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

‘I can’t get through to the Police, it’s the Czech network again.’

I pulled my mobile phone from my pocket and tapped out the number I knew from the television – 997 – and soon after an automated Czech voice responded. That’s what happens here. The signal wanders, with no regard for the national borders. Sometimes the dividing line between operators parks itself in my kitchen for hours on end, and occasionally it has stopped by Oddball’s house or on the terrace for several days. Its capricious nature is hard to predict.

‘You should have gone higher up the hill behind the house,’ I belatedly advised him.

‘He’ll be stiff as a board before they get here,’ said Oddball in a tone that I particularly disliked in him – as if he had all the answers. He took off his sheepskin coat and hung it on the back of a chair. ‘We can’t leave him like that, he looks ghastly. He was our neighbour, after all.’

As I looked at Big Foot’s poor, twisted body I found it hard to believe that only yesterday I’d been afraid of this Person. I disliked him. To say I disliked him might be putting it too mildly. Instead I should say that I found him repulsive, horrible. In fact I didn’t even regard him as a human Being. Now he was lying on the stained floor in his dirty underwear, small and skinny, limp and harmless. Just a piece of matter, which some unimaginable processes had reduced to a fragile object, separated from everything else. It made me feel sad, horrified, for even someone as foul as he was did not deserve death. Who on earth does? The same fate awaits me too, and Oddball, and the Deer outside; one day we shall all be nothing more than corpses.

I glanced at Oddball, in the hope of some consolation, but he was already busy making the rumpled bed, a shake-down on a dilapidated folding couch, so I did my best to comfort myself. And then it occurred to me that in a way Big Foot’s death might be a good thing. It had freed him from the mess that was his life. And it had freed other living Creatures from him. Oh yes, suddenly I realised what a good thing death can be, how just and fair, like a disinfectant, or a vacuum cleaner. I admit that’s what I thought, and that’s what I still think now.

Big Foot was my neighbour, our houses were only half a kilometre apart, yet I rarely had anything to do with him. Fortunately. Instead I used to see him from afar – his diminutive, wiry figure, always a little unsteady, would move across the landscape. As he went along, he’d mumble to himself, and sometimes the windy acoustics of the Plateau would bring me snippets of this essentially simple, unvarying monologue. His vocabulary mainly consisted of curses, onto which he tacked some proper nouns.

He knew every scrap of this terrain, for it seems he was born here and never went further than Kłodzko. He knew the forest well – what parts of it he could use to earn money, what he could sell and to whom. Mushrooms, blueberries, stolen timber, brushwood for kindling, snares, the annual off-road vehicle rally, hunting. The forest nurtured this little goblin. Thus he should have respected the forest, but he did not. One August, when there was a drought, he set an entire blueberry patch ablaze. I called the fire brigade, but not much could be saved. I never found out why he did it. In summer he would wander about with a saw, cutting down trees full of sap. When I politely admonished him, though finding it hard to restrain my Anger, he replied in the simplest terms: ‘Get lost, you old crone.’ But more crudely than that. He was always up to a bit of stealing, filching, fiddling, to make himself extra cash; when the summer residents left a torch or a pair of pruning shears in the yard, Big Foot would instantly nose out an opportunity to swipe these items, which he could then sell off in town. In my view he should have received several Punishments by now, or even been sent to prison. I don’t know how he got away with it all. Perhaps there were some angels watching over him; sometimes they turn up on the wrong side.

I also knew that he poached by every possible means. He treated the forest like his own personal farm – everything there belonged to him. He was the pillaging type.

He caused me many a sleepless Night. I would lie awake out of helplessness. Several times I called the Police – when the telephone was finally answered, my report would be received politely, but nothing else would happen. Big Foot would go on his usual rounds, with a bunch of snares on his arm, emitting ominous shouts. Like a small, evil sprite, malevolent and unpredictable. He was always slightly drunk, and maybe that prompted his spiteful mood. He’d go about muttering and striking the tree trunks with a stick, as if to push them out of his way; he seemed to have been born in a state of mild intoxication. Many a time I followed in his tracks and gathered up the primitive wire traps he’d set for Animals, the nooses tied to young trees bent in such a way that the snared Animal would be catapulted up to hang in mid-air. Sometimes I found dead Animals – Hares, Badgers and Deer.

‘We must shift him onto the couch,’ said Oddball.

I didn’t like this idea. I didn’t like having to touch him.

‘I think we should wait for the Police,’ I said.

But Oddball had already made space on the folding couch and was rolling up the sleeves of his sweater. He gave me a piercing look with those pale eyes of his. ‘You wouldn’t want to be found like that, would you? In such a state. It’s inhuman.’

Oh yes, the human body is most definitely inhuman. Especially a dead one.

Wasn’t it a sinister paradox that now we had to deal with Big Foot’s body, that he’d left us this final trouble? Us, his neighbours, whom he’d never respected, never liked, and never cared about?

To my mind, Death should be followed by the annihilation of matter. That would be the best solution for the body. Like this, annihilated bodies would go straight back into the black holes whence they came. The Souls would travel at the speed of light into the light. If such a thing as the Soul exists.

Overcoming tremendous resistance, I did as Oddball asked. We took hold of the body by the legs and arms and shifted it onto the couch. To my surprise I found that it was heavy, not entirely inert, but stubbornly stiff instead, like starched bed linen that has just been through the mangle. I also saw his socks, or what was on his feet in their place – dirty rags, foot wrappings made from a sheet torn into strips, now grey and stained. I don’t know why, but the sight of those wrappings hit me so hard in the chest, in the diaphragm, in my entire body, that I could no longer contain my sobbing. Oddball cast me a cold, fleeting glance, with distinct reproach.

‘We must dress him before they arrive,’ said Oddball, and I noticed that his chin was quivering too at the sight of this human misery (though for some reason he refused to admit it).

So first we tried to remove his vest, dirty and stinking, but it adamantly refused to be pulled over his head, so Oddball took an elaborate penknife from his pocket and cut the material to pieces across the chest. Now Big Foot lay half-naked before us on the couch, hairy as a troll, with scars on his chest and arms, covered in tattoos, none of which made any sense to me. His eyes squinted ironically while we searched the broken wardrobe for something decent to dress him in before his body stiffened for good and reverted to what it really was – a lump of matter. His torn underpants protruded from brand-new silvery tracksuit bottoms.

Cautiously I unwound the repulsive foot wrappings, and saw his feet. They astonished me. I have always regarded the feet as the most intimate and personal part of our bodies, and not the genitals, not the heart, or even the brain, organs of no great significance that are too highly valued. It is in the feet that all knowledge of Mankind lies hidden; the body sends them a weighty sense of who we really are and how we relate to the earth. It’s in the touch of the earth, at its point of contact with the body that the whole mystery is located – the fact that we’re built of elements of matter, while also being alien to it, separated from it. The feet – those are our plugs into the socket. And now those naked feet gave me proof that his origin was different. He couldn’t have been human. He must have been some sort of nameless form, one of the kind that – as Blake tells us – melts metals into infinity, changes order into chaos. Perhaps he was a sort of devil. Devilish creatures are always recognised by their feet – they stamp the earth with a different seal.