Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  Blau and Kampa dug out a couple of real archeological rarities here, too. They came upon, for example, four specimens from Ruysch’s renowned collection from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, a collection that had been dispersed, its fate unknown. Unfortunately, one of them, Acardius hemisomus, which could have been the gem of any teratological collection, had to be sent to the crematorium because of a crack in its glass receptacle – there was no way of saving it. The committee, seeing the specimen in its state of considerably advanced decay, did consider briefly whether in such cases there ought not to be some type of funeral arranged.

  Blau was overjoyed at this discovery because it enabled him to run a number of tests on the famous preservation concoction of Frederik Ruysch, the Dutch anatomist of the late seventeenth century. This solution was exceedingly effective for its time – it managed to maintain the natural colour of the specimen, as well as keeping it from swelling, which was otherwise the bane of that era’s fluid preservation. Blau found that in addition to brandy from Nantes and black pepper, it also contained ginger root extract. He wrote an article and joined in the old debate on the ingredients of ‘Ruysch’s solution’, that Stygian liquid intended to ensure immortality through immersion, at least for the body. From that time forward Kampa started calling their underground collections ‘pickles’.

  He and Kampa – who brought him the specimen one morning – discovered something remarkable, on which Blau then worked for several months, in order to precisely understand the make-up and the workings of the conserving liquid. Namely, an arm. Male, powerful (the circumference of the biceps was 54 centimetres), 47 centimetres long, cut clean with the clear aim of showing the tattoo – multi-coloured, representing with great sensitivity to proportions a whale emerging from the waves of the sea (white crests captured with Baroque grace and precision), blowing a fountain into the sky. The drawing was perfectly executed, expecially the sky, which from the outside of the arm seemed intensely blue – though the closer you got to the armpit, the darker it became. The play of hues had been perfectly preserved in the translucent liquid.

  The specimen had no label. The jar was reminiscent of those made in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, meaning it had a cylindrical shape – they didn’t know at that time how to make cuboid forms from glass, in any case. The specimen, attached to the slate cap by horse hair, appeared to float in the fluid. But the strangest thing was the fluid itself… It wasn’t alcohol, although at first glance Blau had thought this came from the beginning of the seventeenth century, and from the Netherlands. It was a mixture of water and formaldehyde with a small amount of glycerin. Its composition could be said to be very modern, quite similar to the Kaeserling III mixture still used today. The container no longer had to be hermetically sealed, because the mixture didn’t vapourize like alcohol. In the wax that was used to seal the lid haphazardly in place he found fingerprints which moved him, deeply. He imagined that those tiny little wavy lines, that natural stamp in the shape of a labyrinth, had belonged to someone just like him.

  He took care of that arm and its artwork with something that might have been termed love. He wasn’t going to find out now whom it had belonged to, nor who had dispatched this arm with its tattoo on its travels through time.

  He and Kampa shared a moment of terror – which Blau recounted later to a female first-year student, observing with satisfaction how her eyes became wide with surprise as her pupils turned a dark matte, which according to sociobiologists was a sign of erotic interest.

  In the wooden boxes in one of the corridors that led to a dead end, they found some stuffed mummies in very poor condition. The skin was completely blackened, dry, torn, seagrass spilling out through the seams, which had split apart in places. The bodies were shrivelled, dried up, and to top it all off they were dressed in what must have once been considered lavish garments – now all the lace and the collars had taken on the same colour as the dust. Their decorations, folds and flounces had lost their distinguishing characteristics, become a ball of rotted material from which, here and there, some little button, made of pearl, stood out. From the stretched-out mouth, forced open by desiccation, grass emerged.

  They found two mummies like this, small, that looked like children, but on close examination Blau realized they were – thank God – stuffed chimpanzees, very poorly preserved, completely unprofessionally; the sale and purchase of ones like these was quite widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of course their suspicions could have been confirmed, human mummies had also been bought and sold, and quite ample collections created out of them. Collectors were especially interested in acquiring what was different and exceptional, people of other races, the spectacularly crippled, the diseased.

