Flights

by Olga Tokarczuk

  His breathing returns after a little while to normal, although his hands are still shaking. He lights a cigarette, that’s it, let it pollute his lungs with a little nicotine, stupefy him with smoke, evict the demons. But he knows now that he can’t go any further, that he wouldn’t be able to handle this new knowledge that now overwhelms him. He gasps for breath with his head on the steering wheel.

  He positions the car on the pavement, he’s sure they’ll give him a ticket, and carefully he walks away. The asphalt surface of the road seems viscous now.

  ‘Mr Untouchable,’ she says.

  Provocatively, Kunicki doesn’t respond. She slams the cabinet door after pulling out a packet of tea, waiting out the duration she’s given him to react.

  ‘What’s going on with you?’ she asks. Aggressively now. Kunicki knows that if he doesn’t answer now she’ll launch a full-blown attack, so he says calmly:

  ‘Nothing. What would be going on?’

  She snorts and says in a monotone:

  ‘You don’t say anything, you don’t let me touch you, you scoot over to the very edge of the bed, you’re not sleeping, you’re not watching TV, you come home late, smelling of alcohol…’

  Kunicki contemplates how he should behave. He knows that whatever he does will be wrong. So he stops. He stiffens in the chair, looks at the table. He’s as uncomfortable as if he’d swallowed something that won’t go down his throat. He feels a menacing movement of air in the kitchen. He tries one last time:

  ‘We have to call things by their name…’ he starts, but she interrupts him.

  ‘I mean, yeah, if only we knew what their name was.’

  ‘Fine. You didn’t tell me what really…’

  But he doesn’t finish, because she throws the tea on the floor and runs out of the kitchen. After a second the door slams.

  Kunicki thinks she’s a great actress. She could have been a great actress.

  He’s always known what he wanted. Now he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t even know what it is he ought to know. He pulls out trays of catalogues and inattentively looks over boxes impaled on skewers. He doesn’t know how to search or what to search for.

  He sat up the whole previous night on the internet. And what did he find? An inexact map of Vis, the official Croatian tourism page, the ferry schedule. When he typed in the name Vis, dozens of pages came up. Only a few about the island. Hotel prices, attractions. Also Visible Imagine System, in English, with satellite photos, as far as he could tell. And Vaccine Information Statements, Victorian Institute of Sport. And System for Verification and Synthesis.

  The internet itself led him from one word to the next, giving links, pointing out. When it didn’t know something it tactfully kept quiet or stubbornly showed him the same pages, ad nauseam. Then Kunicki had the impression that he had just landed at the border of the known world, at the wall, at the membrane of the heavenly firmament. There wasn’t any way to break through it with his head and look through.

  The internet is a fraud. It promises so much – that it will execute your every command, that it will find you what you’re looking for; execution, fulfilment, reward. But in essence that promise is a kind of bait, because you immediately fall into a trance, into hypnosis. The paths quickly diverge, double and multiple, and you go down them, still chasing an aim that will now get blurry and undergo some transformations. You lose the ground beneath your feet, the place where you started from just gets forgotten, and your aim finally vanishes from sight, disappears in the passage of more and more pages, businesses that always promise more than they can give, shamelessly pretending that under the flat plane of the screen there is some cosmos. But nothing could be more deceptive, dear Kunicki. What are you, Kunicki, looking for? What are you aiming at? You feel like spreading out your arms and plunging into it, into that abyss, but there is nothing more deceptive: the landscape turns out to be a wallpaper, you can’t go any further.

  His office is small, it’s a single room he rents for cheap on the fourth floor of a dilapidated office building. Next door there’s a real estate agency, and further down a tattoo parlour. What fits in here is a desk and a computer. On the floor lie packages of books. On the windowsill an electric kettle and a jar of coffee.

  He cranks up the computer and waits for it to wake back up. Then he lights his first cigarette. He looks at the pictures again, but this time he carefully studies each one, for a long time, until he gets to the ones he took at the end – the contents of her purse laid out on the table, and that ticket with the inscription ‘Kairos,’ yes, he’s even memorized that word: καιρóς. Yes, that word will explain everything to him.

