Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

  I’m not sure what exactly he meant by this.

  III

  PERPETUAL LIGHT

  Whate’er is Born of Mortal Birth

  Must be consumed with the Earth.

  When I came home, it was already light and I was entirely off my guard, because once again I imagined I could hear the patter of my Little Girls on the hall floor, that I’d see their enquiring gazes, their furrowed brows, their smiles. And at once my body was gearing up for the welcoming rituals, for affection.

  But the house was deserted. Winter whiteness was pouring through the windows in soft waves, and the vast open space of the Plateau was insistently pushing its way inside. I stored the Deer’s head in the garage, where it was cold, and topped up the wood-burning stove. I went to bed in my clothes, and slept like the dead.

  ‘Mrs Duszejko, Janina.’

  And after a pause, again, louder: ‘Mrs Duszejko, Janina, Janina.’

  A voice in the hall awoke me. Low, male and tentative. Someone was there, calling me by my detested first Name. I was doubly annoyed: for once again my sleep had been disturbed, and secondly, I was being called by that Name, which I do not like and do not accept. I was given it by chance, without a second thought. That’s what happens when a Person fails to consider the meaning of Words, and of Names in particular, but uses them blindly. I never let anyone call me ‘Janina’.

  I got up and brushed down my clothing, which was looking rumpled – after all, I’d slept in it for two Nights – and peeped out of the room. In the hall, in a pool of melted snow, stood two men from the village. Both were tall, with broad shoulders and moustaches. They had come inside because I hadn’t locked the door, and perhaps for that reason they had a justified sense of guilt.

  ‘Would you please come over to the cottage?’ said one of them in a deep voice.

  They smiled apologetically, and I noticed that they had identical teeth. I recognised them – they worked as lumberjacks. I’d seen them at the village shop.

  ‘I’ve only just come back from there,’ I muttered.

  They said the Police hadn’t arrived yet, and they were also waiting for the priest – the roads had been snowed in during the Night; even the road to the Czech Republic and Wrocław was impassable, and the container lorries were stuck in long traffic jams. But news travels quickly about the neighbourhood, and some of Big Foot’s friends had come on foot. It was nice to hear that he did have some friends. It looked to me as if the adverse weather conditions were improving their mood. It’s easier to cope with a snowstorm than a death.

  I followed them, trudging through the fluffy, pure white snow. It was fresh, and the low winter Sun gave it a blush. The men were wearing thick rubber boots with felt uppers, which is the only winter fashion for the men around here. Using their wide soles, they trod out a small tunnel for me.

  Several other men were standing outside the cottage, smoking cigarettes. They bowed hesitantly, avoiding eye contact. The death of someone you know is enough to deprive anyone of self-confidence. They all had the same look on their faces – of ritual solemnity and formal ceremonial grief. They spoke to each other in muffled tones. Whoever had finished smoking went inside.

  All of them, without exception, had moustaches. They stood gloomily around the folding couch where the body lay. Now and then the door opened and new men arrived, bringing snow and the metallic smell of frost into the room. Most of them were former state-farm workers, now on benefits, though occasionally employed to fell trees. Some of them had gone to work in England, but soon returned, scared of being in a foreign place. Or they doggedly ran small, unprofitable farms that were kept alive by subsidies from the European Union. There were only men in the cottage. The room was steamy with their breath, and now I could smell a faint whiff of ingested alcohol, tobacco and damp clothing. They were casting furtive, rapid glances at the body. I could hear sniffling, but I don’t know if it was just the cold, or if in fact tears had sprung to the eyes of these great big men, but finding no outlet there, were flowing into their noses. Oddball wasn’t there, or anyone else I knew.

  One of the men took a handful of flat candles in little metal cups from his pocket and gave them to me with such an overt gesture that I automatically accepted them, but I wasn’t entirely sure what I was meant to do with them. Only after a lengthy pause did I realise what he had in mind. Ah, yes – I was to position the candles around the body and light them; things would become solemn and ceremonial. Maybe their flames would allow the tears to flow and soak into the bushy moustaches. And that would bring them all relief. So I bustled about with the candles, thinking that many of them must have the wrong idea about my involvement. They took me for the mistress of ceremonies, for the chief mourner, for once the candles were burning, they suddenly fell silent and fixed their sad gazes on me.

