Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

  I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism – it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components, the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means ‘the dropping of petals’. The world has dropped its petals.

  But something new is bound to follow, as it always has – isn’t that a comical paradox? Uranus is in Pisces, but when it moves into Aries, a new cycle will begin and reality will be born again. In spring, in two years’ time.

  Studying Horoscopes gave me pleasure, even while I was discovering these orders of death. The motion of the planets is always hypnotic, beautiful, impossible to halt or hasten. I like considering the fact that this order goes far beyond the time and place of Janina Duszejko. It’s good to be able to rely on something totally.

  And thus: to determine natural death we examine the positions of the hyleg, in other words the heavenly body that sucks vital energy from the Cosmos for us. For daytime births it is the Sun, for nocturnal ones it is the Moon, and in some cases the ruler of the Ascendant is the hyleg. Death usually ensues when the hyleg reaches some radically inharmonious aspect with the ruler of the eighth house or with the planet positioned within it.

  In considering the risk of violent death, I had to take note of the hyleg, its house and the planets situated within this house. In doing so I paid attention to which of the harmful planets – Mars, Saturn or Uranus – was stronger than the hyleg, and was creating a negative aspect with it.

  That day I sat down to work and pulled from my pocket the crumpled piece of paper on which I had written down Big Foot’s details, to check if his death had come for him at the right time. As I was tapping out his date of birth, I cast an eye at the piece of paper and saw that I’d written his details down on a page from a hunting calendar, headed ‘March’. There was a table featuring the figures of Animals that could be hunted in March.

  The Horoscope sprang up before me on the screen, and for an hour it held my gaze captive. First of all I looked at Saturn. Saturn in a fixed sign is often a signifier of death by suffocation, choking or hanging.

  For two evenings I laboured over Big Foot’s Horoscope, until Dizzy called and I had to dissuade him from the idea of visiting me. His valiant old Fiat 126 would get bogged down in the mushy snow. Let that golden boy translate Blake at home in his workers’ hostel. Let him develop English negatives to produce Polish sentences in the darkroom of his mind. It would be better if he came on Friday – then I would tell him the whole story, and present as proof the precise configuration of the stars.

  I must be very careful. Now I shall dare to say this: I’m not a good Astrologer, unfortunately. There’s a flaw in my character that obscures the image of the distribution of the planets. I look at them through my fear, and despite the semblance of cheerfulness that people naively and ingenuously ascribe to me, I see everything as if in a dark mirror, as if through smoked glass. I view the world in the same way as others look at the Sun in eclipse. Thus I see the Earth in eclipse. I see us moving about blindly in eternal Gloom, like May beetles trapped in a box by a cruel child. It’s easy to harm and injure us, to smash up our intricately assembled, bizarre existence. I interpret everything as abnormal, terrible and threatening. I see nothing but Catastrophes. But as the Fall is the beginning, can we possibly fall even lower?

  In any case, I know the date of my own death, and that lets me feel free.

  V

  A LIGHT IN THE RAIN

  Prisons are built with stones of Law,

  Brothels with bricks of Religion.

  A thump, a distant bang, as if someone in the next room had clapped an inflated paper bag.

  I sat up in bed with a terrible foreboding that something bad was happening, and that this noise might be a sentence on someone’s life. More of them followed, so I hurriedly started to dress, though not entirely conscious. I came to a halt in the middle of the room, tangled in my sweater, suddenly feeling helpless – what was I to do? As usual on such days the weather was beautiful; the weather god clearly favours hunters. The Sun was dazzlingly bright, it had only just risen and, still red from the effort, was casting long, sleepy shadows. I went outside, and again I felt as if my Little Girls were running out ahead of me, straight into the snow, thrilled that the day had come, showing their joy so openly and shamelessly that I was bound to be infected by it. I’d throw them a snowball, they’d take it as a green light for all sorts of high jinks and immediately be off on their chaotic chases, in which the pursuer suddenly turns into the pursued, so the reason for the race changes from one second to the next, and finally their joy becomes so great that there’s no way to express it other than by running around the house like mad.

