Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  – in the chamber, the acetone evaporates, and the silicone polymer takes its place, working its way into the tissues’ deepest recesses;

  – the silicone hardens but stays pliant.

  I’ve touched a kidney and a liver that had been prepared in this way – they were like toys made out of tough rubber, the kinds of balls you throw for a dog to play fetch with. And the line between what is fake and what is real suddenly became very fine. I also had the rather unnerving suspicion that this technique could permanently transform original into copy.

  BOARDING

  He takes off his shoes, places his backpack at his feet, and waits now for them to start boarding the plane. He has a few days’ worth of facial hair, is almost bald, aged somewhere between forty and fifty. He looks like a guy who discovered not so long ago that he’s not really so different from everybody else – thus attaining, in other words, his own enlightenment. Traces of that shock are still visible on his face: the eyes that only look down, around where his shoes are, likely to prevent his gaze from getting tripped up by the sight of other people. No facial expressions or gestures, which he no longer requires. After a while he gets out a notebook, a nice one, hand-sewn, probably from one of those shops that charges a fortune for cheap third-world products; it says ‘Traveller’s Log Book’ in English on the recycled-paper cover. It’s a third full. He opens it up on his lap, and his black roller ball pen embarks upon a first sentence.

  So I also get out my notebook and start to write about this man writing down. Chances are he’s now writing: ‘Woman writing something down. She’s taken off her shoes and placed her backpack at her feet…’

  Don’t be shy, I think to the rest, all waiting for our gate to open – take your notebooks out too, and write. For in fact there are lots of us who write things down. We don’t let on we’re looking at each other; we don’t take our eyes off our shoes. We will simply write each other down, which is the safest form of communication and of transit; we will reciprocally transform each other into letters and initials, immortalize each other, plastinate each other, submerge each other in formaldehyde phrases and pages.

  When we get home we’ll put our written-in notebooks with all the rest – there’s a box for them behind the wardrobe, or the bottom desk drawer, or the shelf on the nightstand. Here we have chronicled our other journeys already, our preparations, our happy returns. Raptures over sunset on a beach littered with plastic bottles; that evening in that hotel where the heat was on too high. A foreign street where a sick dog begged for food, and we didn’t have a thing; the kids who crowded around in the village where the bus stopped to cool off its radiators. There’s a recipe for peanut soup that tasted like dirty sock broth; there’s the fire-eater with the scorched lips. Here is where we kept careful track of our expenses and attempted in vain to sketch the likeness of the motif that for once captured our attention for one split second on the metro. The strange dream dreamed on the plane and the beauty of the Buddhist nun in her grey robes, standing ahead of us for a little while in line. Everything is in here, even the sailor who tap-danced on the empty pier that once sent ship after ship on its way.

  Who will read it?

  The gate’s about to open. The flight attendants are already closing in on the desk, and passengers plunged until now in lethargy arise and call their hand luggage to order. They search for boarding passes, set aside the papers they haven’t finished reading with no visible regret. In their heads they perform mute examinations of conscience: do they have everything, passport, ticket, and papers, have they exchanged money. And where is it they’re going. And what for. And will they find what they are looking for, have they chosen the direction they need.

  The flight attendants, beautiful as angels, check to make sure we’re fit to travel, and then, with a benevolent motion of the hand, permit us to plunge on into the soft, carpet-lined curves of the tunnel that will lead us aboard our plane and onto a chilly aerial road to new worlds. That smile of theirs holds – or so it strikes us – a kind of promise that perhaps we will be born anew now, this time in the right time and the right place.

  Born in 1962 in Poland, Olga Tokarczuk is one of her country’s most beloved authors. In 2015 she received the Brückepreis and the prestigious annual literary award from Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, as well as Poland’s highest literary honour, the Nike Award, and the Nike Readers’ Prize. Tokarczuk also received a Nike in 2008 for Flights. She is the author of eight novels, two short story collections and has been translated into a dozen languages.