  ‘Please begin,’ a man whom I thought I knew from somewhere whispered to me.

  I didn’t understand.

  ‘Please start singing.’

  ‘What am I to sing?’ I asked, genuinely alarmed. ‘I don’t know how to sing.’

  ‘Anything,’ he said. ‘Best of all “Eternal Rest”.’

  ‘Why me?’ I asked in an impatient whisper.

  At this point the man standing closest to me replied firmly: ‘Because you’re a woman.’

  Oh, I see. So that’s the order of the day. I didn’t know what my gender had to do with singing, but I wasn’t going to rebel against tradition at a time like this. ‘Eternal Rest’. I remembered that hymn from funerals I had attended in my childhood; as an adult I never went to them. But I’d forgotten the words. It turned out, however, that all I had to do was mumble the beginning and a whole chorus of deep voices instantly joined in with my feeble one, producing a hesitant polyphony which was out of tune but gathered strength with every repetition. And suddenly I felt relief myself, my voice gained confidence and soon I had remembered the simple words about the Perpetual Light that, as we believed, would enfold Big Foot as well.

  We sang like that for about an hour, the same thing over and over, until the words ceased to have any meaning, as if they were pebbles in the sea, tossed eternally by the waves, until they were round and as alike as two grains of sand. It undoubtedly gave us respite, and the corpse lying there became more and more unreal, until it was just an excuse for this gathering of hardworking people on the windy Plateau. We sang about the real Light that exists somewhere far away, imperceptible for now, but that we shall behold as soon as we die. Now we can only see it through a pane of glass, or in a crooked mirror, but one day we shall stand face to face with it. And it will enfold us, for it is our mother, this Light, and we came from it. We even carry a particle of it within us, each of us, even Big Foot. So in fact death should please us. That’s what I was thinking as I sang, though in actual fact I have never believed in any personalised distribution of eternal Light. No Lord God is going to see to it, no celestial accountant. It would be hard for one individual to bear so much suffering, especially an omniscient one; in my view they would collapse under the burden of all that pain, unless equipped in advance with some form of defence mechanism, as Mankind is. Only a piece of machinery could possibly carry all the world’s pain. Only a machine, simple, effective and just. But if everything were to happen mechanically, our prayers wouldn’t be needed.

  When I went outside, I saw that the moustachioed men who had summoned the priest were now greeting him in front of the cottage. The priest hadn’t been able to drive all the way here – his car was stuck in a snowdrift, so they’d had to bring him here by tractor. Father Rustle (as I privately called him) brushed off his cassock and gratefully jumped to the ground. Without looking at anyone, at a fast pace he went inside. He passed so close that his scent enveloped me – a mixture of eau de Cologne and smouldering fireplace.

  I noticed that Oddball was extremely well organised. In his sheepskin work coat, like the master of ceremonies, he was pouring coffee from a large Chinese thermos into plastic cups and handing the
m out to the mourners. So there we stood outside the house, and drank hot, sweetened coffee.

  A little later the Police arrived. They didn’t drive, but walked up, because they’d had to leave their car on the asphalt – they didn’t have winter tyres.

  There were two policemen in uniform and one in plain clothes, in a long black coat. By the time they reached the cottage in their snow-caked boots, panting heavily, we had all come outside. In my view, we were showing courtesy and respect towards the authorities. Both uniformed policemen were stand-offish and very formal, visibly seething with rage because of the snow, the long journey and the general circumstances of the case. They brushed off their boots and disappeared into the house without speaking. Meanwhile, quite out of the blue, the fellow in the black coat came up to me and Oddball.

  ‘Good morning. Hello, madam. Hi, Dad.’

  He said ‘Hi, Dad’, and he said it to Oddball.