  So he has found something he hadn’t noticed before. He has to light a cigarette, he’s so excited. He looks at that mysterious word, it will guide him now, he’ll let it up with the wind like a kite and follow it. ‘Kairos,’ Kunicki reads, ‘Kairos,’ repeating it, unsure how it’s pronounced. It has to be Greek, he thinks happily, Greek, and he dives into his bookshelves, but there’s no Greek dictionary there, only Useful Latin Phrases, a book he’s never even opened. Now he knows he’s on the right track. Now he can’t stop. He lays out the pictures of the contents of her purse, good thing he thought to take them. He places them next to one another like in solitaire, in even rows. He lights another cigarette and walks around the desk like he’s some kind of detective. He stops, inhales some smoke, examines the photographed lipstick and pen.

  Suddenly he realizes: there are different kinds of looking. One kind of looking allows you to simply see objects, useful human things, honest and concrete, which you know right away how to use and what for. And then there’s panoramic viewing, a more general view, thanks to which you notice links between objects, their network of reflections. Things cease to be things, the fact that they serve a purpose is insignificant, just a surface. Now they’re signs, indicating something that isn’t in the photographs, referring beyond the frames of the pictures. You have to really concentrate to be able to maintain that gaze, at its essence it’s a gift, grace. Kunicki’s heart starts beating faster. This red pen with ‘Septolete’ written on it is obscuring some dark unknowable, impenetrable thing.

  He knows this place, the last time he was here was when the water was going back down, just after the flood. The library, the respectable Ossolineum, sits by the river, faces it, a fatal error. Books should be kept in elevated places.

  He remembers that view, when the sun showed itself again and the water was subsiding. The flood brought in sludge and mud, but some places had been cleared, and the library workers were laying out books there to dry. They set them out, open, on the floor, there were hundreds of them, thousands. In that position, unnatural for them, they looked like live creatures, a cross between a bird and an anemone. Hands in thin latex gloves patiently unsticking wet pages, in order for individual sentences and words to dry. Unfortunately the pages withered, darkened from the sludge and water, warping. People were walking between them carefully, women in white aprons, as at a hospital, opening volumes to the sun, letting the sun read. But in fact it was a terrifying sight, something like a meeting of the elements. Kunicki stood and looked on in horror, and then, animated by the example of some other passer-by, joined in enthusiastically to help.

  Today at the library in the city centre, beautifully renovated after the flood, tucked away in buildings arranged around the well in the courtyard, he feels uneasy. When he goes into the great reading room he sees tables placed in even rows at discreet distances from one another. At almost every single one sits someone’s back – leaning over, hunched. Trees over a grave. A cemetery.

  The books set on the shelves show only their spines to people, and it’s as though, thinks Kunicki, you could only see people in profile. They don’t tempt you with their colourful covers, don’t boast with banners on which every word is a superlative; as though being punished, like recruits, they present only their most basic facts: title and author, nothing more.

 
Instead of folders, posters and commercials there are catalogues. The egalitarian quality of those little cards stuffed into drawers inspires respect. Only a little information, numbers, a short description, no showing off.

  He’s never been here. When he was at university he only used the modern library. He wrote out a title and author on a card and turned it in and after a quarter of an hour received the book. But even there he didn’t go too often, in truth he went only exceptionally, since most of the texts he needed he got Xeroxed. That was a new generation of literature – text without spine, fleeting copy, something like the Kleenex that took the helm after the abdication of cloth handkerchiefs. Kleenexes led a modest revolution, eliminating class differences. After using them once you just threw them away.

  He has three dictionaries in front of him. Greek-Polish Dictionary. Edited by Zygmunt Węclewski, Lwów 1929. Samuel Bodek Bookstore, Batory Street 20. Little Greek-Polish Dictionary. Eds. Teresa Kambureli, Thanasis Kamburelis. Published by Wiedza Powszechna, Warsaw, 1999. And the four volumes of Greek-Polish Dictionary edited by Zofia Abramowiczówna, 1962. Published by PWN. There, with difficulty, using the tabular alphabet, he deciphers the word: καιρóς.

