Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

  I had exactly the same feeling.

  VII

  A SPEECH TO A POODLE

  A Horse misused upon the Road

  Calls to Heaven for Human blood.

  The Police harassed us all several times more. In law-abiding fashion, we presented ourselves for questioning, and took the opportunity to see to various things in town – we bought seeds, applied for an EU grant, and once we went to the cinema. For we always went together, even if only one of us was being questioned. Oddball admitted to the Police that he had heard the Commandant’s car whining and wheezing as it drove past our houses that afternoon. He said that the Commandant always drove along the side roads when he was drunk, so he hadn’t been particularly surprised. The policemen who took his statements must have been embarrassed.

  Unfortunately, I could not confirm what Oddball had said, although I very much wanted to. ‘I was at home, I didn’t hear any cars, nor did I see the Commandant. I must have been topping up the stove in the boiler room, and noises from the road aren’t audible in there.’

  And I soon stopped caring about it, though for the past few weeks the entire district had talked of nothing else, coming up with ever more elaborate theories. I simply did my best to ward off my thoughts on the matter – are there so few deaths around that one should take an obsessive interest in this one?

  I went back to one of my Enquiries. This time I carefully analysed the television schedule for as many channels as I could and studied the correlation between the contents of the films being broadcast and the configuration of the Planets on a given day. The mutual connections between them were highly distinct and plain to see. I had often wondered if the people who did the television programming were trying to display to us their extensive astrological knowledge. Or perhaps they just arranged the schedule unconsciously, unaffected by this vast store of knowledge. It could in fact be true that the correlations exist outside us, but that we pick them up quite unconsciously. For the time being I had limited my research to a small scale, only covering a few titles. For instance, I had noticed that a film entitled The Medium, very strange and thrilling, had been shown on television when the transiting Sun was entering an aspect with Pluto and the Planets in Scorpio. The film was about the desire for immortality and how to take possession of the human will. There was talk in it about states bordering on death, sexual obsession and other Plutonic matters.

  I succeeded in observing similar conformities with regard to the Alien films, set on a spaceship. Here subtle dependencies between Pluto, Neptune and Mars came into play. As soon as Mars was in aspect to these two Slow Planets at the same time, the television showed a repeat of one of the Alien films. Isn’t that fascinating?

  Coincidences of this kind are astonishing. I have enough empirical material to write an entire book about it. But for the time being I made do with a short essay, which I sent to several weeklies. I don’t think anyone will publish it, but perhaps someone will Reflect on it.

  In mid-March, once I was feeling completely well again, I set off on a wider round, meaning that I didn’t limit myself to inspecting the houses that were left in my care, but chose to turn an even bigger circle, going all the way to the forest, then across the meadows to the highway, making a stop at the precipice.

  At this time of year the world is at its most detestable. There are still large white patches of snow on the ground, hard and compacted, barely recognisable as the lovely, innocent fluff that falls at Christmas to our great joy. Now it’s like a knife blade, like a metal surface. It’s difficult to walk across, it traps the legs. If not for tall snow boots, it would wound the calves. The sky is low and grey – it looks as if you could reach out and touch it from the top of a small hill.

  As I walked, I considered the fact that I wouldn’t be able to go on living here forever, in this house on the Plateau, guarding the other houses. Eventually the Samurai would break down and there’d be no way to drive into town. The wooden steps would rot, snow would tear off the gutters, the stove would stop working, and one freezing cold February the pipes would burst. And I would grow weaker too. My Ailments were destroying my body, gradually, relentlessly. Each year my knees ached more, and my liver was clearly no longer fit for purpose. After all, I’ve been alive a long time. That’s what I was thinking, rather pitifully. But one day I would have to start giving it all some proper thought.

