Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  They are more than travel hubs: this is a special category of city-state, with a stable location, but citizens in flux. They are airport-republics, members of a World Airport Union, and while they aren’t yet represented at the UN, it is only a matter of time. They are an example of a system where internal politics matter less than ties with other airport members of the Union – for only these provide them with their raison d’être. An example of an extroverted system, where the constitution is spelled out on every ticket, and where one’s boarding pass is one’s only identification as a citizen.

  The number of inhabitants here always varies quite a bit. Interestingly, the population increases in fogs and storms. Citizens, so as to feel comfortable anywhere, must not be too eye-catching. Sometimes, as one is going down a moving walkway, one passes one’s brothers- and sisters-in-travel, who may give the impression of having been preserved in formaldehyde – as though everyone is peering out at everyone else from inside bell jars. In the airport-republic, your address is your seat on the plane: 7D, let’s say, or 16A. Those great moving belts whisk us away in opposite directions, some voyagers in cloaks and hats, others in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, eyes blurred by snow or skin darkened by the sun, seeped in the damp of the north, the scent of rotting leaves and softened earth, or bearing desert sand in the recesses of their sandals. Some bronzed or tanned or burned, others blindingly, fluorescently white. People who shave their heads and those who never get a haircut. The big and tall, like that man, and the delicate and petite, like that woman who only reaches up to his waist.

  Airports also have a soundtrack, a symphony of airplane engines, a couple of simple sounds that extend into a space devoid of rhythm, an Orthodox twin-engine choir, gloomy minor, infrared, infrablack, largo, based on a single chord that bores even itself. A requiem that opens with the potent introitus of take-off and closes with an amen descending into landing.

  RETURNING TO ONE’S ROOTS

  Hostels ought to be sued for ageism: for some reason, they only offer accommodation to the young. The acceptable age range is determined on a hostel-by-hostel basis, but nowhere will a forty-year-old make the cut. Why should the young receive such special treatment? Are they not, even aside from this, showered with the privileges of biology itself?

  Let us take as an example those backpackers who constitute the vast majority of hostel-goers: they are strong and tall – both the men and the women – with clear, glowing skin, and they rarely smoke, if at all, let alone take drugs, or at most a joint from time to time. They travel by ecologically friendly means – in other words, by land: overnight trains, packed long-distance buses. In some countries they even hitchhike. They get to their hostels at night, and as they dine they all begin to ask each other the Three Travel Questions: where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? The first question determines the vertical axis, while the next two establish two horizontal axes. Thus these backpackers are able to create something like a coordinates system; when they have all situated one another on that map, they drift peaceably off to sleep.

  The guy I met on the train was travelling, like so many of them, in search of his roots. His was a complicated journey: his grandmother on his mother’s side was a Russian Jew, his grandfather a Pole from Vilnius (now Lithuania); they left Russia with General Anders’ army and emigrated to Canada after the war. On his father’s side, meanwhile, his grandfather was Spanish, and his grandmother a Native American whose tribe I can’t recall the name of.

  He was at the beginning of his trip, and he seemed rather overwhelmed.

  TRAVEL SIZES

  These days, any self-respecting pharmacy offers its customers a special range of travel-sized toiletries. Some places even set aside whole aisles. Here, one can obtain anything and everything one might want on a trip: shampoo, a tube of liquid soap to wash your underwear in the sink at the hotel, toothbrushes you can fold in half, sunscreen, insect repellant, shoe polish wipes (the whole gamut of colours is available), sets of feminine hygiene products, foot cream, hand cream. The defining characteristic of all of these items is their size – they are miniatures, tiny tubes and jarlets, itsy-bitsy bottles the size of one’s thumb: the smallest sewing kit fits three needles, five mini-skeins of different-coloured thread, each three metres in length, and two white emergency buttons and a safety pin. Of particular usefulness is the travel-sized hairspray, whose miniature container measures no more than a woman’s palm.

  It is as if the cosmetics industry sees the phenomenon of travel as mirroring sedentary life, but in miniature, a cute little baby version of the same.

  MANO DI GIOVANNI BATTISTA

  There’s too much in the world. It would be wiser to reduce it, rather than expanding or enlarging it. We’d be better off stuffing it back into its little can – a portable panopticon we’d be allowed to peek inside only on Saturday afternoons, once our daily tasks had been completed, once we’d made sure there was clean underwear to wear, ironed shirts taut over armrests, floors scrubbed, coffee cake cooling on the window sill. We could peer inside it through a tiny little hole like at the Fotoplastikon in Warsaw, marvelling over its every detail.

  But I fear it may already be too late.

  We have no choice now but to learn how to endlessly select. Learn how to be like a fellow traveller I once met on a night train who told me that every so often he goes back to the Louvre just to see the one painting he considers to be worthwhile, of John the Baptist. He just stands there before it, beholding it, gazing up at the saint’s raised finger.

