Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

“Perhaps he’s still alive,” said Dizzy mournfully. I prayed that he was not.

I had always cared about Dizzy very much, and I didn’t want him to take me for a lunatic. Not him.

I knew very well what I was saying. I decided to check the facts as soon as I had the chance.

There stood my Momma, in a flowery summer frock, with a handbag slung over her shoulder. She was anxious and confused.

I was angry with her, for she had died a long time ago, and that’s not how long-gone mothers should behave.

But she wasn’t listening to me; perhaps she couldn’t even hear me. Her gaze refused to stop on me.

Perhaps before next winter I would have to move back to my little apartment on Więzienna Street in Wrocław, right by the university, from where one can watch the River Oder for hours on end as it hypnotically, insistently pumps its waters northward.

I have a Theory. It’s that an awful thing has happened—our cerebellum has not been correctly connected to our brain. This could be the worst mistake in our programming. Someone has made us badly.

We have this body of ours, a troublesome piece of luggage, we don’t really know anything about it and we need all sorts of Tools to find out about its most natural processes.

Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There’s no instruction manual.

Luckily my sleep cycle was changing again; I’d nod off at dawn and wake in the afternoon, which may have been a natural defense against the daylight, against the day in general and everything that belonged to it.

And perhaps, if he were still alive, seeing all this, Blake would say that there are some places in the Universe where the Fall has not occurred, the world has not turned upside down and Eden still exists.

Here Mankind is not governed by the rules of reason, stupid and strict, but by the heart and intuition. The people do not indulge in idle chatter, parading what they know, but create remarkable things by applying their imagination. The state ceases to impose the shackles of daily oppression, but helps people to realize their hopes and dreams. And Man is not just a cog in the system, not just playing a role, but a free Creature.

Sometimes I think that only the sick are truly healthy.

There are more than enough traits and Characteristics in this world for each of us to be richly endowed,

“I thought the Police were capable of more astute discoveries than that. The fact that he’d choked was obvious at first glance . . .”

“Nothing’s obvious at first glance,” he snapped with uncharacteristic vigor, causing the remark to stick in my mind.

“How?” “How, how. I don’t know exactly.

“Try to keep your theory to yourself. It’s highly improbable and it could do you harm,”

It occurred to me that like everyone else, he took me for a madwoman, and it hurt my feelings.

That’s what I dislike most of all in people—cold irony. It’s a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything.

Like an impotent man who can’t experience pleasure himself, but will do all he can to ruin it for others.

His need to speak ill of his neighbors was so great that there was no need to draw him out.

You’ll say power goes to the head in a nasty way, and you’ll be right. A man loses all sense of decency.

The Postman sighed heavily, and suddenly I felt sorry for him, for once upon a time he must have been one of the innocent too, but now his heart was flooded with bile. His life must be hard indeed. And it must have been all the bitterness that was making him so angry.

“God made Man Happy and Rich, but cunning made the innocent poor,” I quoted Blake, more or less. Anyway, that’s what I think. Except that I place the word “God” in quotation marks.

I travel’d through a Land of Men, A land of Men & Women too, And heard & saw such dreadful things As cold Earth wanderers never knew.

Over Human Lands I wandered, Lands of Men and also Women, Seeing, hearing Things so fearful, Such as no mind ever summoned. Or: Through the World of Man I journeyed, Realms of Men as well as Women, Hearing, seeing sights so awful, No pure soul would ever dream on. Or: Throughout the World of Men I wandered, Crossing Realms of Men and Women, What I saw and heard was ghastly, Such as None would ever dream on.

As I wandered human countries, Men’s and women’s shared domain, Dreadful things did I encounter, Horrors none on Earth had seen.

I simply did my best to ward off my thoughts on the matter—are there so few deaths around that one should take an obsessive interest in this one?

It could in fact be true that the correlations exist outside us, but that we pick them up quite unconsciously.

Coincidences of this kind are astonishing. I have enough empirical material to write an entire book about it. But for the time being I made do with a short essay, which I sent to several weeklies. I don’t think anyone will publish it, but perhaps someone will Reflect on it.

How many times can one look at a dead body? Is there no end to it? I felt a stab of pain in my lungs and found it hard to breathe. I sat down on the snow, and once again my eyes began to stream with tears.

Must I be a witness to every Crime?

Sorrow, I felt great sorrow, an endless sense of mourning for every dead Animal. One period of grief is followed by another, so I am in constant mourning. This is my natural state.

“You have more compassion for animals than for people.” “That’s not true. I feel just as sorry for both. But nobody shoots at defenseless people,” I told the City Guard that same evening. “At least not these days,” I added.

“Its Animals show the truth about a country,” I said. “Its attitude toward Animals. If people behave brutally toward Animals, no form of democracy is ever going to help them, in fact nothing will at all.”

I was chilled to the bone.

“No, it’s the killer who was rabid,” I cried, because I know that argument well; the Slaughter of Animals is often justified by the fact that they may have been rabid.

“What do you expect us to do?” “Set the wheels in motion. Punish the culprits. Change the law.”

“Sometimes dogs from the village kill animals. You have dogs too, and I remember that last year there were complaints about you . . .” I froze. The blow was very painful. “I don’t have my Dogs anymore.”

I tried to slow down my thoughts, but they must have broken the speed limit by now, and were racing in my head, somehow managing to pervade my body and my bloodstream as well.

‘Keep away from the pulpits, they won’t preach the gospel to you from there, you won’t hear any good news over there, they won’t promise you salvation after death, they won’t take pity on your poor souls, for they say you haven’t got souls. They don’t see their brethren in you, they won’t give you their blessing. The nastiest criminal has a soul, but not you, beautiful Deer, nor you, Boar, nor you, wild Goose, nor you, Pig, nor you, Dog.’

“In fact Man has a great responsibility toward wild Animals—to help them to live their lives, and it’s his duty toward domesticated Animals to return their love and affection, for they give us far more than they receive from us.

Obviously, the first Horoscope a Person ever calculates is their own, and so it was in my case too. And then a structure emerged, supported by a circle. I examined it in astonishment—is that me? Here before me lay the blueprint for the person I am, my actual self in a basic written record, at once the simplest and the most complicated possible.

I think we all feel great ambivalence at the sight of our own Horoscope. On the one hand we’re proud to see that the sky is imprinted on our individual life, like a postmark with a date stamped on a letter—this makes it distinct, one of a kind. But at the same time it’s a form of imprisonment in space, like a tattooed prison number. There’s no escaping it. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful.

We’d prefer to think we’re free, able to reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. This connection with something as great and monumental as the sky makes us feel uncomfortable. We’d rather be small, and then our petty little sins would be forgivable.

Therefore I’m convinced that we should get to know our...

My talent for algebra was useful to me for Horoscopes in the days when one had to do all one’s calculations on a slide rule.

It gave me a lot of pleasure. Children have always attracted me more than adults, for I too am a little infantile. There’s nothing wrong with that. The main thing is, I’m aware of it. Children are soft and supple, open-minded and unpretentious. And they don’t engage in the sort of small talk in which every adult is able to gabble their life away. Unfortunately, the older they are, the more they succumb to the power of reason; they become citizens of Ulro, as Blake would have put it, and refuse to be led down the right path as easily and naturally anymore. That’s why I only liked the smaller children. The older ones, over the age of ten, say, were even more loathsome than adults. At that age the children lost their individuality. I could see them ossifying as they inevitably entered adolescence, which gradually forced them to be hooked on being the same as others.