  Just then I saw a fast and agile swarm of Fieldfares. These are Birds that I only ever see in a flock. They move nimbly, like one large piece of living fretwork in the air. I read somewhere that were a Predator to attack them, one of those languid Hawks that hover in the sky like the Holy Spirit, for instance, the Fieldfares will defend themselves. For as a flock they’re capable of fighting, in a very special, perfidious way, and also of taking revenge – they swiftly soar into the air, then in perfect unison they defecate on their oppressor – dozens of white droppings land on the predator’s lovely wings, soiling them, gluing them together, and coating the feathers in corrosive acid. This forces the Hawk to come to its senses, cease its pursuit and land on the grass in disgust. It may well die of revulsion, so badly polluted are its feathers. It spends the whole day cleaning them, and then the next day too. It doesn’t sleep, it cannot sleep with such dirty wings. It’s sickened by its own overwhelming stink. It’s like a Mouse, like a Frog, like carrion. It can’t remove the hardened excrement with its beak, it’s freezing cold, and now the rainwater can easily pervade its glued-up feathers to reach its fragile skin. Its own kind, other Hawks, shun it too. It seems to them leprous, infected by a vile disease. Its majesty has been injured. All this is unbearable for the Hawk, and sometimes the Bird will die.

  Now the Fieldfares, aware of their strength in numbers, were frolicking in front of me, performing aerobatics.

  I also watched a pair of Magpies, and was surprised they had ventured all the way to the Plateau. But I know that these Birds spread their range faster than others, and in the near future they’ll be everywhere, as Pigeons are today. One for sorrow, two for joy. So they said when I was a child, but there were fewer Magpies then. Last autumn, after the nesting season, I would see hundreds of them flying off to their night roost. I wonder if that means joy multiplied.

  I watched the Magpies as they bathed in a puddle of melted snow. They gave me sidelong glances, but clearly weren’t afraid of me, for they boldly went on spattering the water with their wings and dipping their heads in it. Seeing their joy, no one could doubt how much fun a bath of this kind must be.

  Apparently Magpies cannot live without frequent baths. What’s more, they’re intelligent and insolent. As everyone knows, they steal material for their nests from other Birds and carry off shiny objects to put in them. I have also heard that sometimes they make mistakes and take glowing cigarette butts to their nests; like this they become fire-raisers, and burn down the building on which they’ve built their nest. Our good old Magpie has a lovely name in Latin: Pica pica.

  How great and full of life the world is.

  Far in the distance I also saw a familiar Fox whom I call Consul, so refined and well-bred is he. He always wanders the same paths; the winter reveals his routes – straight as an arrow, purposeful. He’s an old dog fox, he comes and goes from the Czech Republic – clearly he has business to attend to over here. I watched him through binoculars as he loped downhill at a light trot, following the tracks he’d left in the snow the last time he came this way – perhaps to make his potential stalkers think he’d only done it once. It was like seeing an old friend. Suddenly I noticed that this time Consul had turned off the beaten track and before I knew it, he’d vanished in the brushwood growing on the field boundary. There was a hunting pulpit at that spot, and another one a few hundred metres further on. I’d had dealings with them in the past. The Fox was gone from my sight, and as I had nothing else to do, I walked along the edge of the forest after him.

  Here there was a large, snow-coated field. In the autumn it had been ploughed, and now lumps of h
alf-frozen earth created a surface underfoot that was hard to walk across. I was just starting to regret my decision to follow Consul when suddenly, once I’d toiled a short way uphill, I saw what had attracted him – a large black shape on the snow, and dried bloodstains. Consul was standing a little higher up, gazing at me calmly, without fear, as if he were saying: ‘You see? You see? I’ve brought you here, but now you must deal with it.’ And off he ran.

  I went closer and saw that the shape was a Wild Boar, not quite an adult, lying in a pool of brown blood. The surrounding snow had been scraped away, exposing the ground, as if the Animal had thrashed about in convulsions. I could see other tracks around it too – of Foxes, Birds and Deer. Lots of Animals had been here. They’d come to see the murder for themselves and to mourn the poor young Boar. I preferred to examine their tracks rather than look at its body. How many times can one look at a dead body? Is there no end to it? I felt a stab of pain in my lungs and found it hard to breathe. I sat down on the snow, and once again my eyes began to stream with tears. I could feel the huge, unbearable burden of my own body. Why couldn’t I have gone in another direction, without following Consul? Why hadn’t I ignored his gloomy paths? Must I be a witness to every Crime? The day would have turned out quite differently, other days too perhaps. I could see where the bullets had struck – in the chest and belly. I could see where the Boar had been heading – towards the border, to the Czech Republic, away from the new pulpits, which stood on the other side of the forest. It must have been shot from there, so it must have run on, wounded, just a little further, in its effort to escape to the Czech Republic.

