Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

  I had stopped talking about my own Theory. Indeed, I’d just been exposing myself to ridicule. The Grey Lady was right – people are only capable of understanding what they invent for themselves and feed on. The idea of a conspiracy among people from the provincial authorities, corrupt and demoralised, fitted the sort of story the television and the newspapers revelled in reporting. Neither the newspapers nor the television are interested in Animals, unless a Tiger escapes from the zoo.

  The winter starts straight after All Saints’ Day. That’s the way here; the autumn takes away all her Tools and toys, shakes off the leaves – they won’t be needed any more – sweeps them under the field boundary and strips the colours from the grass until it goes dull and grey. Then everything becomes black against white: snow falls on the ploughed fields.

  ‘Drive your plow over the bones of the dead,’ I said to myself in the words of Blake; is that how it went?

  I stood in the window and watched nature’s high-speed housework until dusk fell, and from then on the march of winter proceeded in darkness. Next morning I fetched out my down jacket, the red one from Good News’ shop, and my woollen hats.

  The Samurai’s windows were coated in hoar frost, still young, very fine and delicate, like a cosmic mycelium. Two days after All Saints’ I drove to town, with the aim of visiting Good News and buying some snow boots. From now on one had to be prepared for the worst. The sky hung low, as usual at this time of year. Not all the votive candles at the cemeteries had burned out yet, and through the wire fence I could see the coloured lights flickering in the daytime, as if with these feeble little flames people were trying to assist the Sun as it weakened in Scorpio. Pluto had taken control of the World. It made me feel sad. Yesterday I had written emails to my gracious employers to say that this year I would no longer be taking on the task of caring for their houses in winter.

  I was on my way before I remembered that today was 3 November, and that there would be celebrations in town for Saint Hubert’s Day.

  Whenever some dubious rip-off is organised, they always drag children into it from the very start. I remember them doing the same thing to us for the communist-era 1 May parade. Long, long ago. Now the children were obliged to take part in the Kłodzko County Children and Young Adults’ Creative Arts Contest, on the theme ‘Saint Hubert as the model modern ecologist’, and then in a show about the life and death of the saint. I had written a letter on this matter to the education board in October, but I hadn’t had an answer. I regarded this – like so many things – as scandalous.

  There were lots of cars parked along the road, which reminded me about the mass, and I decided to go into the church to see the result of the lengthy autumn preparations that had caused so much harm to my English lessons. I glanced at my watch and realised the mass had already started.

  I happen to have occasionally entered a church and sat there in peace a while with the people. I’ve always liked the fact that people can be together in there, without having to talk to one another. If they could chat, they’d instantly start telling each other nonsense, or gossip, they’d start making things up and showing off. But here they sit in the pews, each one deep in thought, mentally reviewing what has happened lately and imagining what’s going to happen soon. Like this, they monitor their own lives. Just like everyone else, I would sit in a pew and sink into a sort of semi-conscious state. My thoughts would move idly, as if coming from outside me, from other people’s heads, or maybe from the heads of the wooden angels positioned nearby. Every time, something new occurred to me, something different than if I were doing my thinking at home. In this way the church is a good place.

  Sometimes I have felt as if I could read the minds of the other people in here if I wanted to. On several occasions I seemed to hear other people’s thoughts: ‘What pattern should we have for the new wallpaper in the bedroom? Is the smooth kind better, or the kind that’s stamped with a subtle design? The money in my account is earning too little interest, other banks give better rates, first thing on Monday I must check their offers and transfer the cash. Where does she get her money from? How can she afford the things she’s wearing? Maybe they don’t eat, they just spend all their income on her clothes… How much he’s aged, how grey he’s gone! To think he was once the best-looking man in the village. But now he’s a wreck…I’ll tell the doctor straight – I want a sick note…No way, I shall never agree to anything of the kind, I won’t be treated like a child…’

  And would there be anything wrong with such thoughts? Are mine any different? It’s a good thing that God, if he exists, and even if he doesn’t, gives us a place where we can think in peace. Perhaps that’s the whole point of prayer – to think to yourself in peace, to want nothing, to ask for nothing, but simply to sort out your own mind. That should be enough.