  THE ORIGINAL AND THE COPY

  A guy in the cafeteria of this one museum said that nothing gives him such great satisfaction as being in the presence of an original artwork. He also insisted that the more copies there are in the world, the greater the power of the original becomes, a power sometimes approaching the great might of a holy relic. For what is singular is significant, what with the threat of destruction hanging over it as it does. Confirmation of these words came in the form of a nearby cluster of tourists who, with fervent focus, stood worshipping a painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Just occasionally, when one of them couldn’t take it anymore, there came the clearly audible click of a camera, sounding like an ‘amen’ spoken in a new, digital language.

  TRAINS FOR COWARDS

  There are trains that are designed to be slept on. They are comprised, in their entirety, of sleeping compartments and a single café car, not even a restaurant car, because a café car is enough. This type of train runs, for example, from Szczecin to Wrocław. It leaves at 10.30 at night and gets in at 7 in the morning, although the trip itself is not that long, only about 200 miles, and you could make it in five hours. But the point isn’t always to get there faster: the company cares about its passengers’ comfort. The train stops in fields and stands in their nocturnal fogs, a quiet hotel on wheels. There’s no sense in trying to race the night.

  There’s a very good train from Berlin to Paris. And from Budapest to Belgrade. And from Bucharest to Zurich.

  I feel as though these trains were just invented for people with a fear of flying. They’re a little embarrassing – it’s better not to admit that you take them. And they’re not really advertised that much. They’re trains for longstanding customers, for that unfortunate percentage of the population that has a heart attack over every takeoff and every landing. For those with sweaty hands who wad up Kleenex after Kleenex in despair, and for those who grasp onto the flight attendants’ sleeves.

  This sort of train stands humbly on the side track, keeping a low profile. (For example, the one from Hamburg to Krakow at Altona, where it is concealed by billboards and other advertising.) People taking one for the first time wander around the station for a while before they find it. Boarding is carried out discreetly. In the outer pockets of suitcases there are pyjamas and slippers, toiletry cases, earplugs. Clothing is hung carefully on special hooks, and at the miniscule washbasins closed off in closets the tools for teeth-brushing are arrayed. Soon t
he conductor will take breakfast orders. Coffee or tea? That’s the closest to freedom the railway gets. Had these passengers just got one of those cheap flights, they would have been there in an hour, and it would have cost them less money, too. They would have had a night in the arms of their longing lovers, breakfast at one of the restaurants on rue je-ne-sais-quoi, where oysters are served. An evening Mozart concert at a cathedral. A walk along the riverbanks. Instead they must fully surrender to the time taken by rail travel, must personally traverse every kilometre according to the age-old custom of their ancestors, go over every bridge and through each viaduct and tunnel on this voyage over land. Nothing can be skipped, nothing bypassed. Every millimetre of the way will be touched by the wheel, will for an instant be part of its tangent, and this will be an unrepeatable configuration for all time – of the wheel and the rail, of the time and place, unique throughout the cosmos.

  As soon as this train for cowards sets off into the night – practically without warning – the bar begins to fill up with people. Drawn in are men in suits who come for a couple of quick ones or for a pint to help them sleep, elegant gay men whose eyes dart around like castanets; forlorn football fans, separated from their friends – who’d flown – as insecure as sheep parted from their flocks; female friends over the age of forty who have left their boring husbands in search of some excitement. Slowly there begins to be less and less space, and passengers behave as though they were at a big party, and sometimes the amiable waiters will introduce them to one another: ‘This fellow travels with us every week’; ‘Ted, who says he won’t go to bed but is actually always the first one snoring’; ‘The passenger who travels every week to see his wife – he must really love her’; ‘Mrs I’m-Never-Travelling-on-this-Train-Again.’

  In the middle of the night, as the train creeps along the plains of Belgium or Lubusz, as the night-time mist thickens and blurs everything, the café car is host to a second round of visitors: exhausted, insomniac passengers who are not ashamed of the slippers on their unstockinged feet. They join in with the rest as though putting themselves in fate’s hands – whatever will be, will be.

  But it seems to me that the only things that can happen to them are the things that are for the best. After all, they are now in a place that is mobile, that moves through black space; they are borne by the night. Not knowing anyone and being recognized by no one. Escaping their own lives, and then being safely escorted right back to them.

  ABANDONED APARTMENT

  The apartment doesn’t understand what’s happened. The apartment thinks its owner has died. Ever since the door slammed shut, since the key grated around in the lock, all sounds are muffled, their shades and edges absent, as in indistinct stains. Space condenses, unused, undisturbed by any draft, any ruffling of the curtains, and in this motionlessness, trial forms tentatively begin to crystallize, forms suspended for a moment between the floor and ceiling of the entryway.

  Of course no new thing comes into being now – how could it? These are only imitations of familiar shapes, melding into bubbly, blistery clumps, maintaining their outlines just for a second. These are individual episodes, isolated gestures, like a footprint on a soft carpet made endlessly and always in the same exact spot and then vanishes. Or a hand over a table, going through the motions of writing, although the motions are incomprehensible because they occur without a pen, without paper, without writing, without even the rest of the body.

  THE BOOK OF INFAMY

  She was not my friend. I met her at Stockholm airport, the only one in the world with wood floors; a pretty, dark oak parquet with carefully matched slats – a low estimate would put it at several hectares of northern woods.

