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

I think we all feel great ambivalence at the sight of our own Horoscope. On the one hand we’re proud to see that the sky is imprinted on our individual life, like a postmark with a date stamped on a letter – this makes it distinct, one of a kind. But at the same time it’s a form of imprisonment in space, like a tattooed prison number. There’s no escaping it. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful. We’d prefer to think we’re free, able to reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. This connection with something as great and monumental as the sky makes us feel uncomfortable. We’d rather be small, and then our petty little sins would be forgivable.

Therefore I’m convinced that we should get to know our prison very well.

By profession I am a bridge-construction engineer – have I mentioned that already? I have built bridges in Syria and in Libya, and also in Poland – near Elbląg, and two in Podlasie. The one in Syria was a strange bridge: it spanned the banks of a river that only appeared periodically. Water flowed in its bed for two or three months, then soaked into the sun-baked earth, changing it into something like a bob-sleigh track. Wild desert Dogs would chase each other along it.

I always gained the greatest pleasure from transforming concepts into figures – from these figures a specific image arose, then a drawing, and then a design. The figures came together on my piece of paper and assumed a meaningful shape. My talent for algebra was useful to me for Horoscopes in the days when one had to do all one’s calculations on a slide rule. Nowadays that’s unnecessary; there are computer programs to do it for us. Who still remembers the slide rule, when the cure for any thirst for knowledge is just a mouse-click away? But it was then, during the best phase in my life, that my Ailments began, and I had to return to Poland. I spent a long time in hospital, but it still wasn’t clear what was really wrong with me.

For a time I slept with a Protestant, who in his turn designed motorways, and he told me, probably quoting Luther, that he who suffers sees the back of God. I wondered if this meant the shoulders, or the buttocks perhaps, and what this divine back looked like, since we’re incapable of imagining the front. Maybe it meant that he who suffers has special access to God, by a side door, he is blessed, he embraces some sort of truth which without suffering would be hard to comprehend. So in a way the only Person who’s healthy is one who suffers, however strange it might sound. I think that would be in harmony with the rest.

For a year I couldn’t walk at all, and by the time my Ailments began to ease a little, I knew I would never be able to build bridges across rivers in the desert again, and that I couldn’t stray too far from a fridge with glucose in it. So I changed profession and became a teacher. I worked at a school and taught the children various useful things: English, handicrafts and geography. I always did my best to capture their attention fully, to have them remember important things not out of fear of a bad mark but out of genuine passion.

It gave me a lot of pleasure. Children have always attracted me more than adults, for I too am a little infantile. There’s nothing wrong with that. The main thing is that I’m aware of it. Children are soft and supple, open-minded and unpretentious. And they don’t engage in the sort of small talk in which every adult is able to gabble their life away. Unfortunately, the older they are, the more they succumb to the power of reason; they become citizens of Ulro, as Blake would have put it, and refuse to be led down the right path as easily and naturally any more. That’s why I only liked the smaller children. The older ones, over the age of ten, say, were even more loathsome than adults. At that age the children lost their individuality. I could see them ossifying as they inevitably entered adolescence, which gradually forced them to be hooked on being the same as others. In a few cases there was a bit of an inner struggle as they wrestled with this new state of being, but almost all of them ended up capitulating. I never made the effort to keep in touch with them after that – for it would be like having to witness the Fall, yet again. Usually I taught children up to this limit, at most until the fifth year.

Finally I was pensioned off. Far too early, in my opinion. It’s hard to understand why because I was a good teacher, with plenty of experience, and free of troubles, apart from my Ailments, but they only made their presence known from time to time. So I went to the education board, where I submitted the relevant certificates, references and applications to be allowed to go on teaching. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I had run into a bad moment – a time of reforms, overhauling the system, changing the program, and rising unemployment.

Then I looked for work in another school, and then another, half-time and quarter-time, by the hour – I’d have taken a job by the minute if only they’d offered one, but wherever I went I could sense an army of other, younger people standing behind me, breathing down my neck, impatiently treading on my tail, even though it’s a thankless, badly paid profession.

Only here did I succeed. Once I’d moved out of the city, bought this house and taken on the job as guardian of my neighbours’ properties, a breathless young headmistress came across the hills to see me. ‘I know you’re a teacher,’ she said – and she used the present tense, which instantly won me over, for I regard my profession as a mental attitude rather than a set of isolated activities. She offered me a few hours teaching English at her school, working with small children, the kind I like. So I agreed, and once a week I started teaching English to seven- and eight-year-olds, who approach learning very enthusiastically but who just as quickly and suddenly get bored. The headmistress wanted me to teach music too – she must have heard us singing ‘Amazing Grace’ – but that would have been beyond my strength. It’s quite enough for me to scurry down to the village every Wednesday, to have to dress in clean clothes, brush my hair and put on a little make-up – I paint my eyelids green and powder my face. All this costs me a great deal of time and patience. I could have taken the PE class too, I am tall and strong. I used to go in for sports. Somewhere in the city I still have my medals. Though I had no chance of teaching PE any more because of my age.

But I’ll admit that now, in winter, it’s hard for me to get there. On teaching days I have to get up earlier than usual, when it’s still dark, stoke the fire, clear the snow from the Samurai, and if it’s parked away from the house on the surfaced road, I must wade through the snow to reach it, which isn’t fun at all. Winter mornings are made of steel; they have a metallic taste and sharp edges. On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it’s plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure.

Unfortunately, neither Dizzy nor any of my friends shares my passion for Astrology, so I try not to flaunt it. They regard me as a crank already. I only spill the beans when I need to obtain someone’s date and place of birth, as in the case of the Commandant. For this purpose I have questioned almost everyone from the Plateau and half the town. In giving me their date of birth, people are actually revealing their real name to me, they’re showing me their celestial date-stamp, opening their past and future to me. But there are many people whom I shall never have the opportunity to ask.

Obtaining a date of birth is relatively easy. All it takes is an identity card, or just about any other document, and sometimes, by chance, it turns up on the internet. Dizzy has access to all sorts of lists and tables, though I won’t elaborate here. But what really matters is the time of birth. That’s not recorded in the documents, and yet it’s the time that’s the real key to a Person. A Horoscope without the exact time is fairly worthless – we know WHAT, but we don’t know HOW and WHERE.