The Friendship Files #3

(1,200 words, about 6 minutes)

Olga Tokarczuk’s unusual and immersive novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), is a moving cry against our treatment of animals. It’s a dark fable about Western society’s perverse habit of underestimating elderly women. It’s a bizarre murder mystery touched with comic elements. In short, it defies definition. Guardian reviewer Sarah Perry calls Drive Your Plow “an astonishing amalgam of thriller, comedy and political treatise.” The New York Times’ Sloane Crosley goes with, “a philosophical fairy tale about life and death…”

To all this, I’ll add that it portrays a strange and moving entanglement of friendships, proving friendship, much like this novel, can’t be contained. Of all human relationships, friendship offers the widest scope for defying stereotypes or expectations: you never know who will form a bond with whom, and intimacy tends to rear before even those involved see it coming.

At first, this story doesn’t seem a welcome environment for friendship of any kind. The main character, Janina Duszejko—known commonly in the story as Mrs. Duszejko, the name I’ll use—lives in an isolated Polish community near the Czech border. A retired bridge engineer and schoolteacher, she serves as winter caretaker for the local cottagers, checking on their empty properties during the long, cold months—our first hint that she is not so frail as her oft-mentioned “Ailments” imply.

Mrs. Duszejko speaks to readers in a seemingly frank, confiding tone, reporting her struggles without self-pity, as in the novel’s opening line: “I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.” She thus exudes fastidiousness, as well as a propensity to expect trouble. Her capitalization of Night might be a red flag regarding her mental state, or simply tongue-in-cheek.

Mrs. Duszejko embodies an aura of solitude. She’s absorbed in her own ruminations and quiet hobbies—the latter includes a careful study of astrology—with little company or any apparent wish for it. Her only near neighbours are a man she loathes, whom she calls Big Foot; and the taciturn Oddball.

She professes to find Oddball annoying, yet here is our first clear view of him, through her eyes: “Oddball stood next to me in silence, tall, thin, and bony like a figure sketched in a few pencil strokes. Every time he moved, snow fell from him like icing sugar from pastry ribbons.” This gentle portrait, landing smack in the midst of the macabre first chapter (when Oddball has turned up in the night to report having found Big Foot dead) is our first clue to a crucial undercurrent in the novel. Oddball “stood next to” her. Illuminated by her surprisingly vivid description—a painterly consideration that borders on gratitude—he points toward ideas of companionship.

Despite her self-sufficiency and solitary air,  Mrs. Duszejko in fact has a standing Friday dinner guest: young Dionizy, aka Dizzy, a former student of hers. Their weekly routine is the picture of cozy togetherness: “…once we’d eaten every last scrap and were sipping black tea (the only kind that finds favor with us), he reported on what he had managed to do that week. Dizzy was translating Blake. Or so he had decided, and until now he had been rigorously pursuing his aim.” Mrs. Duszejko has no taste for poetry, though. She can’t “make head or tail of the beautiful, dramatic images that Blake conjured up in words,” and enjoys tormenting Dizzy with reflections along the lines of, “I couldn’t understand why these revelations weren’t recorded properly—in prose.”

I was relieved to discover this playful sparring—a hallmark of the most enduring friendships—between Mrs. Duszejko and Dizzy. That’s a testament to Tokarczuk’s skill at tweaking tension. Dizzy’s arrival reconfigured my sense of Mrs. Duszejko, who heretofore seemed chiefly alone in the world. The scene that sparked their friendship is pure delight:

“Is it you?” he finally whispered, sounding surprised.

“Dionizy?”
            “What are you doing here?”

“I live near here. What about you?”

“So do I, Mrs. Duszejko.”

Then we spontaneously threw ourselves into each other’s arms.

I had no prior inkling that this protagonist was capable of such an unguarded burst of affection. Yet I believed that hug. That’s how well Tokarczuk has modulated her first-person narrator’s not-wholly-reliable voice: Mrs. Duszejko reveals only what she’s willing to, what’s necessary, or what rises to the surface at a given moment. But beyond deft narration, the scene interests me for its stirring dramatization of the way our interactions with others—often, most potently, friends—draw out aspects of our personalities that might otherwise remain unnoticed, even latent.

As the novel progresses, Mrs. Duszejko gathers more friends about her, including a local shopkeeper and a mushroom picker. Meanwhile, her relationship with Oddball evolves in direct opposition to the increasingly troubling plot. Via a handful of moving encounters, Tokarczuk chips away at their stilted politeness. In one example, Mrs. Duszejko witnesses Oddball’s awkwardness with his grown son, a police officer: “Oddball defended himself weakly, as if rendered helpless by talking to his son.” Now a kindness toward him takes root, tinged with a bewildered sympathy: “I’d have thought it would be the other way around, and that a conversation with his own child could only give him extra strength.”

Yet their alliance is so tentative, it’s page 180 before she learns Oddball’s first name, and with it, his family history. “I was truly moved by his story, but also by the fact that never before (or since) had I heard him make such a long speech.” She notices that they were both so absorbed, “we had unconsciously eaten all the strawberries.” There’s a sweet, unforeseen intimacy in this modest, shared meal.

Tokarczuk has populated her geographically remote fictional world with a bristling cast of characters; together, they amount to a community. Friendships aren’t explicitly the driving force here, but Tokarczuk renders them affectionately, and with respect for their place at the heart of society, and in how individual lives play out. Mrs. Duszejko’s companions soften the edges of her personality. Without them, her eccentricities might overpower, her comic aspects lose their charm, and, ultimately, her sense of wholeness diminish.

When events reach their disturbing conclusion, Mrs. Duszejko’s friends step in; they protect; they interfere. The significance of their care—even in the face of truly troubling revelations—can’t be overstated. They secure the structure of her reality, and her place within it. The constancy of Mrs. Duszejko’s friends is not exactly redemptive, but it’s not redemption that’s required. It’s only to see the truth of our own circumstance, while, at the same time, how elusive its full comprehension. Our friends, through the strange mixture of joy, comfort, and friction their presence provides, help us to grasp this.

“I think it’s a good Sign not to recognize oneself,” Mrs. Dezszejko declares. She also says, as she wends her way toward her own end, “I think of Oddball, and that this winter he’ll be alone on the Plateau.” Then she writes Dizzy a letter.