  Sorrow, I felt great sorrow, an endless sense of mourning for every dead Animal. One period of grief is followed by another, so I am in constant mourning. This is my natural state. I kneeled on the bloodstained snow and stroked the Boar’s coarse hair, cold and stiff.

  ‘You have more compassion for animals than for people.’

  ‘That’s not true. I feel just as sorry for both. But nobody shoots at defenceless people,’ I told the City Guard that same evening. ‘At least not these days,’ I added.

  ‘True. We’re a law-abiding country,’ confirmed the guard. He seemed good-natured and not very bright.

  ‘Its Animals show the truth about a country,’ I said. ‘Its attitude towards Animals. If people behave brutally towards Animals, no form of democracy is ever going help them, in fact nothing will at all.’

  At the Police station I had only submitted a report. They had brushed me off. They had handed me a sheet of paper and I had written the relevant facts on it. It occurred to me that the City Guard was also a public body responsible for law and order, so I had come here. I promised myself that if this didn’t help, I’d go to the Prosecution Service. Next day. To Black Coat. And I’d report a Murder.

  The handsome young man who looked a bit like Paul Newman had fetched a wad of papers out of a drawer and was now looking for a pen. A woman in uniform came in from the other room and placed a full mug in front of him.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ she asked me.

  I nodded gratefully. I was chilled to the bone. My legs were aching again.

  ‘Why didn’t they take away the body? What do you think?’ I asked, without expecting them to answer. They both seemed surprised by my visit and weren’t entirely sure how to behave. I accepted a mug of coffee from the nice young woman and answered my own question.

  ‘Because they didn’t even know they’d killed it. They shoot at everything illegally, so they shot it too, and then forgot about it. They thought it was sure to fall somewhere in the bushes, and nobody would ever know they’d killed a Boar beyond the legal deadline.’ I extracted a print-out from my bag and shoved it under the man’s nose. ‘I’ve checked the dates. It’s March now. Have a look, it’s not legal to shoot a Boar now,’ I concluded with satisfaction, feeling sure that my reasoning was beyond reproach, though from the logical point of view it would be hard to convince me that on 28 February you may kill someone, but the next day you may not.

  ‘I’m sorry, madam,’ replied Paul Newman, ‘but this isn’t really within our jurisdiction. Why don’t you go and report the matter to the vet? He’ll know what’s done in such cases. Maybe the boar was rabid?’

  I put down my mug with a thump. ‘No, it’s the killer who was rabid,’ I cried, because I know that argument well; the Slaughter of Animals is often justified by the fact that they may have been rabid. ‘It had been shot through the lungs, it must have died in agony, they shot it, and they thought it had run away alive. Besides, the vet is one of them, he hunts too.’

  The man cast a helpless glance at his female colleague. ‘What do you expect us to do?’

  ‘Set the wheels in motion. Punish the culprits. Change the law.’

  ‘That’s too much. You can’t want all those things,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes I can! And I’m the one to define what I can want,’ I shouted furiously.

  He was confused; the situation was slipping from his control. ‘All right, all right. We’ll report it formally.’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘First we’ll ask the Hunters Association for an explanation. Let them have their say.’

  ‘And this isn’t the first instance, because I found a Hare’s skull with a bullet hole in it on the other side of the Plateau. Do you know where? Very near the border. Now I call that copse the Site of the Skull.’

  ‘They might have lost one of their hares.’

  ‘Lost!’ I shrieked. ‘They shoot at everything that moves.’ I paused briefly, for I felt as if a large fist had hit me in the chest with all its might. ‘Even at Dogs.’

  ‘Sometimes dogs from the village kill animals. You have dogs too, and I remember that last year there were complaints about you…’

  I froze. The blow was very painful.

  ‘I don’t have my Dogs any more.’

