Flights

GODZONE

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.

‘Ten,’ the taxi driver says.

She pays him.

In that local airport, she shows her ticket at the counter and takes her luggage up to customs. She’s left with just her backpack, and she heads straight for her plane; sleepy people are already being loaded onto it, with children, with dogs, with plastic bags brimming over with provisions.

As the little plane that will transport her to the main airport becomes aloft she sees a view so beautiful that for a moment she is overwhelmed by a kind of elation. ‘Elation’, a funny, lofty word, originally meaning ‘to be raised up’, and now here she is literally being lifted up into the clouds. These islands, the sandy beaches are as much a part of her as her own hands and feet; the sea that winds up into foaming coils at the shores, scraps of ships and boats, the gentle, undulating shoreline, the green insides of the islands all belong to her. Godzone, that’s what the island’s inhabitants call it. It’s where God came to settle down, bringing with him all the beauty in the world. Now he gives that beauty out, for free, to everybody on the island, requesting nothing in return.

At the big airport she goes to the toilet to wash her face. She watches the edgy little line to use the free computer for a while. Travellers pause here for a moment to let people near and far know they are here. It occurred to her that even she might go up to one of those screens, type in the name of her server, and then her address, and check who might have written to her, too – but she knows what she will find: nothing of note. Something about the project she’s working on now, jokes from a friend in Australia, perhaps a rare email from one of her kids. The sender of the messages that had given rise to this expedition had been silent for some time.

She’s surprised by all the safety rites; she hasn’t flown for quite a while. They scan both her and her backpack. They confiscate her nail clippers, and she laments the loss, because she’d liked them, and had been using them for years. The airport officials attempt to evaluate, with their expert gaze, who among the passengers might be armed with an explosive, gazing particularly at those with darker skin and at the girls wearing headscarves, who are chipper and twittering. It would seem that the world where she is heading, standing right on the border of it now, just behind the yellow line, is governed by a different set of rules, and that its grim and angry rumbles reach all the way here.

After passport control she makes incidental purchases at the duty-free shop. She finds her gate – nine – and sits down facing it and tries to read.

The plane takes off painlessly, on time; so once more the miracle has happened, of a machine as big as a building slipping gracefully out of Earth’s grasp, soaring gently up and up.

After the plastic airplane food everyone begins to get ready for bed. Just a few with headphones over their ears are watching a movie about the fantastic voyage of several brave scientists reduced in some sort of ‘accelerator’ to the size of bacteria, now headed into a patient’s body. She watches the screen without headphones, loves the spectacular photography – settings that resemble the bottom of the ocean, the crimson corridors of blood vessels, the pulse of constricting arteries, and inside these the bellicose lymphocytes like visitors from outer space, and the gentle, concave blood cells, innocent little sheep. A flight attendant passes discreetly down the aisle with water, a single slice of lemon for the whole jug. She drinks a cup.

When it rained it flooded the park paths, washing them out and collecting the fine light sand; you could write on them with the end of a stick – these undulating bands cried out for inscription. You could draw squares on them for hopscotch and princesses in hoop skirts with tiny waists, and then a few years later riddles and confessions and the romantic algebra of all those M + B = GL, which meant that a Marek or a Maciek loved a Basia or a Bożena, while GL stood for ‘Great Love’. This always happens when she flies: she gets a bird’s eye view of her whole life, of particular moments that you’d think on the ground had been completely forgotten. The banal mechanism of the flashback, mechanical reminiscence.

When she first got the email, she couldn’t figure out who it could be from, who was hiding behind that name and how come they addressed her so informally. This amnesia lasted several seconds – she ought to be ashamed. On the surface, as she later realized, it was just a Christmas greeting. It arrived in the middle of December, as the season’s first heat waves were just rolling in. But it clearly went beyond the ordinary phrases people say at the holidays. It struck her as a kind of crying out on the other side of a speaking tube, far-off, muffled, indistinct. She didn’t understand all of it, and some sentences unsettled her, like the one about how ‘life seems like a disgusting habit we lost control over a long time ago’. ‘Did you ever give up smoking?’ he’d added. Yes, she’d given it up. And it had been hard.