  He only reads what’s written in Polish, in the Latin alphabet. ‘1. (On measure.) Due measure, appropriateness, moderation; difference; meaning. 2. (On place.) A vital, sensitive place in the body. 3. (On time.) Critical moment, right time, appropriateness, opportunity, nick of time, the propitious time is fleeting; those who turned up unexpectedly; miss the moment; when the right time comes, help in the event of a storm, on time, when the opportunity arises, prematurely, critical moments, periodic states, the chronological sequence of facts, situation, state of things, placement, ultimate danger, benefit, use, to what aim?, what will help you?, where would be convenient?’

  That’s one dictionary. The next, older – Kunicki goes over the tiny entries with his eyes, passing over the Greek words and stumbling over old spellings: ‘in good measure, moderation, correct relations, attain an aim, overmuch, the appropriate moment, a suitable time, a nice moment, a convenient occasion, just here, time, hour, and in plural, circumstances, relations, times, cases, incidents, decisive moments of the revolution, dangers; the occasion is convenient, the occasion suits, it comes in time. It is also said: something happens at the appropriate time.’ In the newest dictionary they finally give the pronunciation in brackets: [kieros]. And: ‘weather, time, season, what’s the weather?, now is grape season, wasting time, from time to time, one time, how long? this was needed long ago.’

  Kunicki looks around the reading room in despair. He sees the tops of heads leaned over books. He returns to the dictionaries, reads the previous entry, which looks similar, only different by one letter: καιριος. And here there’s still more: ‘done in time, purposeful, effective, lethal, fatal, question solved and: a dangerous place on the body where wounds are effective, what is always on time, what always has to happen.’

  Kunicki gathers his things and heads home. At night he finds on Wikipedia a page about Kairos, from which he simply learns that it’s a god, of little importance, forgotten, Hellenic. And that this god was discovered in Trogir. That museum has its image, so she wrote down the word. Nothing more.

  When his son was still a baby, when he was an infant, Kunicki had never thought of him as a person. And that was fine, because then they were close. People are always far away. He figured out how to change his nappies as efficiently as possible, he could do it in just a couple of swift motions, almost imperceptibly, but for the sound of nappies. He would submerge his little body in the bath, wash his belly, and then carry him still wrapped up in his towel into his room, where he would put him in his pyjamas. That was easy. When you have a little kid, you never have to think about anything, everything is obvious and natural. Attaching child to breast, and his weight; his smell – familiar and heart-warming. But children aren’t people. Children become people when they wriggle out of your arms and say ‘no’.

  Kunicki is unnerved now by the silence. What was the child doing? He stands in the doorway and sees the child on the floor, surrounded by blocks. He sits down next to him and picks up one of his little plastic cars. He moves it along the painted road. He doesn’t know if he’s supposed to start off with a story: once upon a time there was a little car that got lost. He’s getting his mouth ready to speak when the boy rips the toy from his hands and gives him something else – a wooden truck carrying blocks in the back.

  ‘We’re going to build,’ says the child.

  ‘What are we going to build?’ improvises Kunicki.

  ‘A little house.’

  Alright then, a little house. They position the blocks in a square. The truck brings the materials.

  ‘Hey, what if we build an island?’ says Kunicki.

  ‘No, a house,’ says the child as he plops the blocks down willy-nilly, one on top of the other. Kunicki delicately rearranges, so that the whole house doesn’t come crashing down.

  ‘But do you remember the sea?’ says Kunicki.

  The child assents, and the truck empties out a new supply. Now Kunicki has no idea what to say or what to ask. He might point to the rug and say, this rug is the island, and we are on the island, but the boy is lost on the island, and daddy is worried, because where could his little son be? Which is what he says, but it doesn’t really work.