  Again I felt tears on my cheeks – perhaps I should go and see Doctor Ali about it. He’s a dermatologist, but he knows about everything and understands it all. My eyes must be really sick.

  As I strode towards the Samurai, I unhooked the carrier bag filled with ice from the plum tree and manually felt the weight of it. ‘Die kalte Teufelshand’, a distant memory came back to me from the past. Is it Faust? The cold fist of the devil. The Samurai started up first time, and, as if it knew my state of mind, obligingly set off across the snow. The spades and the spare wheel rattled in the back. It was hard to localise where the shots were coming from; they were bouncing off the wall of the forest, amplifying. I drove towards the Pass, and about two kilometres beyond the precipice I saw their cars – swanky jeeps and a small truck. There was a man standing by them, smoking a cigarette. I accelerated and drove straight past this encampment. The Samurai clearly knew what I was thinking, because it enthusiastically splashed wet snow in all directions. The man ran a few metres after me, waving his arms, probably trying to stop me. But I took no notice of him.

  Then I saw them, walking in loose line formation. Twenty or thirty men in green uniforms, in army camouflage and those idiotic hats with feathers in them. I stopped my car and ran towards them. Soon I recognised several of them. And they saw me too. They looked at me in amazement and exchanged amused glances.

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’ I shouted.

  One of them, a helper, came up to me. It was one of the two moustachioed men who’d come to fetch me on the day of Big Foot’s death. ‘Mrs Duszejko, please don’t come any closer, it’s dangerous. Please move away from here. We’re shooting.’

  I waved my hands in front of his face. ‘No, it’s you who should get out of here. Otherwise I’ll call the Police.’

  Another one detached himself from the line formation and came up to us; I didn’t know him. He was dressed in classic hunting gear, with a hat. The line of men moved on, pointing their shotguns ahead of them. ‘There’s no need, madam,’ he said politely. ‘The Police are already here.’ He smiled patronisingly. Indeed, I could see the pot-bellied figure of the Commandant in the distance.

  ‘What is it?’ someone shouted.

  ‘Nothing, it’s just the old lady from Luftzug. She wants to call the Police,’ he said, with a note of irony in his voice.

  I felt hatred towards him.

  ‘Mrs Duszejko, please don’t be foolish,’ said Moustachio amicably. ‘We really are shooting here.’

  ‘You’ve no right to shoot at living Creatures!’ I shouted at the top of my voice. The wind tore the words from my mouth and carried them across the entire Plateau.

  ‘It’s all right – please go home. We’re just shooting pheasants,’ Moustachio reassured me, as if he didn’t understand my protest. The other man added in a sugary tone: ‘Don’t argue with her, she’s crazy.’

&nbs
p; At that point I felt a surge of Anger, genuine, not to say Divine Anger. It flooded me from inside in a burning hot wave. This energy made me feel great, as if it were lifting me off the ground, a mini Big Bang within the universe of my body. There was fire burning within me, like a neutron star. I sprang forward and pushed the Man in the silly hat so hard that he fell onto the snow, completely taken by surprise. And when Moustachio rushed to his aid, I attacked him too, hitting him on the shoulder with all my might. He groaned with pain. I am not a feeble girl.

  ‘Hey, hey, woman, is that the way to behave?’ His mouth was twisted in pain as he tried to catch me by the hands.

  Just then the Man who’d been standing by the cars ran up from behind – he’d clearly driven after me – and grabbed me in a vice-like grip. ‘I’ll escort you to your car,’ he said into my ear, but that wasn’t his plan at all; instead he pulled me backwards, making me fall over.

  Moustachio tried to help me to my feet, but I pushed him away in disgust. I didn’t have a chance.

  ‘Don’t upset yourself, madam. We’re within the law.’