For a good couple of days she mulled over that strange letter from a person she’d known more than thirty years ago, and whom she hadn’t seen once since then, whom she had completely forgotten by now, but whom she had, after all, once loved, for two intense years in her youth. She responded politely, in a totally different tone, and from that point forward she got letters back from him on a daily basis.

These emails took away her peace of mind. They evidently awoke that dormant section of her brain where those years had been stored, parcelled up into images, scraps of dialogues, shreds of smells. Now, on a daily basis, when she drove to work, as soon as she turned on the engine these tapes came on, too, these recordings filmed with whatever camera had been at hand, with faded colours or even black and white, generic scenes, moments, with no logic to them, scattered, out of order, and she had no idea what to do with them. That for instance they walk outside the city limits – the limits of the little town, more like – into the hills, to where the high voltage line runs, and from then on their words are accompanied ceaselessly by a buzzing, like a chord to underscore the significance of this walk, a low monotone, a tension that neither increases nor decreases. They hold hands; this is the era of first kisses, which couldn’t possibly be called anything other than strange.

Their secondary school was a chilly old building where on two floors classrooms multiplied inside the broad hallways. They all looked more or less the same – three rows of benches, and opposite these, the teacher’s desk. Boards covered in dark green rubber that could be moved up and down. One of the kids would be put in charge of moistening the sponge before each class. On the walls hung black and white portraits of men – it was only in the physics department that you could find the single female face in the whole school, Madame Maria Skłodowska-Curie’s, the sole indication of the equality of the sexes. These rows of faces hanging over the students’ heads were no doubt supposed to remind them that by some miracle the school remained within that great family of knowledge and learning, that in spite of its provincialism it was heir to the finest tradition, and it belonged to a world in which everything could be described, explained, proved, demonstrated by examples.

In her first year there she began to be interested in biology. She’d found an article – maybe her dad had given it to her – on mitochondria. It said that most likely in the remotest past, in the primeval ocean, mitochondria were creatures in their own right before they were intercepted by other single-cell organisms and forced, for the remainder of history, into labouring on behalf of their hosts. Evolution had sanctioned this slavery – and that was how we’d turned out the way we had. That was how it had been described, in those terms: ‘seized’, ‘forced’, ‘slavery’. In truth, she had never been able to come to terms with this. With the hypothesis that in the beginning there’d been violence.

So she’d already known at school that she wanted to become a biologist, which was why she had studied biology and chemistry with such zeal. In Russian she’d written notes filled with gossip that had been dutifully passed by her classmates beneath the benches to her best friends. In Polish she’d been bored to death, until in year six she had fallen in love with a kid her same age but with a different home room, a kid who had the same name as the author of these emails, and whose face she strove so hard now to call forth. He must have been the reason she’d learned so little about positivism and Young Poland.

Her daily commute is a pendular voyage along an elegantly curved arc, eight kilometres of coast, there and back, from home to work and vice versa. The sea is ever-present in this journey, and one could say without hesitation that hers is a maritime voyage.

At work, she’d stop thinking about his emails. She was herself again, and anyway there was no place for hazy recollections here. As soon as she’d pulled out of the driveway at home and merged onto the highway she was always kind of excited at all the things that awaited her in the lab and in her office. And then the familiar solidity of that low, glassy building would readjust her consciousness, and her brain began to work more efficiently, as focused as a well-oiled engine, reliable, the kind that always gets you to your destination.

She was taking part in a massive programme aimed at eliminating pests like weasels and opossums, which – imprudently introduced into the region by humans – now wreaked havoc among the endemic bird species, feeding mostly off their eggs.

She worked on a team that tested poisons on these small animals. The poison was injected into the eggs, which were then distributed as bait in special wooden cages throughout forests and in the bush; it had to be fast, humane, and also highly biodegradable, so that the fallen animals didn’t poison insect populations, as well. A crystal clear poison, completely safe for the world, aimed only at the pest, at one chosen organism type, self-neutralizing after completing its mission. The James Bond of ecology.

This was what she did. She created just this sort of substance, had been working on it for seven whole years.

