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

‘What’s this?’ I asked, picking up some wide metal pincers.

‘Those are tongs for removing cling film when it sticks to the roller,’ he said, and poured the coffee into cups.

Then he reached for a small whisk, used it to whip the milk into snowy froth and poured it onto the coffee. From the drawer he took out a set of circular stencils and a small container of cocoa powder. For a while he wondered which pattern to choose, and finally picked a little heart shape. Then he sprinkled cocoa powder onto it, and, lo and behold, a brown cocoa heart appeared on the snowy foam on my coffee. He smiled broadly.

Later that day I thought about his drawer again, about how peeping into it brought me total calm, and how I would really like to be one of those useful Utensils.

By Monday everyone knew the President was dead. The women who had come to clean the firehouse had found him on Sunday evening. Apparently one of them had suffered shock and had ended up in hospital.

To the Police,

I realise that for some very important reason the Police are not in a position to answer letters from the public (not just the anonymous ones). Without going into those reasons, I shall take the liberty of referring you once more to the topic that I brought up in my previous letter. But I would not wish the Police nor anyone else to be ignored in this manner. The citizen whom the public services ignore is in a way condemned to non-existence. Yet it would be a mistake to forget that he who has no rights is not bound by any duties.

I am pleased to inform you that I have managed to obtain the date of birth of the deceased Mr Innerd and to draw up his Horoscope (without the time, unfortunately, which makes my cosmogram less precise), and have found an extremely interesting fact in it, which fully confirms the Hypotheses that I presented to you previously.

Thus it appears that at the moment of his death the victim had transiting Mars in Virgo, which, according to the best principles of traditional Astrology, has many analogies with fur-bearing Animals. At the same time his Sun in Pisces indicates the weakest parts of the body, such as the ankles. So it looks as if Mr Innerd’s death was accurately forecast in his radix Horoscope. Therefore, were the Police to take note of the findings of Astrologers, many people could be protected from misfortune. The configuration of the planets clearly tells us that the perpetrators of this cruel Murder were fur-bearing Animals, most probably Foxes, either wild ones or runaways from the farm (or both acting in collusion), that somehow managed to drive the victim into the snares people had been setting there for years. He was caught in a particularly cruel type of trap, known as a ‘gibbet’, and had hung in the air for some time.

This discovery leads us straight to a general conclusion. The Police should check exactly where each of the victims had Saturn. Then they will find that each one had Saturn in an animal sign; the President additionally had it in Taurus, which heralds a violent death by suffocation caused by an Animal…

Please find enclosed a newspaper cutting about the reported sightings of a certain as-yet-unidentified Animal, seen in the Opole region, which is said to kill other Animals with a blow of its paw to the chest. Recently on television I saw a video recorded on a mobile phone, in which a young Tiger was clearly visible. All this has been happening in the Opole region, and thus not far away from us. Perhaps they are Animals that escaped from a zoo, managed to survive the floods and are now at liberty? In any case the matter is worth investigating, especially since, as I have noticed, the local population is gradually yielding to pathological fear, if not panic.

As I was writing this letter, someone knocked timidly at my door. It was the Writer, the Grey Lady.

‘Mrs Duszejko,’ she said from the threshold. ‘What’s going on around here? Have you heard?’

‘Please don’t stand in the doorway, there’s a draught. Come inside.’ She was wearing a knitted cardigan, almost floor-length. She came in, taking tiny little steps, and sat down on the edge of a chair.

‘So what will become of us?’ she asked dramatically.

‘Are you afraid Animals are going to kill us too?’

She bristled. ‘I do not believe in your theory. It’s absurd.’

‘I thought that you, as a Writer, had an imagination and a capacity for conjecture, and were not closed to ideas that at first glance seem improbable. You should know that everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth,’ I concluded, citing Blake, which seemed to make an impression on her.

‘I’d never have written a single line if I didn’t have my feet firmly on the ground, Mrs Duszejko,’ she said in the tone of an official, and then added in a softer tone: ‘I cannot imagine it. Would you please tell me – was he really suffocated by cockchafers?’

I bustled about making tea. Black tea. Let her know what Tea is.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘He was covered in those Insects, they’d gone into his mouth, his lungs, his stomach, his ears. The women said he was crawling with Beetles. I didn’t see it, but I can perfectly well imagine it. Cucujus haematodes everywhere.’

She gave me a penetrating stare. I couldn’t interpret that look.

I served the tea.

Early in the morning they came for me and said I must make a statement. I replied that I’d do my best to drop in during the week.

‘You don’t understand,’ replied a young policeman, the one who used to work with the Commandant. Since his death he’d been promoted and was now in charge of the police station in town. ‘You’re coming with us now, to Kłodzko.’

In view of his tone of voice, I did not protest. I merely locked the house and took a toothbrush and my pills with me just in case. The last thing I needed was to have an Attack and fall ill there.

As it had been pouring with rain for two weeks and there was a flood, we drove the long way round, on the asphalt, where it was safer. When we were descending into the valley from the Plateau, I saw a herd of Deer; they were standing still, gazing without fear at the police jeep. Joyfully I realised that I didn’t recognize them – it must be a new herd that had come across from the Czech Republic to graze on our luscious green mountain pasture. The Policemen weren’t interested in the Deer. They didn’t speak, either to me or to each other.

I was given a mug of instant coffee with powdered cream and the interview began.

‘You were going to drive the President home? Is that right? Please tell us in detail, moment by moment – what exactly did you see?’

And plenty more questions of this kind.

There wasn’t much to tell, but I tried my best to be precise about every detail. I said I had decided to wait for the President outside because inside it was noisy. Nobody was bothering with the buffer zone any more, and everyone was smoking inside, which was having a very bad effect on me. So I sat down on the steps and gazed at the sky.

After the rain Sirius had appeared, and the shaft of the Plough had risen… I wondered whether the stars can see us. And if they can, what might they think of us? Do they really know our future? Do they feel sorry for us? For being stuck in the present time, with no chance to move? But it also crossed my mind that in spite of all, in spite of our fragility and ignorance, we have an incredible advantage over the stars – it is for us that time works, giving us a major opportunity to transform the suffering, aching world into a happy and peaceful one. It’s the stars that are imprisoned in their own power, and they cannot really help us. They merely design the nets, and on cosmic looms they weave the warp thread that we must complete with our own weft. And then a curious Hypothesis occurred to me – maybe the stars see us in the same way as we see our Dogs, for example – having greater awareness than they do, at some points in time we know better what’s good for them; we walk them on leads so they won’t get lost, we sterilise them so they won’t senselessly reproduce, we take them to the vet for medical treatment. They don’t understand where this comes from, why it happens, for what purpose. Yet they yield to us. So maybe we too should yield to the influence of the stars, but in the process we should arouse our human sensitivity. That’s what I was pondering as I sat on those steps in the dark. And when I saw that most of the people were coming out, and either on foot or in cars were heading off, I went inside to remind the President that I was going to drive him home. But he wasn’t there, or anywhere else. I checked the toilets and walked around the firehouse. I also asked all the inebriated mushroom pickers where he’d got to, but nobody was capable of giving me a sensible answer. Some were still humming ‘Hey, Falcons’, others were finishing off the beer, flouting the rules by drinking it outside. So I assumed someone must have taken him home already, but I simply hadn’t noticed. And I’m still sure it was a reasonable supposition. What harm could possibly come to him? Even if he’d fallen asleep in a drunken state among the burdocks, the Night was warm and he wasn’t in any danger. Nothing suspicious occurred to me, so I fetched the Samurai and we went home.