  Jennifer Croft is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize, and her translations from Polish, Spanish and Ukrainian have been published widely. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa.

  Itinerarium

  1 Vienna — Narrenturm — Pathologisch-anatomisches Bundesmuseum, Spitalgasse 2

  2 Vienna — Josephinum, Museum des Instituts für Geschichte der Medizin, Währingerstrasse 25

  3 Dresden — Deutsches Hygiene Museum, Lingnerplatz 1, Dresden Gläesernen Menschen

  4 Berlin — Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, Charitéplatz 1

  5 Leiden — Museum Boerhaave, St. Caecilia Hospice, Lange St. Agnietenstraat 10

  6 Amsterdam — Vrolik Museum, Academisch Medisch Centrum, Meibergdreef 15

  7 Riga — Pauls Stradins Museum of the History of Medicine, Antonijas iela 1, and the Jekabs Primanis Anatomy Museum, Kronvalda bulvāris 9

  8 Saint Petersburg — Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamerr), 3, Universitetskaya Naberezhnaya

  9 Philadelphia — Mütter Museum, 19 South 22nd Street

  Index of Maps and Drawings

  The maps and drawings are taken from The Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps, © The Pepin Press, Amsterdam, 2005.

  1 Comparative overview of important rivers (no date)

  2 Details of St Petersburg (1850)

  3 Boufarik, Algeria (1882)

  4 Chinese map (1984)

  5 Parc Monceau (1878)

  6 Chinese map (1984)

  7 Europe, circa 1750

  8 Novaya Zemlaya, Russia (1855)

  9 Russian map (no date)

  10 Plan of Jerusalem based on a manuscript from 1200 (no date)

  11 New York, USA (no date)

  12 The wanderings of Odysseus representend on a map from the Odissey (1911)

  Translator’s acknowledgements

  The translator wishes to thank Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the Institute for the Book in Krakow, the National Endowment for the Arts, Esther Allen and Sean Bye for their help with and support of this project.

  Praise for Olga Tokarczuk and Flights

  ‘A novel in essays, a world-exploration in words, a soaring journey across space and through time.’ Nicolas Rothwell

  ‘Tokarczuk is interested in what connects the human soul and body. It is a leitmotif that…weaves the text’s different strands—of fiction, memoir and essay—into a whole.’ Spectator

  ‘A magnificent writer.’ Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Laureate in Literature, 2015

  ‘One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.’ Economist

  ‘Reading Flights is like finally hearing from a weird old best friend you lost touch with years ago and assumed was gone forever because people that amazing and inventive just don’t last. Wrong—they were off rediscovering the world on your behalf, just as Olga Tokarczuk does.’ Toby Litt, author of Hospital

  ‘I have always considered Tokarczuk a person of great literary abilities. With Flights I have my proof. This is one of the most important Polish books I have read for years.’ Jerzy Sosnowski

  ‘Olga Tokarczuk is a household name in Poland and one of Europe’s major humanist writers, working here in the continental tradition of the “thinking” or essayistic novel. Flights has echoes of W.G. Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš
and Dubravka Ugrešić, but Tokarzcuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own…Flights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness…Hotels on the continent would do well to have a copy of Flights on the bedside table. I can think of no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times.’ Guardian

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Olga Tokarczuk 2007

  Translation copyright © Jennifer Croft 2017

  The moral right of Olga Tokarczuk to be identified as the author and Jennifer Croft as the translator of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published as Bieguni in Poland by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków in 2007

  First published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017

  This edition published by the Text Publishing Company in 2017

  Cover design by Marek Pawlowski © Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków, 2007

  All rights reserved

  The cover illustrations and internal maps and drawings are taken from The Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps © The Pepin Press, Amsterdam, 2005

  Page design by Ray O’Meara

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Tokarczuk, Olga, author.

  Title: Flights / by Olga Tokarczuk.

  ISBN: 9781925603149 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925626223 (ebook)