Ольга Токарчук - Flights

‘Well, would you looky here,’ says his sister to him. ‘Somebody has a visitor! Look who came to see you.’ And then to her: ‘Would you like to sit?’

His room looks out onto a snow-covered yard and four enormous pines; at the back there is a fence and a road, and further down real villas; she is stunned by the glamour of their architecture. She remembered it differently. There are columns, verandas, lighted driveways. She hears the wheezing of an engine as a neighbour tries in vain to start his car. There is a slight scent in the air of fire, of the smoke given off by coniferous wood.

He glances at her and smiles, but only with his lips, whose corners curl up a little while his eyes stay serious. There’s a stand with an IV drip to the left of the bed; his IV protrudes from a blue, swollen vein that seems to be near collapse.

When his sister leaves, he says, ‘Is it you?’

She smiles.

‘Would you look at that, I came,’ she says: a simple sentence she’d been practising in her head for some time now. And it turns out fine.

‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think –’ and he swallows like he’s about to cry.

She’s afraid she’ll be subjected to some uncomfortable scene. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hesitate for one second.’

‘You look lovely. Young. Although you did dye your hair,’ he says, trying to lighten things up.

His lips are cracked. She spots a drinking glass on his bedside table with a straw wrapped in gauze sticking out of it.

‘Would you like some water?’

He nods.

She wets the gauze in the glass and leans over this prostrate man; he smells sickeningly sweet. His eyes flutter shut as she delicately moistens his lips.

They try to have a conversation, but they can’t quite pull it off. He keeps shutting his eyes for a few seconds, and she can never tell if he’s still there or if he’s drifted off somewhere. She tries something along the lines of, ‘Remember when…’, but it doesn’t take. When she falls silent he touches her hand and says, ‘Please tell me a story. Please talk.’

‘How much longer…’ she tries to find the words. ‘Will this last?’

He says it could be within weeks.

‘What’s that?’ she asks, glancing at the drip.

He smiles again.

‘Super value meal,’ he says. ‘Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Pork chops and cabbage, apple pie and beer for dessert.’

Quietly she repeats after him the word for ‘cabbage’, ‘ kapusta ’, a word she had all but forgotten, and it is enough to make her hungry. She takes his hand and rubs his cold fingers carefully. A stranger’s hands, a stranger – there is nothing in him that she knows now. A stranger’s body, a stranger’s voice. She might just as easily be in someone else’s room.

‘Do you really recognize me?’ she asks him.

‘Of course I do. You haven’t changed that much.’

But she can tell this isn’t true. She knows he doesn’t recognize her at all. Maybe if they could spend more time together, time for all these different faces, gestures, habits of movement to properly unfold… But what would be the point? She thinks he’s drifted off again for a while now – he’s shut his eyes as though he’s sleeping. She doesn’t disturb him. She watches his ashen face and sunken eyes, his nails that are so white they look like they are made of wax, but carelessly, because the line between them and the skin of his fingers is blurred.

After a while he comes to again, looking at her as though only a second had passed.

‘I found you online a long time ago. I read your articles, although I couldn’t really follow most of them.’ He smiles wanly. ‘All those complicated terms.’

‘Did you really read them?’ she asks in surprise.

‘You seem good,’ he says. ‘You look good.’

‘I am,’ she says.

‘How was your trip? How many hours is it?’

She tells him about her layovers, about the airports. She tries to figure out the hours, but nothing works out right: time apparently expanded when you flew from east to west. She describes her home to him, and the view of the bay. She tells him about the opossums, and about her son going to Guatemala for a year to teach English in a rural school. About her parents, who had died in quick succession, fulfilled, grey-haired, telling secrets to each other in Polish. About her husband, who performs complicated neurological operations.

‘You kill animals, don’t you?’ he asks suddenly.

She is startled. She looks at him. And then she understands.

‘It’s hard,’ she says, ‘but it has to be done. Water?’

He shakes his head.

‘Why?’ he says.

She makes a vague gesture with her hand. Of impatience. It’s obvious why. Because people had introduced domesticated animals to the island that were previously unknown to the native ecosystem. Some had been brought in out of carelessness, a long time ago, over two hundred years ago, while others seemed to have come ashore through no fault of anyone, just by escaping. Rabbits. Opossums and weasels farmed for their fur. Plants had slipped out of people’s gardens – just recently she’d seen clumps of blood-red geraniums on the side of the road. Garlic had got away and turned feral in the wilderness. Its flowers had faded somewhat – who knew, maybe after thousands of years it was making some sort of local mutation of its own here. People like her worked hard to keep the island from being contaminated by the rest of the world; to keep random seeds from sneaking out from random pockets and landing in the island’s soil; to keep foreign fungi from banana peels brought in from knocking down the whole ecosystem. And on their shoes, on the soles of their hiking boots, to keep any other undesirable immigrants from getting through – bacteria, insects, algae. It’s a battle that must be waged, though of course it’s been doomed from the start. You have to make peace with the fact that in the end there won’t be individual ecosystems. The world all sloshed together in a single sludge.

But you have to enforce customs regulations. You’re not allowed to bring any biological substances onto the island; seeds require a special permit.

She notices he is listening attentively. But is this topic appropriate to this type of encounter? she thinks, and then gets quiet.

‘Tell me, tell me,’ he says.

She straightens his pyjamas, which had fallen open at his chest, revealing a blanched section of skin with a couple of grey hairs.

‘Look, this is my husband. These are my kids,’ she said, reaching for her purse, pulling out her wallet, where in a transparent compartment she keeps her pictures. She shows him her children. He can’t move his head, so she raises it slightly for him. He smiles.

‘Had you been here before?’

She shakes her head.

‘But I’ve been in Europe, for different conferences. Well, three.’

‘And you didn’t feel like coming back?’

She thinks for a moment.

‘I had so much going on in my life, you know, with school, and then the kids, and then work. We built this house on the ocean,’ she starts to say, but in her mind she hears the voice of her father, saying how the country was only suited to small mammals and insects, moths. ‘I guess I just forgot about it,’ she concludes.

‘Do you know how to do it?’ he asks after a longer pause.

‘I do,’ she says.

‘When?’

‘Whenever you want.’

With evident strain he turns to face the window.

‘As soon as possible,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow?’

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘Thank you,’ he says, and he looks at her as though he’s just told her he loves her.

As she leaves an old, overfed dog comes up and sniffs her. His sister is standing in the snow, on the porch, smoking a cigarette.