Between the boiler room and the garage there was a small hiding place for the water meters, cables and mops. Every house should have a hiding place like that in case of Persecution and War. Every house. I squeezed in there with my backpack and laptop under my arm, in my pyjamas and slippers. My stomach was aching more and more.
First I heard knocking, then the creak of the front door and footsteps in the hall. I heard them coming up the steps and opening all the doors. I heard the voices of Black Coat and the young policeman who used to work with the Commandant and had interviewed me later. But there were other, unfamiliar ones too. They spread about the entire house. They tried calling me: ‘Citizen Duszejko! Janina!’, and actually that was quite enough reason for me not to want to respond.
They went upstairs – they were sure to be bringing in mud – and visited every room. Then one of them started coming downstairs, and moments later the door into the boiler room opened. Someone came in and took a good look around, peeping into the larder too, and then went through to the garage. I felt a rush of air as he passed by, only centimetres away from me. I held my breath.
‘Where are you, Adam?’ I heard from above.
‘Here!’ he shouted back, right by my ear. ‘There’s no one here.’
Someone upstairs cursed. Obscenely.
‘Brr, what a nasty place,’ said the one in the boiler room to himself, switched off the light and went upstairs.
I could hear them standing in the hall, talking. They were conferring.
‘She must have simply cleared out…’
‘But she left the car. Odd, isn’t it? Did she go on foot?’
Then Oddball’s voice joined them, out of breath, as if he had followed the Police at a run.
‘She told me she was going to Szczecin to visit a friend.’
Where did he get that idea from? Szczecin! How funny!
‘Why didn’t you tell me before, Dad?’
No answer.
‘To Szczecin? She has a friend there? What do you know, Dad?’ asked Black Coat pensively. It must have been painful for Oddball to have his son drilling him like that.
‘How’s she going to get there?’ A lively discussion began, and I heard the voice of the young policeman again: ‘Oh well, we were too late. And we were pretty close to catching her at last. She took us in for a long time. And to think how many times we had her within our grasp.’
Now they were standing in the hall, and even at this distance I could smell that one of them had lit a cigarette.
‘We must call Szczecin at once to find out how she might have got there. By bus, by train, hitchhiking? We must issue an arrest warrant,’ said Black Coat.
And the young policeman said: ‘We’re hardly going to need an anti-terrorist squad to find her. She’s a crazy old woman. Round the twist.’
‘She’s dangerous,’ said Black Coat.
They left the house.
‘We must seal this door.’
‘And the one downstairs. All right, then. Come on,’ they said to each other.
Suddenly I heard Oddball’s ringing voice: ‘I’ll marry her when she gets out of jail.’
And at once Black Coat angrily replied: ‘Have you totally lost your marbles out here in the wilds, Dad?’
There I stood, squeezed into the corner, in total darkness, for a good while after they had gone, until I heard the roar of their car engines. After that I waited another hour or so, listening to the sound of my own breathing. I no longer had to dream. I really was in the boiler room, as in my dreams, in the place where the Dead came. I thought I could hear their voices somewhere under the garage, deep inside the hill, a great underground procession. But it was the wind again, whistling as usual on the Plateau. I crept upstairs like a thief and quickly dressed for the journey. I only took two small bags – Ali would have been proud of me. Of course there was a third way out of the house too, through the woodshed, and I slipped out that way, leaving the house to the Dead. I waited in the Professor’s outhouse until it grew dark. I only had the essential items with me – my notebooks, Blake, my medicine and the laptop containing my Astrology. And the Ephemerides of course, in case I were to end up on a Desert Island in the future. The further I moved away from the house across the shallow, wet snow, the more my spirits lifted. From the border I looked back at my Plateau, and remembered the day when I first saw it – I’d been delighted, but hadn’t yet sensed that one day I would live here. The fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future is a terrible mistake in the programming of the world. It should be fixed at the first opportunity.
By now the valleys beyond the Plateau lay in dense Gloom, and from up here I could see the lights of the larger towns – Lewin and Frankenstein far away on the horizon, and Kłodzko to the north. The air was pure and the lights were twinkling. Here, higher up, Night had not yet fallen, the sky in the west was still orange and brown, still growing darker. I wasn’t afraid of this darkness. I walked ahead, towards the Table Mountains, tripping over frozen clods of earth and clumps of dry grass. I felt hot in my fleeces, my hat and scarf, but I knew that as soon as I crossed the border I wouldn’t need them anymore. It’s always warmer in the Czech Republic, nothing but southern slopes.
And just then, over on the Czech side, Venus, my Damsel, shone out above the horizon.
