Ольга Токарчук - Flights

‘Smoke?’ she says.

She knows this is an invitation to talk, and to her own surprise, she accepts a cigarette. It’s very slender, mentholated. She is staggered by her first drag.

‘He’s on morphine patches, that’s why he’s not fully conscious,’ says the woman. ‘Was it a long trip for you?’

And she realizes that he hadn’t told his sister. So she doesn’t know what to say.

‘No, no. We worked together for a while,’ she says without hesitation; she’d never had the slightest suspicion she was capable of lying. ‘I’m a foreign correspondent,’ she adds quickly, wanting to come up with something to explain her accent, which sounds foreign after all this time.

‘God is unjust, unjust and cruel. To torment him,’ says his sister, with a fierce determination on her face. ‘It’s good you came. He’s so alone. There’s a nurse who comes from the clinic in the mornings. She says it would be better to put him back in hospice care, but he doesn’t want that.’

They extinguish their cigarettes in the snow simultaneously. They don’t so much as hiss as they go out.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ she says. ‘To say goodbye, because I’ve got to go already.’

‘Tomorrow? So soon? He was so happy you were coming… And you only came for two days.’ The woman makes a movement like she wants to grab her hand, as though she wants to add: Please don’t leave us.

She has to rebook her tickets – she hadn’t thought it would go so quickly. The most important flight, the one from Europe home, can’t be changed now, so as it turns out she has a week to kill. But she decides not to stay here – it’d be better to just go already, and besides, she feels out of place in this snow and this darkness. There are seats available to Amsterdam and London for the following afternoon; she chooses Amsterdam. She’ll be a tourist there for a week.

She eats dinner by herself, and then she takes a walk down the main street of the Old Town. She looks in the windows of the little shops, which mostly sell souvenirs and amber jewellery she doesn’t care for. And the city itself seems impenetrable, too big and too cold. People move around it all bundled up, their faces half hidden by their collars and their scarves, their lips emitting little clouds of steam. Piles of frozen snow lie on the pavements. She gives up on the idea of visiting the halls where she’d once lived. In fact, everything here repels her. Suddenly she’s utterly baffled by this phenomenon of people actually choosing, of their own free will, to go back and visit the different places of their youths. What is it they think they’re going to find? What is it they have to have validation of – just the fact that they had been there? Or that they’d done the right thing in leaving? Or perhaps they were urged on by some hope that recollecting more precisely these lost places would work with the lightning speed of a zipper to unite the past and future, creating a single stable surface, tooth to tooth, a metal suture.

And clearly she repels the locals, too, who don’t so much as look at her, overlooking her as they pass. It is as though her childhood dream of being invisible have all come true. A fairy-tale gadget: the hat of invisibility you put on your head to temporarily vanish from everyone else’s view.

In the last few years she had realized that all you have to do to become invisible is be a woman of a certain age, without any outstanding features: it’s automatic. Not only invisible to men, but also to women, who no longer treat her as competition in anything. It is a new and surprising sensation, how people’s eyes just sort of float right over her face, her cheeks and her nose, not even skimming the surface. They look straight through her, no doubt looking past her at ads and landscapes and schedules. Yes, yes, all signs point to her having become invisible, though now she thinks, too, of all the opportunities that this invisibility might afford – she simply has to learn how she can take them. For example, if something crazy were to happen, nobody on the scene would even remember her having been there, or if they did all they’d say would be, ‘some woman’, or ‘somebody else was over there…’ Men are more ruthless here than women, who sometimes still paid her compliments on things like earrings, if she wore them, while men don’t even try to hide it, never looking at her longer than a second. Just occasionally some child would fixate on her for some unknown reason, making a meticulous and dispassionate examination of her face until finally turning away, towards the future.

She spends the evening in the sauna at the hotel, and then she falls asleep, too fast, exhausted from jetlag, like a lone card taken out of its deck and shuffled into some other, strange one. She wakes up too early in the morning, seized by fear. She is lying on her back; it’s still dark, and she thinks about her husband saying goodbye to her almost in his sleep. What if she never sees him again? And she pictures leaving her purse on the steps and taking off her clothes and lying down with him the way he likes her to, pressing up against his bare back, her nose against the nape of his neck. She calls. It’s evening there, and he’s just come home from the hospital. She tells him a little bit about the conference. And the weather, how cold it is, how she suspects he wouldn’t make it. She reminds him to water the flowers in the garden, especially the tarragon in the rocky patch. She asks if she’s got any phone calls from her work. Then she takes a shower, makes herself up, and heads down to breakfast, where she is the first to arrive.

In the little bag with her make-up there is also a vial that looks like a perfume sample. She takes it with her today, picking up a syringe at a pharmacy on her way. It’s actually kind of funny because she can’t remember the bizarre word for syringe, ‘ strzykawka ’, so instead she says the word for injection, ‘ zastrzyk ’. They sound so similar.

As her taxi crosses the city, it slowly dawns on her what the source of her sense of not belonging was: it’s a different city now, in no way reminiscent of the one she’d had still in her head; there’s nothing here for her memory to grab onto. Nothing looks familiar. The houses are too stocky, too squat, the streets too wide, the doors too solid; it’s different cars driving down different streets, plus in the opposite direction of what she’s used to now. Which is why she can’t quite shake the feeling that she’s ended up on the other side of a mirror in some fictional land, where everything is unreal, which somehow also makes everything allowed. There is no one who could grab her hand, no one who could detain her. She moves along these frozen streets like a visitor from another dimension, like some higher being; she has to sort of contract inside herself to even be able to fit. And her only task here is this one mission, obvious and aseptic, a mission of love.

The cab driver gets a little lost once they get to that little town with the villas, which also have a fairy-tale name: Zalesie Górne, meaning over the hills, and through the woods. She asks him to stop around the corner, at a little bar, and she pays.

She walks several dozen metres quickly, and then she struggles through all the uncleared snow on the familiar path from the gate to the house. As she opens the gate she knocks off its snowy cap, revealing the address underneath: 1.

His sister lets her in again. Her eyes are red from crying.

‘He’s expecting you,’ she says, and then she disappears, saying, ‘He even asked for a shave.’

He is lying in fresh bedding, conscious, facing the door – he really has been expecting her. When she sits down on the bed beside him and takes his hands, she notices there was something strange about them: they’re dripping with sweat, even the backs of them. She smiles at him.