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

I had never thought about it.

‘They interrogated me, did you know?’ she said indignantly, suddenly changing the subject.

I wasn’t at all surprised, because they had interrogated everyone. This case was now their priority. What a ghastly word.

‘And? Were you any help to them?’

‘You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.’

There was some truth in what she said.

As she was saying goodbye, I rummaged in my things and handed her a deer hoof. As she took off the paper wrapping, her face twisted into a scowl of revulsion.

‘What on earth is this? For the love of God, Mrs Duszejko, what are you giving me?’

‘Please take it. It’s a bit like the Finger of God. It has entirely dehydrated, it doesn’t smell.’

‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ she asked in dismay.

‘Put it to good use.’

She wrapped the trotter up again, hesitated in the doorway, and was gone.

I spent ages pondering what the Grey Lady had said. And I think it tallies with one of my Theories – my belief that the human psyche evolved in order to defend us against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defence system – it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.

So first I came out of prison. Then I came out of hospital. There can be no doubt I was battling with the influences of Saturn. Yet in August it moved far enough to cease to create a negative aspect, and so we spent the rest of the year like a good family. I lay in a darkened room, Oddball tidied and ran the house, while Dizzy and Good News cooked and did the shopping. Once I was feeling better, we made another trip to the Czech Republic, to the extraordinary shop where we visited Honza and his books. We had dinner with him twice, and held our own miniature conference on Blake, without any EU grants or support.

Dizzy found a short video on the internet. It lasts no more than a minute. A handsome Stag attacks a hunter. We see it standing on its hind legs, striking the Man with its front hooves. The hunter falls over, but the Animal doesn’t stop, it stamps on him in a fury, it doesn’t give him a chance to crawl away on his knees. The Man tries to protect his head and to escape from the enraged Animal, but the Stag keeps knocking him down again.

The scene has no end – we don’t know what happened afterwards, either to the hunter or the Stag.

Lying in my dark room, in the middle of the summer, I watched this video over and over again.

My Venus is damaged, or in exile – that’s what you say of a Planet that can’t be found in the sign where it should be. What’s more, Pluto is in a negative aspect to Venus, and in my case Pluto rules the Ascendant. The result of this situation is that I have, as I see it, Lazy Venus syndrome. That’s what I call this Conformity. In this case we’re dealing with a Person whom fortune has gifted generously, but who has entirely failed to use their potential. Such people are bright and intelligent, but don’t apply themselves to their studies, and use their intelligence to play card games or patience instead. They have beautiful bodies, but they destroy them through neglect, poison themselves with harmful substances, and ignore doctors and dentists.

This Venus induces a strange kind of laziness – lifetime opportunities are missed, because you overslept, because you didn’t feel like going, because you were late, because you were neglectful. It’s a tendency to be sybaritic, to live in a state of mild semi-consciousness, to fritter your life away on petty pleasures, to dislike effort and be devoid of any penchant for competition. Long mornings, unopened letters, things put off for later, abandoned projects. A dislike of any authority and a refusal to submit to it, going your own way in a taciturn, idle manner. You could say such people are of no use at all.

Perhaps if I had made an effort, I would have gone back to school in September, but I couldn’t summon the strength to pull myself together. I was sorry the children had lost a whole month’s teaching. But what could I do? I was aching all over.

I couldn’t return to work until October. By then I felt so much better that I organised an English club twice a week, and helped my pupils to make up for the lost lessons. But it was impossible to work normally. In October children started being excused from my lessons because preparations were at full steam for the opening and consecration of a newly built chapel. It was to be consecrated to Hubert on his saint’s day, 3 November. I refused to let the children go. I’d rather they learned a few more English words than the lives of the saints by heart. But the young headmistress intervened.

‘You’re exaggerating. There are certain priorities,’ she said, sounding as if she didn’t believe in what she was saying.

To my mind, the word ‘priority’ is just as ugly as ‘cadaver’ or ‘cohabitee’, but I really didn’t want to quarrel with her, either about excusing the children or about words.

‘Naturally you’ll be at the consecration of the chapel, won’t you?’ she said.

‘I’m not a Catholic.’

‘It doesn’t matter. We’re all Catholics by culture, whether we like it or not. So please come.’

I wasn’t prepared for this particular argument, so I said nothing. The children and I made up for the missing lessons at the afternoon club.

Dizzy was interrogated twice more, and finally was given notice to quit his job by mutual agreement. He was only going to work until the end of the year. He was given some vague justification, staff reductions, cutbacks, the usual excuses. People like Dizzy are always the first to be eliminated. But I think it had something to do with his statements. Was he a suspect? Dizzy wasn’t bothered about it. He had already decided to become a translator. He planned to live off translating Blake’s poetry. How wonderful – to translate from one language to another, and by so doing to bring people closer to one another – what a beautiful idea.

He was also conducting his own enquiry, and no wonder – everyone was anxiously waiting for the Police to make new discoveries, revelations that would put an end to this string of deaths once and for all. For this purpose he even went to see Mrs Innerd and the President’s wife, and tracked the murder victims’ movements as much as he could.

We knew all three had died from a heavy blow to the head, but it wasn’t clear what sort of Tool could have inflicted it. We speculated that it may just have been a piece of wood, a thick branch perhaps, but that would have left specific evidence on the skin. Instead it looked as if a large object with a hard, smooth surface had been used. On top of that, the Police had found trace amounts of Animal blood at the point of impact, probably from a Deer.

‘I was right,’ I insisted once again. ‘It’s the Deer, you see?’

Dizzy was tending towards a Hypothesis that the murders must be to do with settling scores. It was a known fact that the Commandant was on his way back from Innerd’s house that evening, and that Innerd had given him a bribe.