Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

Olga Tokarczuk, Antonia Lloyd-Jones

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781913097257
• eBook ISBN: 9781910695562
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

With  Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Man Booker International Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk returns with a subversive, entertaining noir novel. In a remote Polish village, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. She is reclusive, preferring the company of animals to people; she's unconventional, believing in the stars; and she is fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the title of the book is taken. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, Duszejko becomes involved in the investigation. By no means a conventional crime story, this existential thriller by 'one of Europe's major humanist writers' ( Guardian) offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustice against marginalized people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in predestination – and caused a genuine political uproar in Tokarczuk's native Poland.

XV. SAINT HUBERT

The Bleat the Bark Bellow & Roar
Are Waves that Beat on Heavens Shore.

My Venus is damaged, or in exile, that’s what you say of a Planet that can’t be found in the sign where it should be. What’s more, Pluto is in a negative aspect to Venus, and in my case Pluto rules the Ascendant. The result of this situation is that I have, as I see it, Lazy Venus syndrome. That’s what I call this Conformity. In this case we’re dealing with a Person whom fortune has gifted generously, but who has entirely failed to use their potential. Such People are bright and intelligent, but don’t apply themselves to their studies, and use their intelligence to play card games or patience instead. They have beautiful bodies, but they destroy them through neglect, poison themselves with harmful substances, and ignore doctors and dentists.

This Venus induces a strange kind of laziness – lifetime opportunities are missed, because you overslept, because you didn’t feel like going, because you were late, because you were neglectful. It’s a tendency to be sybaritic, to live in a state of mild semi-consciousness, to fritter your life away on petty pleasures, to dislike effort and be devoid of any penchant for competition. Long mornings, unopened letters, things put off for later, abandoned projects. A dislike of any authority and a refusal to submit to it, going your own way in a taciturn, idle manner. You could say such people are of no use at all.

Perhaps if I had made an effort, I would have gone back to school in September, but I couldn’t summon the strength to pull myself together. I was sorry the children had lost a whole month’s teaching. But what could I do? I was aching all over.

I couldn’t return to work until October. By then I felt so much better that I organized an English club twice a week, and helped my pupils to make up for the lost lessons. But it was impossible to work normally. In October children started being excused from my lessons because preparations were at full steam for the opening and consecration of a newly built chapel. It was to be consecrated to Hubert on his saint’s day, 3 November. I refused to let the children go. I’d rather they learned a few more English words than the lives of the saints by heart. But the young headmistress intervened.

‘You’re exaggerating. There are certain priorities,’ she said, sounding as if she didn’t believe in what she was saying.

To my mind, the word ‘priority’ is just as ugly as ‘cadaver’ or ‘cohabitee’, but I really didn’t want to quarrel with her, either about excusing the children or about words.

‘Naturally you’ll be at the consecration of the chapel, won’t you?’ she said.

‘I’m not a Catholic.’

‘It doesn’t matter. We’re all Catholics by culture, whether we like it or not. So please come.’

I wasn’t prepared for this particular argument, so I said nothing. The children and I made up for the missing lessons at the afternoon club.

Dizzy was interrogated twice more, and finally was given notice to quit his job by mutual agreement. He was only going to work until the end of the year. He was given some vague justification, staff reductions, cutbacks, the usual excuses. People like Dizzy are always the first to be eliminated. But I think it had something to do with his statements. Was he a suspect? Dizzy wasn’t bothered about it. He had already decided to become a translator. He planned to live off translating Blake’s poetry. How wonderful – to translate from one language to another, and by so doing to bring people closer to one another – what a beautiful idea.

He was also conducting his own enquiry, and no wonder – everyone was anxiously waiting for the Police to make new discoveries, revelations that would put an end to this string of deaths once and for all. For this purpose he even went to see Mrs Innerd and the President’s wife, and tracked the murder victims’ movements as much as he could.

We knew that all three had died from a heavy blow to the head, but it wasn’t clear what sort of Tool could have inflicted it. We speculated that it may just have been a piece of wood, a thick branch perhaps, but that would have left specific evidence on the skin. Instead it looked as if a large object with a hard, smooth surface had been used. On top of that, the Police had found trace amounts of Animal blood at the point of impact, probably from a Deer.

‘I was right,’ I insisted once again. ‘It’s the Deer, you see?’