She was growing brighter by the minute, as if a smile had risen on the dark face of the sky, so now I knew I had chosen a good direction and was heading the right way. She glowed in the sky as I safely crossed the forest and imperceptibly stepped across the border. She was guiding me. I walked across the Czech fields, constantly moving in her direction, as she descended lower and lower, as if encouraging me to follow her over the horizon.
She led me as far as the highway, from where I could see the town of Náchod. I walked down the road in a light and happy mood – whatever happened now, it would be Right and Good. I felt no fear at all, though the streets of the Czech town were empty now. But what is there to be afraid of in the Czech Republic?
So when I stopped outside the bookshop, not knowing what would happen next, my Damsel was still with me, though out of sight behind the rooftops. And then I found that despite the late hour there was someone in the shop. I knocked, and Honza opened the door to me, not in the least surprised. I said I needed a place for the night.
‘Yes,’ he said, letting me in without asking any questions.
A few days later Boros came to fetch me, bringing some clothes and wigs that Good News had thoughtfully prepared for me. Now we looked like an elderly couple on our way to a funeral, and in a sense it was true – we were going to my funeral. Boros had even bought a lovely wreath. This time he had a car, though borrowed from some students, and he drove it fast and assertively. We made a lot of stops at parking areas – I really was feeling ill. The journey was long and tiring. When we reached our destination, I couldn’t stand on my own feet, so Boros had to carry me over the threshold.
Now I live at the Entomologists’ research station on the edge of the Białowieńa Forest, and since I’ve been feeling a little better, each day I try to go on my short round. But I find it hard to walk now. Besides, I haven’t much to keep an eye on here, and the forest is impenetrable. Sometimes, when the temperature rises and oscillates close to zero, sluggish Flies, Springtails and Gall Wasps appear on the snow – by now I have learned their names. I also see Spiders here. I have learned, however, that most Insects hibernate. Deep inside their anthill, the Ants cling to each other in a large ball and sleep like that until spring. I only wish people had the same sort of confidence in each other. Perhaps because of the different air and my recent experiences, my Ailments have grown worse, so I spend most of my time just sitting and gazing out of the window.
Whenever Boros appears, he always comes with interesting soup in a thermos flask. Personally, I haven’t the strength to cook. He also brings me newspapers, encouraging me to read them, but they prompt my disgust. Newspapers rely on keeping us in a co
nstant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us. Why should I yield to their power and let them tell me what to think? I trot around the little house, treading paths this way and that. Sometimes I don’t recognise my own footprints in the snow and then I ask: who could have come this way? Who made these footprints? I think it’s a good Sign not to recognize oneself. But I am trying to complete my Investigations. My own Horoscope is the thousandth, and I often sit over it, doing my best to understand it. Who am I? One thing’s for sure – I know the date of my death.
I think of Oddball, and that this winter he’ll be alone on the Plateau. And I think about the concrete I poured – will it withstand the frost? How will they all survive yet another winter? The Bats in the Professor’s cellar. The Deer and the Foxes. Good News is studying in Wrocław and is living in my flat. Dizzy’s there too – it’s easier for two to live together. And I’m sorry I failed to bring him round to Astrology. I often write to him through Boros. Yesterday I sent him a little story. He’ll know what it’s about:
A medieval monk and Astrologer – in the days before Saint Augustine forbade the reading of the future from the stars – foresaw his own death in his Horoscope. He was to die from the blow of a stone that would fall on his head. From then on he always wore a metal cap beneath his monk’s hood. Until one Good Friday, he took it off along with the hood, more for fear of drawing attention to himself in church than for love of God. Just then a tiny pebble fell on his bare head, giving him a superficial scratch. But the monk was sure the prediction had come true, so he put all his affairs in order, and a month later he died.
That is how it works, Dizzy. But I know I still have plenty of time.
FROM THE AUTHOR
The epigraphs and quotations in the text are from Proverbs of Hell, Auguries of Innocence, The Mental Traveller and the letters of William Blake.
Father Rustle’s sermon is a compilation of genuine sermons by hunt chaplains sourced from the internet.
My thanks to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) for the opportunity for peaceful, productive work.
And to Andrew Leader for his very generous grant towards the cost of translation.
OLGA TOKARCZUK is one of Poland’s most beloved authors. In 2015 she received the Brückepreis and the prestigious annual literary award from Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, along with Poland’s highest literary honour, the Nike Award and the Nike Readers’ Prize. Tokarczuk also received a Nike in 2008 for Flights, as well as the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for the English translation by Jennifer Croft. She is the author of nine novels and three short-story collections and has been translated into a dozen languages.
ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES is a leading translator from Polish and has twice won the Found in Translation Award, as well as the 2018 Transatlantyk Prize for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad. She is a mentor for the UK’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme and a former co-chair of the Translators Association.
