Ольга Токарчук - Flights

The sand on the beach seemed almost white; diminutive, clean, dotted here and there with white shells. The doctor wondered whether he should remove his shoes, because he realized that it might be rude to walk onto a private beach with shoes on.

In the distance he saw a figure emerging from the water in silhouette – the sun, already low, was still intense. The woman was wearing a dark one-piece bathing suit. On the shore she reached out for a towel and wrapped herself in it. With one end of it she rubbed her hair. Then she picked up her sandals and began approaching the startled doctor. He didn’t know what to do now. Whether to turn around and leave or to in fact walk towards her. He would have preferred to meet her in the calm of an office, in a more official setting. But she was already upon him. She held out her hand by way of greeting and said his last name in an interrogative tone. She was of average height and must have been getting close to sixty; cruel wrinkles shot across her face – you could tell she didn’t skimp on sun. Had it not been for that, she would probably have looked younger. Her short, light-coloured hair stuck to her face and neck. The towel she had around her reached her knees, below which were her evenly tanned legs, and her feet, marred by bunions.

‘Let’s go inside,’ she said.

She told him to take a seat in the living room and disappeared for a few minutes. The doctor flushed out of anxiety – he felt as though he had caught her in the bathroom, as though he’d walked in on her cutting her nails. This encounter with her nearly naked old body, with her feet, her wet hair – it threw him off completely. But she didn’t seem to be bothered by it at all. She came back after a while in light-coloured trousers and a T-shirt, a fine-boned woman, with flabby arm muscles, her skin teeming with moles and birthmarks, ruffling her still-damp hair with her hand. This wasn’t how he had imagined her. He’d thought the wife of someone like Mole would be different. Different how? Taller, more modest, distinguished. In a silk blouse with a jabot and a carved cameo at her neck. Someone who didn’t swim in the sea.

She sat down across from him, rolled up her trouser legs and slid a bowl of chocolates towards him. She took one, too, and as she ate she sucked in her cheeks. He looked at her, she had bags under her eyes, hypothyroidism or perhaps just a flabbiness in the musculus orbicularis oculi .

‘So it’s you,’ she said. ‘Could you please remind me exactly what you do?’

He hurriedly swallowed his chocolate whole – it didn’t matter, he’d grab another one. He told her who he was again and talked a little bit about his work and publications. He reminded her of his History of Conservation , which had been published recently and which he had included in the dossier he’d sent her. He praised her husband. He said that Professor Mole had engineered a veritable revolution in the field of anatomy. She watched him attentively with her blue eyes, with a slight, content smile, which he might have taken as friendly or as ironic. Despite her first name, there was nothing exotic about her. He suddenly thought that maybe this wasn’t her, that maybe he was speaking with the cook, or the maid. As he finished with his background, he wrung his hands nervously, although he would have liked to keep himself from displaying such obvious evidence of nerves; he felt bedraggled in the shirt he’d worn to travel, and she leaped up, as though reading his mind.

‘I’ll show you your room. It’s this way.’

She guided him up the stairs onto the dark second floor and pointed to a door. She went in first and pulled back the red curtains. The windows gave onto the sea, the sun lit the room up orange.

‘You can get settled in while I make us something to eat. You must be tired. Are you tired? How was your flight?’

He gave an off-handed answer.

‘I’ll be downstairs,’ she said and left.

He wasn’t quite sure how it had happened – this woman of average height in her light-coloured trousers and stretched-out T-shirt had with some imperceptible gesture, perhaps just by her eyebrows, arranged anew the whole space and all the doctor’s expectations and fantasies. She had rid him of the whole of his long and tiring journey and prepared speeches, possible scenarios. She had introduced something of her own. She was the one who dictated the conditions. The doctor gave into it without batting an eyelash. Resigned, he took a quick shower, changed his clothes and went downstairs.

For dinner she served a salad with croutons made of dark bread and baked vegetables. So she was a vegetarian. It was a good thing he’d had that fish at the station. She sat opposite him with her elbows on the table, crumbling what was left of the croutons with her fingertips, and she talked about healthy food, about the harmfulness of flour and sugar, about the nearby organic farms where she bought her vegetables, milk and maple syrup, which she used instead of sugar. But the wine was good. Blau, unused to alcohol and tired, felt drunk after two glasses. Each subsequent sentence would form in his head, but she always got there first. By the end of the bottle she had told him the story of her husband’s death. A motorboat collision.

‘He was only sixty-seven years old. There was nothing they could do about the body. Completely mutilated.’

He thought she would burst into tears now, but she just took another crouton and crumbled it onto the scant remains of her salad.

‘He was not prepared for death, but who is?’ she mused. ‘But I know that he would want a successor who was worthy of him, someone who is not merely competent, but also works with passion, like him. He was a loner, you know that, I’m sure. He left no will, gave no instructions. Should I donate his specimens to a museum? Several museums have already inquired. Do you know of any respectable institution? There’s so much bad energy around plastinates now, but of course today, in order to do something, it’s not as though you have to cut down the bodies off the gallows,’ she sighed, and shaped a few leaves of her salad into a slender roll, which she slipped into her mouth. ‘But I know he would want a successor. Some of his projects are only barely begun; I try to keep them going myself, but I don’t have as much energy and enthusiasm as he did… Did you know I am a botanist by training? There is, for example, a problem…’ she started, hesitated. ‘It doesn’t matter, we’ll have time to discuss that later.’

He nodded, suppressing his curiosity.

‘But you deal primarily with historical specimens, is that right?’

Blau waited until the echo of her words had petered out, then dashed upstairs and raced back with his laptop.

They pushed back their plates, and after a moment the screen lit up with a cool glow. The doctor panicked for a moment, wondering what he had on his desktop – if he hadn’t left any erotic icons – but he had just cleaned it up recently. He hoped she had read what he had sent her about himself, that she had looked over his books. Now they both leaned into the screen.

As they looked over his work, it seemed to him that she was giving him admiring glances. He noted this to himself – twice. He made a mental note of what had inspired her admiration. She knew her stuff, posing professional questions. The doctor hadn’t expected her to know quite so much. Her skin gave off a slight fragrance of the kind of lotion older women put on their bodies, nice, powdery, innocent. The index finger of her right hand – the one with which she touched the screen – was adorned with a strange ring with the shape of a human eye as its stone. The skin of her hand was already being covered by dark liver spots. Her hands were as ruined by the sun as her face. He thought for a second about what method might help stop the effects of the sun on this thin, corrugated skin.