Ольга Токарчук - Flights

People glanced nervously around. Someone said, let’s draw straws for it! Someone laughed, and then an uncomfortable silence descended. Nobody would want to stay, and understandably enough: we don’t live in a vacuum, we have places to be, we have to see the dentist tomorrow, we have invited friends over for dinner.

I looked down at my shoes. I wasn’t in a hurry. I never have to be in any particular place at any particular time. Let time watch me, not me it. And besides – there are different ways of making a living, but here a whole other dimension of employment opened up, perhaps the employment of the future, the kind of thing that would guard against joblessness and the production of excessive waste. Stand aside, get your day’s wages just by staying at a hotel, have some coffee in the morning and a buffet breakfast, take advantage of the smorgasbord’s wide range of different yoghurts. Why not? I stood up and headed over to the jittery flight attendants. Then the woman who’d been sitting beside me stood and came up, too.

‘Why not?’ she said.

Unfortunately, our bags flew without us. An empty shuttle took us to the hotel, where we were given comfortable little adjoining rooms. There was nothing to unpack, just a toothbrush and a pair of clean underwear – we were down to iron rations. Plus face cream and a big book, a page-turner. And a notepad. There would be time to note down everything, to describe the woman: She is tall, with a good body, her hips quite wide, her hands delicate. Her thick, curly hair is tied back in a ponytail, but it’s unruly, and strands float above her head like a kind of silver halo – she is completely grey. But she has a young, bright, freckled face. She must be Swedish. Swedish women tend not to dye their hair.

We arranged to meet downstairs, at the bar, that evening, after a luxurious shower and a look through the various channels on the TV.

We ordered white wine, and after the polite preliminaries, including the Three Basic Questions of the Traveller, we moved on to matters of greater substance. I started off by telling her a bit about my peregrinations, but as I was speaking I got the impression she was only listening to be polite. This made me lose momentum, for I figured she must have a more interesting story to tell, until finally I gave her the floor.

She was collecting evidence, she said, she had even gotten a grant for it from the European Union, although it still didn’t cover her travels, so she had had to borrow money from her dad – who had since passed away. She swept a little coil of grey hair from her forehead (I decided for sure then that she couldn’t be over forty-five), and we ordered salads in exchange for our airline vouchers; the only option with the voucher was the Niçoise. She narrowed her eyes when she talked, which lent her words a slightly ironic undertone, which was probably why for the first few minutes I couldn’t tell if she was being serious. She said that at first glance the world seems so diverse. Wherever you go you find all sorts of different people, different cultures, cities constructed according to local custom, using different materials. Different roofs and different windows and different courtyards. Here she speared a piece of feta on her fork and traced circles with it in the air.

‘But don’t let yourself be taken in by the diversity – it’s superficial,’ she said. ‘It’s all smoke and mirrors. In reality, everywhere is the same. In terms of animals. In terms of how we interact with animals.’

Calmly, as though reiterating a lecture she knew by heart, she began to enumerate: dogs strain against chains in the sweltering sun, just desperately hoping for water – these puppies are chained up so tight that by the time they’re two months old they can’t even walk; ewes give birth in the fields, in the winter, in the snow, and all the farmers do is arrange large vehicles to cart off the frozen lambs; lobsters are kept in restaurant aquariums so that the customer may sentence them, with the rap of an index finger, to death by boiling, while other restaurants breed dogs in their storerooms – dog meat restores virility, after all; hens in cages are defined by the number of eggs they lay, rushed by chemicals through their brief lives; people put on dog fights; primates are injected with diseases; cosmetics are tested on rabbits; fur coats are made of sheep fetuses – and she said all of this unfazed, inserting olives into her mouth.

‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I can’t listen to this.’

So she took her bag, which was made of rags, from the back of her chair, and she took out from inside it a folder of laminated pages in black Xeroxed print. She handed it to me across the little table. I reluctantly flipped through the darkened pages, the text in two columns, like in an encyclopaedia or in the Bible. Small print, footnotes. ‘Reports on Infamy’, and the address of her website. I took a look and knew instantly I wasn’t going to read any of it. But still I tucked the material away inside my backpack.

‘That’s what I do,’ she said.

Then, over our second bottle of wine, she told me about the time she had got altitude sickness on a trip to Tibet and almost died. She was healed by some local woman who beat a drum and mixed her herbal tinctures.

Our talk was free that evening, our tongues – which had yearned for long sentences and stories – well lubricated by white wine, and we went to bed late.

The next morning over breakfast in our hotel, Aleksandra – that was this angry woman’s name – leaned in over the croissants and said:

‘The true God is an animal. He’s in animals, so close that we don’t notice. Every day God sacrifices himself for us, dying over and over, feeding us with his body, clothing us in his skin, allowing us to test our medicines on him so that we might live longer and better. Thus does he show his affection, bestow on us his friendship and love.’

I froze, staring at her mouth, shaken not so much by this revelation as by the tone in which she said it – so serene. And by the knife that glinted as it spread layers of butter over the fluffy insides of her croissant, back and forth, methodical, relentless.

‘You can find the proof in Ghent.’

She extracted a postcard from her hodge-podge bag and tossed it onto my plate.

I picked it up and tried to glean some meaning in the proliferation of details; I might need a magnifying glass to do that, though.

‘Anyone can see it,’ said Aleksandra. ‘In the middle of the city there’s a cathedral, and there, on the altar, you’ll see an enormous, beautiful painting. In it there are fields, a green plain somewhere outside of the city, and in that meadow there is an ordinary elevation. Right here,’ and she pointed with the tip of her knife, ‘here is the Animal in the form of a white lamb, exalted.’

I did recognize the painting. I’d seen it a number of times in different reproductions. Adoration of the Mystic Lamb .

‘His true identity was discovered – his bright luminous figure draws the gaze, causes heads to bow before his divine majesty,’ she said, pointing at the lamb with her knife. ‘And you can see how from just about everywhere there is a procession flowing towards him – those are all these people coming to pay tribute to him, to gaze upon this humblest, humiliated God. Here, look at how the rulers of countries are making their way up towards him, emperors and kings, churches, parliaments, political parties, guilds; there are mothers and children, elderly folk and teenage girls…’

‘Why do you do this?’ I asked.

‘For obvious reasons,’ she replied. ‘I want to write an exhaustive volume that leaves out no crime, from the dawn of the world to our time. It will be humanity’s confessions.’