Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

  So while you were looking for a phone signal, Świętopełk, I found this photograph. I also took the Deer’s head, to bury the remains in my graveyard.

  At dawn, by the time I went home after that dreadful Night of dressing Big Foot, I knew what I had to do. Those Deer we saw outside the house had told me. They chose me from among others – maybe because I don’t eat meat and they can sense it – to continue to act in their Name. They appeared before me, like the Stag to Saint Hubert, to have me become the punitive hand of justice, in secret. Not just for the Deer, but for other Animals too. For they have no voice in parliament. They even gave me a Weapon, a very clever one. Nobody guessed a thing.

  I followed the Commandant for several days, and it gave me satisfaction. I observed his life. It wasn’t interesting. I discovered for example that he often went to Innerd’s illegal brothel. And he drank nothing but Absolut vodka.

  That day as usual I waited for him on the road to come back from work. I drove after him, and as usual he didn’t notice me. Nobody takes any notice of old women who wander around with their shopping bags.

  I waited a long time outside Innerd’s house for him to emerge, but there was rain and wind, so finally I felt too cold and went home. However, I knew he’d come back via the Pass, taking the side roads, because they were sure to have been drinking. I had no idea what I was going to do. I wanted to talk to him, to stand face to face with him – on my terms, not his, like at the police station, where I had been an ordinary suppliant, a tedious madwoman who’s hopeless at everything, pathetic and laughable.

  Perhaps I wanted to give him a fright. I was dressed in a yellow waterproof cape. I looked like a large gnome. Outside the house I noticed that the plastic carrier bag in which I had brought the Deer’s head home and which I had then hung on the plum tree had filled with water and frozen solid. I unhooked it and took it with me. I don’t know if I took it with the intention of using it. One doesn’t think about such things at the time when they’re happening. I knew Dizzy was due to come that evening, so I couldn’t wait long for the Commandant. But just as I reached the Pass, along came his car, and I took that to be a sign too. I stepped into the road and waved my arms. Oh yes, he did have a fright. I pulled off my hood to show him my face. He was furious.

  ‘What do you want now?’ he shouted at me, leaning out of the window.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ I said.

  I had no idea what I was going to do. For a moment he hesitated, but as he was fairly drunk, he was in the mood for an adventure. He got out of the car and unsteadily walked a short way after me.

  ‘What do you want to show me, woman?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s to do with Big Foot’s death,’ I said the first thing that entered my mind.

  ‘Big Foot?’ he asked dubiously, and then instantly realised who that meant, and burst into spiteful laughter. ‘Yes, indeed, he really did have enormous feet.’

  Intrigued, he followed me, taking several paces to the left, towards the undergrowth and the well.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you shot my Dogs?’ I asked, suddenly turning to face him.

  ‘What do you want to show me?’ he said angrily, trying to maintain control. He was the one who was going to ask the questions.

  I pointed my index finger at him like a pistol barrel and prodded him in the belly. ‘Did you shoot my Dogs?’

  He laughed, and immediately relaxed. ‘What are you on about? Do you know something that I don’t?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Answer my question.’

  ‘It wasn’t me who shot them. It may have been Innerd, or the parish priest.’

  ‘The priest? He hunts?’ I was speechless.

  ‘Why shouldn’t he? He’s the chaplain. He hunts like anything.’

  His face was puffy, and he kept adjusting his trouser belt. It never occurred to me that he had money there.

  ‘Turn around, woman, I want to take a piss,’ he said suddenly.

  We were standing right by the well when he started scrabbling at his flies. Without thinking at all, I positioned myself with the bag of frozen ice as if for throwing the hammer. My only fleeting thought was: ‘This is die kalte Teufelshand’ – oh yes, where is that from? Didn’t I tell you that the sport I won all the medals for was hammer throwing? I was the national vice-champion in 1971. So my body adopted the familiar position and gathered all its strength. Oh, how wise the body is. I could say it was my body that made the decision, it took the swing and struck the blow.

