defeat nor the greatest success are conducive to writing.

  THE EARTH’S NIPPLES

  These young people – a girl, at most nineteen, studying Scandinavian literature, and her boyfriend, a small blond with dreadlocks, insisted on hitchhiking from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður. They were categorically advised against it for two reasons: first, there’s not a lot of traffic in Iceland, and especially up north, so they might get stuck somewhere along the way; second, the temperature is liable to plummet out of nowhere. But these young people did not listen. Both warnings, as it turned out, came true: they got stuck in the wilderness, where before getting off the road to go to some distant little village their previous car had left them, and no other car was forthcoming. In the course of an hour the weather changed radically, and snow started to fall. Increasingly worried they stood by the road, which crossed a plain full of lava rocks from one side to the other, and they kept warm by smoking, hoping that some other car would finally come along. But it didn’t. Evidently people had given up on getting to Ísafjörður that evening.

  There was nothing to make a fire from – only damp cold moss and sparse bushes the fire wouldn’t even put in its mouth, let alone digest. They camped out in sleeping bags between the rocks in the moss, and when the snow clouds disappeared and a starry freezing sky was revealed, they saw faces in the lava stones, and everything started whispering, murmuring, rustling. It turned out that all you had to do was reach under the moss, under the stones, in order to touch the earth, which was warm. Your hand could feel distant, delicate vibrations, some far-off movement, a breath – there could be no doubt: the earth was alive.

  Then they learned from the Icelanders that no real ill could have come to them: for los
t souls like them the earth is able to bare its warm nipples. You just have to suck at them with gratitude and drink the earth’s milk. Apparently it tastes like milk of magnesium – what they sell in pharmacies for hyperacidity and heartburn.

  POGO

  Tomorrow is the Sabbath. Young fledgling Hassidim pogo dance on the boardwalk to the rhythm of a lively, trendy South American music. ‘Dance’ isn’t the right word. These are wild ecstatic leaps, twirling in place, bodies bounding into one another and bouncing back off – it’s the dance stamped out by teenagers all over the world at concerts, in front of the stage. Here the music comes from some speakers placed atop a car in which sits a rabbi, supervising everything.

  Some entertained Scandinavian tourist girls join in with the boys and awkwardly, holding hands, attempt a cancan. But then they’re issued orders by one of the teenagers:

  ‘We ask that if women wish to dance, they do so over to one side.’

  WALL

  Here there are some who believe that we have reached the end of our journey.

  The city is completely white, like bones left in the desert, licked by tongues of heat, polished by the sand. It looks like a calcified coral colony grown up over the hill from the times of the immemorial sea.

  It is also said that this city’s runway is uneven – difficult for any pilot – a runway from which gods once took off from land. Those who have any idea about those times repeat, unfortunately, contradictory things. No one can agree on any one version of events today.

  Beware, all pilgrims, tourists and wanderers who have made it this far – you sailed up in ships, came on planes, crossed on foot over straits and bridges, military cordons and barbed wire. Many times were your cars and caravans stopped, your passports carefully checked, your eyes looked into. Beware, traverse this labyrinth of little streets according to signs, stations, do not be guided by the index finger of an extended hand, the numbered verses in a book, the Roman numerals painted on the walls of houses. Do not be misled by stalls with beads, carpets, water pipes, coins unearthed (supposedly) from the sands of the desert, spices sprinkled in colourful pyramids; do not be distracted by the colourful crowd of people like you, of all possible types, colours of skin, faces, hair, clothing, hats and backpacks.