Ольга Токарчук - Flights

There was nothing to make a fire from – only damp cold moss and sparse bushes the fire wouldn’t even put in its mouth, let alone digest. They camped out in sleeping bags between the rocks in the moss, and when the snow clouds disappeared and a starry freezing sky was revealed, they saw faces in the lava stones, and everything started whispering, murmuring, rustling. It turned out that all you had to do was reach under the moss, under the stones, in order to touch the earth, which was warm. Your hand could feel distant, delicate vibrations, some far-off movement, a breath – there could be no doubt: the earth was alive.

Then they learned from the Icelanders that no real ill could have come to them: for lost souls like them the earth is able to bare its warm nipples. You just have to suck at them with gratitude and drink the earth’s milk. Apparently it tastes like milk of magnesium – what they sell in pharmacies for hyperacidity and heartburn.

Tomorrow is the Sabbath. Young fledgling Hassidim pogo dance on the boardwalk to the rhythm of a lively, trendy South American music. ‘Dance’ isn’t the right word. These are wild ecstatic leaps, twirling in place, bodies bounding into one another and bouncing back off – it’s the dance stamped out by teenagers all over the world at concerts, in front of the stage. Here the music comes from some speakers placed atop a car in which sits a rabbi, supervising everything.

Some entertained Scandinavian tourist girls join in with the boys and awkwardly, holding hands, attempt a cancan. But then they’re issued orders by one of the teenagers:

‘We ask that if women wish to dance, they do so over to one side.’

Here there are some who believe that we have reached the end of our journey.

The city is completely white, like bones left in the desert, licked by tongues of heat, polished by the sand. It looks like a calcified coral colony grown up over the hill from the times of the immemorial sea.

It is also said that this city’s runway is uneven – difficult for any pilot – a runway from which gods once took off from land. Those who have any idea about those times repeat, unfortunately, contradictory things. No one can agree on any one version of events today.

Beware, all pilgrims, tourists and wanderers who have made it this far – you sailed up in ships, came on planes, crossed on foot over straits and bridges, military cordons and barbed wire. Many times were your cars and caravans stopped, your passports carefully checked, your eyes looked into. Beware, traverse this labyrinth of little streets according to signs, stations, do not be guided by the index finger of an extended hand, the numbered verses in a book, the Roman numerals painted on the walls of houses. Do not be misled by stalls with beads, carpets, water pipes, coins unearthed (supposedly) from the sands of the desert, spices sprinkled in colourful pyramids; do not be distracted by the colourful crowd of people like you, of all possible types, colours of skin, faces, hair, clothing, hats and backpacks.

At the centre of the labyrinth there’s neither treasure nor a minotaur you’ll have to fight in battle; the road ends suddenly with a wall – white like the whole city, tall, impossible to climb. Supposedly this is the wall of some invisible temple, but facts are facts – we’ve reached the end, there’s nothing past this now.

And so don’t be surprised by the sight of those who stand before the wall in shock, or those who cool their foreheads resting them against the chilly stone, or even those who out of exhaustion and disappointment have sat down and are now snuggling up to the wall like children.

It’s time to go back.

On my first night in New York I dreamed that I was wandering the streets of the city at night. I did however have a map, and I checked it from time to time, searching for a way out of this grid labyrinth. Suddenly I came to a big square and saw an enormous ancient amphitheatre. I stood, completely astonished. Then a couple of Japanese tourists came up and pointed it out to me on my city map. Yes, it really is there, I sighed with relief.

In the thicket of perpendicular and parallel streets that intersect with each other like warp and weft, in the midst of that monotonous network, I saw a great round eye gazing up into the heavens.

It’s reminiscent of a great Tao – if you look at it closely, you can indeed see a great Tao made of water and earth. But in no place is it as though one element were gaining an advantage over the other – they embrace each other reciprocally: earth and water. The Peloponnesian Straits are what the earth gives to the water, and Crete what the water gives to the earth.

I do think that the Peloponnese has the most beautiful shape. It’s the shape of a great maternal hand, not a human one, that is dipping into the water to check if the temperature is right for a bath.

‘We are the ones who confront head-on,’ said the professor, once they were out of the big airport building, waiting for their taxi. He took pleasure in deep breaths of warm, gentle Greek air.

He was eighty-one years old, with a wife twenty years his junior, a woman he had married prudently, as the air was leaking out of his first marriage, his adult children having left the nest. And it was a good thing, because that other wife now needed to be cared for herself, living out her days in a perfectly reasonable retirement home.

He handled the flight well, and a few hours’ time difference didn’t really make a difference; the rhythm of the professor’s sleep had long since come to resemble a cacophonous symphony, random timetables of unexpected sleepiness and dazzling lucidity. The time change merely shifted those chaotic chords of waking and sleep by seven hours.

The air-conditioned taxi took them to their hotel; there, Karen, the professor’s younger wife, skilfully oversaw the unloading of their baggage, collected information from the organizers of the cruise at reception, got the keys and then, accepting help from a solicitous porter – for this was no easy task – took her husband up to the second floor, to their room. There she carefully arranged him in their bed, loosened his scarf and took his shoes off for him. Instantly he was asleep.

And they were in Athens! She was happy, she went up to the window and struggled for a second with its ingenious latch. Athens in April. Spring at full tilt, leaves feverishly clambering into space. The dust had risen already outside, but it wasn’t yet severe; and the noise, of course: ever-present. She shut the window.

In the bathroom Karen tousled her short grey hair and got into the shower. Inside it she felt all her tension washing away with the soap, pooling at her feet, then escaping for all eternity down the drain.

Nothing to get worked up about, she reminded herself, deep down. All of our bodies must conform to the world. There is no other way.

‘We’re nearing the finish line,’ she said aloud, standing still under the stream of warm water. And because somehow she couldn’t help but think in images – which, she thought, had almost certainly been a hindrance to her academic career – she saw something like an ancient Greek gymnasium with its characteristic starting block raised on cables, and its runners, her husband and herself, trotting awkwardly towards the finish line, although they’d only just taken off.

She wrapped a fluffy towel around herself and applied moisturizer, thoroughly, to her face, neck and chest. The familiar scent of the cream soothed her fully now, so she lay down for a moment on the made bed beside her husband, and fell asleep without realizing.