  ‘No,’ insists the boy. ‘Let’s build a little house.’

  ‘Do you remember when you and mummy got lost?’

  ‘No!’ screams the child, gleefully tossing blocks onto the little house.

  ‘Have you ever got lost?’ Kunicki asks again.

  ‘No,’ says the child, and the truck crashes into the newly constructed house at full speed. The walls fall down. ‘Boom! Boom!’ laughs the boy.

  Kunicki begins patiently to build it back up again.

  When she comes home, Kunicki first sees her from the floor, just like the child. She’s large, flushed from the cold, suspiciously excited. Her lips are red. She tosses a red (or maybe mauve, maybe plum) shawl onto the arm of a chair and hugs the child. ‘Are you guys hungry?’ she asks. Kunicki feels as though a wind has come with her into the room, the cold, blustery wind that comes off the sea. He would like to say, ‘Where were you?’ But he can’t afford to.

  In the morning he has an erection and has to turn away from her; he has to hide these inconvenient notions the body sometimes gets, so that she won’t read them as encouragement, attempts at reconciliation, any type of attachment. He turns to face the wall and celebrates the erection, that purposeless readiness, that state of alert, that adherent, taut extremity; he has it all to himself.

  The tip of his penis rises like a vector, pointing out the window, towards the world.

  Legs. Feet. Even when he stops, when he sits down, they seem to keep going, they can’t restrain themselves, they cross a given space in small, hurried steps. When he wants to restrain them, they rebel. Kunicki is afraid his legs will break out into a run, whisk him off, take him a way he would never agree to, will leap up into the air like they’re folk dancing, against his will, or they’ll go into the gloomy courtyards of mouldy old stone buildings, work their way up someone else’s stairs, pull him up through hatches and onto steep, slippery roofs and make him walk along the scaly roofing tiles, like they would a sleepwalker.

  It must be because of his restless legs that Kunicki can’t sleep: from the waist up he’s calm, relaxed, and sleepy; from the waist down – insuperable. He’s obviously made up of two people. His upper person wants calm and justice; his downward person is transgressive and ignores all principles. His upper person has a name, an address, a social security number; there’s not really anything his downward person can say for himself, in fact he’s had it up to here with himself.

  He’d like to quiet his legs, rub a soothing ointment into them; as a matter of fact, this internal tickling sensation is painful. He finally takes a sleeping pill. He restores his legs to order.r />
  Kunicki tries to control his own extremities. He invents a way of doing so: he lets them be in constant motion, even just his toes in his shoes, while the rest of his body is at rest. And when he sits down – he releases them then, too: let them be uneasy. He peers down at the toes of his shoes and sees the delicate movement of the leather as his feet begin their obsessive marching in place. But he also takes frequent walks around town. He thinks that this time he will have crossed all the possible bridges over the Odra and the canals. That he will not have missed a single one.

  The third week of September is rainy and windy. They have to get their autumn things out of storage, jackets and rubber boots for the child. He picks him up from nursery school; they walk quickly to the car. The boy jumps into a puddle and splashes water everywhere. Kunicki doesn’t notice, he’s thinking about what to say, stringing together sentences. Such as, ‘I’m concerned the child may have had a kind of shock,’ or, with more self-confidence, ‘I believe my son has experienced a shock.’ Now he remembers the word ‘trauma’. ‘To experience trauma.’

  They drive across the wet city, the windshield wipers working as hard as they can to clear off the water from the windshield, baring for just a second at a time the world plunged in rain, the smeared world.

  It’s his day, Thursday. Thursdays he picks up his son from nursery school. She’s busy because she works all afternoon, she has some workshops or something, she won’t be back until late, so Kunicki has the child to himself.

  They pull up to a big renovated brick building in the very centre of the city and look for a little while for a parking place.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asks the child, and because Kunicki doesn’t answer, the boy begins to repeat the question over and over: ‘Wherewegoing wherewegoing?’

  ‘Be quiet,’ says the father, but then, a moment later, he explains, ‘To see a lady.’