Somehow he knew. He must have found it on the internet – everything’s on there somewhere. If you’re not on the internet, it’s almost as though you don’t exist at all. You have to have at least one little mention, even if it’s just in a list of school alumni. And it would have been easy for him to track her down since she never changed her name. So he must have just put her name into Google, and up came several pages: her articles, the courses she taught, and her environmental activism. At first she thought that that was what interested him. And so she innocently let herself be pulled into the exchange.

It is hard to sleep on this great, transcontinental airplane. Her ankles swell, and her feet go numb. She dozes off in short spurts, which disorients her even further in terms of time. Can the night really be so long? wonders the lost human body estranged from Earth, from its place, where the sun rises and sets, and the pineal gland, that hidden third eye, conscientiously registers its movement in the sky. Finally it starts to get light out, and the plane’s engines change their tone. From the tenor to which the ear had grown accustomed to lower registers, baritones and basses; finally, faster than she’d expected, the great machine makes its landing, deft and smooth. On the jet bridge as she heads into the airport she can feel how hot the air is here, squeezing in through the cracks, sticky, damp – the lungs rear up, trying to take it in. But fortunately she won’t have to deal with it. Her next flight leaves in almost six hours, and she plans to spend that time here in the airport, napping and nodding off, trying to get her bearings in time. Another twelve-hour flight awaits her next.

She thought often of the man who had unexpectedly sent her that email. And then more emails, so forming a correspondence brimming with hints and surmises. Such things aren’t written out, but to those with whom you once had an intimate physical relationship a certain kind of loyalty remains in effect, in the end – so she understood. Was that why he had come to her? It was obvious. Losing your virginity is a singular and irreversible event that can never be done over; by virtue of this it somehow becomes momentous, whether you want it to be or not, regardless of whatever ideology. She remembers exactly what it was like: the brief, piercing pain, an incision, a scarification – how astonishing that it had been effected by such a mild, blunt instrument.

She also recalls the beige-grey buildings around the university, the gloomy pharmacy that always kept the light on, in any weather, in all seasons, and the old brown jars with their contents painstakingly spelled out on the label. The little yellow packages of pills for headaches, six in each, held together with a rubber band. She recalls the pleasant ovoid shape of those telephones, moulded out of hard rubber, most often black or mahogany – they didn’t even have a rotary dial, just a little crank, and their sound was like a little tornado wound up deep within the cable tunnels in order to bring about the voice desired.

She’s surprised she can see it all so clearly – for the first time in her life. She must be starting to get old, because it seems like it’s in old age that you begin to hear from those little nooks in the brain that have the records of everything that ever happened. She’d never had time before to really think about those types of things, from days gone by; the past was like a smudged streak. Now the movie slows and reveals details – capacious is the human brain. Hers had preserved even her little brown purse, pre-war, which had originally belonged to her mother, with soft sides made out of rubber-lined material, with a beautiful metal clasp that looked like a jewel. On the inside it was smooth and cool to the touch; when you reached inside it seemed like a dead offshoot of time had got stuck there.

The next plane, the one to Europe, is even larger, with different stories. It flies well-rested, suntanned tourists. They try to stuff their eccentric souvenirs into the overhead bins – a high drum covered in an ethnic pattern, a straw hat, a wooden Buddha. She sits crammed in between two women, in the very centre of the row, in a very uncomfortable place. She rests her head back on her seat, but she knows she won’t be able to sleep.

They came to do their studies from the same small town, he specializing in philosophy, she biology. They met up every day after classes, both a little frightened of the big city, a little lost. Sometimes they’d smuggle one another into their different dorms; once – now she remembers – he even climbed up to the second floor of hers along the drainpipe. She remembers her room number, too: 321. But university and the city only lasted for a year. She managed to get through end of year exams, and then they left. Her father sold his clinic for a song, lock, stock, and barrel: that dentist’s chair, the metal and glass cabinets, the autoclaves and instruments. By the by, now she wonders, where did all of that end up? In the rubbish heap? Was the off-white paint still peeling off it? Her mother sold the furniture. There was no sadness, no despair – just an unease about getting rid of everything, because after all it meant starting over. They’d both been younger than she was now (though then they’d seemed absolutely elderly to her), and they’d been ready to embark on a new adventure, anywhere’d be fine: Sweden, Australia, maybe Madagascar – anywhere, just as far as they could get away from their rotten, claustrophobic northern life in that absurd, unfriendly communist country of the late sixties. Her father said it was not a country suited to human beings, though then he spent the rest of his life pining away for it. And she wanted to go, she really wanted it, like any nineteen-year-old – wanted to set out into the world.

