Flights

Flights Plot Summary

Introduction

# Flights: Fragments of Bodies, Time, and Restless Motion A woman sits at an airport gate, watching travelers disappear through departure doors like souls crossing into the afterlife. She carries no luggage, only a restless hunger that drives her from city to city, country to country, never staying long enough for roots to take hold. Movement is her religion, departure her prayer. But somewhere in the Mediterranean heat of a Croatian island, another traveler will discover that some journeys lead not to destinations, but to disappearances so complete they challenge the very nature of existence. This is a world where phantom limbs ache across centuries, where preserved bodies float in museum jars like prayers made flesh, where families vanish into olive groves and return changed beyond recognition. Here, the act of moving becomes a desperate attempt to outrun the terrible stillness of death, while the fragments we leave behind—in morgues, in memories, in the spaces between heartbeats—tell the only stories that matter. Every departure is a small death. Every arrival, a resurrection that never quite takes hold.

Chapter 1: The Nomadic Impulse: Psychology of Perpetual Departure

The lecture begins in an airport waiting lounge, delivered by a young woman in army boots to an audience of restless travelers. Her voice carries over the mechanical hum of departure announcements, explaining the psychology of constant motion to those who already understand it in their bones. Movement, she argues, is humanity's natural state. We are nomads pretending to be settlers, wanderers masquerading as citizens. She speaks of time and space as constructs that dissolve at thirty thousand feet, of how identity becomes fluid when stripped of familiar coordinates. The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue, she notes, reading from a sanitary pad wrapper—perhaps because we are always trying to speak ourselves into existence, to narrate our way through the spaces between departure and arrival. Among her audience sits a man named Kunicki, his wife Jagoda and three-year-old son beside him, bound for the Croatian island of Vis. He doesn't yet know that this journey will shatter his understanding of reality itself. The woman's words follow them through the departure gate like a prophecy: we experience time and space in ways that are primarily unconscious, she says. Place pauses time. Movement creates meaning from chaos. But some passengers carry different cargo. An elderly woman clutches an urn containing her husband's ashes, planning to scatter them in places that share her name—Ruth Valley, Ruth Creek, Ruth Island. Her journey is a map of grief, each destination a prayer for the dead. Others flee their origins, adopting universal names that work in any language, becoming lighter and more translucent with each border crossing. The departure lounge empties as flights are called. Travelers board planes like pilgrims entering temples, carrying their broken stories across borders that exist only on maps. They seek completion in foreign cities, healing in distant climates, understanding in museums filled with other people's fragments. The journey itself becomes a form of prayer, movement a meditation on impermanence.

Chapter 2: Vanishing Acts: When Presence Becomes Absence

The Croatian sun beats down mercilessly as Kunicki sits in his rental car, engine running, waiting. His wife and son stepped out to relieve themselves in the olive grove fifteen minutes ago. The silence feels wrong—too complete, too final. He honks the horn, the sound echoing off limestone cliffs like a funeral bell. When he finally searches the grove, he finds only rubbish and flies buzzing over human waste. The path leads nowhere. His family has simply vanished into the Mediterranean heat, leaving behind her purse on the passenger seat and a growing sense that the world operates by rules he doesn't understand. The island isn't large—everyone says this like a mantra—yet somehow it has swallowed two people without a trace. Branko, the bearded owner of their guesthouse, organizes search parties. Local men comb the vineyards calling "Jagoda! Jagoda!"—the word means "berry" in Polish, and Kunicki realizes he's participating in some ancient ritual, shouting for fruit that may never have existed. Police arrive with dogs and helicopters, but the island keeps its secrets. The search expands to neighboring islands, to Split, to the mainland. Kunicki photographs the contents of his wife's purse with obsessive precision—lipstick, sanitary pads, a slip of paper with Greek letters: καιρός. Each object becomes evidence in a case that will never be solved, artifacts of lives that may have been erased from existence itself. Then, impossibly, they return. His wife appears at the police station with their son, claiming they got lost, that she felt ill, that they sheltered in an abandoned house. Her story shifts with each telling—first they ate grapes, then they had no food; first they found water, then they drank from puddles. The boy remembers nothing, his three-year-old mind already editing the experience into forgettable fragments.