  But after the first few pleasant moments of relaxation, the same old questions from childhood always came back to me. Probably because I’m a little infantile by nature. How can God be listening to all the prayers in the entire world simultaneously? And what if they contradict each other? Does he have to listen to the prayers of all these bastards, devils and bad people? Do they pray? Are there places where this God is absent? Is he at the Fox farm, for instance? And what does he think about it? Or at Innerd’s slaughterhouse? Does he go there? I know these are stupid, naive questions. The theologians would laugh at me. I have a wooden head, like the angels suspended from the vault of the artificial sky.

  But I was prevented from thinking by the insistent, unpleasant voice of Father Rustle. It always seemed to me that as he moved, his dry, bony body, covered in baggy, dark skin, rustled slightly. His cassock brushed against his trousers, his chin against his dog collar, and his joints creaked. What sort of creature of God was he, this priest? He had dry, wrinkled skin, and there was a little too much of it everywhere. Apparently he used to be obese, but he’d been cured of it surgically, by letting them remove half his stomach. And now he’d grown very thin, perhaps that was why. I couldn’t help thinking he was entirely made of rice paper, the kind that’s used to make lampshades. To me he was like an artificial creature, hollow on the inside, and flammable too.

  Early in January, when I was still plunged in the blackest despair because of my Little Girls, he had visited me on his traditional new-year round of the parish. First his acolytes had called by, in white surplices on top of warm jackets, boys with red cheeks, which undermined their gravity as emissaries of the priest. I had some halva, which I liked to nibble from time to time, so I broke off a piece for each of them. They ate it, sang some songs and then went outside.

  Father Rustle appeared, walking fast and out of breath; without shaking the snow from his boots he entered my little dayroom, stepping straight onto the rug. He sprinkled the walls with his aspergillum, dropped his gaze and recited a prayer, then quick as blinking, placed a holy picture on the table and perched on a corner of the sofa. He did it all at lightning speed – my eyes could barely keep up with him. It looked to me as if he didn’t feel at ease in my house and wanted to leave as soon as possible.

  ‘A cup of tea, perhaps?’ I asked shyly.

  He refused. For a while we sat in silence. I could see the altar boys having a snowball fight outside.

  Suddenly I felt an absurd need to nestle my face into his wide, starched sleeve.

  ‘Why do you weep?’ he asked in that strange, impersonal priest’s slang, in which they say ‘trepidation’ instead of ‘fear’, ‘attend’ instead of ‘take notice’, ‘enrich’ instead of ‘learn’ and so on. But not even that could stop me. I went on crying.

  ‘My Dogs have gone missing,’ I said at last.

  It was a winter afternoon, Gloom was already pouring into the dayroom through the small windows, and I couldn’t see the expression on his face.

  ‘I understand your pain,’ he said after a pause. ‘But they were just animals.’

  ‘They were my only loved ones. My family. My daughters.’

  ‘Please do n
ot blaspheme,’ he bristled. ‘You cannot speak of dogs as your daughters. Don’t weep any more. It’s better to pray – that brings relief in suffering.’

  I tugged at his lovely clean sleeve to draw him to the window, and showed him my graveyard. The gravestones stood sadly, covered with snow; a small lantern burned on one of them.

  ‘I’m already reconciled to the fact that they’re dead. They were probably shot by hunters, did you know?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘I wish I could have buried them at the very least. How am I to mourn them without even knowing how they died and where their bodies are?’

  The priest twitched nervously. ‘It’s wrong to treat animals as if they were people. It’s a sin – this sort of graveyard is the result of human pride. God gave animals a lower rank, in the service of man.’

  ‘Please tell me what I should do. Perhaps you know, Father?’

  ‘You must pray,’ he replied.

  ‘For them?’

  ‘For yourself. Animals don’t have souls, they’re not immortal. They shall not know salvation. Please pray for yourself.’