PRAISE FOR OLGA TOKARCZUK
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize
DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD
‘Strange, mordantly funny, consoling and wise, Olga Tokarczuk’s novels fill the reader’s mind with intimations of a unique consciousness. Her latest novel to be translated into English, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of The Dead, is simultaneously unsettling and oddly companionable…both a meditation on human compassion and a murder mystery that lingers in the imagination.’ Marcel Theroux, author of Strange Bodies
‘I loved this wry, richly melancholic philosophical mystery. It’s a compelling and endlessly thought-provoking novel, luminous with the strangeness of existence.’ Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From
FLIGHTS
‘A magnificent writer.’ Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate 2015
‘Tokarczuk’s peerless travel guide is actually a guide to living. Every word, observation, reflection and story embraces the importance of staying mobile in thought as much as in being…This is as brilliant and life-affirming as literature gets.’ Saturday Paper
‘A profound meditation on time, mythology, the self and human anatomy…We drift along happily on her flights of fancy, as her travels across space give way to journeys through history and deep into the psyche. Jennifer Croft’s bump-free translation only adds to the reader’s pleasure.’ Prospect Magazine
‘Tokarczuk examines questions of travel in our increasingly interconnected and fast-moving world…Trained as a psychologist, Tokarczuk is interested in what connects the human soul and body. It is a leitmotif that, despite the apparent lack of a single plot, tightly weaves the text’s different strands—of fiction, memoir and essay—into a whole.’ Spectator
‘One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.’ Economist
‘The book is a personal, yet universal mythology of travel, a cabinet of curiosities, a box with old tickets, museum leaflets, shells and beer mats collected on the way. What we can touch, whether it is our own body, someone else’s hand in spontaneous dance, a crumbled leaf from a particularly important tree—all those things are imbued with meaning that, in Tokarczuk’s telling, becomes greater than the grand narratives history and politics have been feeding us.’ Glasgow Review of Books
‘Olga Tokarczuk is a household name in Poland and one of Europe’s major humanist writers, working here in the continental tradition of the “thinking” or essayistic novel. Flights has echoes of W. G. Sebald, Milan Kundera…but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own…Flights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness…Hotels on the continent would do well to have a copy of Flights on the bedside table. I can think of no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times.’ Guardian
‘Reading Flights is like finally hearing from a weird old best friend you lost touch with years ago and assumed was gone forever because people that amazing and inventive just don’t last. Wrong—they were off rediscovering the world on your behalf, just as Olga Tokarczuk does.’ Toby Litt
‘I have always considered her a person of great literary abilities. With Flights I have my proof. This is one of the most important Polish books I have read for years.’ Jerzy Sosnowski
‘Flights could almost be an inventory of the ways narrative can serve a writer short of, and beyond, telling a story.’ London Review of Books
‘A novel in essays, a world-exploration in words, a soaring journey across space and through time.’ Nicolas Rothwell
‘Tokarczuk is one of Europe’s most daring and original writers, and this astonishing performance is her glittering, bravura entry in the literature of ideas…A select few novels possess the wonder of music, and this is one of them. No two readers will experience it exactly the same way. Flights is an international, mercurial, and always generous book, to be endlessly revisited. Like a glorious, charmingly impertinent travel companion, it reflects, challenges, and rewards.’ Los Angeles Review of Books
‘Flights is a dense, challenging novel…its submerged themes and hidden insights are worth uncovering.’ Financial Times
‘Tokarczuk has a quizzical and highly observant eye, seeking and recording, turning perversely towards the deformed, the monstrous and abject…This all makes for excellent and entertaining reading as we are privy to scenes and descriptions from which our first reaction would be to turn away.’ Otago Daily Times
‘An indisputable masterpiece of “controlled psychosis”… Punctuated by maps and figures, the discursive novel is reminiscent of the work of Sebald. The threads ultimately converge in a remarkable way, making this an extraordinary accomplishment.’ Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘Flights is a fragmented, bursting-with-life novel…A lively and strange collection of portraits of unrelated characters, all in transit, woven together by the narrator’s essayistic musings.’ Austra
lian
‘This is a book about rootlessness in the grandest sense—which is to say it is a book about mortality.’ Times Literary Supplement
‘Every sentence lands with the artful cadence of a poet.’ Deborah Levy
‘A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald.’ Annie Proulx
textpublishing.com.au
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
Copyright © Olga Tokarczuk 2009
Translation copyright © Antonia Lloyd-Jones 2018
The moral right of Olga Tokarczuk and Antonia Lloyd-Jones to be identified respectively as the author and translator of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published as Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych by Wydawnictwo Literackie in 2009
First published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2018
This edition published by the Text Publishing Company in 2018
Book design by Jessica Horrocks
Cover images by Buyenlarge/Getty and Shutterstock
Typeset by J&M Typesetting
ISBN: 9781925773088 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925774009 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Page 23