Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

  So I spoke, using wise words.

  From a back room a cleaner emerged with a plastic pail and stared at me in curiosity. Stony-faced, the guard was still filling in his form.

  ‘You’ll say it’s just one Boar,’ I continued. ‘But what about the deluge of butchered meat that falls on our cities day by day like never-ending, apocalyptic rain? This rain heralds slaughter, disease, collective madness, the obfuscation and contamination of the Mind. For no human heart is capable of bearing so much pain. The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing. To stop the truth from reaching him by wrapping it in illusion, in idle chatter. The world is a prison full of suffering, so constructed that in order to survive one must inflict pain on others. Do you hear me?’ I said. But now even the cleaner, disappointed by my speech, had set about his work, so I was only talking to the Poodle.

  ‘What sort of a world is this? Someone’s body is made into shoes, into meatballs, sausages, a bedside rug, someone’s bones are boiled to make broth…Shoes, sofas, a shoulder bag made of someone’s belly, keeping warm with someone else’s fur, eating someone’s body, cutting it into bits and frying it in oil…Can it really be true? Is this nightmare really happening? This mass killing, cruel, impassive, automatic, without any pangs of conscience, without the slightest pause for thought, though plenty of thought is applied to ingenious philosophies and theologies. What sort of a world is this, where killing and pain are the norm? What on earth is wrong with us?’

  Silence fell. My head was spinning, and suddenly I started to cough. Just then the man with the Poodle cleared his throat.

  ‘You’re right, madam. You’re absolutely right,’ he said.

  This confused me. I glanced at him, angrily at first, but I could see that he was moved. He was a lean, elderly gentleman, neatly dressed, in a suit with a waistcoat, sure to be straight from Good News’ shop. His Poodle was clean and well-groomed – I’d say he looked grand. But my declaration had made no impression on the guard. He was one of those ironists who don’t like pathos, so they button their lip to avoid being infected by it. They fear pathos more than hell.

  ‘You’re exaggerating,’ was all he said at last, as he calmly laid the sheets of paper on his desk. ‘I find it truly puzzling. Why is it that old women…women of your age are so concerned about animals? Aren’t there any people left for them to take care of? Is it because their children have grown up and they don’t have anyone to look after any more, but their instincts prompt them to care for something else? Women have an instinct for caring, don’t they?’ He glanced at his colleague, but she made no gesture to confirm this Hypothesis. ‘Take my granny for example. She has seven cats at home, and she also feeds all the local cats in her area. Would you read this, please?’ he said, passing me a sheet of paper with a short text printed on it. ‘You’re approaching this too emotionally. You’re more concerned about the fate of animals than people,’ he repeated himself in conclusion.

  I didn’t feel like speaking any more. I thrust a hand into my pocket, pulled out a ball of bloodstained Boar bristles and put it down on the desk in front of them. Their first impulse was to lean forward, but they instantly recoiled in disgust.

  ‘Christ Almighty, what is that? Yuck,’ cried Newman the guard. ‘Bloody hell, take it away!’

  I leaned back comfortably in my chair and said with satisfaction: ‘Those are Remains. I pick them up and collect them. I have boxes at home, properly labelled, to store them in. Hair and bones. One day it’ll be possible to clone all the murdered Animals. So perhaps there’ll be some sort of redress.’

  ‘What a nerve,’ said the female guard into the telephone, leaning over the hairball, her mouth twisted in disgust. ‘What a nerve you have!’

  Caked blood and muck had soiled their papers. The guard leaped to his feet and backed away from the desk.

  ‘Are you repulsed by blood?’ I asked mischievously. ‘But you like black pudding, don’t you?’

  ‘Please calm down. That’s enough of your nonsense. After all, we’re trying to help you.’

  I signed every copy of the report, and then the female guard took me gently by the arm and led me to the door. Like a madwoman. I didn’t resist. Meanwhile, she never stopped talking on the phone.

  Once again I had the same dream. Once again my Mother was in the boiler room. Once again I was angry with her for coming here.

  I looked her straight in the face, but her gaze kept veering sideways, she couldn’t look me in the eyes. She was being evasive, as if she knew an embarrassing secret. She kept smiling, and then suddenly becoming serious – the expression on her face was fluid, the image was rippling. I said I didn’t want her to keep coming here. This is a place for the living, not the dead. Then she turned to face the door, and I saw that my Grandmother was standing there too, a handsome young woman in a grey dress. She was holding a handbag. They both looked as if they were just on their way to church. I remembered that handbag – a funny one from before the war. What can you have in your handbag when you come to visit from the spirit world? A handful of dust? Ashes? A stone? A mouldering handkerchief for your non-existent nose? Now they were both standing in front of me, so close that I thought I could smell their scent – old perfume, bed linen neatly piled in a wooden wardrobe.

  ‘Go on, go home,’ I said, waving my arms at them, as I had at the Deer.

  But they didn’t move. So I was the first to turn around and get out of there, locking the door behind me.

  The old method for dealing with bad dreams is to tell them aloud above the toilet bowl, and then flush them away.