  The coffee wasn’t good, the instant kind. I felt it in my stomach like a cramp. I bent double.

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’ asked the woman.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I replied. ‘At my age one has various Ailments. I shouldn’t drink instant coffee, and I advise you against it too. It’s bad for the stomach.’

  I put down the mug. ‘Well, then? Are you going to write the report?’ I asked, in what I considered to be a business-like tone.

  They exchanged glances again, and the man reluctantly drew the form towards him. ‘All right, then,’ he said, and I could almost hear what he was thinking: I’ll write it to shut her up but I won’t bother showing it to anyone, so I added: ‘And please give me a date-stamped copy with your signature.’

  As he was writing, I tried to slow down my thoughts, but they must have broken the speed limit by now, and were racing in my head, somehow managing to pervade my body and my blood stream as well. Yet paradoxically, from the feet, from the ground up, a strange calm was slowly spreading through me. It was a state I recognized – that same state of clarity, divine Wrath, terrible and unstoppable. I could feel my legs itching, and fire pouring into my blood from somewhere, and my blood flowing quickly, carrying this fire to my brain, and now my brain was glowing brightly, my fingertips were filling with fire, and so was my face, and it felt as if my entire body were being flooded by a bright aura, gently raising me upwards, tearing me free of the ground.

  ‘Just look at the way those pulpits work. It’s evil – you have to call it by its proper name: it’s cunning, treacherous, sophisticated evil – they build hayracks, scatter fresh apples and wheat to lure Animals there, and once the Creatures have become habituated, they shoot them in the head from their hiding place, from a pulpit,’ I began to say in a low tone, with my gaze fixed on the floor. I could sense they were looking at me anxiously while carrying on with their work. ‘I wish I knew Animal script,’ I said, ‘signs in which I could write warnings for them: “Don’t go over there,” “That food is lethal,” “Keep away from the pulpits, they won’t preach the gospel to
you from there, you won’t hear any good news over there, they won’t promise you salvation after death, they won’t take pity on your poor souls, for they say you haven’t got souls. They don’t see their brethren in you, they won’t give you their blessing. The nastiest criminal has a soul, but not you, beautiful Deer, nor you, Boar, nor you, wild Goose, nor you, Pig, nor you, Dog.” Killing has become exempt from punishment. And as it goes unpunished, nobody notices it any more. And as nobody notices it, it doesn’t exist. When you walk past a shop window where large red chunks of butchered bodies are hanging on display, do you stop to wonder what it really is? You never think twice about it, do you? Or when you order a kebab or a chop – what are you actually getting? There’s nothing shocking about it. Crime has come to be regarded as a normal, everyday activity. Everyone commits it. That’s just how the world would look if concentration camps became the norm. Nobody would see anything wrong with them.’

  That’s what I was saying while he was writing. The woman had left the room, and now I could hear her talking on the phone. No one was listening to me, but I went on with my speech. I couldn’t stop, because the words were coming to me from somewhere of their own accord – I simply had to utter them. After each sentence I felt relief. And I was further stimulated by the fact that a client had just come in with a little Poodle; clearly perturbed by my tone, he gently closed the door and at once began whispering to Newman. His Poodle sat down quietly, tilted its head and looked at me. So I carried on:

  ‘In fact Man has a great responsibility towards wild Animals – to help them to live their lives, and it’s his duty towards domesticated Animals to return their love and affection, for they give us far more than they receive from us. And they need to be able to live their lives with dignity, to be able to settle their Accounts and register their semester in the karmic index – I was an Animal, I lived and I ate, I grazed in green pastures, I bore Young, I kept them warm with my body, I built nests, I performed my duty. When you kill them, and they die in Fear and Terror – like that Boar whose body lay before me yesterday, and is still lying there, defiled, muddied and smeared with blood, reduced to carrion – you doom them to hell, and the whole world changes into hell. Can’t people see that? Are their minds incapable of reaching beyond petty, selfish pleasures? People have a duty towards Animals to lead them – in successive lives – to Liberation. We’re all travelling in the same direction, from dependence to freedom, from ritual to free choice.’