It was not a country suited to human beings, but rather to small mammals, to insects, moths. She’s asleep. The plane is suspended in this clear, frosty air that kills bacteria. Every flight disinfects us. Every night cleanses us completely. She sees a print, though she doesn’t know its title – she remembers it from her childhood: a young woman touches the eyelids of an old man kneeling before her. It’s a print from her father’s study, and she knows where the book was kept, on the bottom right shelf, with the other art books. Now she could shut her eyes and enter that room with the bay windows where you could stand and see the garden. To the right, at eye level, there was the black hard rubber outlet with the little cylinder you had to take between your index finger and your thumb and dial around. It would always put up some resistance before it gave way. The light came on in the chandelier with the five glass shades like calyces, which in turn formed a kind of circling wheel. But that light from the ceiling was faint, and too high up, and she didn’t like it. She preferred to turn on the floor lamp with the yellow shade, which had – although who knew how – blades of grass inside it, and she’d sit beside it in that tattered old chair. As a child she thought that boboks lived inside it, those horrible, not-quite-defined creatures. The book she would now open over her lap was – she remembers – a book of Malczewski. She opens it to the page where the pretty young woman with a scythe is calmly and lovingly shutting the eyes of the old man who kneels before her.

Her terrace looks out over vast meadows, and past these the azure waters of the bay; the rising tide plays with colours, mixes them, varnishes the waves with a silver sheen. She always goes out onto the terrace in the evenings after dinner – a hangover from when she used to smoke. She stands there and watches people engaged in all manner of pleasure and delight. If you painted it, it would look like a joyful, sunny, and perhaps slightly childish Brueghel. A southern Brueghel. People flew kites – one was in the shape of a big, bright fish, whose long, slender fins floated in the air with the grace of a veiltail. Another was a panda bear, an enormous oval that rose high above the people’s tiny little figures. Another is a white sail that pulls its owner’s short cart along the ground. Think of all the uses you can get out of a kite! Think how helpful the wind is. How good.

People play with dogs, throwing them colourful little balls. The dogs retrieve them with boundless enthusiasm. Itsy-bitsy figures run and ride bikes and rollerskate and play volleyball and badminton and practise yoga. Along the nearby highway glide cars with trailers, and on them boats, catamarans, bicycles, mobile homes. There is a light breeze, the sun is shining, little birds scuffle over some forgotten crumbs beneath a tree.

This is how she understands it: life on this planet gets developed by some powerful force contained in every atom of organic matter. It’s a force there is no physical evidence of, for the time being – you can’t catch it on even the most precise microscopic images, nor in photographs of the atomic spectrum. It’s a thing that consists in bursting open, thrusting forward, in constantly going beyond what it is. That is the engine that drives changes, a blind and powerful energy. To ascribe goals or intentions to it is to misunderstand. Darwin read this energy as well as he could, but he still read it wrong. Competition shmompetition. The more experienced a biologist you become, the longer and harder you look at the complex structures and connections in the biosystem, the stronger your hunch that all animate things cooperate in this growth and bursting, supporting one another. Living organisms give themselves to one another, permit one another to make use of them. If rivalry exists, it is a localized phenomenon, an upsetting of the balance. It is true that tree branches jostle one another out of the way to reach the light, their roots collide in the race to a water source, animals eat each other, but there is in all this a kind of accord, it’s just an accord that men find frightening. It might appear that we are actors in a great bodily theatre, as though those wars we wage were merely civil wars. This – what other word to use? – lives, has a million traits and qualities, so that everything is contained within it, and there is nothing that might lie outside of it, all death is part of life, and in some sense there is no death. There are no errors. There are no guilty parties and no innocents, either, no merits, no sins, no good or evil; whoever thought up those notions led humankind astray.