  I just heard a crack. For a few seconds the Commandant remained upright, swaying, but the blood immediately began to pour down his face. The cold fist had struck him on the head. My heart was thumping and the roar of my own blood was deafening me. My mind was a blank. I watched as he fell beside the well, slowly, softly, almost gracefully, his belly blocking the opening. It didn’t take much effort to push him in. Really.

  And that’s all. I didn’t stop to think about it. I was sure I had killed him, and it seemed quite all right. I had no pangs of conscience. I only felt great relief.

  There was one other thing. In my pocket I had the Finger of God, the Deer’s hoof, one of the four I’d found in Big Foot’s house. I had buried the head and the other three feet, but I had kept this one for myself. I don’t know why. I made prints with it in the snow, lots of them, chaotically. I thought they’d still be there in the morning to imply that the Deer had been here. But no one saw them except you, Dizzy. Water poured from the sky that night and wiped out all the prints. That was a Sign too.

  I went home and set about making our supper.

  I know I had a lot of luck, and that was what emboldened me. For surely it means I’d chanced upon a good moment, a time when I had the permission of the Planets? How come nobody intervenes to stop all the evil that’s rife everywhere? Is it like with my letters to institutions? They should answer, but they don’t. Don’t we demand this sort of intervention convincingly enough? One can put up with the petty things that hardly cause any discomfort, but not with senseless, ubiquitous cruelty. It’s perfectly simple – if other people are happy, we’re happy too. The simplest equation in the world. As I drove to the Fox farm with the Cold Fist, I imagined I was triggering a process that would reverse everything evil. That Night the Sun would enter Aries and an entirely new year would begin. For if evil created the world, then good must destroy it.

  And so I set off to see Innerd on purpose. First I called him and said we must meet; I said I had seen the Commandant just before his death and he’d told me to deliver something. Innerd agreed at once; at the time I didn’t know the Commandant had had some money on him, but now I can see that Innerd was hoping to get it back. I said I would come to his farm once he was alone there. He agreed. He was shocked by the Commandant’s death.

  Earlier that day, in the afternoon, I had prepared a trap – I’d taken some wire snares from Big Foot’s shed. I’d removed them so many times before that I knew very well how they worked. You choose a young, springy tree and bend it to the ground; then you pin it down by trapping it under a solid branch. You attach a wire noose to it. When the Animal gets caught in the noose, it starts to struggle, and the tree straightens, breaking the Animal’s neck. I hid the wire noose among the ferns after making the effort to bend a medium-sized birch tree.

  None of the employees ever stayed at the farm at night, the lights were switched off, and the gate was locked. That evening the gate was open. For me. We met inside, in his office. He smiled when he saw me.

  ‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ he said.

  He can’t have remembered our encounter on the bridge. No one remembers meeting old biddies like me.

  I said we must go outside, that’s where I had the thing from the Commandant, I hid it in the forest. He took his keys and his jacket and followed me. Once I was leading him through the wet ferns, he started to grow impatient, but I played my role well, replying to his insistent questions in monosyllables.

  ‘Oh, it’s here,’
I finally said.

  He looked around uncertainly and cast me a glance as if he had only just understood. ‘What’s here? There’s nothing here.’

  ‘Here,’ I said, pointing, and he took that one step forwards, putting his foot in the noose. It must have looked comical from the outside – he did what I said like a child at playschool. I was assuming that my trap would break his neck, just like a Deer’s. That’s what I wanted to happen, because he’d fed my Little Girls’ bodies to the Foxes. Because he hunted. Because he stripped Animals of their skin. I think it would have been a perfectly fair Punishment.