  I would never have expected Oddball to have a son in the Police, and in such a funny black coat as well.

  Disconcerted, Oddball introduced us rather awkwardly, but I didn’t register Black Coat’s official name, for at once they stepped aside, and I heard the son scolding his father: ‘For the love of God, Dad, why did you touch the body? Haven’t you seen the films? Everyone knows that whatever may have happened, you don’t touch the body until the Police arrive.’

  Oddball defended himself weakly, as if rendered helpless by talking to his son. I’d have thought it would be the other way around, and that a conversation with his own child could only give him extra strength.

  ‘He looked dreadful, Son. You’d have done just the same. He’d choked on something, he was all twisted and dirty…He was our neighbour, you know – we couldn’t just leave him on the floor that way, like, like…’ he said, searching for the right words.

  ‘An Animal,’ I specified, going up to them; I couldn’t bear the way Black Coat was dressing down his father. ‘He choked on a bone from a Deer he’d poached. Vengeance from beyond the grave.’

  Black Coat cast me a fleeting glance and addressed his father. ‘Dad, you could be charged with obstructing the enquiry. You too, madam.’

  ‘You must be joking! That’d be the limit. And with a son who’s the local prosecutor.’

  The son decided to put an end to this embarrassing conversation.

  ‘All right, Dad. You’ll both have to make statements later on. They might have to do an autopsy.’

  He gave Oddball an affectionate pat on the arm, a gesture that included domination, as if he were saying: There, there, old boy, I’ll take matters into my own hands now. Then he disappeared into the dead man’s cottage.

  Without waiting for any sort of resolution, I went home, frozen through, and with a sore throat. I had had enough.

  From my windows I saw a snow plough locally known as ‘the Belarussian’ driving up from the direction of the village. Thanks to the path it cleared, towards evening a hearse was able to drive up to Big Foot’s cottage – a long, low, dark vehicle, with black curtains veiling its windows. But only to drive up. At around four o’clock, just before Dusk, when I went out onto the terrace, I noticed a black shape moving along the road in the distance – it was the men with moustaches, bravely pushing the hearse with their friend’s body back towards the village, to his eternal rest in Perpetual Light.

  Usually I have the television on all day, from breakfast onwards. I find it soothing. When there’s a winter fog outside, or after only a few hours of daylight the Dawn imperceptibly fades into the Dusk, I start to believe there’s nothing out there. You look outside, but the window panes merely reflect the inside of my kitchen, the small, cluttered centre of the Universe.

  Hence the television.

  I have a large choice of programs; one day Dizzy brought me an aerial that looks like an enamel bowl. There are several dozen channels, but that’s too many for me. Even ten would be too many. Or even two. In fact I only watch the weather channel. Since finding it, I’m happy to say I have everything I need, and I have no idea where the remote control has gone.

  So from morning onwards I’m kept company by pictures of weather fronts, lovely abstract lines on maps, blue ones and red ones, relentlessly approaching from the west, from over the Czech Republic and Germany. They carry the air that Prague was breathing a short while ago, maybe Berlin too. It flew in from the Atlantic and crept across the whole of Europe, so one could say we have sea air up here, in the mountains. I particularly love it when they show maps of pressure, which explain a sudden resistance to getting out of bed or an ache in the knees, or something else again – an inexplicable sorrow that has just the same character as an atmospheric front, a moody figura serpentinata within the Earth’s atmosphere.

  I find the satellite pictures and the curvature of the Earth very moving. So is it true that we live on the surface of a sphere, exposed to the gaze of the planets, left in a great void, where after the Fall the light was smashed to smithereens and blown apart? It is true. We should remember that every day, for we do tend to forget. We believe we are free, and that God will forgive us. Personally I think otherwise. Finally, transformed into tiny quivering photons, each of our deeds will set off into Outer Space, where the planets will keep watching it like a film until the end of the world.

