Ольга Токарчук - Flights

Due to the earth’s rotation, throwing something westward will send it flying further than if it’s going east.

The average human body contains enough sulphur to kill a dog.

Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to your palate.

But the one I was the most struck by was this:

The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.

In Prague in the year 1677 you could go to Saint Vitus Cathedral to see: the breasts of Saint Anne, totally intact, kept in a glass jar; the head of Saint Stephen the Martyr; the head of John the Baptist. The nuns of Saint Teresa would show interested visitors a sister deceased some three hundred years earlier, sitting behind bars, very well preserved. The Jesuits, meanwhile, had the head of Saint Ursula and the hat and finger of Saint Francis Xavier.

A hundred years earlier a Pole had wound up in La Valetta on Malta, from whence he wrote that a local priest took him around the city and showed him: ‘ palmam dextram integram (the whole right hand) of Saint John the Baptist, perfectly fresh, as though he’d just cut it off the body, and having opened its crystal case, he gave it to my unworthy lips to kiss, the which being the greatest glory this sinner has ever known, blessed be the Lord. He also permitted me to kiss a snippet of that saint’s nose, the whole leg of Saint Lazari Quadriduani, the fingers of Saint Magdalene, a portion of the head of Saint Ursula (this striking me as strange, for in Cologne, on the Rhine, I also saw the whole head, and touched my unworthy lips to it).’

After the food the waiter hurriedly brought me a coffee, then retreated into the back of the room, behind the counter; he would watch, as well.

We lowered our voices because we were forced to do so, because the lights went out softly, and in between the tables came the young woman I had seen a few minutes earlier smoking a cigarette outside. Now she stood among the seated people and shook her loose black hair. Her eyes were heavily painted; her fitted top, embroidered with sequins around her breasts, shimmering brightly, all the colours at once, would have pleased any child, any girl. The bracelets on her arms clanged and clattered. Her long skirt flowed down from her hips to her bare feet. A very pretty girl, her teeth shone an impossible white, her eyes casting intrepid glances under which it was impossible to sit still: you wanted to move, stand up, smoke. The woman was dancing to the rhythm of the drums as her hips showed off, challenging to a duel anyone who might so much as dream of underestimating their power.

Finally a guy responded to this call and boldly ventured up to dance; he was a tourist, wearing shorts, not particularly suited to her sequins, but he was trying, shaking his hips excitedly, while his friends at his table stomped and whistled. And now two young girls set forth to dance; in jeans, thin as rails.

This dance in our cheap pub was holy. That was how we felt about it – I and my companion, another woman.

When the lights came back on we discovered our eyes were filled with tears, and that we were rushing to wipe our eyes with napkins, embarrassed. Men – worked up into a kind of frenzy – made fun of us. But I was certain that our being moved by this dance was a quicker route to grasping it than the men’s excitement.

A woman named Ingibjörg was travelling along the prime meridian. She was from Iceland, and she began her journey in the Shetland Islands. She complained that it was, of course, impossible to travel in a straight line, since she was totally dependent upon roads and ship routes and train tracks. But she was trying to stick to her guns, continuing south, manoeuvering along the line as best she could, in a zigzag.

She talked about it so vividly and so enthusiastically that I didn’t have the courage to ask her why she was doing it. Although the answer to that kind of question is more or less always: why not?

As she spoke, I saw in my mind’s eye the image of a drop sliding down the surface of a globe.

And yet I find the idea unsettling to this very day. Meridians don’t exist, after all. Not really.

I have a poet friend who, unfortunately, was never able to live off her poetry. Is there anyone who lives off poetry? So she started working at this travel agency, and since she spoke excellent English, she ended up becoming a tour guide for American groups. She was great at it, and she kept getting recommended for even the most exacting guests. She would pick them up in Madrid, fly with them to Malaga, and then they’d sail to Tunis. Normally it was a small group, around ten people.

She enjoyed these assignments, and she had on average two per month. She liked to relax then in the finest hotels, which she would take the opportunity to sleep in. She had to take them around the various landmarks, and so she read a lot in those days in preparation. On the sly she also wrote. When some especially interesting idea came to mind – a phrase, an association – she knew she had to write it down right away, because if not, it would be gone forever. Memory falters with age, gets spottier. So she’d get up and go to the bathroom and write it down, sitting on the toilet. Sometimes she would write on her hands, just letters, mnemotechnics.

She was not a specialist in Arab countries and their cultures – she had studied literature and linguistics – but she consoled herself with the fact that her tourists weren’t either.

‘Let’s not kid ourselves,’ she’d say. ‘It’s just one world.’

You didn’t need to be a specialist; you just had to have an imagination. Sometimes when there would be some interruption in their travel, when they’d have to sit for hours in strange shadow, in the middle of nowhere, because a cable in their Jeep just snapped, she would have to entertain her clients somehow. That was when she started telling stories. They expected her to. She took some from Borges and embellished them a little, dramatized them. Others came from the Thousand and One Nights , although even then she always added a little something of her own. She said you had to find stories that hadn’t been made into films yet, and it turned out in fact there were quite a few of them. To everything she lent some Arab colour, holding forth on details of dress, cuisine, camel varietals. They must not have listened to her too attentively because on the occasions when she would mix up some historical fact, no one ever pointed it out to her, until in the end she simply stopped bothering about the facts.

Words won’t do justice to the harem’s labyrinth. So picture perhaps the cells of a honeycomb, the curved arrangement of intestines, the insides of a body, the canals of an ear; spirals, dead-ends, appendixes, soft rounded tunnels that finish just here, at the entrance to a secret chamber.

The centre is hidden deep, as in an ant’s nest, these are the sultan’s mother’s chambers, lined with a uterine matrix of carpets, censed with myrrh, cooled by water that makes the parapets into streaming riverbeds. Around this extend the rooms of sons not yet of age; they, too, are women, after a fashion, enveloped in the feminine element until initiation cleaves by sword their pearly amniotic sac. Past these internal courtyards a complex hierarchy of cells for concubines opens up: the least desirable women are transferred upwards, as though their bodies, forgotten by men, were undergoing a mysterious process of angelification; the eldest live right beneath the roof – soon their souls will float away, off into the heavens, while their bodies, once so alluring, will dry out in imitation of ginger root.