Ольга Токарчук - Flights

She could embark tomorrow; she has heard they still need sailors at the Company. She could get on one of those ships that would take her to Texel, where a whole fleet is waiting. The Company ships are bulky, with great bellies, squat, so they can fit as much as possible – silk, porcelain, carpets and spices. She would be quiet as a mouse, no one would even realize; she’s quite tall and sturdy, and she would bind her breasts with a band of canvas. And even if it came out, they’d be somewhere on the open seas, on the way to the East Indies – what could they do to her then? At most they’d kick her off in some civilized place, for example in Batavia, where apparently – she’s seen this on engravings – monkeys run in packs and sit on the roofs of houses, and all year round fruits grow as in paradise, and it is so warm no one even wears stockings.

So she thinks, so she imagines, but then her attention is drawn by a big, sturdy man and his naked shoulders, his naked torso, tattooed, covered in colourful drawings dominated by ships, sails, half-naked women with darker skin; it is as though this man wore his life story written out on his own body, these drawings must represent his travels and lovers. Charlotta can’t take her eyes off him. The man throws over his shoulder bundles sewn up in grey canvas and carries it down the planks onto a medium-sized boat. He must feel her gaze on him, because he looks at her fleetingly, neither smiling nor frowning, because she’s no attraction to him. An old maid in black. But she can’t take her eyes off his tattoos. She sees on his shoulder a colourful fish, a great whale, and because the sailor’s muscles are working, she has the impression that this whale is alive and that it lives with this man in some sort of unprecedented symbiosis, on his skin, glued to it for all time, travelling from his shoulder blade towards his chest. This big sturdy body makes an enormous impression on her. She feels her legs get slow and heavy, and her body opens up from below, that’s how it feels – it opens up, to that shoulder, to that whale.

She clenches her teeth so tight her head roars. She starts to walk along the canal towards him, but in the end she slows and stops. She’s overcome by a strange feeling that the water here is overflowing onto the banks. Gently, at first checking with the first waves the place of its expansion, then it grows bolder, pours out onto the paving stones, and in a moment it’s reached the first steps of the nearest houses’ stairs. Charlotta feels distinctly the weight of the element – her skirts absorb the water, become leaden, she can’t move. She feels this flood in every inch of her body and sees the surprised boats battering the trees; always lined up with their bows against the current, now they’ve lost their direction.

The next day at dawn the Russian sailboat with the collection carefully arranged in the hold raised its anchor and headed out to sea. It met with good fortune crossing the Danish straits, and after several days it was received by the Baltic. The captain, in a good mood, was contemplating his recent purchase, a beautifully executed tellurion by Dutch artisans. He had always been interested in such things much more than sailing itself, and deep down he would rather have been an astronomer, a cartographer, someone who reaches beyond the space available to our gaze and our ships.

From time to time he went down into the hold and checked to make sure the precious cargo was still in place, but somewhere around Gotland the weather changed – after a not-too-violent storm the wind dropped. The air hovered over the sea, forming a great block of atmospheric amber out of August’s final heat. The sails slumped, and this went on for several days. The captain, in order to occupy people somehow, ordered them to roll and unroll the halyards, scrub the deck, and in the evenings he made them go through drills. After dark, his authority lost its outlines somewhat, and he snuck back into the cozy cocoon of his cabin, partly of wariness towards these gruff, primitive sailors, partly on account of his travel journal, which he was writing for his two sons.

On the eighth day of dead calm the sailors began to be stormy themselves, and the vegetables they’d bought in Amsterdam, especially the onion, turned out to be poor quality and in large part mouldy. Their supply of vodka was already running out – the captain was actually afraid to look under the deck, where they kept the barrels, but the reports of his first officer certainly did not bode well. The captain felt uneasy as nocturnal clattering on deck reached his ears. At first they were individual steps. But then it was several pairs of legs knocking, and in the end he heard a peaceable trot and a rhythmic shouting (could they be dancing?), which finally transitioned into raucous drunken shouts and uneven choruses sung so pathetically and painfully that it reminded him of the wailing of some marine animals. This happened over several long nights, almost until dawn. By day he saw the sailors’ puffy eyes and swollen eyelids and their gazes that avoided him. But both he and his first officer agreed that deepest darkness at stilled sea would hardly favour any behavioural correctives. It wasn’t until the tenth day of silence, when the nocturnal excesses could no longer be tolerated, that he went out onto the deck, in full sun so that his epaulettes and insignia could be seen, and arrested the ringleader, a man by the name of Kalukin.

Unfortunately, with a trembling heart, he confirmed his suspicions that some of the cargo had been damaged. Some dozen or so of the hundreds of jars they were transporting had been opened, and their liquid contents, a strong brandy, drunk till the last drop. The specimens themselves were still there, lying around on the floor, submerged in tow and sawdust. He didn’t take too close a look at them, out of disgust and fear. The next night he made some men stand with arms in hand to guard the entrance to the hold; a mutiny was close to breaking out. The August heat was driving the men crazy. And the smoothness of the surface of the sea. And the cargo itself.

In the end there was no other way – the captain had the remains that were left sewn up in a cloth bag and he personally threw them overboard. And as though at the touch of a wizard’s wand, the sea, mollified by this morsel, smacked and moved. Somewhere near the Swedish mainland the wind came in and pushed the Tsar’s sailboat towards home.

When they got back to Petersburg the captain had to write a secret report. Kalukin was convicted and hanged, and the collection itself, though incomplete, was transferred safely to rooms prepared expressly for it.

The captain, meanwhile, for his failure to take care of the transport, was sent along with his family to the Far North, where for the rest of his life he organized little fishing expeditions and contributed to the drawing up of more detailed maps of Novaya Zemlya.

Flight from Irkutsk to Moscow. It takes off at 8 a.m. and lands in Moscow at the same time – at eight o’clock in the morning on that same day. It turns out to be right at sunrise, which means the whole flight takes place during dawn. Passengers remain in this one moment, a great, peaceful Now, vast as Siberia itself.

So there should be time enough for confessions of whole lifetimes. Time elapses inside the plane but doesn’t trickle out of it.

In the third hour of the flight, when the man sitting next to me came back from the bathroom and I had to get up to let him in again, we exchanged a few polite remarks on the weather, the turbulence and the food. During the fourth hour of the flight, however, we introduced ourselves. He was a physicist. He was returning home after giving a series of lectures. When he took off his shoes, I noticed he had an enormous hole in the heel of his sock. Thus I became aware of the physical presence of the physicist, and from that point forward we spoke in a more ordinary way. He told me stories about whales with great enthusiasm, although his work dealt with something else.