She went back into the bedroom and read his letter, which had just arrived, announced by an electronic ping, and suddenly she recalls all the despair this person, this letter-writer had provoked in her, long, long ago. Despair at leaving while he stayed. He came to the train station back then, but she doesn’t remember him standing on the platform, although she knows she’d carefully preserved that image once – but all she can remember now is the movement of the train and the flashes of a wintry Warsaw as they slipped faster and faster away, and the words ‘never again’, and the conviction they had triggered. Now it sounds so sentimental, and to tell the truth, she can’t understand that pain. It was a good pain, like menstrual pain. A thing reaches completion, an internal process is finalized, eliminating all that is unnecessary. That’s why it hurts, but it’s just the pain of purging.

For some time they wrote letters to one another; his letters came in light blue envelopes with stamps the colour of whole-wheat bread. Their plan, of course, was for him to someday make it to where she was. But, of course, he never made it; how could she ever have believed he would? There were reasons, all of which seem vague now, and even incomprehensible – no passport, politics, the abyss of the winters, which you could get stuck in as though you’d fallen into a crevasse and couldn’t move again.

Just before she’d come here she’d suddenly been battered by waves of a strange nostalgia. Strange because it had to do with things that were too trivial to really be missed: the water that collects in puddles in the holes in the pavements, the shades of neon left in that water by stray drops of petrol; the heavy, creaky old doors to the dark stairwells. She also missed the glazed earthenware plates with the brown band with the Społem co-op logo on it that they used at the cafeteria to serve lazy pierogi with melted butter and sugar sprinkled on top. But then with time that nostalgia had seeped into the new land like spilled milk, not leaving any trace. She graduated, and she got a fellowship. She travelled around the world, and she got married to the man she’s still with now. They had twins, who will soon have their own children. So it would appear that memory is a drawer stuffed with papers – some of them are totally useless, those one-time documents like dry cleaning tickets and the proofs of purchase of winter boots or a toaster long since gone. But then there are other reusable ones, testaments not to events but to whole processes: a child’s vaccination booklet, her student ID like a tiny passport, its pages half-filled with stamps from each term, her school diploma, a certificate of completion from a dressmaking course.

In the next letter she got from him, he wrote that although he was in the hospital now, they’d said they’d let him out for Christmas, and he wouldn’t go back after that. They’d already done everything they could, scanned everything they could, diagnosed it all. So now he’d be at home, and he lived outside of Warsaw, in the country, and there was snow, and severe cold all over Europe, with people even freezing to death. He also gave her the name of his illness, but in Polish, so she had no idea what it was, because she just didn’t know the Polish name for it. ‘Do you remember our promise?’ he wrote. ‘Do you remember that last night before you left? We were sitting in the park, on the grass, it was very hot, it was June, we’d already aced all our exams, and the city, after being heated all day long, now gave off a warmth mixed with the scent of concrete, like it was sweating. Do you remember? You’d brought a bottle of vodka, but we couldn’t finish it. We promised we would see each other. That no matter what happened, we would meet again. And there was one other thing. Do you remember?’

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.

‘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.

‘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.

‘So how’s it going?’ she says.

‘OK,’ he says.

He is lying: it is not going okay.

‘Stick that patch on me,’ he says, and he glances over at a flat box lying on his bedside table. ‘I’m in pain. We have to wait until it starts to work. I wasn’t sure when you’d get here, and I wanted to be conscious when you came. I might not have recognized you otherwise. I might think that maybe it wasn’t you. You’re so young and beautiful.’

She strokes the hollow at his temple. The patch adheres like a second skin, a mercy skin, just above where his kidneys are. She is shaken by the sight of a section of his body, so battered and beleaguered. She bites her lip.

‘Will I feel it somehow?’ he asks, but she assures him he didn’t need to worry about that.

‘Tell me what you’d like. Would you like to be alone for a minute?’

He shakes his head. His forehead is dry as parchment paper.

‘I don’t want to do confession,’ he says. ‘Just hold my face in your hands.’ He smiles weakly; there is mischief in his smile.