  VIII

  URANUS IN LEO

  Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.

  Obviously, the first Horoscope a Person ever calculates is their own, and so it was in my case. And then a structure emerged, supported by a circle. I examined it in astonishment – is that me? Here before me lay the blueprint for the Person I am, my actual self in a basic written record, at once the simplest and the most complicated possible. Like a mirror that changes the sensory image of the face into a simple geometric chart. Everything about my own face that seemed to me familiar and obvious had vanished; what remained was a distinctive scattering of dots that symbolised the planets set against the celestial vault. Nothing ages, nothing is subject to change, their positions in the firmament are unique and permanent. The hour of birth divides the space within the circle into houses, and thus the chart becomes practically unique, like a fingerprint.

  I think we all feel great ambivalence at the sight of our own Horoscope. On the one hand we’re proud to see that the sky is imprinted on our individual life, like a postmark with a date stamped on a letter – this makes it distinct, one of a kind. But at the same time it’s a form of imprisonment in space, like a tattooed prison number. There’s no escaping it. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful. We’d prefer to think we’re free, able to reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. This connection with something as great and monumental as the sky makes us feel uncomfortable. We’d rather be small, and then our petty little sins would be forgivable.

  Therefore I’m convinced that we should get to know our prison very well.

  By profession I am a bridge-construction engineer – have I mentioned that already? I have built bridges in Syria and in Libya, and also in Poland – near Elbląg, and two in Podlasie. The one in Syria was a strange bridge: it spanned the banks of a river that only appeared periodically. Water flowed in its bed for two or three months, then soaked into the sun-baked earth, changing it into something like a bob-sleigh track. Wild desert Dogs would chase each other along it.

  I always gained the greatest pleasure from transforming concepts into figures – from these figures a specific image arose, then a drawing, and then a design. The figures came together on my piece of paper and assumed a meaningful shape. My talent for algebra was useful to me for Horoscopes in the days when one had to do all one’s calculation
s on a slide rule. Nowadays that’s unnecessary; there are computer programs to do it for us. Who still remembers the slide rule, when the cure for any thirst for knowledge is just a mouse-click away? But it was then, during the best phase in my life, that my Ailments began, and I had to return to Poland. I spent a long time in hospital, but it still wasn’t clear what was really wrong with me.

  For a time I slept with a Protestant, who in his turn designed motorways, and he told me, probably quoting Luther, that he who suffers sees the back of God. I wondered if this meant the shoulders, or the buttocks perhaps, and what this divine back looked like, since we’re incapable of imagining the front. Maybe it meant that he who suffers has special access to God, by a side door, he is blessed, he embraces some sort of truth which without suffering would be hard to comprehend. So in a way the only Person who’s healthy is one who suffers, however strange it might sound. I think that would be in harmony with the rest.

  For a year I couldn’t walk at all, and by the time my Ailments began to ease a little, I knew I would never be able to build bridges across rivers in the desert again, and that I couldn’t stray too far from a fridge with glucose in it. So I changed profession and became a teacher. I worked at a school and taught the children various useful things: English, handicrafts and geography. I always did my best to capture their attention fully, to have them remember important things not out of fear of a bad mark but out of genuine passion.

  It gave me a lot of pleasure. Children have always attracted me more than adults, for I too am a little infantile. There’s nothing wrong with that. The main thing is that I’m aware of it. Children are soft and supple, open-minded and unpretentious. And they don’t engage in the sort of small talk in which every adult is able to gabble their life away. Unfortunately, the older they are, the more they succumb to the power of reason; they become citizens of Ulro, as Blake would have put it, and refuse to be led down the right path as easily and naturally any more. That’s why I only liked the smaller children. The older ones, over the age of ten, say, were even more loathsome than adults. At that age the children lost their individuality. I could see them ossifying as they inevitably entered adolescence, which gradually forced them to be hooked on being the same as others. In a few cases there was a bit of an inner struggle as they wrestled with this new state of being, but almost all of them ended up capitulating. I never made the effort to keep in touch with them after that – for it would be like having to witness the Fall, yet again. Usually I taught children up to this limit, at most until the fifth year.

  Finally I was pensioned off. Far too early, in my opinion. It’s hard to understand why because I was a good teacher, with plenty of experience, and free of troubles, apart from my Ailments, but they only made their presence known from time to time. So I went to the education board, where I submitted the relevant certificates, references and applications to be allowed to go on teaching. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I had run into a bad moment – a time of reforms, overhauling the system, changing the program, and rising unemployment.

  Then I looked for work in another school, and then another, half-time and quarter-time, by the hour – I’d have taken a job by the minute if only they’d offered one, but wherever I went I could sense an army of other, younger people standing behind me, breathing down my neck, impatiently treading on my tail, even though it’s a thankless, badly paid profession.