  That’s what he said: ‘within the law’. I brushed off the snow and headed for my car. Trembling with anger, I kept stumbling. Meanwhile, the line of hunters had disappeared into the low brushwood, young willows on boggy terrain. Soon after that I heard shots again; they were shooting at the Birds. I got into the car and sat still, with my hands on the steering wheel, but it was a while before I was capable of moving.

  I drove home, weeping out of helplessness. My hands were shaking, and now I knew this would end badly. With a sigh of relief, the Samurai stopped outside the house, as if it were on my side in everything. I pressed my face against the steering wheel. The horn responded sadly, like a summons. Like a cry of mourning.

  My Ailments appear treacherously; I never know when they’re coming. And then something happens inside my body, my bones begin to ache. It’s an unpleasant ache, sickening – that’s the word I’d use. It continues incessantly, it doesn’t stop for hours, sometimes days on end. There’s no hiding from this pain, there are no pills or injections for it. It must hurt, just as a river must flow and fire must burn. It spitefully reminds me that I consist of physical particles, which are slipping away by the second. Perhaps one could get used to it? Learn to live with it, just as people live in the cities of Auschwitz or Hiroshima without ever thinking about what happened there in the past. They simply live their lives.

  But after these pains in my bones come pains in my stomach, intestine, liver, everything we have inside, without cease. Glucose is capable of soothing it for a while, so I always carry a small bottle in my pocket. I never know when an Attack will occur, or when I will feel worse. Sometimes it’s as if I’m composed of nothing but symptoms of illness, I am a phantom built out of pain. Whenever I find it hard to know what to do with myself, I imagine I have a zip fastener in my belly, from my neck to my groin, and that I’m slowly undoing it, from top to bottom. And then I pull my arms out of my arms, my legs out of my legs, and take my head off my head. As I extract myself from my own body, it falls off me like old clothes. Underneath them I’m finer, soft, almost transparent. I have a body like a Jellyfish, white, milky, phosphorescent.

  This fantasy is the only thing capable of bringing me relief. Oh yes, then I am free.

  Towards the end of the week, on Friday, I asked Dizzy to come later than usual, for I was feeling sick enough to have decided to go to the doctor.

  I sat in the queue in the waiting room and remembered how I had met Doctor Ali.

  Last year, the Sun had burned me again. I must have looked rather pitiful, because the terrified nurses on reception took me straight into the ward. They told me to wait there, and as I was hungry, I fetched some biscuits sprinkled with coconut out of my bag and tucked into them. Shortly after, the doctor appeared. He was pale brown, like a walnut. He looked at me and said: ‘I like coconut baskets too.’

  That made me warm to him at once. He turned out to have a special Characteristic – like many people who have learned Polish in adult life, he swapped some words for completely different ones.

  ‘I’ll soon see what’s wailing you,’ he said this time.

  This Man treated my Ailments very thoroughly, and not just the ones affecting my skin. His dark face was always calm. Taking his time, he would tell me convoluted anecdotes while carefully checking my pulse and blood pressure. Oh yes, he certainly went far beyond the duties of a dermatologist. Ali, who came from the Middle East, had very traditional, reliable methods for curing skin diseases – he’d tell the ladies at the pharmacy to prepare some unusually elaborate ointments and lotions, time-consuming to make and including many ingredients. I guessed the local pharmacists didn’t like him for this reason. His mixtures had startling colours and shocking smells. Perhaps he believed that the cure for an allergic rash had to be just as spectacular as the rash itself.

  Today he closely examined the bruises on my arms as well. ‘How did this happen?’

  I made light of the matter. Just a small knock has always been enough to give me a red mark for a month. He also looked down my throat, felt my lymph nodes and listened to my lungs.

  ‘Would you please give me something to anaesthetise me?’ I said. ‘There must be some sort of drug. I’d like that. To stop me from feeling anything, or worrying, to let me sleep. Is that possible?’

  He started writing out the prescriptions. He contemplated each one at length, chewing the tip of his pen; finally he handed me a whole wad of them, and each medicine was to be made to order.

