Ольга Токарчук - Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Sometimes during my ritual daily rounds I would see his slim, hunched figure, but always from afar. Once I even waved to him from the hilltop, but he didn’t answer. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed me.

In early March I had another, acute Attack, and the thought crossed my mind of calling Oddball or shambling over there to knock at his door. My stove had gone out, but I hadn’t enough strength to go down to the boiler room, which had never been a pleasure. I promised myself that when my clients came to visit their houses in the summer I would tell them that unfortunately I wasn’t going to take the job on again next year. And that this might be my last year here. Perhaps before next winter I would have to move back to my little flat on Więzienna Street in Wrocław, right by the university, from where one can watch the River Oder for hours on end as it hypnotically, insistently pumps its waters northwards.

Luckily Dizzy came by and got the old stove going again. He went to the woodshed and fetched a wheelbarrow full of logs saturated with March damp that gave off a lot of smoke, but little warmth. From a jar of pickled gherkins and the remains of some vegetables he managed to make a delicious soup.

I lay up for several days, subdued by my body’s rebellions. I patiently endured fits of numbness in my legs, and the unbearable sensation of fire burning within them. I pissed red, and can confirm that a toilet bowl filled with red liquid is a dreadful sight. I drew the curtains, for I could not bear the bright March light reflected off the snow. Pain lashed my brain.

I have a Theory. It’s that an awful thing has happened – our cerebellum has not been correctly connected to our brain. This could be the worst mistake in our programming. Someone has made us badly. This is why our model ought to be replaced. If our cerebellum were connected to our brain, we would possess full knowledge of our own anatomy, of what was happening inside our bodies. Oh, we’d say to ourselves, the level of potassium in my blood has fallen. My third cervical vertebra is feeling tension. My blood pressure is low today, I must move about. Yesterday’s egg mayonnaise has sent my cholesterol level too high so I must watch what I eat today.

We have this body of ours, a troublesome piece of luggage, we don’t really know anything about it and we need all sorts of Tools to find out about its most natural processes. Isn’t it scandalous that the last time a doctor wanted to check what was happening in my stomach he made me have a gastroscopy? I had to swallow a thick tube, and it took a camera to reveal the inside of my stomach to us. The only coarse and primitive Tool gifted us for consolation is pain. The angels, if they really do exist, must be splitting their sides laughing at us. Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There’s no instruction manual.

Unfortunately, the mistake was made at the very start, as were other errors too.

Luckily my sleep cycle was changing again; I’d nod off at dawn and wake in the afternoon, which may have been a natural defence against the daylight, against the day in general and everything that belonged to it. I’d wake up – or maybe it was all in a dream – and I’d hear my Little Girls’ footsteps pattering on the stairs, as if everything that had happened lately were just a tiresome hallucination prompted by fever. And those were beautiful moments.

In my somnolent state I also thought about the Czech Republic. The border would appear in my mind, and that gentle, beautiful country beyond it. Over there, everything is lit up by the Sun, gilded with light. The fields breathe evenly at the foot of the Table Mountains, surely created purely for the purpose of looking pretty. The roads are straight, the streams are clear, Mouflons and Fallow Deer graze in pens by the houses, Leverets frolic in the corn, and little bells are tied to the combines as a gentle way of scaring them off to a safe distance. The people aren’t in a hurry, and don’t compete against each other all the time. They don’t go chasing after pipe dreams. They’re happy with who they are and what they have.

The other day Dizzy told me that in a small bookshop in the Czech town of Náchod he found a nice edition of Blake, so let us now imagine that these good people, who live on the other side of the border, and who speak to each other in a soft, childlike language, come home from work in the evenings, light a fire in the hearth and read Blake to one another. And perhaps, if he were still alive, seeing all this, Blake would say that there are some places in the Universe where the Fall has not occurred, the world has not turned upside down and Eden still exists. Here Mankind is not governed by the rules of reason, stupid and strict, but by the heart and intuition. The people do not indulge in idle chatter, parading what they know, but create remarkable things by applying their imagination. The state ceases to impose the shackles of daily oppression, but helps people to realise their hopes and dreams. And Man is not just a cog in the system, not just playing a role, but a free Creature. That’s what was passing through my mind, making my bed rest almost a pleasure.

Sometimes I think that only the sick are truly healthy.

The first day I felt better I put on some clothes and, hounded by a sense of duty, went on my usual round. I was as weak as a potato sprout grown in darkness in the cellar.

It turned out that the melting snow had torn off a gutter at the Writer’s house, and now water was pouring straight down the wooden wall. Dry rot guaranteed. I called her, but of course she wasn’t at home, maybe she was out of the country. Which meant that I would have to deal with the gutter myself.

It’s a complete mystery that every challenge triggers vital forces within us. I really did feel better – only my left leg was still racked with pain, like an electric current, so I was walking on it stiffly, as if it were a prosthesis. But once I had to move the ladder, I stopped worrying about my Ailments. I forgot about the pain.

I stood on that ladder for about an hour with my arms raised, unsuccessfully struggling to replace the gutter in its semi-circular supports. On top of that, one of them had broken off and must be lying somewhere in the deep snow piled against the house. I could have waited for Dizzy, who was coming by that evening with a new quatrain and the shopping, but Dizzy is fragile, he has small, girlish hands, and to put it plainly, he’s a bit scatter-brained. I say this with all due love and respect for him. It’s not an imperfection on his part. There are more than enough traits and Characteristics in this world for each of us to be richly endowed, I thought to myself.

And from the ladder I viewed the changes that the thaw had brought to the Plateau. Here and there, especially on the southern and eastern slopes, dark patches had appeared – there the winter was withdrawing its army, but it was still holding out on the field boundaries and below the forest. The entire Pass was white. Why is ploughed land warmer than grassland? Why does the snow melt faster in the forest? Why do rings appear in the snow around tree trunks? Are trees warm?

I put these questions to Oddball, whom I had gone to ask for help with the Writer’s gutter. He gave me a baffled look but didn’t answer. As I was waiting for him, I examined his diploma for taking part in the mushroom-picking contest organised each year by the Penny Buns Mushroom Pickers’ Society.

‘I didn’t know you were so good at picking mushrooms,’ I said.

He smiled gloomily without speaking, in his usual way.

He led me into his workshop, which was like a surgery – there were all sorts of drawers and little shelves, with a Tool on each one, a special Tool designed to perform one particular task. He spent ages rummaging in a box until finally he extracted a piece of flattened aluminium wire, twisted into a ring that wasn’t quite closed.