  Only here did I succeed. Once I’d moved out of the city, bought this house and taken on the job as guardian of my neighbours’ properties, a breathless young headmistress came across the hills to see me. ‘I know you’re a teacher,’ she said – and she used the present tense, which instantly won me over, for I regard my profession as a mental attitude rather than a set of isolated activities. She offered me a few hours teaching English at her school, working with small children, the kind I like. So I agreed, and once a week I started teaching English to seven- and eight-year-olds, who approach learning very enthusiastically but who just as quickly and suddenly get bored. The headmistress wanted me to teach music too – she must have heard us singing ‘Amazing Grace’ – but that would have been beyond my strength. It’s quite enough for me to scurry down to the village every Wednesday, to have to dress in clean clothes, brush my hair and put on a little make-up – I paint my eyelids green and powder my face. All this costs me a great deal of time and patience. I could have taken the PE class too, I am tall and strong. I used to go in for sports. Somewhere in the city I still have my medals. Though I had no chance of teaching PE any more because of my age.

  But I’ll admit that now, in winter, it’s hard for me to get there. On teaching days I have to get up earlier than usual, when it’s still dark, stoke the fire, clear the snow from the Samurai, and if it’s parked away from the house on the surfaced road, I must wade through the snow to reach it, which isn’t fun at all. Winter mornings are made of steel; they have a metallic taste and sharp edges. On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it’s plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure.

  Unfortunately, neither Dizzy nor any of my friends shares my passion for Astrology, so I try not to flaunt it. They regard me as a crank already. I only spill the beans when I need to obtain someone’s date and place of birth, as in the case of the Commandant. For this purpose I have questioned almost everyone from the Plateau and half the town. In giving me their date of birth, people are actually revealing their real name to me, they’re showing me their celestial date-stamp, opening their past and future to me. But there are many people whom I shall never have the opportunity to ask.

  Obtaining a date of birth is relatively easy. All it takes is an identity card, or just about any other document, and sometimes, by chance, it turns up on the internet. Dizzy has access to all sorts of lists and tables, though I won’t elaborate here. But what really matters is the time of birth. That’s not recorded in the documents, and yet it’s the time that’s the real key to a Person. A Horoscope without the exact time is fairly worthless – we know WHAT, but we don’t know HOW and WHERE.

  I tried explaining to the reluctant Dizzy that in the past Astrology was much the same as socio-biology is today. Then at least he seemed a little more interested. There’s nothing outrageous about this comparison. The Astrologer believes that the heavenly bodies have an influence on human personality, while the socio-biologist thinks it’s the mysterious emanations of molecular bodies that affect us. The difference is in scale. Neither of them knows what’s behind this influence or how it is transmitted. They’re really talking about the same thing, except that they’re using different scales. Sometimes I’m surprised by the similarity, and by the fact that while I adore Astrology, I have no respect for socio-biology at all.

  In a natal Horoscope the date of birth determines the date of death as well. That’s obvious – anyone who has been born is going to die. There are many places in the Horoscope that point us towards the time and nature of death – one simply needs to know how to spot and connect them. For example, one has to check the transitory aspects of Saturn to the hyleg, and what’s going on in the eighth house. Also to cast an eye on the relative position of the Lights – meaning the Sun and Moon.

  It is quite complicated, and it could be boring for anyone who isn’t an expert. But when you look carefully, I told Dizzy, when you join up the facts, you’ll see that the concurrences of events down here with the position of the planets up there are crystal-clear. It always puts me into a state of exhilaration. But the source of my excitement is understanding. That’s why Dizzy cannot feel it.

  In my defence of Astrology I’m often forced to use statistical arguments, which I hate, but which always appeal to young minds. Without any thought but with religious zeal, young people believe in statistics. It’s enough to give them something expressed as a percentage, or as a probability, and they take it in good faith. So then I referred to Gauquelin and his ‘Mars effect’ – a phenomenon that seems bizarre, but the s
tatistics confirm it. What Gauquelin did was to demonstrate that, statistically, in the Horoscopes of sportsmen, Mars – the planet of fitness, competition and so on – is more frequently found in one particular location than in the Horoscopes of non-sportsmen. Of course Dizzy made light of this proof, and of all the other evidence that he found uncomfortable. Even when I offered him a whole string of examples of predictions that had come true. For instance, concerning Hitler, when Himmler’s court Astrologer, Wilhelm Wolf, predicted ‘eine grosse Gefahr für Hitler am 20.07.44’, meaning great danger for Hitler on that day, and as we know, that was the date of the assassination attempt at the Wolf’s Lair. And later on, the same sinister Astrologer predicted impassively: ‘dass Hitler noch vor dem 7.05.45 eines geheimnissvollen Todes sterben werde’, meaning that Hitler would die a mysterious death before the seventh of May.

  ‘Incredible,’ said Dizzy. ‘How’s that possible?’ he asked himself, but then instantly forgot it all, and let his incredulity flare up again.

  I tried using other methods to convince him, by showing him the perfect harmony between what happens down here and what’s going on up there.

  ‘Look at this, for example, look carefully – the summer of 1980, Jupiter in conjunction with Saturn in Libra. A powerful conjunction. Jupiter represents the authorities, and Saturn the workers. What’s more, Wałęsa has the Sun in Libra. Do you see?’