Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

  A young man with a shaved head who’d been asking about Nike or Puma track suits and was now rummaging among the clothes rails responded. ‘It wasn’t a racket, it was the mafia,’ he said, hardly opening his mouth at all. ‘They were importing furs illegally from Russia, using his farm as a cover. He hadn’t settled up with the Russian mafia, so he got scared and did a runner.’

  I found this topic alarming. I was starting to feel afraid.

  ‘Is your Poodle a Dog or a Bitch?’ I politely asked the old gentleman, in a desperate attempt to divert the conversation onto less sinister tracks.

  ‘My Maxy? He’s a boy of course. Still a bachelor,’ he said, laughing. But he was clearly more interested in the local gossip, because he turned to the skinhead and continued: ‘He was very wealthy. He had a hotel on the main road out of Kłodzko. A delicatessen. A fox farm. A slaughterhouse and meat-processing plant. A stud farm. But how much more there was in his wife’s name!’

  ‘Here’s a size eighty for you,’ I said, handing him a pretty good pair of grey trousers.

  He examined them carefully and put on his glasses to read the laundry label.

  ‘Oh yes, I like these, I’ll take them. You know what, I like things that are trim, nice and close-fitting. They emphasise the figure.’

  ‘Well, sir, how different people can be. I always buy everything too big. It gives me freedom,’ I said.

  Dizzy had received some encouraging news. The local weekly, the Kłodzko Gazette, had offered to publish his translations of Blake in its poetry corner. He was excited and intimidated all at once. We drove along the almost deserted highway towards the border.

  ‘First I’d like to translate his Letters, and only then go back to the poetry. But if they’re asking for poetry…My God, what can I give them? What shall we give them first?’

  To tell the truth, I couldn’t concentrate on Blake any more. I saw that we were passing the shabby buildings at the border crossing and entering the Czech Republic. The road here was better and Dizzy’s car stopped rattling.

  ‘Dizzy, is it true about those foxes?’ Good News asked him from the back seat. ‘That they escaped from Innerd’s farm and are going about the forest?’

  Dizzy confirmed that it was. ‘It happened a few days ago. At first the Police thought he’d sold all the animals to someone before disappearing. But it looks as if he let them go. Strange, isn’t it?’

  ‘Are they searching for him?’ I asked.

  Dizzy replied that no one had reported him missing, so there was no reason to look for him. His wife hadn’t come forward, nor had his children. Maybe he’d given himself a holiday. His wife claimed it wasn’t the first time it had happened. Once he’d vanished for a week, and then called from the Dominican Republic. Until the banks were after him there was no reason for alarm.

  ‘A man’s free to do what he wants with his life, until he falls foul of the banks,’ Dizzy sermonised with contagious certainty. I think he’d make a superb press spokesman for the Police.

  Dizzy also said the Police were trying to establish the source of the money that the Commandant had under his trouser belt. It was a bribe. By now they were sure he’d been on his way back from a meeting with Innerd. It takes the Police a long time to establish things that seem obvious.

  ‘And there’s another thing,’ he said finally. ‘The weapon that must have been used to kill the Commandant had traces of animal blood on it.’

  We called at the bookshop at the last moment, just as it was about to close. When silver-haired Honza handed him the two books he had ordered, I saw a blush appear on Dizzy’s cheeks. Beaming with joy, he looked at us, then raised his arms, as if to give Honza a hug. They were old editions from the 1970s, properly annotated. Like gold dust. We all went home in a state of elation, and no one mentioned the sinister incidents again.

  Dizzy lent me the Selected Letters for a few days, and as soon as I got home, I lit the stove, made myself some strong tea and started to read.

  One passage particularly appealed to me, so I translated it quickly for myself on a paper bag.

  ‘I believe my Constitution to be a good one,’ wrote Blake, ‘but it has many Peculiarities that no one but myself can know. When I was young, many places always laid me up the day after, & sometimes two or three days, with precisely the same Complaint & the same torment of the Stomach. Sir Francis Bacon would say, it is want of Discipline in Mountainous Places. Sir Francis Bacon is a Liar. No discipline will turn one Man into another, even in the least particle, & such discipline I call Presumption & Folly.’