  ‘Stuffing corpses is the simplest way of preserving them,’ mused Blau, guiding around the makeshift cellar collection two more female students who had enthusiastically accepted his invitation, much to Kampa’s disapproval and dismay. Blau was counting on at least one of them letting him invite her out for wine, adding a new photograph to his collection. ‘In so doing,’ he continued now, ‘they only really leave the skin, which means this isn’t, in the full sense of the word, a body. It’s just a section of a body, the external form stretched out over a dummy made of hay. Mummification is quite a pathetic way of conserving a body. It only gives the illusion that we have the whole thing here before us. In reality, it is an obvious fraud. A circus trick, since only its shape and external covering have been preserved. And in fact the body has been destroyed, in other words, the ideological opposition to preservation. Barbarity.’

  Yes, they had breathed a sigh of relief that these were not human mummies. That would have brought them headaches since the law clearly forbids keeping in state museums whole human corpses (if they are not ancient mummies, and even with that people start to object and cause trouble). If they had been people – children, as they thought in the beginning – they would have faced a complicated bureaucratic procedure and lots of issues. Many times he had heard about these uncomfortable discoveries when collections at medical academies or at universities were put in order.

  Emperor Joseph II had created such a collection in Vienna. In his cabinet of curiosities he had decided to collect everything that was particular, every manifestation of the aberration of the world, every instance of matter forgetting itself. One of his successors, Francis I, had not hesitated to stuff his black-skinned courtier, one Angelo Soliman, after his death. At which point his mummy, wearing only a grass band, was displayed for the viewing pleasure of all the monarch’s guests.

  JOSEFINE SOLIMAN’S FIRST LETTER TO FRANCIS I, EMPEROR OF AUSTRIA

  It is with a profound sense of sorrow and of shame that I come to Your Majesty, though also in the hopes that there has somehow been some sort of terrible mistake. Angel Soliman, my father, that unflinchingly faithful servant to Your Majesty’s uncle, Emperor Joseph (that vastly magnanimous lord to us all), has since his death (may he rest in peace) become victim to a truly reprehensible iniquity that must now be put to rights.

  Your Majesty knows well the story of my father’s life, and I am also aware that Your Majesty knew my father personally, too, and esteemed him for his long-standing devotion and work, particularly as a faithful servant and chess master, and, like Your Majesty’s uncle, Emperor Joseph (may he rest in peace), and like many others, you once consistently treated him with distinction and respect. He had many wonderful friends who appreciated his qualities of mind and spirit, his great sense of humour and kindness of heart. He was in close contact for many years with Herr Mozart, from whom Your Majesty’s uncle was so gracious as to commission an opera. He also joined the diplomatic ranks and was widely famed on account of his prudence, his foresight, and his wisdom.

  I shall now permit myself a brief harkening back to my father’s history, thereby to restore his person to Your Majesty’s gracious memory. What makes us most human is the possession of a unique and irreproducible story, t
hat we take place over time and leave behind our traces. And yet, even if we did absolutely nothing for others – not for our ruler nor for our state – we would still have the right to be buried with dignity, for burial is merely the act of returning to our Creator his creation, the human body.

  My father was born around 1720 in northern Africa, though the early years of his life are shrouded in mystery. He often commented that he could not remember clearly the period of his earliest childhood. His memory reached just back to the time when as a young child he was sold into slavery. With horror he would tell us what he did remember: the long sea voyage in the dark hold of some ship or other, scenes taken straight out of Dante’s inferno that had played out before the eyes of that small child following his separation from his mother and his other close blood relatives. His parents most likely ended up in the New World, while he was passed around as a sort of black pet, like a Maltese puppy or a Siamese cat. Why did he speak of it so rarely? Ought he not have done the opposite and spoken up about it all the time once he had obtained his position? I believe that his silence was brought about by a terrible conviction, a conviction he may himself have been unaware of: the faster painful events are erased from memory, the faster they will lose their power over us. They will cease to haunt us. The world will become better. As long as people don’t find out how awful and abominable man can be to fellow man, their innocence will be left intact. What happened to my father’s body after his death, however, is a testament to the wrongheadedness of that conviction.

