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

I was outraged. But when the bell rang for lessons, I quickly said: ‘One has to tell people what to think. There’s no alternative. Otherwise someone else will do it.’

I didn’t sleep too well that Night, knowing that a stranger was lurking so close to the house. But the news of the potential closure of the investigation prompted stressful, disagreeable anxiety too. How could it be ‘shelved’ just like that? Without checking all the possibilities? And what about those prints? Had they taken them into consideration? After all, a Person had died. How could they ‘shelve’ it, for goodness’ sake?

For the first time since moving here I locked the door and windows. At once the house felt stuffy. I couldn’t get to sleep. It was early June, so the Nights were already warm and scented. I felt as if I had been locked for life in the boiler room. I listened out for footsteps around the house, analysed every rustle, and jumped at every snap of a twig. The Night magnified the subtlest sounds, changed them into grunts, groans, voices. I think I was terrified. For the first time since coming to live here.

The next morning I saw the same man with the backpack standing outside my house. At first I was paralysed by fear and started reaching a hand into the secret closet for the pepper spray.

‘Good morning. Excuse me for disturbing you,’ he said in a low baritone, which set the air quivering. ‘I’d like to buy some milk from the cow.’

‘From the Cow?’ I said in amazement. ‘I don’t have milk from a Cow, only from the Froggy, will that do?’ The Froggy was the name of the village grocery store.

He was disappointed.

Now, in the daylight, he looked perfectly agreeable. I wouldn’t have to use my spray. He had a white linen shirt with a mandarin collar, the sort people wore in the good old days. Close up, it was also plain to see that he wasn’t bald after all. He still had some hair left at the back of his head, and he’d plaited it into a skinny little pigtail, which looked like a grubby shoelace.

‘Do you bake your own bread?’

‘No,’ I replied in surprise. ‘I buy that at the shop down the hill too.’

‘Aha. Good, all right.’

I was already on my way to the kitchen, but I turned round to inform him: ‘I saw you yesterday. Did you sleep in the forest?’

‘Yes, I did. May I sit here a while? My bones are rather stiff.’

He seemed distracted. The back of his shirt was green with grass stains. He must have slipped out of his sleeping bag. I giggled to myself.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

He flapped his hands. ‘I don’t drink coffee.’

Plainly, he wasn’t very bright. If he were, he’d have known that I wasn’t interested in his culinary likes and dislikes.

‘Then maybe you’d like a piece of cake,’ I said, pointing to the table, which Dizzy and I had recently brought outside. There was a rhubarb tart on it, which I had baked the day before yesterday and had almost entirely eaten.

‘May I please use the bathroom?’ he asked, as if we were bargaining.

‘Of course,’ I said, letting him into the house ahead of me.

He drank some tea and ate a slice of tart. He was called Borys Sznajder, but he pronounced his first name funnily, stretching the vowels: ‘Boorooos’. And for me, that name stuck. He had a soft, eastern accent, and his next few remarks explained its origin – he was from Białystok.

‘I’m an entomologist,’ he said with his mouth full of cake. ‘I’m studying a particular species of flat bark beetle, endangered, rare and beautiful. Do you know that you live at the southernmost site in Europe where Cucujus haematodes is found?’

I was not aware of this. Frankly, I was pleased – it was as if a new family member had come to join us here.

‘What does it look like?’ I asked.

Boros reached into a tatty canvas knapsack and carefully extracted a small plastic box. He shoved it under my nose. ‘Like this.’

Inside the transparent box lay a dead Bug – that’s what I’d have called it, a Bug. Small, brown, quite average-looking. I had sometimes seen very beautiful Bugs. This one was not exceptional in any way.

‘Why is it dead?’ I asked.

‘Please don’t think I’m one of those amateurs who kill insects just to make them into specimens. It was dead when I found it.’

I cast a glance at Boros and tried to guess what his particular illness was.

He searched dead tree stumps and logs, whether they’d been felled or were rotting naturally, looking for Cucujus larvae. He counted and catalogued the larvae, and wrote down the results in a notebook entitled: ‘Distribution in the Kłodzko County Forests of selected species of saproxylic beetle, as featured on the lists of annexes II and IV of the European Union Habitat Directive, and proposals for their protection. A project.’ I read the title very carefully, which saved me from having to look inside.

Just imagine, he told me, the State Forests are totally unaware of the fact that article 12 of the Directive obliges member states to establish a rigorous system to protect reproduction habitats and prevent their destruction. But they were allowing the removal from the forest of timber in which the Insects were laying their eggs, from which the larvae would later hatch. The larvae were ending up at sawmills and wood-processing plants. There was nothing left of them. They were dying, but no one was taking any notice. So it was as if no one were to blame.

‘Here, in this forest, every log is full of Cucujus larvae,’ he said. ‘When the forest is cleared some of the branches are burned. So they’re throwing branches full of larvae onto the fire.’

It occurred to me that every unjustly inflicted death deserved public exposure. Even an Insect’s. A death that nobody noticed was twice as scandalous. And I liked what Boros was doing. Oh yes, he convinced me, I was entirely on his side.

As I had to go on my daily round anyway, I decided to combine the useful with the interesting, and went into the forest with Boros. With his help, the tree trunks revealed their secrets to me. The most ordinary stumps turned out to be entire kingdoms of Creatures that bored corridors, chambers and passages, and laid their precious eggs there. The larvae may not have been beautiful, but I was moved by their sense of trust – they entrusted their lives to the trees, without imagining that these huge, immobile Creatures are essentially very fragile, and wholly dependent on the will of people too. It was hard to think of the larvae perishing in fires. Boros scooped up the forest litter to show me other rare and less rare species: the Hermit Beetle, the Deathwatch Beetle – who’d have thought it was sitting here, under a flake of bark? – the Golden Ground Beetle – ah, so that’s what it’s called; I had seen it so many times before, and always thought of it as shiny but nameless. The Clown Beetle, like a lovely drop of mercury. The Lesser Stag Beetle. A curious name. The names of Insects should be given to children. So should the names of Birds and other Animals. Cockchafer Kowalski. Drosophila Nowak. Corvus Duszejko. Those are just a few of the names I could remember. Boros’s hands did conjuring tricks, drew mysterious signs, and lo and behold, an Insect appeared, a larva, or some tiny eggs laid in a cluster. When I asked which of them are useful, Boros was outraged.

‘From nature’s point of view, no creatures are useful or not useful. That’s just a foolish distinction applied by people.’

He came by that evening, after Dusk, because I had invited him to stay the night. As he had nowhere to sleep… I made up a bed for him in the dayroom, but we sat and talked a while longer. I fetched out half a bottle of liqueur left over from Oddball’s visit. Once Boros had told me about all the abuses and vile acts committed by the State Forests, he finally relaxed a bit. I found it hard to understand him, for how can one have such a very emotional attitude to something called the State Forests? The only person whom I associated with this institution was the forester, Wolf Eye. That’s what I called him because he seemed to have oblong pupils. He was a decent Person, too.