Ольга Токарчук - Flights

It is said that one particular Buddha statue appeared on its own, perfect, made out of the best metal. It only had to have the soil removed from it. It represents a sitting Buddha resting its head in its hands. This Buddha is smiling a little bit, to himself, with a hint of irony, like someone who’s just heard a subtle joke. A joke in which the punch line comes not in the final sentence, but in the breath of the person telling it.

A certain island-dwelling woman from the other hemisphere, whom I met in a hotel in Prague, told me the following:

People have always slogged around with them millions of bacteria, viruses and diseases; there’s no way to stop it. But we can at least try. After the worldwide panic over mad cow disease some countries introduced new legislation. Any of the residents of her island who went away to Europe could no longer donate blood; it might be said that according to the law they suffered from lifelong contamination. And this would now be her case – she would never be able to give blood now. This was the price of her trip, not included in the cost of the ticket. Lost purity. Lost honour.

I asked her if it was worth it, if it made sense to sacrifice the purity of her blood for the pleasure of looking around a few cities, churches and museums.

She answered seriously that all things have a price.

Each of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim, this time I immediately recognized the sensitive hand of Charlotta. In the oblong jar, with a lid that looked like a sculpture, there floated a small fetus with closed eyes hanging from two horse hairs. Its little feet touched the dyed-red remains of the bed at the bottom of the jar. On the jar’s shale lid a little underwater still life – everything evoking the marine, even the protagonist of this exhibit, the fetus. We all come from water. Which is no doubt why Charlotta adorned this one with seashells, starfish, corals and sponges, and at its centre, a dried-out seahorse – a hippocampus.

One other specimen made an impression on me – conjoined twins preserved in Stygian water, and next to it, their dried skeleton. Proof of great economy of material – two specimens with one double body.

The first thing that caught my eye upon arriving in the Eternal City was the beautiful black salesmen of handbags and wallets. I bought a little red coin purse, because my last one had been stolen in Stockholm. The second thing was the stalls laden with postcards – as a matter of fact you could leave it at that, spending the rest of your time in the shade on the banks of the Tiber, perhaps having a glass of wine later on in one of the expensive little cafés. Postcards of landscapes, panoramas of old ruins, postcards ambitiously prepared so as to show as much as possible on that flat space, are slowly being replaced by photographs focusing on details. This is no doubt a good idea, because they relieve tired minds. There is too much world, so it’s better to concentrate on particulars, rather than the whole.

Here is a nice detail of a fountain, a little kitten sitting on a Roman ledge, the genitalia of Michelangelo’s David, a stone sculpture’s gigantic foot, a mutilated torso that instantly makes you wonder what face belonged to that body. An individual window on a wall the colour of ochre, and finally – yes – just a hand with its index finger raised up into the sky, monstrous, detached from some incredible whole just here, at the wrist – the hand of the Emperor Constantine.

I was infected by that postcard. You really have to be careful about what you look at when you’re first starting out! From that point forward I saw hands pointing something out everywhere; I became a slave to that detail, which possessed me.

The half-naked statue of a warrior, just in a parade helmet and with a pike in one hand; the other pointing out something up above. Two putti with greasy fingers directing others’ attention to the fact that there, above their heads – but what? And more, two women tourists bent over with laughter, their fingers, a group of people in front of an elegant hotel – because Richard Gere and Nicole Kidman had just come out of it – and on St Peter’s Square you could see hundreds of those pointing fingers.

At the Campo di Fiori I saw a woman petrified by the heat next to a tap with water, her finger up against her ear, as though she wanted to remember a melody from her youth and was just beginning to hear the first notes of it.

And then I noticed an old, sick man in a wheelchair being pushed by two girls. The old man was paralyzed, sticking out of his nose were two little transparent plastic tubes that disappeared into a black backpack. An expression of absolute terror was frozen on his face, and his right hand, with a predatory gnarled finger, was pointing at something that must have been just over his left shoulder.

James Cook set out on the southern seas to observe the passage of Venus over the solar disk. Venus revealed to him not only its beauty, but also the land that had already been noticed by the Dutchman Tasman. From his notes the sailors already knew it had to be here somewhere. Every day they looked out for it, and every day they made the same mistakes – taking clouds for land. In the evenings they would talk about the mysterious island – that it would certainly be beautiful, given it was in the custody of Venus, but that it had to also have other superior characteristics, being the land of Venus. Everyone had his own fantasy about it.

The first officer was from Tahiti; he was certain that this land would be like his Hawaii – warm, tropical, sun-drenched, surrounded by long, endless beaches, full of flowers, useful herbs and beautiful women with bare breasts. The captain himself came from Yorkshire (of which he was very proud), and as a matter of fact he wouldn’t have anything against here being like there. He even wondered if maybe lands on the other side of the globe might not be connected by some sort of correspondence, a planetary intimacy, a likeness – if not obvious and trivial, then perhaps manifested in some other, deeper way. The cabin boy, Nils Jung, dreamed of mountains, wanted this land to be mountainous, for them to reach up into the sky and have snow-capped peaks, and between them, for there to be fertile valleys, filled with grazing sheep, and clear streams in which trout swam (he apparently came from Norway).

And it was his eyes that first spotted New Zealand on 6 October 1769.

From then on the Endeavour sailed straight ahead, and the sight of land emerged from the clouds, mile by mile. In the evenings an emotional Captain Cook transferred its contours onto paper, drawing maps.

Over several years of this mapping they had many adventures, which have already been colourfully described. When a crew member mused aloud that such an extraordinary land must be inhabited, the next day they saw smoke over the bush. When they began to fear obstacles in securing provisions on land and to imagine it peopled by valiant savages, that same morning they appeared on the land – scary and frightening. They had tattooed faces, they stuck out their tongues and shook their spears. To definitively demonstrate their advantage and immediately establish a hierarchy, they shot several savages – that’s when the explorers were attacked.

New Zealand was, it seems, the last land we invented.

In 1841, Thomas set out on foot to a meeting of the Temperance Society – for he was a great advocate of the temperate mind – from his native Loughborough to Leicester, eleven miles removed. With him went several other gentlemen. Along the way, which was long and tiring, this Cook had an idea – it now seems so strange that no one had ever thought of it before, but that is of course the famous simplicity of brilliant ideas – namely, to rent a railway carriage to transport all the travellers together on the next trip.