  Unfortunately, I’m no expert on Murder. The wire caught around his ankle, and as the tree sprang straight, it merely knocked him over. He fell and howled with pain – the wire must have cut into his skin, possibly the muscle too. I had my back-up plan, involving the carrier bag. This time I had prepared it deliberately, in the freezer. The ideal murder Weapon for an old woman. Old girls like me always go about with plastic bags, don’t they? It was simple – I hit him with all my might as he tried to get up, once, twice, maybe more. After each blow I waited a while to see if I could still hear him breathing. Finally he went quiet. I stood over the dead body in silence and darkness, my mind a blank. Once again I felt nothing but relief. I extracted his keys and passport from his jacket, pushed the body into the clay pit and covered it with branches. I quietly returned to the farm and went inside.

  I wish I could forget what I saw there. Weeping, I tried to open the cages and chase out the Foxes, but then I discovered that Innerd’s keys only fitted the first hall, which led into the others. For ages I searched desperately for the remaining keys, delving in the contents of closets and drawers, until at last I found them. I told myself I wouldn’t leave this place until I had freed the Animals. It took a long time for me to open all the cages. The Foxes were bewildered, aggressive, dirty, sick, and some had wounds on their legs. They didn’t want to leave the cages – they weren’t familiar with freedom. When I waved my hands at them they growled. Finally I came up with an idea – I fully opened the door to the outside world and withdrew to my car. And later it turned out they had all escaped.

  On my way home I threw away the keys, and after memorising the date and place of his birth, I burned Innerd’s passport in the boiler room. I did the same with the carrier bag, though I try not to burn waste plastic.

  I got home without being noticed. Once I was in the car I couldn’t remember a thing. I felt exhausted, my bones ached and I spent the whole evening vomiting.

  Sometimes the memory came back to me. I wondered why Innerd’s body hadn’t been found yet. I fantasised that the Foxes had eaten him, picked his bones clean, and then dragged them about the forest. But they hadn’t touched him. He went mouldy, which in my judgement is proof that he was not a human Being.

  From then on I carried all my Tools about in the back of the Samurai. A bag of ice in the portable cooler, a pickaxe, a hammer, nails, even some syringes and my glucose. I was ready for action at any moment. I wasn’t lying when I kept insisting it was Animals taking revenge on people. That was the truth. I was their Tool.

  But will you believe me when I say I didn’t do it entirely consciously? I instantly forgot what had happened, as if there were some powerful Defence Mechanisms protecting me. Perhaps I should ascribe it to my Ailments – quite simply, from time to time I was not Janina, but Bellona or Medea.

  I don’t know how and when I took Boros’s bottle of pheromones. He called me later to ask about it, but I didn’t confess. I said he must have lost it, and expressed my sympathy for his absent-mindedness.

  So when I said I would take the President home, I already knew what was going to happen. The stars had started their countdown. I only had to follow them.

  He was sitting against a wall, dumbly staring into space. When I came into his field of vision I didn’t think he had noticed me at all, but he coughed and said in a sepulchral tone: ‘I feel unwell, Mrs Duszejko.’

  This Man was suffering. ‘Unwell’ didn’t just apply to his present physical state after overindulging in drink. He was ill in general, which brought him closer to me.

  ‘You shouldn’t overdo it with alcohol.’

  I was ready to carry out my sentence, but hadn’t yet taken the final decision. It occurred to me that if I was in the right, everything would fall into place and I’d know exactly what to do.

  ‘Help me,’ he wheezed. ‘Take me home.’

  It sounded sad. I felt sorry for him. Yes, I should take him home, he was right. Release him from himself, from the rotten, cruel life he led. This was the Sign, I understood it at once.

  ‘Wait here a moment, I’ll be right back,’ I said.

  I went to the car and took the bag of ice from the cooler. A chance witness might have thought I was going to make him a cold compress for a migraine. But there weren’t any witnesses. Most of the cars had driven off by now. Someone was still shouting at the front entrance; I could hear raised voices.

  In my pocket I had the little bottle that I had taken from Boros.

  When I returned he was sitting with his head tilted backwards, crying.

  ‘If you’re going to drink that much, one day you’ll have a heart attack,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

  I took him under the arm and dragged him to his feet.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re so kind…’

  ‘I know,’ I replied.

