26 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019
two dogs as companions. One day, the
dogs vanished. “I started to ask people
what happened,” she said. “Somebody
told me that there was a big hunting
expedition in the area, and sometimes
these drunken hunters, they used to kill
dogs.” She went on, “It was many years
ago, but I kept this idea in my mind for
a long time. Ideas like this—it’s like
they’re in the refrigerator. And then one
day they appear on my table.”
The book is anything but a conven-
tional mystery novel. The main charac-
ter, Janina Duszejko, lives in an unnamed
village, where she is waging a one-woman
war against the hunters who are her
neighbors. A vegetarian and a passion-
ate believer in animal rights, Duszejko
is grief-stricken after the unexplained
disappearance of her pet dogs, and suffers
from an assortment of physical and men-
tal afflictions. As her neighbors begin
to turn up dead in unlikely ways—one
chokes on a bone while eating a deer
he’s killed, another falls into an aban-
doned well—Duszejko tries to convince
the police that the animals themselves
are taking revenge on the hunters.
The story is told entirely through
Duszejko’s odd, obsessive voice. Isolated
and fixated on astrology as a means of
understanding the world—“Order does
exist, and it is within reach”—she is a
naked soul, utterly lacking in mental
defenses. Early in the book, thinking
about her pain, she wonders, “Perhaps
one could get used to it? Learn to live
with it, just as people live in the cities
of Auschwitz or Hiroshima, without
ever thinking about what happened there
in the past.” By the end, though, she has
realized that such a life is impossible.
“Every tiny particle of the world is made
of suffering,” she says.
Little by little, the asphalt road turned
to dirt. A fox appeared in the brush and,
just as quickly, disappeared. Tokarczuk
mused about what the area must have
looked like after the war, when the Ger-
mans fled and the Poles settled. “The
Poles used to treat those houses as just
a temporary settlement. They didn’t
take care of them,” she said. “They were
sure that the Third World War was
coming and they would have to be ready
to leave again.”
The house emerged out of the mist,
gutted down to its wood frame. Exca-
vations to the side had created great piles
of reddish earth. Two men were oper-
ating what looked like a handheld ce-
ment mixer, making mortar to lay bricks.
The contractor, a compact middle-aged
man wearing a black newsboy cap and
a quilted black jacket, ushered Tokarczuk
into the house. There was no electricity,
and she stepped carefully across the un-
finished floors, examining tiles for the
kitchen and discussing paint colors.
Upstairs, she and Zygadło surveyed
the progress on the bedrooms. Tokarczuk
had intended the room with the larg-
est window to be a guest room for her
sister, to whom she is close, but Zygadło
tried to persuade her to keep it as her
workroom. At home in Wrocław, she
has her own writing space, but here she
has grown accustomed to working in
the kitchen. “This is how it always goes
with women,” she said.
“Not in my time,” Zygadło retorted,
shaking his head.
Tokarczuk peered out the window.
“Are you sure we can’t go to the top of
the hill?” she asked. “Maybe in the car?”
He sighed. “We can try.”
Back at the car, Tokarczuk remem-
bered the tree from Apostrof. “Oh,
Mr. Roman! Here’s something for you,”
she said to a gardener who was stand-
ing on the porch.
“What do you want to do with this?”
he asked.
“I don’t know,” Tokarczuk said. “It’s
a beech tree. It needs room to grow. But
I don’t want to block the view. What
do you think?”
Together they walked toward a grove
of trees in front of the house. Tokarczuk
returned in a moment, satisfied. “The
forest here was planted by me,” she said.
“I don’t have enough imagination, and I
didn’t expect that they would be so high.
Now they cut off our sun in the morning.”
Beeps of protest issued from the car
as Zygadło attempted to maneuver it
up the dirt road, now entirely mud.
“Let’s try,” Tokarczuk urged. “Oi!”
she exclaimed as the car skidded.
“We can’t go this way!” Zygadło said.
“There’s nothing to see when it’s like
this anyway,” Tokarczuk added, sigh-
ing. “It’s all fogged over. Such a shame.”
The car beeped again as Zygadło
tried to make a tight three-point turn
on the narrow road. Across a meadow,
there was a wooden hunting pulpit, for
hunters to hide in. “Oh dear, that’s a newone,” Tokarczuk said sadly. In the novel,
Duszejko remarks, “Isn’t it the height of
arrogance, isn’t it a diabolical idea to call
a place from which one kills a pulpit?”“
L
iving here, in the center of Europe,
where armies are coming and going
and destroying everything, culture be-
comes a kind of glue,” Tokarczuk said
at one point on our drive. “Poles know
that without culture they wouldn’t have
survived as a nation.” A nation that is
held together by the patriotic poetry of
Mickiewicz—or by the mythology of a
proud people who remain united even
when ravaged by conquering armies—
is perhaps something like a cracked vase:
serviceable, as long as the glue holds, but
hardly stable. But, if there can be no Pol-
ish culture without Ukrainian culture or
Jewish culture, what happens when those
minorities are suppressed or extermi-
nated? The glue degrades, the shards fall
apart. Artists may make attempts at res-
titution—by telling stories that show
Jews and Poles living in harmony, by
singing Mickiewicz’s words in Ukrainian.
But they can’t restore the vessel to its
original form. Their work reconfigures
the pile of shards, making something
new out of them. The vessel that To-
karczuk has fashioned out of her na-
tion’s history is fractured and frag-
mented, and, after what happened in
the past century, it has to be. Some
have directed their wrath at what it re-
veals back at her.
The Polish title of “Flights,” “Bie-
guni” (“Runners”), comes from the name
of a Russian Orthodox sect dating to
the eighteenth century, whose mem-
bers believe that staying constantly in
motion will allow them to ward off evil.
In many ways, Poland is a country of
nomads running from the evil of the
past, its many ethnic populations re-
peatedly supplanting one another in
its various regions. “Blessed is he who
leaves,” the religious nomads say. But
such flight can be only temporary.
“Every culture is built upon defense
mechanisms,” Tokarczuk says. “This is
quite normal, that we try to suppress ev-
erything that’s not comfortable for us.”
Her role, as she sees it, is to force her
readers to examine aspects of history—
their own or their nation’s—that they
would rather avoid. She has become, she
says, a “psychotherapist of the past.”