  I found this captivating. I read and read, unable to stop. And perhaps it was just as the Author would have wished – everything that I read pervaded my dreams – and all Night I saw visions.

  IX

  THE LARGEST IN THE SMALLEST

  A Skylark wounded in the wing,

  A Cherubim does cease to sing.

  Spring starts in May and is unwittingly heralded by the Dentist, who brings his ancient drilling equipment and his equally antique dental chair outside. He dusts it off with a few flicks of a cloth, one, two, three, and it’s free of cobwebs and hay – both pieces of equipment spent the winter in the barn, and were only brought out from time to time when an urgent need arose. The Dentist didn’t really work in winter; it’s impossible to do anything here in winter, people lose interest in their health, and besides, it’s dark and his sight is poor. He needs the bright light of May or June to shine straight into the mouths of his patients, recruited from among the forest workers and moustachioed men who spend all day standing about on the little bridge in the village, and as a result are known locally as the Bridge Brigade.

  Once the April mud had dried, I started to venture more and more boldly into the neighbourhood on the pretext of making my rounds. At this time of year I was happy to drop in at Achthozja, the hamlet next to the quarry, where the Dentist lived. And like every year I came upon an astonishing sight – there on the brilliant green grass, under a sheet of blue sky, stood the dilapidated white dental chair, with someone half-lying on it, mouth wide open to the Sun, while the Dentist leaned over him, drill in hand. Meanwhile, his foot was moving monotonously, steadily pressing on the drill pedal. And a few metres away another two or three fellows were watching this scene in rapt silence as they sipped their beers.

  The Dentist’s main occupation was pulling out aching teeth, and sometimes, more rarely, treating them. He also made dentures. Before I knew of his existence, I had very often wondered what sort of a race could have settled here, in this area. Many of the local people had quite distinctive teeth, as if they were all a family, with the same genes or the same configuration in their Horoscope. Especially the older ones: their teeth were long and narrow, with a blue tinge. Strange teeth. I came up with an alternative Hypothesis too, for I had heard that under the Plateau there were deep seams of uranium, which, as everyone knows, has an effect on various Anomalies.

  By now I knew that these were the Dentist’s false teeth, his trademark, his brand. Like every artist, he was unique.

  In my view he could have been a tourist attraction for Kłodzko Valley, if only what he did were legal. Unfortunately, some years ago he was stripped of his licence to practise his profession because of alcohol abuse. It’s odd that they don’t take away a dentist’s professional licence because of poor sight. This Ailment could be far more dangerous for the patient. And the Dentist wore powerful spectacles, with one of the lenses taped into place.

  That day he was drilling a man’s tooth. It was hard to recognise the patient’s facial features, twisted in pain and mildly numbed by alcohol, with which the Dentist anaesthetised his patients. The dreadful noise of the drill bored into my brain, stirring the ghastliest childhood memories.

  ‘How’s life?’ I said in greeting.

  ‘Bearable,’ replied the Dentist with a broad smile, which reminded me of the old adage ‘Physician, heal thyself’. ‘You haven’t been here for ages. I think the last time we met was when
you were looking for your…’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I interrupted him. ‘It was impossible to walk this far in the winter. By the time I’d dug myself out of the snow it would be dark.’

  He went back to his drilling and I stood with the other onlookers, pensively watching the drill working in the man’s mouth.

  ‘Have you seen the white foxes?’ one of the men asked me. He had a beautiful face. If his life had turned out differently I’m sure he’d have been a film star. But now his good looks were disappearing beneath a network of furrows and wrinkles.

  ‘They say Innerd let them out before he ran off,’ said a second man.

  ‘Maybe he had pangs of conscience,’ I added. ‘Maybe the Foxes ate him.’

  The Dentist glanced at me with curiosity. He nodded and sank the drill into the patient’s tooth. The poor man jolted in the chair.

  ‘Isn’t it possible to fill a tooth without all that drilling?’ I asked.