  That’s what came back to my mind, this sad scene from almost a year ago, when I didn’t yet know what I know now.

  The mass was still in progress. I took a seat quite near the exit, next to the third-year children, who were looking rather quaint, by the way. Most of them were dressed as Does, Stags and Hares. They had masks made of cardboard and were growing impatient to perform in them. I realised the performance would take place straight after the mass. They obligingly made room for me. So there I sat among the children.

  ‘What sort of show will it be?’ I whispered to a girl from 3A with the lovely name Jagoda.

  ‘How Saint Hubert met the deer in the forest,’ she said. ‘I’m playing a hare.’

  I smiled at her. But in fact I couldn’t understand the logic: Hubert, not yet a saint, is a ne’er-do-well and a wastrel. He adores hunting. He kills. And one day, during the hunt, he sees Christ on the cross, on the head of a Deer that he is trying to kill. He falls to his knees and is converted. He realises how badly he has sinned until now. From then on he stops killing and becomes a saint.

  How does someone like that become the patron saint of hunters? I was struck by the fundamental lack of logic in it all. If Hubert’s followers really wanted to emulate him, they would have to stop killing. But if the hunters have him as their patron, they’re making him the patron saint of the sin he used to commit, from which he broke free. Thus they’re making him the patron saint of sin. I had already opened my mouth and was drawing air into my lungs in order to share my doubts with Jagoda, but I realised this was not the time or place for a debate, especially as the priest was singing very loudly and we couldn’t hear each other. So I simply set up a Hypothesis in my mind, that the point here was appropriation via antithesis.

  The church was full, not so much because of the schoolchildren who had been herded in here, but a large number of quite unfamiliar men who were filling the front pews. Everything went green before my eyes because of their uniforms. There were yet more of them standing to the sides of the altar, holding drooping coloured flags. Even Father Rustle was festive today, but his baggy, grey face looked ponderous. I couldn’t sink into my favourite state and abandon myself to contemplation as usual. I was anxious and worked up, and felt as if I were gradually slipping into a state where vibrations began to run around inside me.

  Someone touched me gently on the arm and I looked round. It was Grześ, a boy from the senior class, with lovely, intelligent eyes. I taught him last year.

  ‘Did you find your dogs?’ he whispered.

  Instantly I was reminded of how last autumn his class had helped me put up notices on fences and at bus stops.

  ‘No, Grześ, unfortunately not.’

  Grześ blinked. ‘I’m very sorry, Mrs Duszejko.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Father Rustle’s voice broke the cold silence, with only a light scattering of foot-scraping and throat-clearing, and everyone shuddered, moments later to fall to their knees with a rumble that rolled to the very vault.

  ‘O Lamb of God...’ the words thundered overhead, and I heard a strange noise, a faint thudding sound from all directions – it was people beating their own chests as they prayed to the Lamb.

  Then they started heading for the altar, moving out of the pews with their hands folded and their gaze lowered, repentant sinners, and soon there was a scrum in the aisle, but they all had more goodwill than usual, so without exchanging glances they made way for each other, looking deadly serious.

  I couldn’t stop wondering what they had in their bellies. What they had eaten today and yesterday, whether they had already digested the ham, whether the Chickens, Rabbits and Calves had already gone through their stomachs yet.

  The green army in the front rows had also stood up and was moving down the pew to the altar. Father Rustle was now coming along the railing, accompanied by an altar boy, feeding them their next bit of meat, this time in symbolic form, but nevertheless meat, the body of a living Being.

  It occurred to me that if there really was a Good God, he should appear now in his true shape, as a Sheep, Cow or Stag, and thunder in a mighty tone, he should roar, and if he could not appear in person, he should send his vicars, his fiery archangels, to put an end to this terrible hypocrisy for once and for all. But of course no one intervened. He never intervenes.