  I returned home late. It had been dark for a long time now, and since yesterday a foehn wind had been blowing, so the snow was melting rapidly and dreadful sleet was falling. Luckily the stove had not gone out. Dizzy was late too, for once again it was impossible to drive up our road because of the softened, slippery snow. He left his little Fiat where the asphalt ended and came on foot, soaked through and frozen to the marrow.

  Dizzy, official name Dionizy, showed up at my house every Friday, and as he came straight from work, I would make dinner that day. As I am alone the rest of the week, I make a large pot of soup on Sunday, and heat it up daily until Thursday, when I eat dry provisions from the kitchen cupboard, or a pizza Margarita in town.

  Dizzy has a nasty allergy, so I can’t give free rein to my culinary imagination. I have to cook for him without using dairy products, nuts, peppers, eggs or wheat, which greatly limits our menu. Especially as we don’t eat meat. Sometimes, when he’d been recklessly tempted by something unsuitable for him, his skin would be covered in an itchy rash, and little blisters filled with water. Then he’d start to scratch uncontrollably, and the scratched skin would change into festering wounds. So it was better not to experiment. Even Ali and his mixtures weren’t capable of calming Dizzy’s allergy. Its nature was mysterious and perfidious – the symptoms varied. No one had ever managed to catch it in the act with any test.

  From his tatty backpack Dizzy pulled an exercise book and a battery of coloured pens, at which he cast impatient glances throughout our meal; then, once we’d eaten every last scrap and were sipping black tea (the only kind that finds favour with us), he reported on what he had managed to do that week. Dizzy was translating Blake. Or so he had decided, and until now he had been rigorously pursuing his aim.

  Once, long ago, he had been my pupil. Now he had reached the age of thirty, but in fact he was no different in any way from the Dizzy who had accidentally locked himself in the lavatory during his secondary-school graduation English exam, with the result that he had failed it. He’d been too embarrassed to call for help. He’d always been slight, boyish, or even girlish, with small hands and soft hair.

  It’s strange that fate brought us together again many years after that unfortunate exam, here in the marketplace in town. I saw him one day as I was coming out of the post office. He was on his way to collect a book he had ordered on the internet. Unfortunately, I must have changed a lot, because he didn’t ins
tantly recognise me, but stared at me with his mouth open, blinking.

  ‘Is it you?’ he finally whispered, sounding surprised.

  ‘Dionizy?’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I live near here. What about you?’

  ‘So do I, Mrs Duszejko.’

  Then we spontaneously threw ourselves into each other’s arms. It turned out that while working in Wrocław as an IT specialist for the Police, he’d failed to avoid some reorganisation and restructuring. He’d been offered a job in the provinces, and even guaranteed temporary accommodation at a hostel until he found himself a proper flat. But Dizzy hadn’t found one, and was still living at the local workers’ hostel, a vast, ugly, concrete block where all the noisy tour groups stopped on their way to the Czech Republic, and businesses held their team-building events, with drunken parties until dawn. Dizzy had a large room in there, with a vestibule and a shared kitchen upstairs.

  Now he was working on The Book of Urizen, which seemed to me far harder than the earlier ones, Proverbs of Hell and the Songs of Innocence, with which I had devotedly helped him. In fact I hadn’t found it easy, for I couldn’t make head or tail of the beautiful, dramatic images that Blake conjured up in words. Did he really think like that? What was he describing? Where is that? Where is it happening, and when? Is it a fable or a myth? I kept asking Dizzy these questions.

  ‘It’s happening all the time and everywhere,’ he’d say with a gleam in his eye.

  Once he’d finished a passage, he’d solemnly read each line to me and wait for my comments. Sometimes I felt that I was only understanding the individual words, but failing to grasp their meaning. I wasn’t entirely sure how to help him. I didn’t like poetry; all the poems ever written seemed to me unnecessarily complicated and unclear. I couldn’t understand why these revelations weren’t recorded properly – in prose. Then Dizzy would lose patience and become exasperated. I liked teasing him this way.