Ольга Токарчук - Flights

A month later he managed to ready his first excursion for several hundred people (it is unknown whether all of them were heading to the Temperance Society, however). And so the first travel agency was born.

Thomas Cook and James Cook: two of the chefs who cooked up our reality.

In Australia, everyone in the environs would come out onto the seashore when the news was circulated that yet another disoriented whale had run aground. In shifts, people would charitably ladle water over its delicate skin and try to convince it to go home. Older ladies dressed like hippies would maintain that they knew what they were doing. Apparently all you had to do was say, ‘Go, go, my brother,’ or, if need be, ‘Sister.’ And, with your eyes shut tight, transfer some of your energy into it.

All day, little tiny figures would mill about the beach, waiting for high tide: let the water take it back. Attempts would be made to fasten nets to boats and drag it out by force. Yet the great beast would soon become dead weight, a body indifferent to living. It’s no surprise people would begin to call it ‘suicide’. A small group of activists would appear in order to argue that animals ought to be allowed to simply die, if they so wished. Why should the act of suicide be the dubious privilege of mankind? Maybe the life of every living being has its own set limits, invisible to the eye, and once those have been crossed, life just runs out, on its own. Let that be taken into consideration for the Declaration of Animal Rights being drafted in Sydney or in Brisbane at just that moment. Dear brothers, we give you the right to choose your death.

Suspicious shamans would come down to the dying whale and perform rituals over it, followed by amateur photographs and thrill-seekers. A teacher from a village school brought her whole classroom, and the children were tasked with drawing ‘The Whale’s Farewell’.

Usually it took several days for the whale to die. In that time, the people on the shore became accustomed to the tranquil, magisterial being with its impenetrable will. Someone would name it, usually a human name. The local television station would show up, and the whole country, and the whole world, would take part in the death, thanks to satellite TV. The problem of this individual on the beach would conclude every news broadcast on three continents. Then they’d take the opportunity to talk about global warming and ecology. Scholars would be brought into the studios for debates, and politicians would tack earth-related topics onto their election platforms. Why do whales do this? The ichthyologists and the ecologists all gave different answers.

A collapsed echolocation system. Water pollution. A thermonuclear bomb at the bottom of the sea that no country would admit to setting off. Could it not be a decision, the kind elephants make? Old age? Disenchantment? As was recently discovered, after all, little distinguishes the whale’s brain from the human’s; a whale’s brain even contains certain areas Homo sapiens lack, in the best, the most developed portion of the frontal lobe.

In the end, the whale would finish dying, and its body would need to be removed from the beach. The crowds would have dispersed by this time – in fact, no one would be left, except the service people in bright green jackets who would cut the corpse up and load it onto trailers to haul if off somewhere. If there was a cemetery for whales, that’s definitely where they were headed.

Billy, an orca, drowned in air.

Everyone inconsolable in their grief.

Although there have been instances of people managing to save the whales. In response to the great and dedicated efforts of dozens of volunteers, these whales would take deep breaths and head back into the open sea. Their famous fountains could be seen springing joyfully up towards the sky, and then they would dive down into the depths of the ocean. The crowd would break into applause.

A few weeks later they’d be caught off the coast of Japan, and their gentle, pretty bodies would be turned into dog food.

She’s been packing for days. Her things lie in piles on the rug in their room. To get to the bed she steps between them, wading in among the stacks of shirts and underwear and balled-up socks, trousers folded neat along the crease, and a couple of books for the road, the novels everyone’s been talking about that she has not had time to read. And then a heavy jumper and a pair of winter boots, which she’s purchased just for this – she’s about to venture, after all, into the heart of winter.

They’re just things – soft, inscrutable skins that can be shed time and time again, protective cases for a brittle body in its fifties, to shield from ultraviolet rays and prying gazes. Indispensible on her long voyage, as well as when she gets there, for her weeks at the ends of the earth. She has set everything out on the floor, guided by a list she spent days making, working on it in rare free moments, knowing already she’d need to go. Once you give your word, you have to keep it.

As she carefully fills her red suitcase, she acknowledges she doesn’t really need much. With each passing year she’s discovered she needs less. Thus far she’s eliminated skirts, mousse, nail polish and anything else having to do with her nails, earrings, her portable iron. Cigarettes. Just this year she’d discovered she no longer needed pads.

‘You don’t have to take me,’ she says to the man who now turns his face to her, still basically asleep. ‘I’ll take a taxi.’

With the backs of her fingers she brushes his delicate pale eyelids, and she kisses him on the cheek.

‘Call me when you get there or I’ll worry sick,’ he mumbles, and then his head drops back down into the pillow. He’d had the night shift at the hospital. There had been some kind of accident; the patient had died.

She puts on a pair of black trousers and a black linen tunic. She pulls on her boots and slings her purse over her shoulder. Now she’s standing motionless in the hall without even knowing why herself. In her family they used to say that you always had to sit for a minute before heading off on any kind of trip – an old provincial Polish habit – but this little entrance has no place to sit on, no chair. So she stands there and sets her internal clock, her inner chronometer, so to speak, speaking cosmopolitan, that flesh-and-blood timer ticking dully to the rhythm of her human breath. And suddenly she collects herself, grabs the handle of her suitcase in her hand, like a child that got distracted, and she flings open the door. It’s time to go. So she gets going.

A cab driver with darker skin carefully arranges her bag in the boot. Several of his gestures strike her as unnecessary, and overly intimate: as he lays down her suitcase, for instance, she thinks she seems him giving it a tender caress.

‘Going on a trip, are we?’ he says, smiling, revealing his big white teeth.

She confirms that she is. He smiles even wider, via the discreet intermediary of the rearview mirror.

‘To Europe,’ she adds, and the taxi driver expresses his awe with a sound that was half exclamation and half sigh.

They go along the bay; the tide is just going out, and the water slowly discloses its stony, mussel-strewn bottom. The sun is blinding, and very hot. You had to be careful of your skin. Now she thinks forlornly of her plants in the garden and wonders if her husband will really water them like he said he would; she thinks of her mandarin oranges and wonders if they’ll make it to when she gets back – if so, she’ll make marmalade – and she thinks of her figs that have just begun to ripen and of her herbs that had been exiled to the driest place in the garden, where the soil is almost rock, though they seem to like it there, because this year the tarragon had attained unprecedented proportions. Even the clothes she hangs to dry above the garden return suffused with its brisk, tart scent.