Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  Scissors were invented by Leonardo da Vinci.

  In the bathroom, where I unwrapped the entire box of these pads with their curious teachings, it hit me like a revelation that this was yet another part of the project of the great encyclopaedia now coming into being, the encyclopaedia that would encompass all things. So I went back to the pharmacy and scoured the shelves in search of the name of this strange company that had determined to unite necessity with usefulness. For what sense could it ever possibly make to wrap pads in paper that had flowers and strawberries on it? Paper was created to be the bearer of ideas. Paper packaging is wasteful and should be banned. But if you really do have to package something, then you ought to only be able to do it in novels and poems, and always in such a way that what is contained and what contains it have some connection.

  Starting at the age of thirty, humans begin to slowly shrink.

  Each year more people are killed by kicks from donkeys than by plane crashes.

  If you wind up at the bottom of a well, you’ll be able to see the stars even during the day.

  Did you know that your birthday is shared by nine million people around the world?

  The shortest war in history was waged between Zanzibar and England in 1896, lasting thirty-eight minutes.

  If the earth’s axis were tilted just one degree more, the planet would be uninhabitable, because the regions around the equator would be too hot and the poles too cold.

  Due to the earth’s rotation, throwing something westward will send it flying further than if it’s going east.

  The average human body contains enough sulphur to kill a dog.

  Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to your palate.

  But the one I was the most struck by was this:

  The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.

  RELICS: PEREGRINATIO AD LOCA SANCTA

  In Prague in the year 1677 you could go to Saint Vitus Cathedral to see: the breasts of Saint Anne, totally intact, kept in a glass jar; the head of Saint Stephen the Martyr; the head of John the Baptist. The nuns of Saint Teresa would show interested visitors a sister deceased some three hundred years earlier, sitting behind bars, very well preserved. The Jesuits, meanwhile, had the head of Saint Ursula and the hat and finger of Saint Francis Xavier.

  A hundred years earlier a Pole had wound up in La Valetta on Malta, from whence he wrote that a local priest took him around the city and showed him: ‘palmam dextram integram (the whole right hand) of Saint John the Baptist, perfectly fresh, as though he’d just cut it off the body, and having opened its crystal case, he gave it to my unworthy lips to kiss, the which being the greatest glory this sinner has ever known, blessed be the Lord. He also permitted me to kiss a snippet of that saint’s nose, the whole leg of Saint Lazari Quadriduani, the fingers of Saint Magdalene, a portion of the head of Saint Ursula (this striking me as strange, for in Cologne, on the Rhine, I also saw the whole head, and touched my unworthy lips to it).’

  BELLY DANCE

  After the food the waiter hurriedly brought me a coffee, then retreated into the back of the room, behind the counter; he would watch, as well.

  We lowered our voices because we were forced to do so, because the lights went out softly, and in between the tables came the young woman I had seen a few minutes earlier smoking a cigarette outside. Now she stood among the seated people and shook her loose black hair. Her eyes were heavily painted; her fitted top, embroidered with sequins around her breasts, shimmering brightly, all the colours at once, would have pleased any child, any girl. The bracelets on her arms clanged and clattered. Her long skirt flowed down from her hips to her bare feet. A very pretty girl, her teeth shone an impossible white, her eyes casting intrepid glances under which it was impossible to sit still: you wanted to move, stand up, smoke. The woman was dancing to the rhythm of the drums as her hips showed off, challenging to a duel anyone who might so much as dream of underestimating their power.

  Finally a guy responded to this call and boldly ventured up to dance; he was a tourist, wearing shorts, not particularly suited to her sequins, but he was trying, shaking his hips excitedly, while his friends at his table stomped and whistled. And now two young girls set forth to dance; in jeans, thin as rails.

  This dance in our cheap pub was holy. That was how we felt about it – I and my companion, another woman.

  When the lights came back on we discovered our eyes were filled with tears, and that we were rushing to wipe our eyes with napkins, embarrassed. Men – worked up into a kind of frenzy – made fun of us. But I was certain that our being moved by this dance was a quicker route to grasping it than the men’s excitement.

  MERIDIANS

  A woman named Ingibjörg was travelling along the prime meridian. She was from Iceland, and she began her journey in the Shetland Islands. She complained that it was, of course, impossible to travel in a straight line, since she was totally dependent upon roads and ship routes and train tracks. But she was trying to stick to her guns, continuing south, manoeuvering along the line as best she could, in a zigzag.

  She talked about it so vividly and so enthusiastically that I didn’t have the courage to ask her why she was doing it. Although the answer to that kind of question is more or less always: why not?

  As she spoke, I saw in my mind’s eye the image of a drop sliding down the surface of a globe.

  And yet I find the idea unsettling to this very day. Meridians don’t exist, after all. Not really.

  UNUS MUNDUS

  I have a poet friend who, unfortunately, was never able to live off her poetry. Is there anyone who lives off poetry? So she started working at this travel agency, and since she spoke excellent English, she ended up becoming a tour guide for American groups. She was great at it, and she kept getting recommended for even the most exacting guests. She would pick them up in Madrid, fly with them to Malaga, and then they’d sail to Tunis. Normally it was a small group, around ten people.