  As I make myself coffee, they are usually reading the weather forecast for skiers. They show a bumpy world of mountains, slopes and valleys, with a capricious layer of snow – the Earth’s rough skin is only whitened here and there by snowfields. In spring the skiers are replaced by allergy sufferers, and the picture takes on colour. Soft lines establish the danger zones. Where there is red, nature’s attack is the fiercest. All winter it has been dormant, waiting to assail Mankind’s immune system, fragile as filigree. One day it will get rid of us entirely in this way. Before the weekend, weather forecasts for drivers appear, but their world is reduced to the few rare lines marking this country’s motorways. I find this division of people into three groups – skiers, allergy sufferers and drivers – very convincing. It is a good, straightforward typology. Skiers are hedonists. They are carried down the slopes. Whereas drivers prefer to take their fate in their hands, although their spines often suffer as a result; we all know life is hard. Whereas the allergy sufferers are always at war. I must surely be an allergy sufferer.

  I wish there was a channel about the stars and planets as well. The Cosmic Impact Channel. This sort of viewing would also consist of maps; it would show lines of influence and fields of planetary strikes. ‘Mars is starting to rise above the ecliptic, and this evening it will cross the belt of Pluto’s influence. Please leave your car in the garage or a covered parking lot, please put away the knives, be careful going down into the cellar, and until the planet passes through the sign of Cancer, we appeal to you to avoid bathing and chickening out of family quarrels,’ the slender, ethereal presenter would say. We would know why the trains were late today, why the postman’s Fiat Cinquecento got stuck in the snow, why the mayonnaise didn’t come out right, or why the headache suddenly went of its own accord, without any pills, as unexpectedly as it came. We would know the right time to start dyeing our hair, and when to hold a wedding.

  At night I observe Venus, closely following the transitions of this beautiful Damsel. I prefer her as the Evening Star, when she appears as if out of nowhere, as if by magic, and goes down behind the Sun. A spark of eternal light. It is at Dusk that the most interesting things occur, for that is when simple differences fade away. I could live in everlasting Dusk.

  IV

  999 DEATHS

  He who Doubts from what he sees

  Will ne’er Believe, do what you Please.

  If the Sun & Moon should Doubt

  They’d immediately Go out.

  The next day I buried the Deer’s head in my graveyard by the house. I placed almost everything that I had taken from Big Foot’s house into a hole in the ground. I hung the carrier bag, on which there were still blood stains, on the branch
of a plum tree, in memoriam. At once some snow fell into it, and that night the freezing temperature changed it into ice. I toiled for ages to dig an adequate pit in the frozen, stony soil. The tears froze on my cheeks.

  As usual, I laid a stone on the grave. There were already quite a number of these stones in my graveyard. Here lay: an old Tomcat, whose carcass I found in the cellar when I bought this house, and a She-Cat, semi-feral, who died after giving birth along with her Little Ones. A Fox, killed by forest workers who claimed it was rabid, several Moles and a Deer from last winter mauled to death by Dogs. Those are just some of the Animals. The ones that I found dead in the forest, in Big Foot’s snares, I merely moved to another spot, so that at least someone could feed on them.

  From the graveyard, nicely situated by the pond, on a very gentle hillside, I think the entire Plateau was on view. I’d like to lie here too, and take care of everything from here, for ever.

  Twice a day I made the effort to go on a tour of my estate. I had to keep an eye on Luftzug, as I had agreed to do so. I would go in turn to each of the houses left in my care, and finally I’d climb the hill as well to take in our entire Plateau at a single glance.

  From this perspective, things could be seen that weren’t visible at close range: round here, in winter, the prints in the snow documented every move. Nothing could escape this register – as diligently as a chronicler, the snow recorded the footsteps of Animals and people, and immortalised the infrequent tracks of car wheels. I’d carefully inspect our roofs, in case a cornice of snow had formed that might later tear off a gutter or – God forbid – come to a halt against the chimney, get stuck at some point and slowly melt, letting water trickle under the roof tiles and into the house. I’d carefully inspect the windows to check they were intact, and that I hadn’t neglected anything during my previous visit, or left a light on, perhaps; I’d also monitor the yards, doors, gates, sheds and wood stores.