Ольга Токарчук - Flights

But I fear it may already be too late.

We have no choice now but to learn how to endlessly select. Learn how to be like a fellow traveller I once met on a night train who told me that every so often he goes back to the Louvre just to see the one painting he considers to be worthwhile, of John the Baptist. He just stands there before it, beholding it, gazing up at the saint’s raised finger.

A guy in the cafeteria of this one museum said that nothing gives him such great satisfaction as being in the presence of an original artwork. He also insisted that the more copies there are in the world, the greater the power of the original becomes, a power sometimes approaching the great might of a holy relic. For what is singular is significant, what with the threat of destruction hanging over it as it does. Confirmation of these words came in the form of a nearby cluster of tourists who, with fervent focus, stood worshipping a painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Just occasionally, when one of them couldn’t take it anymore, there came the clearly audible click of a camera, sounding like an ‘amen’ spoken in a new, digital language.

There are trains that are designed to be slept on. They are comprised, in their entirety, of sleeping compartments and a single café car, not even a restaurant car, because a café car is enough. This type of train runs, for example, from Szczecin to Wrocław. It leaves at 10.30 at night and gets in at 7 in the morning, although the trip itself is not that long, only about 200 miles, and you could make it in five hours. But the point isn’t always to get there faster: the company cares about its passengers’ comfort. The train stops in fields and stands in their nocturnal fogs, a quiet hotel on wheels. There’s no sense in trying to race the night.

There’s a very good train from Berlin to Paris. And from Budapest to Belgrade. And from Bucharest to Zurich.

I feel as though these trains were just invented for people with a fear of flying. They’re a little embarrassing – it’s better not to admit that you take them. And they’re not really advertised that much. They’re trains for longstanding customers, for that unfortunate percentage of the population that has a heart attack over every takeoff and every landing. For those with sweaty hands who wad up Kleenex after Kleenex in despair, and for those who grasp onto the flight attendants’ sleeves.

This sort of train stands humbly on the side track, keeping a low profile. (For example, the one from Hamburg to Krakow at Altona, where it is concealed by billboards and other advertising.) People taking one for the first time wander around the station for a while before they find it. Boarding is carried out discreetly. In the outer pockets of suitcases there are pyjamas and slippers, toiletry cases, earplugs. Clothing is hung carefully on special hooks, and at the miniscule washbasins closed off in closets the tools for teeth-brushing are arrayed. Soon the conductor will take breakfast orders. Coffee or tea? That’s the closest to freedom the railway gets. Had these passengers just got one of those cheap flights, they would have been there in an hour, and it would have cost them less money, too. They would have had a night in the arms of their longing lovers, breakfast at one of the restaurants on rue je-ne-sais-quoi, where oysters are served. An evening Mozart concert at a cathedral. A walk along the riverbanks. Instead they must fully surrender to the time taken by rail travel, must personally traverse every kilometre according to the age-old custom of their ancestors, go over every bridge and through each viaduct and tunnel on this voyage over land. Nothing can be skipped, nothing bypassed. Every millimetre of the way will be touched by the wheel, will for an instant be part of its tangent, and this will be an unrepeatable configuration for all time – of the wheel and the rail, of the time and place, unique throughout the cosmos.

As soon as this train for cowards sets off into the night – practically without warning – the bar begins to fill up with people. Drawn in are men in suits who come for a couple of quick ones or for a pint to help them sleep, elegant gay men whose eyes dart around like castanets; forlorn football fans, separated from their friends – who’d flown – as insecure as sheep parted from their flocks; female friends over the age of forty who have left their boring husbands in search of some excitement. Slowly there begins to be less and less space, and passengers behave as though they were at a big party, and sometimes the amiable waiters will introduce them to one another: ‘This fellow travels with us every week’; ‘Ted, who says he won’t go to bed but is actually always the first one snoring’; ‘The passenger who travels every week to see his wife – he must really love her’; ‘Mrs I’m-Never-Travelling-on-this-Train-Again.’

In the middle of the night, as the train creeps along the plains of Belgium or Lubusz, as the night-time mist thickens and blurs everything, the café car is host to a second round of visitors: exhausted, insomniac passengers who are not ashamed of the slippers on their unstockinged feet. They join in with the rest as though putting themselves in fate’s hands – whatever will be, will be.

But it seems to me that the only things that can happen to them are the things that are for the best. After all, they are now in a place that is mobile, that moves through black space; they are borne by the night. Not knowing anyone and being recognized by no one. Escaping their own lives, and then being safely escorted right back to them.

The apartment doesn’t understand what’s happened. The apartment thinks its owner has died. Ever since the door slammed shut, since the key grated around in the lock, all sounds are muffled, their shades and edges absent, as in indistinct stains. Space condenses, unused, undisturbed by any draft, any ruffling of the curtains, and in this motionlessness, trial forms tentatively begin to crystallize, forms suspended for a moment between the floor and ceiling of the entryway.

Of course no new thing comes into being now – how could it? These are only imitations of familiar shapes, melding into bubbly, blistery clumps, maintaining their outlines just for a second. These are individual episodes, isolated gestures, like a footprint on a soft carpet made endlessly and always in the same exact spot and then vanishes. Or a hand over a table, going through the motions of writing, although the motions are incomprehensible because they occur without a pen, without paper, without writing, without even the rest of the body.

She was not my friend. I met her at Stockholm airport, the only one in the world with wood floors; a pretty, dark oak parquet with carefully matched slats – a low estimate would put it at several hectares of northern woods.

She was sitting next to me. She stretched out her legs and rested them on a black backpack. She wasn’t reading, she wasn’t listening to music – she just had her hands folded over her stomach and was staring straight ahead. I liked how peaceful she was, completely resigned to waiting. As I stared at her more openly, her gaze slid away from mine and down onto that polished floor. Blurting out the first thing I could think of, I said it was a waste of the woods to use them for flooring in an airport.

‘They say that you have to sacrifice some living being when you build an airport,’ she replied. ‘To ward off catastrophe.’

The flight attendants were having some sort of problem at the gate. It turned out – they announced to those waiting – that our plane was overbooked. By some fluke in the system, there were simply too many people on the passenger list. A computer error, such was the guise of fate these days. They’d give two people two hundred euros, a night at the airport hotel and a dinner voucher if they’d be willing to leave the following day instead.