  She enjoyed these assignments, and she had on average two per month. She liked to relax then in the finest hotels, which she would take the opportunity to sleep in. She had to take them around the various landmarks, and so she read a lot in those days in preparation. On the sly she also wrote. When some especially interesting idea came to mind – a phrase, an association – she knew she had to write it down right away, because if not, it would be gone forever. Memory falters with age, gets spottier. So she’d get up and go to the bathroom and write it down, sitting on the toilet. Sometimes she would write on her hands, just letters, mnemotechnics.

  She was not a specialist in Arab countries and their cultures – she had studied literature and linguistics – but she consoled herself with the fact that her tourists weren’t either.

  ‘Let’s not kid ourselves,’ she’d say. ‘It’s just one world.’

  You didn’t need to be a specialist; you just had to have an imagination. Sometimes when there would be some interruption in their travel, when they’d have to sit for hours in strange shadow, in the middle of nowhere, because a cable in their Jeep just snapped, she would have to entertain her clients somehow. That was when she started telling stories. They expected her to. She took some from Borges and embellished them a little, dramatized them. Others came from the Thousand and One Nights, although even then she always added a little something of her own. She said you had to find stories that hadn’t been made into films yet, and it turned out in fact there were quite a few of them. To everything she lent some Arab colour, holding forth on details of dress, cuisine, camel varietals. They must not have listened to her too attentively because on the occasions when she would mix up some historical fact, no one ever pointed it out to her, until in the end she simply stopped bothering about the facts.

  HAREM (MENCHU’S TALE)

  Words won’t do justice to the harem’s labyrinth. So picture perhaps the cells of a honeycomb, the curved arrangement of intestines, the insides of a body, the canals of an ear; spirals, dead-en
ds, appendixes, soft rounded tunnels that finish just here, at the entrance to a secret chamber.

  The centre is hidden deep, as in an ant’s nest, these are the sultan’s mother’s chambers, lined with a uterine matrix of carpets, censed with myrrh, cooled by water that makes the parapets into streaming riverbeds. Around this extend the rooms of sons not yet of age; they, too, are women, after a fashion, enveloped in the feminine element until initiation cleaves by sword their pearly amniotic sac. Past these internal courtyards a complex hierarchy of cells for concubines opens up: the least desirable women are transferred upwards, as though their bodies, forgotten by men, were undergoing a mysterious process of angelification; the eldest live right beneath the roof – soon their souls will float away, off into the heavens, while their bodies, once so alluring, will dry out in imitation of ginger root.

  Among these myriad corridors, atria, secret alcoves, cloisters and courtyards the young ruler himself has his bedrooms, each paired with a royal lavatory, where in stately luxury he indulges in tranquil royal defecation.

  Every morning he’s released from the clutches of the mothers into the world, like an oversized child learning to walk a tad too late. Clad in his ceremonial caftan he plays his role – then in the evening returns with relief to the body, to his own intestines, to the soft vaginas of his concubines.

  He returns from the chambers of the elders, where he governs his desert country – receiving delegations and administering the politics of a collapsing little local kingdom, politics in vain. For the news is frightful. The bloody clashes of the three great powers leave no doubts: they have to place a bet on a colour, like in roulette, come down on one of the sides. What is unclear is how to make this decision – based on where he was educated? An affinity for the culture? The sound of the language? This uncertainty’s fuelled further by his guests, whom he receives each morning. They are businessmen, merchants, consuls, whispering advisors. They arrange themselves before him on ornate pillows, wiping the sweat off their foreheads which, perpetually covered with pith helmets, remain a surprising white, reminiscent of the shade of rhizomes underground – stigma of these people with infernal origins. Others are in turbans and torses, pawing at or chewing on their long beards, unaware of the fact that this gesture can only be associated with lies and deceptions. They all have matters to discuss with him, wish to commend to him their services as negotiators, try to talk him into the one right choice. This gives him headaches. The kingdom isn’t large – all told a few dozen settlements in the oases of the rocky desert, of all the possible resources of nature it has only opencast salt mines. It has no access to the sea, no ports, strategic capes or straits. The women who reside in this small country raise chickpeas, sesame and saffron. Their husbands transport travellers and merchants in caravans across the desert to the south.

  The young ruler has never been drawn to politics, doesn’t understand in the least what others find so fascinating about it, how his great father could have dedicated his whole life to it. But then he bears not the slightest resemblance to his father, who over the course of decades of fighting with the nomads in the desert built up this modest kingdom. From among his many brothers he was selected as his father’s successor solely because his mother was the eldest of the wives, an ambitious person. His mother assured him the power that for biological reasons she could not have for herself. The brother who would have been a serious rival to him met an unfortunate end, stung by a scorpion. His sisters don’t count, he doesn’t even really know them. When he looks at women, he always remembers that each could have been his sister and, in some strange way, this fills him with peace.