  But no one seemed particularly concerned about the patient.

  ‘First Big Foot, then the Commandant, now Innerd…’ sighed the Beautiful Man. ‘A man’s afraid to leave the house. After dark I tell my old woman to deal with everything outside.’

  ‘You’ve found an intelligent solution,’ I said, and then slowly added: ‘Animals are taking revenge on them for hunting.’

  ‘You must be joking…Big Foot didn’t hunt,’ said the Beautiful Man doubtfully.

  ‘But he was a beater,’ said someone else. ‘Mrs Duszejko’s right. And he was the biggest poacher around here, wasn’t he?’

  The Dentist smeared a bit of white paste onto a little plate and put it into the drilled tooth with a spatula. ‘Yes, it’s possible,’ he muttered to himself. ‘It really is possible – there has to be some justice, doesn’t there? Yes, yes. Animals.’

  The patient moaned pitifully.

  ‘Do you believe in divine providence?’ the Dentist suddenly asked me, coming to a standstill over the patient. There was a note of provocation in his voice.

  The men sniggered, as if they had heard something improper. I had to think about it.

  ‘Because I do,’ he said, without waiting for an answer. He gave the patient a friendly clap on the shoulder, and the man leaped from the chair, happy. ‘Next,’ he said. One of the group of onlookers stepped forward and reluctantly sat in the chair.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked the Dentist.

  In reply the man opened his mouth, and the Dentist peeked into it. He instantly recoiled, saying: ‘What the fuck!’ which must have been the shortest possible assessment of the state of the patient’s dentition. For a while he prodded with his fingers to check how secure the man’s teeth were, and then reached behind him for a bottle of vodka. ‘Here, drink up. We’ll pull it out.’

  The man mumbled something indistinct, utterly disheartened by this unwelcome verdict. He accepted the near full tumbler of vodka proffered by the Dentist and downed it in one. I was sure he wouldn’t feel any pain after that much anaesthetic.

  While we were waiting for the alcohol to take effect, the men excitedly began to talk about the quarry, which apparently is going to be reopened. Year by year it will swallow the Plateau, until it has devoured the whole thing. We’ll have to move away from here. If they do actually reopen it, the Dentist’s hamlet will be the first to be relocated.

  ‘No, I don’t believe in divine providence,’ I said. ‘Form a protest committee,’ I advised them. ‘Organise a demonstration.’

  ‘Après nous le déluge,’ said the Dentist, sticking his fingers into the mouth of his patient, barely conscious by now. Then, with ease, without effort, he extracted a blackened tooth. All we heard was a slight crack. It made me feel faint.

  ‘They should take revenge for all of it,’ said the Dentist. ‘Animals should fuck it all to buggery.’

  ‘Quite so. Sodding well screw it into oblivion,’ I followed his lead, and the men glanced at me with surprise and respect.

  I went home by a roundabout route; by now it was well into the afternoon. And that was when, at the edge of the forest, I saw the white Foxes, two of them. They were moving slowly, one behind the other. Their whiteness against the green meadow was like something from another world. They looked like the diplomatic service of the Animal Kingdom, come here to reconnoitre.

  At the start of May the dandelions flowered. In a good year they were already in bloom on the holiday weekend, when the owners arrived at their houses for the first time after the winter. In a less good year they didn’t carpet the meadows in yellow spots until Victory Day, on the eighth. Every year, Dizzy and I admired this miracle of miracles.

  Unfortunately, for Dizzy it was a harbinger of tough times; two weeks later his various allergies would hit him – tears streamed from his eyes, he choked and suffocated. In town it was just about bearable, but on Fridays when he came to see me I was obliged to shut all the doors and windows tight to stop the invisible allergens from getting inside his nose. In June, when the grasses were flowering, we had to move our translation sessions to his place in town.

  After such a long, tiring, barren winter, the Sun was having an exceptionally bad effect on me too. I couldn’t sleep in the mornings, I’d get up at dawn and never stop feeling anxious. All winter I’d had to defend myself against the wind eternally blowing on the Plateau, but now I threw the windows and doors wide open to let it come inside and blow away my musty anxieties and every possible Ailment.

