Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  As he was speaking, his face changed, as though his words washed it clean of old age and exhaustion. A different face emerged: now his eyes shone, his cheeks lifted and tightened. The unpleasant impression of a mask that face had made only moments earlier now faded. It was as much of a change as if he had been given drugs, a small dose of amphetamines. She knew that when that drug wore off – whatever kind of drug it was – his face would freeze back, his eyes go matte, his body would slump into the nearest armchair, taking back on that appearance of helplessness she knew so well. And she would need to lift that body carefully, by its armpits, prod it ever so slightly, lead it dragging its feet and swaying to a nap in their cabin – it would have expended too much energy.

  She knew the course of the lectures well. But each time it brought her pleasure to observe him, like putting a desert rose in water, as though he were recounting his own history rather than that of Greece. All the figures he mentioned were him, that was obvious. All the political problems were his problems, personal as possible. Philosophical concepts – those were what kept him up at night; they belonged to him. The gods he knew intimately, of course; he had lunch with them daily, at a restaurant near their house. Lots of nights they’d stayed up talking, drinking an Aegean Sea of wine. He knew their addresses and phone numbers, could call them up at any time. Athens he knew like the inside of his pocket, though not (needless to say) the city they’d just set sail from – that one, truth be told, did not interest him in the slightest – but rather the old Athens, from the times of, let’s say, Pericles, and their map was overlaid onto today’s layout, rendering the present one spectral, unreal.

  Karen had already done her private survey of her fellow passengers that morning, when they had boarded the ship in Piraeus. Everyone, even the French, spoke English. Taxis had brought them straight from the airport in Athens or from their hotels. They were polite, attractive, intelligent. Here was a couple, in their fifties, slim, probably older than they looked, in fact, in light-coloured natural clothing, linen and cotton, him playing with his pen, her sitting up straight and loose, like someone trained in relaxation techniques. Continuing on, a young woman whose eyes were glazed by her contact lenses, taking notes, left-handed, writing in big round letters, drawing figures of eight in the margins. Behind her two gay guys, well-dressed, well-groomed, one of them wearing funny glasses à la Elton John. By the window a father with his daughter, which they mentioned immediately upon introducing themselves, the man probably afraid of being suspected of an affair with a minor; the girl always wore black and had her head shaved almost bald, with pretty dark pouting lips that betrayed an expression of irrepressibly swollen disdain. The next couple, harmoniously grey-haired, was Swedish, apparently ichthyologists – Karen had noticed this on the list of lecture participants they had received ahead of time. The Swedes were calm and looked a lot like one another, though not in the way people look like each other from birth – it was instead the kind of resemblance that must be worked at, hard, over the course of many years of marriage. A few younger people, this cruise was their first; they seemed to still be unsure whether this ancient Greek stuff was for them, or whether they wouldn’t rather delve into the mysteries of orchids or of turn-of-the-century Middle Eastern decorative arts. Was their rightful place this ship with this old man who commenced lectures by rambling about citrus fruits? Karen took a longer look at the red-headed, fair-skinned man in jeans that hung around his hips, who rubbed the several days’ worth of light-blond stubble on his face. She thought he looked German. A handsome German. And a dozen or so others, in focused silence, watching the professor.

  Here was a new type of mind, thought Karen, that didn’t trust words from books, from the best textbooks, from papers, monographs, encyclopaedias – abused over the course of its studies, now it had cerebral hiccups. It had been corrupted by the ease of breaking down any construct – even the most complex – into prime factors. Reducing ad absurdum every ill-considered argumentation, taking on every few years a completely new, fashionable language, which – like the latest advertised version of a pocketknife – could do anything with everything: open cans, clean fish, interpret novels and foresee the evolution of the political situation in central Africa. A mind for charades, a mind that employed citations and cross-references like knife and fork. A rational and discursive mind, lonely and sterile. A mind that seemed to be aware of everything, even things it didn’t really understand, but that moved fast – a quick, intelligent electric impulse without limits, linking everything with everything, convinced that all of it together must mean something, even if we couldn’t yet know what.

  Now, with verve, the professor began to expound upon the origins of the name Poseidon, and Karen turned her face towards the sea.

  After every lecture he needed her assurance that it had gone well. In their cabin, as they dressed for dinner, she would hug him to her, his hair smelling slightly of his chamomile shampoo. Now they were ready to go, him in his lightweight dark-coloured jacket and his favourite old-fashioned scarf, her in her green velvet dress, and stood inside their cramped cabin with their faces at the windows. She handed him his little cup of wine, he took a sip and whispered a few words, then dipped his fingers in and sprinkled wine around the cabin, but carefully, so as not to stain the fluffy brownish carpet. The drops sank into the dark upholstery of the chair, wine vanishing into furniture; there would be no trace of it. She did the same.

  At dinner, the golden German man joined their table, which they were sharing with the captain, and Karen saw that her husband was none too pleased with this new presence. The man, however, was pleasant, tactful. He introduced himself as a programmer, and said he worked with computers in Bergen, near the Arctic Circle. So he was Norwegian. In the soft lamplight his skin, eyes and the thin wire frames of his glasses all seemed made of gold. His white linen shirt unnecessarily covering his golden torso.