  After a seemingly endless series of trials, tribulations, and tragedies, my father was bought out of slavery on Corsica by the Prince of Lichtenstein’s kind-hearted wife and presented at court. This was how he wound up in Vienna, where Her Majesty the Princess developed a great affection for the child, and perhaps even, if I may, love. Thanks to her he was raised and educated in a meticulous manner. That education seems to have replaced in his memory his distant exotic origins. As his only daughter, I never heard him speak about his roots. Never even did I see him seem nostalgic. His heart was always fully in the service of Your Majesty’s uncle.

  He became known, of course, as a distinguished politician, an intelligent envoy, and an endearing man. He was always surrounded by friends. He was loved and respected. He also enjoyed one special privilege: the friendship of Emperor Joseph, known as the Second – Your Majesty’s uncle, who entrusted to my father on a number of occasions missions requiring tremendous intelligence.

  In 1768 he married my mother Magdalena Christiani, the widow of a Dutch general, with whom he lived in domestic bliss for fourteen years, until her death in 1782. I am the sole fruit of that union. After many years of useful contributions, he undertook the decision to retire from the service of the Prince of Lichtenstein, his benefactor, though he always maintained his relationship with the court and always continued to serve the Emperor.

  I know how much my father owed to human kindness, and to the human tendency to help. Many people whose stories began as unhappily as my father’s did were simply lost, dissolving into the chaos of the world. Few black-skinned slave children had the opportunity to attain as high and important a position as my father. But this is precisely the reason why his case is so significant – it shows that as beings created by the hand of God, we are all His children, and we are brothers and sisters to one another.

  A number of my dear departed father’s friends have already written to Your Majesty regarding this matter. I join them here in requesting that Your Majesty release my father’s body and allow him to have the Christian burial he deserves.

  Hopefully,

  Josefine Soliman von Feuchtersleben

  AMONG THE MAORI

  The heads of deceased family members are mummified and conserved as objects of mourning. Stages of mummification include steaming, smoking, and coating in oil. Through such treatments, the heads may be maintained in good condition, with their hair, skin, and teeth.

  DR BLAU’S TRAVELS (II)

  He was emerging now from the body of the plane, down long tunnels, following the arrows and illuminated notices that gently divided passengers between those who had reached their destinations and those who were still en route. The streams of people in the large airport swelled and then dispersed again. This painless selection process led him to the escalators, and then a long, broad hallway, where fluidity was hastened by a moving walkway. Those in a hurry took advantage of technology’s advances and now leaped into another rate of time – at a leisurely pace they passed by others. Blau passed the glassed-in smoking area where nicotine fanatics, having fasted during extended flights, now gave in to their addictions with evident bliss. To Blau they seemed a separate species, living in an element that wasn’t air, but rather a mixture of carbon dioxide and smoke. He watched them through the glass with vague astonishment, as though watching animals in a terrarium – on the plane they’d seemed so like him, but here their distinct biological make-up had been revealed.

  He handed over his passport, and the officer sized him up with a quick, professional glance, comparing both faces – the one on the photo and the one on the other side of the pane. Apparently he didn’t raise suspicions, because without delay they let him onto the terrain of this foreign nation.

  The taxi pulled into the train station, where he showed his electronic ticket at the window. Since he still had over two hours he went to a bar. It reeked of stale grease, and as he waited for his fish, he examined those sitting around him.

  The station didn’t have any particular characteristics to set it apart. The large screen over the departures table showed all the same ads, for shampoo and credit cards. A familiar logo made this foreign world feel safe. He was hungry. The artificial airplane food had left no trace he was aware of in his body. It was as though it had contained no substance – only shape and smell – which was apparently the food they’d serve in paradise. Food for hungry souls. But now the piece of fried fish served with salad, the piece of white meat fried golden, fortified the doctor’s compact body. He also ordered wine, served here in handy little bottles, its contents equal to one generous glass.