  The shuffling of feet was getting quieter by the moment, and finally the cluster of people gradually went back to their pews. In silence, Father Rustle solemnly began to wash the vessels. It occurred to me that he could do with a small dishwasher, the kind that fits one set of tableware; he’d only have to press a button and there’d be more time for his sermon. He climbed into the pulpit, straightened his lacy sleeves – the image of them from a year ago in my dayroom came back to me again – and said: ‘I am delighted that we can consecrate our chapel on this happy day. I am all the more pleased to be taking part in this valuable initiative as chaplain to the hunters.’

  Silence fell, as if everyone wanted to spend some time digesting in peace after the feast. The priest looked around the gathered assembly and continued: ‘As you know, dear brothers and sisters, for some years I have been guardian of our brave hunters. As their chaplain, I bless the hunting headquarters, organise meetings, administer the sacraments and send off the deceased to the “eternal hunting grounds”; I also take care of matters relating to the ethics of hunting and do my best to provide the hunters with spiritual benefits.’

  I began to fidget restlessly, as the priest continued.

  ‘Here in our church, the beautiful chapel of Saint Hubert occupies one nave. There is already a holy figure on the altar, and soon the chapel will also be adorned by two stained-glass windows. One will show the stag with the radiant cross that, according to legend, Saint Hubert met while hunting. The other window will show the saint himself.’

  The congregation turned their heads in the direction indicated by the priest.

  ‘And the people who initiated this new chapel,’ the priest went on, ‘are our brave hunters.’

  All eyes now turned towards the front rows. Mine too – reluctantly. Father Rustle cleared his throat and was plainly getting ready for a very solemn speech.

  ‘My dear brothers and sisters, hunters are the ambassadors and partners of the Lord God in the work of creation, in caring for game animals, in cooperation. Nature, among which man lives, needs help in order to flourish. Through their culls the hunters conduct the correct policy. They have built and regularly stock’ – at this point he took a discreet peep at his notes – ‘forty-one feeding racks for roe deer, four storage feeders for red deer, twenty-five scatterers to feed pheasants and one hundred and fifty salt-licks for deer…’

  ‘And when the Animals come to feed they shoot at them,’ I said aloud, and the heads of the people sitting nearest turned reprovingly in my direction. ‘It’s like inviting someone to
dinner and murdering them,’ I added.

  The children were looking at me with eyes wide open, in terror. They were the same children whom I taught – class 3B.

  Busy with his oration, Father Rustle was too far away to have heard me. He stood in the pulpit, tucked his hands into the lacy sleeves of his surplice and raised his eyes to the church vault, where stars painted long ago were starting to peel.

  ‘In the current hunting season alone they have prepared fifteen tons of concentrated feedstuff for the winter period,’ he went on. ‘For many years our hunting association has been buying and releasing pheasants into the environment, for the purposes of paid shoots for tourists, which supplements the association’s budget. We cultivate the customs and traditions of hunting, with a selection process and oath-taking for new members,’ he said, and there was a note of pride in his voice. ‘We conduct the two most important hunts of the year, on Saint Hubert’s Day, today, and on Christmas Eve, according to tradition and with respect for the rules of hunting. But our chief desire is to experience the beauty of nature, to nurture the customs and traditions,’ he ardently continued. ‘There are still a lot of poachers, who disregard the laws of nature and kill animals in a cruel way with no respect for hunting law. You observe that law. Nowadays, fortunately the concept of hunting has changed. We are no longer seen as people who just want to shoot everything that moves, but as people who care about the beauty of nature; about order and harmony. In recent years our dear hunters have built their own hunting lodge, where they often meet to discuss the topics of culture, ethics, discipline and safety while hunting, and other issues of interest to them…’

  I snorted with laughter so loud that now half the church turned to look at me. I was almost choking. One of the children handed me a paper tissue. At the same time I could feel my legs starting to stiffen, and the nasty numbness coming on, which made me move my feet, then my calves – if I didn’t do it, in seconds a terrible force would blast through my muscles. I thought I was having an Attack, and it also occurred to me that it was a very good thing. Yes, quite, if you please, I’m having an Attack.