  He was interested in one of the words the professor had used during his lecture, which had in fact been explained with great precision.

  ‘Contuition,’ repeated the professor, his irritation painstakingly concealed, ‘is, as I said, a variety of insight that spontaneously reveals the presence of some larger-than-human strength, some unity above heterogeneity. I’ll expand tomorrow,’ he added, with his mouth full.

  ‘Right,’ responded the man somewhat helplessly. ‘But what would that mean?’

  He did not receive a response, because after ruminating for a moment, evidently searching through the stocks of the abyss of his memory, the professor finally began to trace a series of small circles in the air with his hand, reciting:

  ‘Reject everything, do not look, shut your eyes and change your gaze, awaken another one that almost everyone has, but that few use.’

  He was so proud of himself he actually blushed.

  ‘Plato.’

  The captain nodded knowingly, and then raised a toast – this was their fifth shared journey:

  ‘To our happy little anniversary.’

  It was strange, but just then Karen felt certain this would be their last shared journey.

  ‘May we meet again next year,’ she said.

  The professor, animated now, told the captain and the ginger-haired man, who introduced himself as Ole, about his latest idea.

  ‘A trip that would follow in the footsteps of Odysseus,’ he said, and then waited, to give them time to be astonished by the thought. ‘Approximately, of course. We’d need to think how to organize it, logistically.’ He looked at Karen, who muttered:

  ‘It did take Odysseus twenty years.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ the professor replied merrily. ‘In today’s day and age you could do it in two weeks.’

  Then Karen’s and Ole’s eyes met, by accident.

  It was on that night or the following one that she had an orgasm, just like that, in her sleep. It was somehow connected with the red-headed Norwegian, but it wasn’t clear how, because she didn’t remember very much of what had
gone on there, in her dream. She’d simply known that golden man, profoundly. She woke up with echoes of contractions in her lower abdomen, stunned, amazed and then embarrassed. Without realizing she was doing it, she started counting them, catching the final four.

  The next day, as they were moving along the coast, Karen openly admitted to herself that in many places, at this stage, there was nothing left to see.

  The road to Eleusis was an asphalt highway down which cars went speeding; thirty kilometres of ugliness and banality, desiccated hard shoulders, concrete homes, ads, parking lots and land it wouldn’t have made sense to cultivate. Warehouses, loading ramps, a giant dirty port, a heating plant.

  Once they were ashore, the professor led the whole group to the ruins of Demeter’s temple, which now looked rather sad. The group could not conceal its disappointment, so he called on all of them to imagine turning back time.

  ‘This route from Athens was barely reinforced by stones back then, and very narrow – look, swarms of people move along it towards Eleusis, walking, kicking up the dust feared by the greatest rulers of the world. The packed crowd cries out, the sound of hundreds of throats.’

  The professor stood still, leaned back on his heels, wedging his cane into the ground, and said:

  ‘It might have sounded something like this,’ and his voice cut off for a moment, for him to gather his breath, and then he shouted out with all the strength of his old throat. And suddenly his voice loud and clear. His wailing was carried by the heated air, causing everyone to look up: surprised tourists on their own, making their way between the rocks, and ice cream vendors, and workers lining the railings because high season was about to start now, and a small child poking at a frightened beetle with a stick, and two donkeys grazing off in the distance, on the other side of the slope.

  ‘Iacchus, Iacchus,’ cried the professor with his eyes closed.

  Even after he had fallen silent again, his shout still hung in the air, so that everything held its breath for half a minute, for a few dozen strange seconds. Jarred by this eccentric comportment, his listeners couldn’t bring themselves to even look at one another, and Karen turned bright red, as though it had been her crying out in that strange way. She moved off to the side, to cool off from her embarrassment and from the heat.

  But the old man didn’t look even remotely chagrined.

  ‘…and perhaps it is possible,’ she heard him say, ‘to look into the past, cast our glances backwards, imagine it as a panopticon of sorts, or, dear friends, to treat the past as though it still existed, it’s just that it’s been shifted over into another dimension. Maybe all we need to do is change our way of looking, look askance at it all somehow. Because if the future and the past are infinite, then in reality there can be no ‘once upon’, no ‘back when’. Different moments in time hang in space like sheets, like screens lit up by one moment; the world is made up of these frozen moments, great meta-images, and we just hop from one to the next.’

  He broke off for a moment to rest, because they were walking uphill, and then Karen heard him squeeze the next words out between his whistling breaths:

  ‘In reality, movement doesn’t exist. Like the turtle in Zeno’s paradox, we’re heading nowhere, if anything we’re simply wandering into the interior of a moment, and there is no end, nor any destination. And the same might apply to space – since we are all identically removed from infinity, there can also be no somewhere – nothing is truly anchored on any day, nor in any place.’