  ‘What about you? Why are you crying?’ he said.

  That I didn’t know.

  We walked into the forest. I kept pushing him further among the trees; only once the lights of the firehouse were hardly visible did I let him go.

  ‘Try to vomit, it’ll make you feel better at once,’ I said. ‘And then I’ll send you home.’

  He glanced at me with an absent gaze. ‘What do you mean, you’ll “send” me home?’

  I patted him reassuringly on the back. ‘Go on, throw up.’

  He rested against a tree and leaned forwards. A trickle of saliva streamed from his mouth. ‘You want to kill me, don’t you?’ he wheezed.

  He started to cough and hawk, but then I heard a gurgling noise, and he vomited. ‘Oh,’ he said, ashamed.

  That was when I gave him a little of Boros’s pheromones to drink in the bottle cap. ‘You’ll feel better right away.’

  He drank it without batting an eyelid, and started to sob. ‘Have you poisoned me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  And then I was sure that his time had come. I wrapped the handles of the carrier bag around my hand, and twisted my body to take the very best swing. I hit him. I struck him on the back and neck, he was much taller than I am, but the blow was so mighty that he sank to his knees. And again it occurred to me that things fall into place just as they’re meant to. I hit him once again, this time with success. Something cracked, he groaned and fell to the ground. I had the feeling he was grateful to me for this. In the dark I positioned his head to make sure his mouth was open. Then I poured the rest of the pheromones onto his neck and clothing. On the way back, I threw the ice under the firehouse, and hid the carrier bag in my pocket.

  That’s exactly how it happened.

  They sat motionless. The mustard soup had gone cold long ago. Nobody said a word, so I threw on my fleece, left the house and walked towards the Pass.

  From the direction of the village I could hear sirens howling; their plaintive, mournful sound was carried on the wind across the entire Plateau. Then it all went silent. I just saw the lights of Dizzy’s car driving into the distance.

  XVII

  THE DAMSEL

  Every Tear from Every Eye

  Becomes a Babe in Eternity,

  This is caught by Females bright

  And return’d to its own delight.

  Dizzy must have called by early that morning, while I was still sleeping off my pills. How else could I have slept after what had happened? I hadn’t heard him knocking. I didn’t want to
hear anything. Why hadn’t he stayed longer? Why hadn’t he tapped on the window? He must have wanted to tell me something important. He’d been in a hurry.

  I stood on the porch, confused, but all I saw lying on the doormat was the volume of Blake’s letters, the one we had bought in the Czech Republic. Why had he left it here for me? What was he trying to tell me? I opened the book and leafed through it vacantly, but no scrap of paper fell out, nor did I notice any message.

  The day was dark and wet. I could hardly drag my feet along. I went to make myself some strong tea, and only then did I see that one page of the book was marked with a blade of grass. I read the text, a passage we hadn’t worked on yet, from a letter to Richard Phillips, subtly underlined in pencil (Dizzy hated scribbling in books):

  ‘I read in the Oracle and True Briton of Octr 13, that’ – and here Dizzy had added in pencil ‘a Mr Black Coat’ – ‘a Surgeon has with the Cold Fury of Robespierre caused the Police to seize upon the Person & Goods or Property of an Astrologer & to commit him to Prison. The Man who can Read the Stars often is oppressed by their Influence, no less than the Newtonian who reads Not & cannot Read is oppressed by his own Reasonings & Experiments. We are all subject to Error: Who shall say that we are not all subject to Crime?’

  It took about ten seconds for the penny to drop, and then I felt faint. My liver responded with a dull, intensifying pain.

  I had started to stuff my things and my laptop into my backpack when I heard the engine of a car, or rather at least two cars. Without a second thought, I grabbed it all and ran downstairs into the boiler room. Briefly I thought that maybe Mummy and Granny would be waiting there for me again. And my Little Girls. Perhaps that would have been the best solution for me – to join them. But nobody was there.