  On the train, he fell asleep. He didn’t miss much – the train slogged through the city, through some tunnels and the suburbs, confusingly similar to other suburbs, with the same graffitied patterns repeated on the viaducts and the garages they went past. When he came to, he saw the sea, a thin bright belt between the cranes at the port and some ugly warehouse buildings and the shipyards.

  ‘My dear sir,’ she had written him. ‘Your questions and their formulations have instilled within me, I must confess, complete and profound trust. A person who knows what he’s asking is someone who can expect an answer soon. Perhaps what you need is that proverbial pinch that tips the scales.’

  He wondered what sort of pinch she had in mind. He checked the dictionary thoroughly. He didn’t know any proverbs that had to do with scales and pinches. She had taken her husband’s last name, but her first name was fairly exotic – Taina. Which might suggest she came from some distant land and equally exotic language, in which both pinch and scale worked perfectly fine as proverb. ‘Needless to say, it would be best for us to meet. I’ll try to examine your dossier and all your articles in the meantime. Please come and see me. This is where my husband worked right up until the end, and his presence is still felt here. This will no doubt aid us in our conversations.’

  It was a small seaside village stretching down the shore, belted by a straight asphalt highway. The taxi pulled off just before the last sign with the village’s name on it, heading downhill, towards the sea, and now they passed wood houses, pleasant to look at, with terraces and balconies. The house he was looking for turned out to be big, and the most elegant along this gravel road. It was surrounded by a wall of medium height thickly covered with some local vine. The gate was kept open, but he asked the driver to stop on the road and, taking out his wheeled suitcase, he went up the gravel-strewn driveway on foot. The focal point of the neat
yard was a magnificent tree, clearly coniferous, but with a deciduous aspect, like an oak with leaves that had somehow been stunted into needles. He’d never seen such a tree, its almost white bark looked like an elephant’s skin.

  No one responded to his knocking, so for a moment he stood there on the wooden porch, unable to make up his mind; he summoned his courage and turned the handle. The door opened, admitting him into a bright, spacious living room. The window opposite was completely taken up by the sea. A big orange cat came up to his feet, meowed and slipped outside, completely ignoring the houseguest. The doctor was sure there was no one home, so he set down his suitcase and went out on the porch to wait for his hostess. He stood there for a quarter of an hour or so, examining that mighty tree, and then he slowly started to go around the house, which was encircled, like the others in this area, by a wooden terrace, on which (as in every other place in the world) stood lightweight furniture with throw pillows. In the back he found a garden with a meticulously mown lawn, densely planted with flowering bushes. In one of them he recognized a fragrant honeysuckle, and guided by a path lined with smooth, round rocks, he discovered a passage he thought must lead straight to the sea. He hesitated for a moment. Then he set forth.

  The sand on the beach seemed almost white; diminutive, clean, dotted here and there with white shells. The doctor wondered whether he should remove his shoes, because he realized that it might be rude to walk onto a private beach with shoes on.

  In the distance he saw a figure emerging from the water in silhouette – the sun, already low, was still intense. The woman was wearing a dark one-piece bathing suit. On the shore she reached out for a towel and wrapped herself in it. With one end of it she rubbed her hair. Then she picked up her sandals and began approaching the startled doctor. He didn’t know what to do now. Whether to turn around and leave or to in fact walk towards her. He would have preferred to meet her in the calm of an office, in a more official setting. But she was already upon him. She held out her hand by way of greeting and said his last name in an interrogative tone. She was of average height and must have been getting close to sixty; cruel wrinkles shot across her face – you could tell she didn’t skimp on sun. Had it not been for that, she would probably have looked younger. Her short, light-coloured hair stuck to her face and neck. The towel she had around her reached her knees, below which were her evenly tanned legs, and her feet, marred by bunions.