Chapter 3: Phantom Territories: The Persistence of What Is Lost

In 1676, Filip Verheyen climbs the narrow stairs to his rented room in Leiden and tears his leg on a protruding nail. The small wound festers, gangrene sets in, and within days the limb must be amputated below the knee. But Verheyen, a theology student destined for the priesthood, makes an unusual request: he wants to keep the severed leg, convinced he'll need it whole for resurrection. His friend and surgeon, Dirk Kerkrinck, preserves the limb in a mixture of brandy and black pepper, placing it in a glass vessel beside Verheyen's bed. What begins as religious devotion becomes something darker. The phantom limb aches constantly—toes that no longer exist burn and itch, demanding to be scratched. Verheyen sits on his floor at midnight, laying the preserved leg against his stump, trying to locate pain in dead flesh. Abandoning theology, he turns to anatomy, becoming obsessed with mapping the body's hidden territories. He discovers the Achilles tendon, that crucial connection between calf and heel that somehow escaped previous anatomists' notice. His drawings are masterful, each nerve and vessel rendered with precision born of intimate knowledge of flesh's betrayals. The phantom pain drives him to madness. Night after night, he dissects cadavers, searching for answers that anatomy cannot provide. He writes letters to his amputated limb, philosophical treatises on the nature of pain and existence. "What is it that awakens me, when I feel pain and suffering, since my leg has been separated from me?" he writes. "The thing that hurts does not exist. A phantom." In his final years, Verheyen treats his preserved leg as a correspondent in some impossible dialogue between wholeness and fragmentation. The leg sits on his worktable, dissected into increasingly smaller pieces as he searches for the source of phantom pain. When he dies in 1710, the leg has been reduced to thousands of components scattered across his desk—a body's rebellion against the violence of separation.

Chapter 4: Preserving the Ephemeral: Bodies as Eternal Artifacts

Dr. Blau travels to conferences on tissue preservation, carrying photographs of women's bodies in his laptop—not for pleasure, but for scientific documentation. Each vagina is unique as a fingerprint, he believes, worthy of preservation and study. His dream is a world where souls are mortal but bodies achieve immortality through plastination, where the greatest athletes and thinkers donate their flesh to eternal display. In Berlin's medical museum, he catalogs specimens floating in formaldehyde—tumors, deformed bones, fetuses arrested in development. With old Mr. Kampa, he discovers treasures from Frederik Ruysch's legendary collection: an arm tattooed with a whale, preserved in mysterious fluid that shouldn't exist. The tattoo seems alive, the whale swimming across dead skin as Blau manipulates the limb under laboratory lights. His pilgrimage leads to a seaside house where the widow of the famous plastinator Mole guards her husband's secrets. She emerges from the sea in a bathing suit, her aging body marked by sun damage and time's relentless editing. In her library sits a plastinated orange cat, soft and pliable as life, its organs accessible through hidden zippers. When Blau opens the cat's chest, a music box plays Queen's "I Want to Live Forever"—death transformed into macabre entertainment. The widow offers herself to Blau, but he cannot bridge the gap between his obsession with preserved flesh and the messy reality of living bodies. He flees to his conference, leaving behind the secrets he came to steal. Understanding finally dawns: his true marriage is to the dead, to specimens that will never disappoint, never age, never leave him for the chaos of actual existence. In the sterile halls of his laboratory, surrounded by jars of floating organs, he finds the only love he can trust—the devotion between scientist and specimen, observer and observed, the living and the perfectly preserved.

Chapter 5: Cabinet of Curiosities: Cataloging Human Fragments

In 18th-century Vienna, Emperor Francis I maintains a cabinet of curiosities filled with human oddities—including Angelo Soliman, his black courtier, stuffed and displayed after death wearing only a grass skirt. Soliman's daughter Josefine writes desperate letters pleading for her father's burial, invoking Christian mercy and human dignity, but the emperor's collection demands its specimens. The practice spans centuries and continents. Peter the Great pays thirty thousand guilders for Ruysch's anatomical collection, shipping hundreds of specimens to St. Petersburg in wooden crates. During the voyage, drunken sailors break into the cargo hold and consume the preserving brandy, leaving fetal skeletons scattered in sawdust. The captain throws the desecrated remains overboard to appease the becalmed sea. Museums become temples to human fragmentation. In Prague's medical collection, visitors peer at heads without bodies, bodies without heads, organs floating in eternal suspension. A woman with an open stomach reveals her reproductive system like a flower blooming in reverse. Her vagina, cut lengthwise, shows itself to be a dead end—not truly an entrance to the body's interior, but a blind chamber leading nowhere. These collections reflect humanity's desperate attempt to catalog itself, to transform the chaos of mortality into orderly displays. But the specimens resist classification, their preserved flesh holding secrets that no amount of labeling can capture. They stare back at their observers with glass eyes or empty sockets, witnesses to the violence required to make knowledge visible. The Dutch anatomist Ruysch's daughter Charlotta spent her life preparing specimens with the devotion of a medieval monk illuminating manuscripts. She never married, never had children of her own, but tended to these preserved infants with maternal care. When the Tsar bought her father's collection, she watched the jars loaded onto ships, knowing she would never see her children again.

Chapter 6: The Travelers' Confessions: Stories in Transit

Back home in Poland, Kunicki becomes a detective of his own life. He follows his wife through city streets, hiding behind newspaper stands and bus shelters like a character from a noir film. She buys a new purse, changes her lipstick, moves through the world as if nothing has happened. But Kunicki knows something fundamental has shifted during those missing forty-nine hours on Vis. The woman who returned from the island is not quite the same woman who disappeared. She speaks the same words, performs the same gestures, but something essential has been edited out or replaced. The boy, now back in his familiar bedroom, shows no signs of trauma or memory. It's as if those two days existed in a parallel universe that occasionally bleeds through into this one. Sleep abandons Kunicki. He studies the contents of his wife's purse like archaeological artifacts, searching for clues among lipstick tubes and receipts. The slip of paper with "καιρός" becomes his obsession—the Greek word for the perfect moment, the god of opportunity. But what opportunity? What moment? What transaction occurred in that olive grove that required his family's temporary erasure from existence? In airport waiting lounges around the world, other travelers sit with notebooks open, writing each other down. A man with several days' stubble records his observations in a leather-bound journal. Across from him, a woman watches and writes about the man writing. They create an endless chain of observation, each person becoming both author and character in someone else's story. On the Trans-Siberian Railway, passengers share stories that blur the line between truth and fiction. A businessman claims his wife and child vanished on a Croatian island, only to return changed, different. Their tales interweave like railway tracks, parallel lines that sometimes converge at stations where stories are exchanged like currency.

Chapter 7: Museums of Flesh: When Death Becomes Art

The exhibition hall gleams under fluorescent lights, displaying human bodies transformed into art through plastination. The process has replaced blood and water with silicone polymers, creating sculptures that will last forever. Visitors move through the displays in reverent silence, studying cross-sections of torsos, networks of blood vessels that resemble subway maps, brains dissected to reveal the geography of consciousness. This is the final destination of all journeys—the reduction of experience to its essential elements. The preserved bodies tell stories without words: the smoker's blackened lungs, the athlete's overdeveloped muscles, the child's perfect organs unmarked by time. Each specimen represents a life distilled to its biological essence, freed from the chaos of memory and desire. Among the displays, a woman recognizes something familiar in a plastinated hand—the same gesture her husband made when pointing out landmarks during their travels. The dead hand seems to beckon toward some invisible horizon, frozen in eternal departure. She realizes that all movement is illusion, all journeys circular. The exhibition ends where it began, with the simple fact of flesh made permanent. The visitors file out into the street, their own bodies suddenly fragile and temporary by comparison. They board buses and trains, return to hotels and homes, but something has changed. They have seen themselves from the outside, understood their own mortality in a new way. In the basement of Vienna's Narrenturm, the world's strangest museum displays its treasures. Jars filled with amber fluid line the shelves, each containing some fragment of human existence preserved for eternity. Two-headed fetuses float like angels in their glass wombs. A collection of gallstones resembles a rosary made of suffering. These halls transform death into art, suffering into beauty, speaking to the human desire to stop time and hold onto what we love even as it slips away.

Chapter 8: The Eternal Return: Arriving Nowhere, Departing Always

Night never ends—its dominion always spans some section of the world, a dark scar running down the globe's curvature. In Moscow, Annushka tends to her dying son Petya while her husband, returned from some unnamed war, drinks and stares at television screens. She takes one day each week to escape, riding buses through traffic jams to visit cemeteries and churches. At Kievsky Station, she passes a woman wrapped in layers of clothing, her face hidden except for a mouth that emits constant curses—a prophet of urban decay. In a small church, Annushka seeks a place to cry but finds instead the dark face of Christ staring down from an icon. His eyes drill into her forehead with the gaze of a drowned man who didn't die but learned to survive underwater. This is not the gentle savior she expected, but a god who has lost and been exiled to the world's depths. There is no comfort here, no salvation—only the recognition that suffering is the world's natural state. The earth is getting darker, scientists report. Solar radiation has decreased by four percent since the 1960s. We live in the age of darkness, where light becomes increasingly rare. Yet people continue to move, to search, to catalog their losses in museums and morgues. They travel not toward illumination but deeper into the mystery of existence itself. The fragments never coalesce into wholeness. Kunicki's family remains forever changed by their disappearance, their absence more real than their presence ever was. Verheyen's phantom limb aches across centuries, proof that the body remembers what the mind tries to forget. Dr. Blau's specimens float in their eternal suspension, neither alive nor fully dead. The motion continues—travelers boarding planes and trains, carrying their broken stories across borders that exist only on maps.

Summary

In the end, all wanderers return to themselves, but they are never quite the same. Kunicki never learns what happened during those missing hours on Vis, but he comes to understand that some mysteries are meant to remain unsolved. His wife moves through their apartment like a ghost of herself, packing and unpacking, preparing for a departure that never comes. The boy grows older, forgetting whatever he might have remembered about their disappearance, but something in his eyes suggests the experience left marks that language cannot reach. The travelers in airports and train stations continue their endless circulation, writing in journals that will be forgotten, taking photographs that will fade, collecting souvenirs that will gather dust. But in the act of movement itself, they find something approaching grace—the knowledge that to be human is to be always in transit, always seeking, never quite arriving at the place we thought we were going. The world belongs to those who move, but it also belongs to those who stay, who wait, who remember. In the space between departure and arrival, between presence and absence, between the body and its phantom pain, we find the only home we'll ever know—the restless country of the human heart, forever mapping territories that exist only in the geography of longing.

About Author

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Olga Tokarczuk

Tokarczuk reframes the boundaries of narrative through her exploration of identity and culture. With a career rooted in psychological insight and mythological depth, she constructs complex stories that leap across time and perspective. Her book "Flights" intricately weaves themes of travel and human experience, earning her the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Moreover, her magnum opus, "The Books of Jacob", delves into historical and mystical narratives, establishing her as a master of the "constellation novels," a form that features fragmented storytelling and intricate cultural exploration.\n\nThe reader benefits from Tokarczuk’s works by gaining an expanded understanding of human and cultural intersections. Her method of blending historical research with imaginative narrative allows audiences to experience a broad spectrum of human conditions and philosophies. For instance, her early book, "Primeval and Other Times", presents a mythical Polish village, inviting readers to explore layered cultural histories. This approach not only captivates her audience but also challenges them to reflect on the porous nature of boundaries in their own lives.\n\nOlga Tokarczuk, an influential Polish author, has received multiple accolades, including the Nobel Prize in Literature for her innovative narrative style and thematic focus. Her works, translated into almost 40 languages, continue to resonate with a global audience, cementing her status as a leading contemporary writer. This bio captures her trajectory as a public intellectual and prolific writer who challenges traditional storytelling and invites readers into her uniquely constructed worlds.

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