Dizzy was tending towards a Hypothesis that the murders must be to do with settling scores. It was a known fact that the Commandant was on his way back from Innerd’s house that evening, and that Innerd had given him a bribe.

‘Maybe Innerd caught up with him and tried to take back the money, so they tussled, the Commandant fell, then Innerd took fright and dropped the idea of looking for the cash,’ said Dizzy pensively.

‘But who murdered Innerd?’ asked Oddball philosophically.

To tell the truth, I liked the concept of evil people who eliminate each other, in a chain.

‘Hmm, maybe it was the President?’ fantasized Oddball again.

It looked as if the Commandant had been covering up Innerd’s crimes. But whether the President had anything to do with it, we had no idea. If the President killed Innerd, then who killed the President? The motive of revenge on all three of them was a possibility, and in this case too it was probably to do with business dealings. Could the gossip about the mafia be true? Did the Police have any proof of it? It was highly possible that other policemen were mixed up in these sinister practices too, and that was why the enquiry was making such slow progress.

I had stopped talking about my own Theory. Indeed, I’d just been exposing myself to ridicule. The Grey Lady was right – people are only capable of understanding what they invent for themselves and feed on. The idea of a conspiracy among people from the provincial authorities, corrupt and demoralized, fitted the sort of story the television and the newspapers revelled in reporting. Neither the newspapers nor the television are interested in Animals, unless a Tiger escapes from the zoo.

♦

The winter starts straight after All Saints’ Day. That’s the way here; the autumn takes away all her Tools and toys, shakes off the leaves – they won’t be needed any more – sweeps them under the field boundary, and strips the colours from the grass until it goes dull and grey. Then everything becomes black against white: snow falls on the ploughed fields.

‘Drive your plow over the bones of the dead,’ I said to myself in the words of Blake; is that how it went?

I stood in the window and watched nature’s high-speed housework until dusk fell, and from then on the march of winter proceeded in darkness. Next morning I fetched out my down jacket, the red one from Good News’ shop, and my woollen hats.

The Samurai’s windows were coated in hoar frost, still young, very fine and delicate, like a cosmic mycelium. Two days after All Saints’ I drove to town, with the aim of visiting Good News and buying some snow boots. From now on one had to be prepared for the worst. The sky hung low, as usual at this time of year. Not all the votive candles at the cemeteries had burned out yet, and through the wire fence I could see the coloured lights flickering in the daytime, as if with these feeble little flames people were trying to assist the Sun as it weakened in Scorpio. Pluto had taken control of the World. It made me feel sad. Yesterday I had written emails to my gracious employers to say that this year I would no longer be taking on the task of caring for their houses in winter.

I was on my way before I remembered that today was 3 November, and that there would be celebrations in town for Saint Hubert’s Day.

Whenever some dubious rip-off is organized, they always drag children into it from the very start. I remember them doing the same thing to us for the communist-era 1 May parade. Long, long ago. Now the children were obliged to take part in the Kłodzko County Children and Young Adults’ Creative Arts Contest, on the theme: ‘Saint Hubert as the model modern ecologist’, and then in a show about the life and death of the saint. I had written a letter on this matter to the education board in October, but I hadn’t had an answer. I regarded this – like so many things – as scandalous.

There were lots of cars parked along the road, which reminded me about the mass, and I decided to go into the church to see the result of the lengthy autumn preparations that had caused so much harm to my English lessons. I glanced at my watch, and realized the mass had already started.

I happen to have occasionally entered a church and sat there in peace a while with the people. I’ve always liked the fact that people can be together in there, without having to talk to one another. If they could chat, they’d instantly start telling each other nonsense, or gossip, they’d start making things up and showing off. But here they sit in the pews, each one deep in thought, mentally reviewing what has happened lately and imagining what’s going to happen soon. Like this, they monitor their own lives. Just like everyone else, I would sit in a pew and sink into a sort of semi-conscious state. My thoughts would move idly, as if coming from outside me, from other people’s heads, or maybe from the heads of the wooden angels positioned nearby. Every time, something new occurred to me, something different than if I were doing my thinking at home. In this way the church is a good place.

