Flights

Dr. Blau’s plane lands and he takes a train to the coastal town where Taina lives. When he arrives at the house, he finds the front door open and the house seemingly empty. He waits on the porch but then decides to follow a path towards the sea. There, he finds Taina emerging from a swim in the ocean. She is 60, confident, and less refined than Dr. Blau anticipated. Professor Mole recently died in a boating accident, and Taina is searching for an academic to continue his work by learning Mole’s preservation methods.

Taina is a vegetarian and a botanist. Over a dinner she prepares for them, Taina speaks of her husband’s death. Dr. Blau attempts to ingratiate himself with her. He shares his most recent work with her and is surprised by her anatomical knowledge. The next morning, Dr. Blau wonders about Mole’s techniques and his ability to plastinate internal organs in a way that allows for “endless possibilities in terms of travels within the body of the preserved organism” (153).

Dr. Blau and Taina discuss the impact of Ruysch’s work on both Dr. Blau and Professor Mole. Taina shows Dr. Blau a perfectly preserved orange cat that is nearly identical to Taina’s current, living cat. Blau is amazed. He is able to access the cat’s preserved organs through a slit in the stomach; other than this slit, the illusion of life is startlingly real.

Taina takes Dr. Blau to Mole’s laboratory. There, Blau looks through the professor’s materials and memorizes what he finds there. Taina convinces Blau to join her in an afternoon swim. She becomes increasingly intimate with him and enjoys teasing him. At dinner, she is openly affectionate with Blau, who struggles to deny her advances without compromising his opportunity to work in Mole’s laboratory. He claims that he is seeing someone and cannot be with her. Taina accepts this coolly and offers to call him a taxi.

Soon after, Dr. Blau meets another academic at a conference who confesses that Taina has invited him to visit Professor Mole’s lab.

This section begins with a second letter from Josefine to Emperor Francis I, who has ignored her first letter. Josefine has recently had a son but is unable to embrace motherhood knowing that her father’s body is on display for visitors to look at. She appeals to the emperor’s sense of reason and justice, quoting his father’s own argument that all people are equal at birth. She implores the emperor to release her father and the other preserved human beings he keeps in his collection.

The narrator travels to a reliquary in which a small speck of the remains of an “enlightened being” are on display. The narrator questions the remains’ similarity to sand, wondering if the sand on beaches is “entirely made up of the posthumous essences of the bodies of enlightened beings” (167). The narrator relates a fictional tale of a Buddhist pilgrim who visits the Bodhi tree under which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment. The pilgrim is disappointed when he views the physical space of the Bodhi tree and forgoes his quest for enlightenment.

In airports, the narrator encounters more lectures given by travel psychologists. One such lecture concerns the nature of space and time as human constructs dependent on our ability to move and change, respectively. The travel psychologist is interested in the metaphorical meaning of places and why people choose to travel in the way they do. This psychoanalysis is done within the airport itself through an associative test.

When the narrator encounters her native Polish language while traveling in a foreign country, she pretends not to understand it. The narrator desires anonymity. She reveals, “I often dream of watching without being seen” (179). She enjoys visiting Holland because the residents there do not use curtains; she can glimpse their lives. Through this voyeurism, the narrator’s philosophy of writing emerges: She cautions against “leav[ing] any unexplained, unnarrated situations” when traveling (177), as she believes stories should be filled in with detail.

From the Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps, Tokarczuk

includes a map from 1984 with Chinese characters (180).