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

These feet – very long and narrow, with slender toes and shapeless black nails – looked prehensile. The big toe stood slightly apart from the rest, like a thumb. They were thickly coated in black hair. Had anyone seen the like before? Oddball and I exchanged glances.

In the near-empty wardrobe we found a coffee-coloured suit, slightly stained, but obviously rarely worn. I had never seen him in it. Big Foot always went about in thick felt boots and threadbare trousers, with which he wore a check shirt and a quilted waistcoat, whatever the time of year.

Dressing the dead man was like a form of caress. I doubt he ever experienced such tenderness in life. We held him up gently by the arms and pulled the clothing onto him. As his weight rested on my chest, after a wave of quite natural disgust that made me feel nauseous, it suddenly occurred to me to hug this body, to pat it on the back, to soothe it by saying: don’t worry, it’ll be all right. But on account of Oddball’s presence I did no such thing. He might have thought I was being perverse.

My aborted gestures changed into thoughts, and I began to feel sorry for Big Foot. Perhaps his mother had abandoned him, and he’d been unhappy throughout his miserable life. Long years of unhappiness cause a Person worse degradation than a fatal illness. I never saw any visitors at his place, no family or friends had ever appeared. Not even the mushroom pickers stopped outside his house to chat. People feared and disliked him. It seems he only kept company with hunters, but even that was a rare event. I’d say he was about fifty years old; I’d have given a lot to see his eighth house, and whether Neptune and Pluto were conjoined in there by some aspect, with Mars somewhere in the Ascendant, for with that jag-toothed saw in his sinewy hands he reminded me of a predator that only lives in order to sow death and inflict suffering.

To pull on his jacket, Oddball raised him to a sitting position, and that was when we noticed that his large, swollen tongue was trapping something in his mouth, so after a brief hesitation, clenching my teeth with disgust and withdrawing my hand several times, I gently took hold of the something by its tip, and saw that what I had between my fingers was a little bone, long and thin, and sharp as a dagger. A throaty gurgle and some air emerged from the dead mouth, making a soft whistle, exactly like a sigh. We both leaped back from the corpse, and I’m sure Oddball felt the same thing as I did: Horror. Especially seconds later, when dark red, almost black blood appeared in Big Foot’s mouth. A sinister trickle came flowing out of it.

We froze on the spot, terrified.

‘Well, I never,’ said Oddball, his voice quavering. ‘He choked. He choked on a bone, the bone stuck in his throat, the bone got caught in his throat, he choked,’ he nervously repeated. And then, as if to calm himself down, he said: ‘Back to work. It’s no pleasure, but our duties to our neighbours aren’t always going to be pleasant.’

I could see that he had put himself in charge of this night shift, and I fell in line behind him.

We fully abandoned ourselves to the thankless task of squeezing Big Foot into the coffee-coloured suit and placing him in a dignified position. It was a long time since I had touched anyone else’s body, never mind a dead one. I could feel the inertia rapidly flowing into it as it grew more rigid by the minute; that was why we were in such haste. And by the time Big Foot was lying there in his Sunday best, his face had finally lost all human expression – now he was a corpse, without a doubt. Only his right index finger refused to submit to the traditional pose of politely clasped hands but pointed upwards, as if to catch our attention and put a brief stop to our nervous, hurried efforts. ‘Now pay attention!’ said the finger. ‘Now pay attention, there’s something you’re not seeing here, the crucial starting point of a process that’s hidden from you, but that’s worthy of the highest attention. Thanks to it we’re all here in this place at this time, in a small cottage on the Plateau, amid the snow and the Night – I as a dead body, and you as insignificant, ageing human Beings. But this is only the beginning. Only now does it all start to happen.’

There we stood in the cold, damp room, in the frosty vacuum prevailing at this dull, grey time of night, and it crossed my mind that the thing that leaves the body sucks a piece of the world after it, and no matter how good or bad it was, how guilty or blameless, it leaves behind a great big void.

I looked out of the window. Dawn was breaking, and idle snowflakes were gradually starting to fill the nothingness. They were falling slowly, weaving their way through the air and spinning on their own axis like feathers.

By now Big Foot had gone, so it was hard to feel any pity or resentment towards him. All that remained was his body, lifeless, clothed in the suit. Now it looked calm and satisfied, as if the spirit were pleased to be finally free of the matter, and the matter were pleased to be finally free of the spirit. In this short space of time a metaphysical divorce had occurred. The end.

We sat down in the open kitchen doorway, and Oddball reached for a half-drunk bottle of vodka that was standing on the table. He found a clean shot glass and filled it – first for me, then himself. Through the snowy windows, dawn was gradually flowing in, milk-white like hospital light bulbs, and in its glow I saw that Oddball was unshaven; his stubble was just as white as my hair, the faded striped pyjamas protruding from under his sheepskin coat were not buttoned, and the coat itself was soiled with every imaginable sort of stain.

I swallowed a large shot of vodka, which warmed me from inside.

‘I think we’ve done our duty by him. Who else would have done it?’ said Oddball, more to himself than to me. ‘He was a wretched little bastard, but so what?’

He poured himself another shot and drank it in one, then shook with disgust. He plainly wasn’t used to it.

‘I’m going to make that call,’ he said, and went outside. I reckoned he must be feeling faint.

I stood up, and started scanning the terrible mess in the hope of finding Big Foot’s identity card. I wanted to know his date of birth, in order to check his Score.

On a table covered with worn-out oilcloth I saw a roasting tin containing burned pieces of an Animal; in a saucepan next to it there was some stagnant beetroot soup, coated in a film of white fat. A slice of bread cut from a loaf, butter in gold foil. On the floor, covered with torn linoleum, some more Animal remains lay scattered; they’d fallen from the table, along with a plate, a glass and some broken biscuits. All this was crushed and trodden into the dirty floor.

Just then, on a tin tray on the windowsill, I caught sight of something that my brain took quite a while to recognise, in its efforts to shy away; it was a cleanly severed Deer’s head. Beside it lay four little hooves. The half-open eyes must have been closely following our labours throughout.

Oh yes, it was one of those starving Young Ladies that naively let themselves be lured in winter by frozen apples, are caught in snares and die in torment, strangled by the wire.

As I slowly became aware of what had happened here, I was gradually filled with Horror. He had caught the Deer in a snare, killed her, then butchered, roasted and eaten her body. One Creature had devoured another, in the silence and stillness of the Night. Nobody had protested, no thunderbolt had struck. And yet Punishment had come upon the devil, though no one’s hand had guided death.

Quickly, with trembling hands I gathered the remains, those poor little bones, into one spot, in a heap, to bury them later on. I found an old carrier bag, and one after another I put those little bones inside this plastic shroud. Then I carefully placed the head in the carrier bag too.