She does it without hesitation. She feels his thin skin and delicate bones, the cavities of his eyeballs. She feels him pulsing underneath her fingers, trembling, as though tense. The skull, that delicate latticework structure of bone, perfectly solid and strong yet fragile at the same time. Her throat tightens, and it is the first and last time she is close to tears. She knows this contact brings him relief; she can feel it soothing the tremor beneath his skin. Finally she removes her hands, but he stays still, with his eyes closed. Slowly she leans in over him and kisses his forehead.

‘I was a good person,’ he whispers, digging into her now with his eyes.

She assents.

‘Tell me a story about something,’ he says.

Stumped, she clears her throat.

He prompts her: ‘Tell me what it’s like where you are.’

So she starts:

‘It’s the middle of summer, the lemons on the trees are ripe now…’

He interrupts: ‘Can you see the ocean from your window?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘When the tide goes out, the water leaves seashells in its wake.’

But this is a ruse: he hadn’t planned to listen, and for a moment his gaze clouds over, but then its former sharpness is restored. Then he looks out at her from very far away, and then she knows that he is no longer a part of the world where she is. She could not have identified exactly what it was she saw in him – whether fear and panic or precisely the opposite: relief. Faintly he conveys – clumsily, and in a whisper – his gratitude, or something like it, and then he goes to sleep. Then she takes the vial from her purse and fills the syringe up with its contents. She removes the drip from the IV and slowly injects all the droplets of the liquid she has brought. Nothing happens aside from the fact that his breathing stops, suddenly, naturally, as though the movement of his rib cage from before had been an odd anomaly. She runs her hand over his face, reinserts the drip into his IV, and smoothes out the place on the sheets where she’d been sitting. Then she leaves.

His sister is standing on the porch again, smoking.

‘Cigarette?’ she says.

This time she says no.

‘Do you think you’ll be able to visit him again?’ asks the woman. ‘It’s been so important to him that you come.’

‘I’m leaving today,’ she says, and as she goes down the stairs, she adds, ‘You take care of yourself.’

When the plane takes off it switches off her mind. She does not give it a further thought. All those memories now disappear. She spends two days in Amsterdam, which at this time of year is windy and cold and could essentially be reduced to combinations of three colours: white, grey, and black, wandering around museums and spending the evenings at her hotel. As she walks along the main street, she comes upon an anatomy exhibit, with human specimens. Intrigued, she goes inside and spends two hours there, taking in the human body in all its possible permutations, perfectly preserved using the latest techniques. But since she’s in a strange state of mind and very tired, she sees it through a kind of fog, inattentively, just the outlines. She sees nerve endings and the vas deferens that look like exotic plants that had escaped the control of their gardener, bulbs, orchids, lace, embroidery of tissues, meshwork of neuration, slate shards, stamens, antennae and whiskers, racemes, streams, folds, waves, dunes, craters, elevations, mountains, valleys, plateaus, winding blood vessels…

In the air, over the ocean, she finds the coloured leaflet for the exhibit in her purse, featuring a human body, without skin, posed like in the sculpture by Rodin: head resting on hand resting on arm resting on knee, body troubled, almost thinking, and although it’s missing its skin and its face (the face turns out to be one of the most superficial characteristics of the whole human form), you can still see that the eyes are oblique, exotic. Then, half asleep, submerged in the dark, discreet rumble of the plane’s engines, she imagines that soon enough, when the technology becomes more affordable, plastination will be available to all. You’ll be able to put up the bodies of your loved ones instead of putting up tombstones, with labels like, ‘So-and-so travelled in this very body for a few years. Then he left it at such-and-such an age.’ As the plane prepares for its descent, she is suddenly seized by fear and panic. And she grips the armrests, hard.

When finally, exhausted, she gets back to her own country, back onto that beautiful island, the customs officer asks her several routine questions: had she come into contact with any animals where she’d been, had she been in rural areas, might she have been exposed to biological contaminants.

She pictures herself on that porch, shaking the snow off her boots, pictures that overfed dog running up the stairs and rubbing up against her legs. And she pictures her hands as they opened the vial that looked like a perfume sample. So she says, peacefully, yes.

The customs official requests that she step aside. And there her heavy winter boots are washed down with a disinfecting agent.