  Everything was starting to crackle, I could sense a feverish vibration under the grass, under the layer of earth, as if vast, underground nerves, swollen with effort, were just about to burst. I was finding it hard to rid myself of the feeling that under it all lurked a strong, mindless will, as repulsive as the force that made the Frogs climb on top of each other and endlessly copulate in Oddball’s pond.

  As soon as the Sun came close to the horizon, a family of Bats began to make regular appearances. They’d fly in noiselessly, softly; I always thought of their flight as being fluid. Once I counted twelve of them, as they flew around each house in turn. I’d love to know how a Bat sees the world; just once I’d like to fly across the Plateau in its body. How do we all look down here, as perceived by its senses? Like shadows? Like bundles of shudders, sources of noise?

  Towards evening I would sit outside and wait for them to appear, to fly in one by one from over the Professor’s house, as they visited each of us in turn. I gently waved to them in greeting. The truth is I had a lot in common with them – I too saw the world in other spheres, upside down. I too preferred the Dusk. I wasn’t suited to living in the Sunlight.

  My skin reacted badly to the cruel, harsh rays, not yet tempered by any leaves or fluffy clouds. It became red and irritated. As every year, in the first few days of summer small, itchy blisters began to appear on it. I treated them with sour milk and the burn ointment that Dizzy gave me. I had to fetch out last year’s wide-brimmed hats, which I secured under my chin with ribbons to stop the wind from tearing them off.

  One Wednesday when I was coming home from school in one of these hats I took a roundabout route in order to…in fact, I don’t really know why I took the detour. There are places we don’t choose to visit, and yet something draws us to them. Possibly that something is Dread. Maybe that’s why, just like Good News, I like horror stories too.

  By some strange chance, that Wednesday I found myself near the Fox farm. I was driving home in the Samurai when suddenly, at the crossroads, I turned in the opposite direction from my usual route. Soon after, the asphalt came to an end, and at this point I could smell the dreadful stench that scared away anyone out for a walk. The nasty smell was still here, though officially the farm had closed down two weeks ago.

  The Samurai was behaving as if it had a sense of smell too – it stalled. I sat in the car, assaulted by the stink, and a hundred metres ahead of me I saw some buildings surrounded by a high wire fence – some barracks lined up one behind the other. Along the top of the fence ran triple-strand barbed wire
. The Sun was dazzlingly bright. Each blade of grass cast a sharp shadow, each branch resembled a skewer. It was as silent as the grave. I pricked up my ears, as if expecting to hear horrifying sounds coming from behind this barricade, the echoes of what had happened here in the past. But it was plain to see there wasn’t a living soul inside, neither human nor animal. In the course of the summer the farm would be overgrown with burdock and nettles. In a year or two it would vanish among the greenery, at best becoming a house of horror. It crossed my mind that one could set up a museum here. As a warning.

  A little later I started the car and drove back to the main road.

  Oh yes, I knew what the missing owner looked like. Not long after I moved here I met him on our little bridge. It was a strange encounter. I didn’t yet know who he was.

  That afternoon I was on my way home in the Samurai from shopping in town. Ahead of the bridge across our stream I saw a four-wheel drive; it had driven onto the verge, as if it had suddenly felt the urge to stretch its bones: all its doors were open. I slowed down. I don’t like those high, powerful cars, made with war in mind, rather than walks in the lap of nature. Their large wheels churn up the ruts in the dirt roads and damage the footpaths. Their mighty engines make a lot of noise and produce exhaust fumes. I am convinced that their owners have small dicks and compensate for this deficiency by having large cars. Every year I protest to the village representative against the rallies held in these dreadful vehicles, and I issue a petition. I get a perfunctory reply, saying that the representative will consider my comments in due course, and that’s the end of it. But now one of them was parked here, right by the stream, at the way in to the valley, almost on my doorstep. Driving very slowly indeed, I scrutinised this undesirable guest.