  She was sitting next to me. She stretched out her legs and rested them on a black backpack. She wasn’t reading, she wasn’t listening to music – she just had her hands folded over her stomach and was staring straight ahead. I liked how peaceful she was, completely resigned to waiting. As I stared at her more openly, her gaze slid away from mine and down onto that polished floor. Blurting out the first thing I could think of, I said it was a waste of the woods to use them for flooring in an airport.

  ‘They say that you have to sacrifice some living being when you build an airport,’ she replied. ‘To ward off catastrophe.’

  The flight attendants were having some sort of problem at the gate. It turned out – they announced to those waiting – that our plane was overbooked. By some fluke in the system, there were simply too many people on the passenger list. A computer error, such was the guise of fate these days. They’d give two people two hundred euros, a night at the airport hotel and a dinner voucher if they’d be willing to leave the following day instead.

  People glanced nervously around. Someone said, let’s draw straws for it! Someone laughed, and then an uncomfortable silence descended. Nobody would want to stay, and understandably enough: we don’t live in a vacuum, we have places to be, we have to see the dentist tomorrow, we have invited friends over for dinner.

  I looked down at my shoes. I wasn’t in a hurry. I never have to be in any particular place at any particular time. Let time watch me, not me it. And besides – there are different ways of making a living, but here a whole other dimension of employment opened up, perhaps the employment of the future, the kind of thing that would guard against joblessness and the production of excessive waste. Stand aside, get your day’s wages just by staying at a hotel, have some coffee in the morning and a buffet breakfast, take advantage of the smorgasbord’s wide range of different yoghurts. Why not? I stood up and headed over to the jittery flight attendants. Then the woman who’d been sitting beside me stood and came up, too.

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  Unfortunately, our bags flew without us. An empty shuttle took us to the hotel, where we were given comfortable little adjoining rooms. There was nothing to unpack, just a toothbrush and a pair of clean underwear – we were down to iron rations. Plus face cream and a big book, a page-turner. And a notepad. There would be time to note down everything, to describe the woman: She is tall, with a good body, her hips quite wide, her hands delicate. Her thick, curly hair is tied back in a ponytail, but it’s unruly, and strands float above her head like a kind of silver halo – she is completely grey. But she has a young, bright, freckled face. She must be Swedish. Swedish women tend not to dye their hair.

  We arranged to meet downstairs, at the bar, that evening, after a luxurious shower and a look through the various channels on the TV.

  We ordered white wine, and after the polite preliminaries, including the Three Basic Questions of the Traveller, we moved on to matters of greater substance. I started off by telling her a bit about my peregrinations, but as I was speaking I got the impression she was only listening to be polite. This made me lose momentum, for I figured she must have a more interesting story to tell, until finally I gave her the floor.

  She was collecting evidence, she said, she had even gotten a grant for it from the European Union, although it still didn’t cover her travels, so she had had to borrow money from her dad – who had since passed away. She swept a little coil of grey hair from her forehead (I decided for sure then that she couldn’t be over forty-five), and we ordered salads in exchange for our airline vouchers; the only option with the voucher was the Niçoise. She narrowed her eyes when she talked, which lent her words a slightly ironic undertone, which was probably why for the first few minutes I couldn’t tell if she was being serious. She said that at first glance the world seems so diverse. Wherever you go you find all sorts of different people, different cultures, cities constructed according to local custom, using different materials. Different roofs and different windows and different courtyards. Here she speared a piece of feta on her fork and traced circles with it in the air.

  ‘But don’t let yourself be taken in by the diversity – it’s superficial,’ she said. ‘It’s all smoke and mirrors. In reality, everywhere is the same. In terms of animals. In terms of how we interact with animal
s.’

  Calmly, as though reiterating a lecture she knew by heart, she began to enumerate: dogs strain against chains in the sweltering sun, just desperately hoping for water – these puppies are chained up so tight that by the time they’re two months old they can’t even walk; ewes give birth in the fields, in the winter, in the snow, and all the farmers do is arrange large vehicles to cart off the frozen lambs; lobsters are kept in restaurant aquariums so that the customer may sentence them, with the rap of an index finger, to death by boiling, while other restaurants breed dogs in their storerooms – dog meat restores virility, after all; hens in cages are defined by the number of eggs they lay, rushed by chemicals through their brief lives; people put on dog fights; primates are injected with diseases; cosmetics are tested on rabbits; fur coats are made of sheep fetuses – and she said all of this unfazed, inserting olives into her mouth.

  ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I can’t listen to this.’

  So she took her bag, which was made of rags, from the back of her chair, and she took out from inside it a folder of laminated pages in black Xeroxed print. She handed it to me across the little table. I reluctantly flipped through the darkened pages, the text in two columns, like in an encyclopaedia or in the Bible. Small print, footnotes. ‘Reports on Infamy’, and the address of her website. I took a look and knew instantly I wasn’t going to read any of it. But still I tucked the material away inside my backpack.

  ‘That’s what I do,’ she said.

  Then, over our second bottle of wine, she told me about the time she had got altitude sickness on a trip to Tibet and almost died. She was healed by some local woman who beat a drum and mixed her herbal tinctures.