  On the council of elders, that grim group of bearded men, he has no friends. When he appears in the meeting room, they suddenly fall silent, which always makes him feel as though they are conspiring against him. No doubt they are. Then, after a series of ritual greetings, they discuss matters and cast glances at him that only barely hide their contempt and aversion, though they are supposed exclusively to seek approval. Sometimes it seems to him – unfortunately, more and more often – that these fleeting glances contain an enmity that’s gotten rather tangible, sharp as a knife – that ultimately they don’t care if he ends up saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, they only judge whether or not he should even continue to occupy this place in the centre of the room, this privileged position, and if this time he will manage to make any sound at all.

  What do they expect of him? He is incapable of following their shouting over one another, so impassioned, the logic of their arguments. He focuses instead on the beautiful saffron turban worn by one of them, who happens to be the minister of fresh water resources, or to the exceptionally poor appearance of another; it’s difficult not to notice the sickly pallor of his face framed by that grey and massive beard. He must be ill; he’ll no doubt die soon.

  ‘Die’ – the word fills the young ruler with overwhelming disgust; it isn’t good he’s thought of it, already he can feel saliva flood his mouth, his throat contracting – perverse inversion of orgasm. And he knows he must get out.

  This is why he knows already what he’s going to do, though he keeps it all a secret from his mother.

  She comes to him late that evening, nonetheless, although even she must first announce herself to his two trusted guards, eunuchs, black as ebony: Gog and Magog. She visits her son as he’s enjoying his time in the arms of his little friends. She sits at his feet on a beautifully woven pillow, her bracelets clanking. Every time she moves, she sets off waves of the spicy fragrance of the oils in which she coats her aged body. She says she knows about everything, and that she’ll help him to set out, just so long as he promises to take her with him. Does he realize that by leaving her here he would be condemning her to death?

  ‘We have devoted kin in the desert who will certainly receive us. I already sent a man to them with our news. We will wait out the worst time there, and then in disguise, taking what is ours, jewels and gold, we shall set out for the west, for the ports, and escape from there and not return. We shall settle in Europe, but not too far, so that in good weather we’ll be able to glimpse Africa’s shores. I will still care for your children, son,’ she says, and it is clear she does believe in this flight of theirs, but it is just as clear that in those grandchildren she can no longer – certainly not.

  What can he say? He pets their silken heads, consents.

  But in the hive there are no secrets, word spreads hexagonally, cell by cell, through the fireplaces, the restrooms, corridors and courtyards. It spreads with the hot air off cast-iron pans that burn charcoal so as to make the winter chills more bearable. At times the air that comes in from the hinterland is so cold that a thin layer of ice covers the urine in the majolica chamber pots. The news spreads across the concubines’ floors and all of them, even those grown most angelic, on the uppermost floors, pack up their few possessions. They whisper amongst themselves, already arguing over spots in the caravan.

  Over the next few days the palace visibly revives; it’s been ages since it saw so much commotion. Which is why our ruler is surprised everything seems to go unnoticed by the Scarlet Turban or the Miserable Beard.

  He thinks they’re dumber than he even realized.

  Meanwhile, they are thinking the exact same thing – that their ruler has turned out to be more stupid than they’d ever even noticed. They’ll feel less sorry for him because of it. For already from the west a great army is arriving, by ship and over land – they whisper among themselves. It is said they come in hordes. It is said they have declared a holy war upon the world. That they intend to conquer us, the young ruler’s advisors whisper. They care most about Jerusalem, where the remains of their prophet lie. There is nothing that can be done about them – they are insatiable and capable of anything. They will plunder our homes, rape our women, set our houses on fire, desecrate our mosques. They will violate all treaties and agreements, they are greedy and erratic. It is clear – there is no question of a tomb here, we would give t
hem all our tombs, just let them take them, we have plenty here. If what interests them are cemeteries, let them take them. But it has become very apparent this is just a pretext; they want to take the living, not the dead. Just as soon as their ships have moored on our continent they’ll raise their cry of battle in their hoarse and obstreperous language – they cannot speak a proper language, nor read a proper alphabet – and, bleached by the sun from their long journey, faded by the sea salt that covers their skin in the finest layer of silver, they will overrun our cities, unhinging the doors of our houses, shattering pitchers of oil, plundering our larders and even reaching – heaven help us – the shalwar of our women. They are unable to answer any greeting we can offer, they gaze at us dully, and their light-coloured irises appear rinsed out, thoughtless. Someone’s said they are a tribe born at the bottom of the sea, reared by waves and silver fish, and indeed its members do look like bits of wood spit out upon the shore, their skin is the colour of bones the sea has played with for too long. But others insist it isn’t true – how, then, could their ruler, the man with the red beard, have drowned in the depths of the river Selef?

  So they whisper, in earnest, then get to grumbling. This ruler of ours has failed us. His father, of course, he was good, he would have immediately prepared a thousand horsemen for the battle, fortified the enclave, provisioned us with water and grain in case of siege. But this… Someone spits after pronouncing his name, then falling silent, afraid of what might come out of his own mouth.

  There is a long silence. One man rubs his beard, another stares into the complex pattern on the floor, where bits of colourful pottery compose a labyrinth. Still another rubs the scabbard of his knife, elaborately encrusted with turquoise. His finger strokes the little bulges, back and forth. Today nothing will be determined by these brave advisors and ministers. Already outside the guards are posted. The palace army.