Ольга Токарчук - Flights

Model 60 also presents muscles and tendons, but above all our attention is drawn to the gentle ribbon of the intestines, given perfect proportions here. Their smooth surface reflects the museum’s windows. Only after a moment, stunned, do I realize this is a woman – decked in a strange pendant, a piece of grey fur glued onto the base of the abdomen, containing a somewhat crudely marked oblong slit. Evidently the model’s creator wanted to make absolutely certain that the viewer, presumably inexpert in anatomy, understood that he or she was seeing feminine intestines. Here we have the hirsute stamp, the gender trademark, the female logo. Model 60 presents the circulatory and lymphatic systems as an intestinal halo. Most of the blood vessels rest on the muscles, but some of them are shown as a kind of aerial grid; only here can you see the fractal wonder of those red threads.

Next there are arms, legs, stomachs and hearts. Each model is laid out carefully on a piece of silk that glimmers in a pearlescent manner. The kidneys grow out of the bladder like two anemones. ‘Lower limb and blood vessels,’ an inscription announces in three languages. The grid of abdominal lymph vessels, lymph nodes, the pins and stars with which an unknown hand has ornamented the monotony of muscles. Lymphatic vessels could be jewellers’ models.

In the centre of this wax collection rests model 244, the most beautiful of all, the one that so interested the man in the wire-rimmed glasses and that is about to capture my attention, too, for half an hour.

It is a woman lying down, nearly intact; only in one place has her body been interfered with: her opened stomach shows to pilgrims like ourselves the reproductive system, pressed up against the diaphragm, the uterus under its ovarian cap. Here, too, that fur seal of gender, utterly superfluous. There can certainly be no doubt this one is a woman. The pubis meticulously covered with fake hair, and below, done with great care, the opening of the vagina, difficult to spot, only for the persistent who don’t hesitate to crouch down next to the small feet with their reddened toes, as that man in glasses did. And I think: it’s a good thing he’s gone, now it’s my turn.

The woman has light-coloured hair, worn loose, slightly shut eyes and half-parted lips – you can just see the tips of her teeth. On her neck a string of pearls. I am struck by the absolute innocence of her lungs, smooth and silky just beneath the pearls; they obviously never drew smoke from a cigarette. They could be the lungs of an angel. The heart, cut transversely, reveals its dual nature, both chambers lined with the velour of red tissue intended for unvaried motion. The liver wraps around the stomach like a big bloody mouth. Also visible are her kidneys and ureters, which look like a mandrake root resting atop her uterus. The uterus is a muscle very pleasing to the eye – slim and shapely; it’s hard to imagine it travelling around the body and provoking hysteria, as was once believed. There can be no doubt – the organs are packed painstakingly inside the body, preparations for a major journey. So, too, her vagina, cut lengthwise, reveals its secret, the short tunnel that is actually a dead end and appears utterly useless, since it’s not really an entrance into her insides. It ends in a blind chamber.

Exhausted, I sat down by the window on the hard bench, facing the silent crowd of wax models, and let myself feel overwhelmed. What was the muscle that was squeezing my throat so tight? What was its name? Who thought up the human body, and consequently, who holds its eternal copyright?

Grey beard and salt-and-pepper hair, he travels to a conference on the preservation of medical specimens, focusing on plastinating human tissues. He sits back in his chair, puts his headphones on, and listens to a Bach cantata.

The girl in the pictures he’s developed and is now taking with him has an amusing way of wearing her hair – cut straight across the back, but the strands in the front are longer. Reaching her naked shoulders, they flit flirtatiously over her face so that all you can see underneath them is the distinct, red-brown line of her lips, painted onto the smooth surface of her face. Blau liked that, that mouth, just as he liked her body – petite, taut, breasts compact, nipples punctuating the velvety plane of her chest. Hips slender, though her thighs were quite substantial. Blau has always been attracted to powerful legs. ‘Strength in the thighs’ could be Blau’s personal hexagram 65. A woman with powerful thighs is like a nutcracker: to venture between them is to risk being shattered. To venture between them is to disarm a bomb.

This excites him. He is skinny, small. Thus he risks his life.

He was in the grips of excitement as he took these photographs of her. He was naked, too, so that slowly his excitement made itself known, unmistakable, even. But with his face concealed behind the camera, he didn’t mind; he was a mechanical minotaur with a photographic face, the single eye of the lens atop a stalk zooming in and out, advancing and retreating like a mechanical trunk.

The girl noticed his state, which lent her confidence. She raised her arms, clasped her hands together at the nape of her neck, so exposing her defenceless armpits, the blind, underdeveloped possibilities of her crotch. Raised, her breasts became almost flat, almost boyish. Blau came closer, on his knees, the camera at his face, and began to photograph her from below. He was trembling. He considered that the tuft of black hair, shaved down to a thin line, which slimmed her hips still further to the eye and allured like an exclamation mark, might be about to scratch his lens. By now his erection was significant. The girl had had a little white wine – a Greek retsina, he thought – and she sat down on the floor now, crossing her legs and hiding the place the doctor was so moved by. He could guess what her position meant: they were edging towards the evening’s end.

But that wasn’t really what he was after. He retreated to the window, his bare thin buttock touching for a moment the cold sill. He was still taking pictures. Another act, this time a seated one, had now been captured. The lamb-like girl was smiling, proud of the readiness of Dr Blau’s body – for this meant she could work her magic from afar. What power! A few years ago, as a child, she’d played at magic, imagined she could move objects with just her will. Sometimes it seemed to her that some teaspoon or clip really did move a millimetre. But never had any object given into her will so evidently, so theatrically.

Meanwhile Blau was now faced with the real task at hand. There was no use at this stage in putting off the inevitable. Their bodies drifted together. The girl allowed him to caress her and lay her on her back. With gentle fingers the doctor disarmed the bomb. The hexagram of her thighs opened to all interpretation. The camera snapped.

Blau has a whole collection of these photos, dozens, maybe hundreds by now – women’s bodies against blank walls. The walls differ, because the places aren’t the same: hotels, pensions, his office at the Academy, occasionally his own apartment. The bodies are fundamentally similar, no mystery there.

But not the vaginas. Those are like fingerprints, in fact they could use those embarrassing organs, which the police have yet to appreciate, for identification – they are absolutely unique. Beautiful as orchids that draw in insects with their shape and colour. What a strange thought – that this botanical mechanism has been preserved somehow even into the era of humankind’s development. It would be understating it to say it’s been effective. It almost seems to him that nature itself so delighted in this petal-based idea that it became determined to take it further, heedless of the fact that man would wind up with a psyche that would slip out of control and conceal what had been so beautifully developed. Hide it in underwear, in insinuations, in silence.