Ольга Токарчук - Flights

She remembered, of course.

He’d had a little pocket knife with a bone handle that had had the corkscrew he’d just used to open the bottle (because back then vodka bottles had had corks, too, and wax seals), and now with the sharp part of the corkscrew he dug into his hand – if she remembered right, it had been a long cut between his index finger and his thumb – and she had taken that curly metal blade from him and done the same to herself. Then they touched these bloodstains together, applying one scratch to another. This youthful romantic gesture was called blood brotherhood, and it must have come from some movie that had been popular then, or maybe a book, maybe one of Karl May’s series on the Apache chief.

Now she inspected her palms, the left and then the right, because she couldn’t remember which one it was, but of course she turned up nothing. Time commemorated other kinds of wounds.

Of course she remembered that June night – with age, memory starts to slowly open its holographic chasms, one day pulling out the next, easily, as though on a string, and from days to hours, minutes. Immobile images move, first slowly, repeating over and over those same moments, and it’s like extracting ancient skeletons from sand: at first you see a single bone, but a brush soon uncovers more, until finally the whole complex structure is on display, the joints and articulations that comprise the construction that supports the body of time.

From Poland they’d gone to Sweden first. It was 1970, and she was nineteen. Within two years they’d realized that Sweden was too close, that the Baltic Sea brought in certain fluids, nostalgias, miasmas, a kind of unpleasant air. Her father was a good dentist, and her mother a dental hygienist – the kinds of people needed all around the world. Just multiply the population count by the number of teeth they’d have, then you’d know your chances. And the further away the better.

She’d responded to this message, too, reaffirming in surprise that strange promise. And by the next morning she’d already received his reply, as though he’d been waiting impatiently all along, the contents of his next message saved somewhere on his desktop, ready to copy and paste.

‘Imagine, if you can, constant pain and progressive paralysis that goes one step further every single day. But even that could be borne, if not for the knowledge that past that pain there is nothing, no redress due, and that every hour will be worse than the one before it, which means you’re headed into truly unfathomable depths, into a kind of hell made up of hallucinations, with ten circles of suffering. And you don’t get anyone to guide you through it, nobody to take you by the hand and explain what’s going on – because there is no explanation, no set of punishments or rewards.’

And the next letter, where he complained that it was horrendously difficult for him to write even just clichés: ‘You know that here there can be no question of anything of the kind. Our tradition’s not conducive to that line of thought, and that’s exacerbated further by the innate disinclination to any type of reflection on the part of my (could they still be yours, too?) compatriots. It’s typically attributed to our painful history, for history was always unkind to us – as soon as things started to go well, they’d always come crashing down again, and so it became sort of established that we’d be wary of the world, and scared, that we’d have faith in the saving power of ironclad rules but also want to break the very rules we came up with.

‘My situation is as follows: I’m divorced, and I’m not in any contact with my wife – my sister’s taking care of me, but she would never carry out my request. I don’t have children, which I greatly regret – it’s precisely for these types of things you have to have them, if for nothing else. I am, unfortunately, a public figure, and an unpopular one at that. No doctor would dare to help me. During one of the many political skirmishes in which I was involved I got discredited, and I don’t have what you would call a good name now, I know that, and I couldn’t care less. I’d get the occasional visitor in the hospital from time to time, but I suspect it wasn’t out of any real desire to see me, or out of sympathy (this is what I think), but rather – even if they weren’t fully aware of it – to get some closure. So this is what’s become of him! And they’d shake their heads by my bedside. I get that, it’s a human emotion. I myself am certainly not particularly pure of heart. I messed up a lot of things in my life. I’ve only really got one thing going for me, which is that I’ve always been organized. And I’d like to take full advantage of that now.’

She had trouble understanding his Polish – she’d forgotten a lot of words completely. She didn’t know, for example, what ‘ osoba publiczna ’ meant, she’d had to think about it, though then she’d figured out it must be ‘public figure’. But what did he mean by ‘messed up’? That he’d made a mess out of things? That he’d harmed himself?

She tried to picture him writing that letter, if he was sitting up or lying down, and what he looked like, if he was in pyjamas, but his image in her head stayed just an outline, not filled in, an empty shape she could look through and see the way out to the meadows and the bay. After this long letter she took out the cardboard box where she kept her old pictures from Poland, and in the end she found him – a young boy, his hairstyle proper, the shadow of his youthful facial hair, in funny-looking glasses and some sort of highlander’s stretched-out jumper, with a hand up around his face – he must have been saying something when this black and white picture was taken.

An instance of synchronicity: a few hours later she got a letter with a picture attached. ‘Writing is harder and harder on me. Please hurry. This is how I look. You should know – although this was taken a year ago.’ A massive man, the grey hair on his head shaved short, his face smooth, his features soft, a little blurred, sitting in some room where the shelves are loaded down with papers – publishing? There was no resemblance between the two photographs; you could be excused for thinking they were two completely different people.

She didn’t know what kind of illness it was. She enters its Polish name into Google, and she finds out. Aha. In the evening she asked her husband about it. He explained in detail the mechanism of the illness, its in-curability, the progressive degeneration and paralysis.

‘Why do you ask?’ he said finally.

‘Just curious. A friend of a friend has it,’ she responded evasively, and then, as though in passing, surprising even herself, she brought up a conference in Europe, a last-minute emergency, that she would need to attend.

At only an hour long, from London to Warsaw, the last flight doesn’t even really count. She almost doesn’t notice it. A lot of young people going home from work. What an odd feeling – everyone speaking Polish so naturally. At first she’s as taken aback as though she’d happened on a bunch of Ancient Greeks. They are all dressed warmly: hats, gloves, scarves, down jackets like the ones you wear when you go skiing – and it is only now that it really sinks in that she’d be landing in the heart of winter.

A beleaguered body, reminiscent of a single tendon, stretched out on the bed. He doesn’t recognize her when she enters the room, of course. He examines her attentively, knowing it must be her, but he doesn’t really recognize her, or at least that’s what it looks like.

‘Greetings,’ she says.

And he smiles faintly and closes his eyes for a while.

‘You’re amazing,’ he says.

The woman at his bedside, who must be the sister he’d mentioned, makes room for her so she can put her hand on top of his. His hand is bony and ashen; now his blood bears ash, not fire.