Sometimes I have felt as if I could read the minds of the other people in here if I wanted to. On several occasions I seemed to hear other people’s thoughts: ‘What pattern should we have for the new wallpaper in the bedroom? Is the smooth kind better, or the kind that’s stamped with a subtle design? The money in my account is earning too little interest, other banks give better rates, first thing on Monday I must check their offers and transfer the cash. Where does she get her money from? How can she afford the things she’s wearing? Maybe they don’t eat, they just spend all their income on her clothes… How much he’s aged, how grey he’s gone! To think he was once the best-looking man in the village. But now what? He’s a wreck… I’ll tell the doctor straight – I want a sick note… No way, I shall never agree to anything of the kind, I won’t be treated like a child…’

And would there be anything wrong with such thoughts? Are mine any different? It’s a good thing that God, if he exists, and even if he doesn’t, gives us a place where we can think in peace. Perhaps that’s the whole point of prayer – to think to yourself in peace, to want nothing, to ask for nothing, but simply to sort out your own mind. That should be enough.

But after the first few pleasant moments of relaxation the same old questions from childhood always came back to me. Probably because I’m a little infantile by nature. How can God be listening to all the prayers in the entire world simultaneously? And what if they contradict each other? Does he have to listen to the prayers of all these bastards, devils and bad people? Do they pray? Are there places where this God is absent? Is he at the Fox farm, for instance? And what does he think about it? Or at Innerd’s slaughterhouse? Does he go there? I know these are stupid, naïve questions. The theologians would laugh at me. I have a wooden head, like the angels suspended from the vault of the artificial sky.

But I was prevented from thinking by the insistent, unpleasant voice of Father Rustle. It always seemed to me that as he moved, his dry, bony body, covered in baggy, dark skin, rustled slightly. His cassock brushed against his trousers, his chin against his dog collar, and his joints creaked. What sort of creature of God was he, this priest? He had dry, wrinkled skin, and there was a little too much of it everywhere. Apparently he used to be obese, but he’d been cured of it surgically, by letting them remove half his stomach. And now he’d grown very thin, perhaps that was why. I couldn’t help thinking he was entirely made of rice paper, the kind that’s used to make lampshades. To me he was like an artificial creature, hollow on the inside, and flammable too.

Early in January, when I was still plunged in the blackest despair because of my Little Girls, he had visited me on his traditional new-year round of the parish. First his acolytes had called by, in white surplices on top of warm jackets, boys with red cheeks, which undermined their gravity as emissaries of the priest. I had some halva, which I liked to nibble from time to time, so I broke off a piece for each of them. They ate it, sang some songs, and then went outside.

Father Rustle appeared, walking fast and out of breath; without shaking the snow from his boots he entered my little dayroom, stepping straight onto the rug. He sprinkled the walls with his aspergillum, dropped his gaze and recited a prayer, then quick as blinking, placed a holy picture on the table and perched on a corner of the sofa. He did it all at lightning speed – my eyes could barely keep up with him. It looked to me as if he didn’t feel at ease in my house and wanted to leave as soon as possible.

‘A cup of tea, perhaps?’ I asked shyly.

He refused. For a while we sat in silence. I could see the altar boys having a snowball fight outside.

Suddenly I felt an absurd need to nestle my face into his wide, starched sleeve.

‘Why do you weep?’ he asked in that strange, impersonal priest’s slang, in which they say ‘trepidation’ instead of ‘fear’, ‘attend’ instead of ‘take notice’, ‘enrich’ instead of ‘learn’ and so on. But not even that could stop me. I went on crying.

‘My Dogs have gone missing,’ I said at last.

It was a winter afternoon, Gloom was already pouring into the dayroom through the small windows, and I couldn’t see the expression on his face.

‘I understand your pain,’ he said after a pause. ‘But they were just animals.’

‘They were my only loved ones. My family. My daughters.’

‘Please do not blaspheme,’ he bristled. ‘You cannot speak of dog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• PRAISE
• TITLE PAGE
• CONTENTS
• I. NOW PAY ATTENTION
• II. TESTOSTERONE AUTISM
• III. PERPETUAL LIGHT
• IV. 999 DEATHS
• V. A LIGHT IN THE RAIN
• VI. TRIVIA AND BANALITIES
• VII. A SPEECH TO A POODLE
• VIII. URANUS IN LEO
• IX. THE LARGEST IN THE SMALLEST
• X. CUCUJUS HAEMATODES
• XI. THE SINGING OF BATS
• XII. THE VENGEFUL BEAST
• XIII. THE NIGHT ARCHER
• XIV. THE FALL
• XV. SAINT HUBERT
• XVI. THE PHOTOGRAPH
• XVII. THE DAMSEL
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• COPYRIGHT