  That evening Karen did a mental breakdown of the costs of that expedition: a burned nose and forehead, a foot injured to bleeding. A sharp stone had got under the strap of his sandal, and he hadn’t felt it. That must have been a serious symptom of worsening arteriosclerosis, which the professor had had for many years.

  She knew this body well, too well – shrunken, sunken, the dried-out skin dappled with brown spots. The remains of grey hairs on his chest, his frail neck that barely held up his trembling head, the thin bones beneath a thin covering of skin and a skeleton that seemed made of aluminium it was so light, avian.

  Sometimes he fell asleep before she had managed to undress him and prepare the bed, and then she had to carefully remove his jacket and shoes and steer him, still slumbering, towards the bed.

  Every morning they had the same problem – his shoes. The professor suffered from an irritating ailment – he had ingrowing nails. His toes became inflamed, swollen, his nails got raised, boring holes into his socks, scraping painfully against the tops of his shoes. Placing a foot in such pain in its black leather slipper would be a gratuitous act of cruelty. So, for everyday things the professor wore sandals, and covered shoes they ordered from a particular shoemaker near where they lived, and for an incredible sum he would produce for the professor beautiful soft shoes, with a raised top, loose.

  That evening, likely from the sun, he had a fever, so Karen gave up on dinner at the table and ordered food to their cabin.

  In the morning, as the ship was sailing up to Delos, after brushing their teeth and a laborious shave, they went out together onto the deck with the pastries from the previous day’s tea. They crumbled them and threw them into the sea. It was early, everyone else was probably asleep. But the sun had already lost its redness and was shining, gathering its strength moment by moment. The water had turned a golden, honey colour, thick, the waves had died down, and the great iron of the sun pressed them without leaving even the finest line. The professor put his arm around Karen’s shoulder, and in fact that was the only gesture to be made in the face of such an obvious epiphany.

  Looking around where you are once more is like looking at an image in which a million details conceal a hidden shape. Once you see it, you can never forget it’s there.

  I won’t record every day of the trip, nor relay each lecture – in any case, Karen might have them published someday. The ship sailed, every evening there was dancing on the deck, the passengers with glasses of wine in their hands, leaning against the railings, having lazy conversations. Others gazed out at the night-time sea, at the cool, crystal darkness, lit up from time to time by the lights of big ships, bearing thousands of passengers, calling daily at different ports.

  I’ll mention only one lecture, which happened also to be my favourite. Karen had come up with the idea, to talk about those gods who didn’t make it into the pages of the famous, popular books, those not mentioned by Homer, then ignored by Ovid; those who didn’t make names for themselves with drama or romance; who weren’t terrifying enough, cunning enough, elusive enough, who are known only from fragments of rock, from mentions, from the little extant from burned-down libraries. But thanks to that they’ve preserved something the well-known gods have lost forever – a divine volatility and ungraspability, a fluidity of form, an uncertainty of genealogy. They emerge from the shadows, from formlessness, then succumb once more to looming darkness. Just take Kairos, who always operates at the intersection of linear, human time and divine time – circular time. And at the intersection between place and time, at that moment that opens up for just a little while, to situate that single, right, unrepeatable possibility. The point where the straight line that runs from nowhere to nowhere makes – for one moment – contact with the circle.

  He entered the room with a brisk step, dragging his feet and panting, and stood at his podium – the ordinary little restaurant table – and took a bundle out from under his arm. She knew his methods. The bundle was a towel, right out of their cabin. He knew perfectly well that as soon as he began to unroll it the room would fall silent, and the heads in the last row would incline towards him. People are children. Under the towel there was, first, her red scarf, and then, finally, there shone something white, a piece of marble, which may have looked like some shard of rock. The tension in the room had reached its pinnacle, and he, aware of the interest he was arousing, celebrated it with a slight sly smile, drawing out his gestures like he was acting in a movie. Then he lifted that light, flat piece almost to eye
level, extending his arm, parodying Hamlet, and began:

  Who is the sculptor, and where does he come from?

  From Sicyon.

  And his name?

  Lysippus.

  And who are you?

  Kairos the All-Mastering.

  Why do you tread on tiptoes?

  I ceaselessly circumnavigate the world.

  Why do you have wings on both feet?

  Because I fly by with the wind.

  And in your right hand, why do you carry a razor?

  It is a sign to people that I am sharper than any blade.

  Why does your hair fall over your eyes?

  So that anyone who confronts me head-on can still catch me.

  But, by Zeus, why is the back of your head bald?

  So that no one I’ve run over with my winged feet,

  Might seize me from behind, for much as he desired to do so.

  Why did the sculptor create you?

  On account of you, foreigners, and he set me at the entrance as a lesson.

  He began with this lovely epigram by Posidippus – he ought to have used it as an epitaph. The professor went up to the first seats and handed the proof of the god’s existence over to his audience. The girl with the swollen, contemptuous lips reached out for the relief with exaggerated caution, sticking out her tongue slightly from the exertion. She passed it on, while the professor waited in silence, until the small god had made it halfway around the room, and then, with a stony expression on his face, he said: