Ditch, Diamond, and the Velocity of Staying Put

We met in a waiting room. Not a literary conceit — an actual waiting room, in a clinic on the outskirts of some city whose name I keep forgetting. The chairs were bolted to the floor, orange plastic with chrome legs, and there was a television mounted high on the wall playing the news with the sound off. Tokarczuk had arrived first, naturally. She was sitting with a notebook open on her knee, writing something, and she looked up when I came in with a mild expression that could have been greeting or appraisal. Beckett was already there too, though I hadn’t noticed him until he moved. He was in the corner, long legs crossed at the ankle, staring at the television with what I initially mistook for attention.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked, which seemed like the wrong question the moment it left my mouth.

“Does it matter?” Beckett said, without looking away from the screen. On the television, a weather map was turning slowly, isobars tightening over a continent I couldn’t identify.

Tokarczuk closed her notebook. “It matters enormously. The thing you’re waiting for shapes the quality of the waiting. Waiting for test results is not the same as waiting for a bus. Though both involve the body.”

“Waiting is waiting,” Beckett said. “The object changes nothing. You sit, or you stand. Time passes. The light shifts. Eventually someone calls your name, or they don’t.”

“That’s not true,” Tokarczuk said, and there was heat in it, sudden and surprising. “A woman waiting for her son’s plane to land — she is not the same creature as a man waiting for his number at the butcher’s counter. The waiting infiltrates the body differently. The first woman’s stomach is doing something the second man’s stomach is not.”

“The stomach,” Beckett said. He uncrossed his ankles and recrossed them the other way. “Always the stomach with you.”

“The body is where we live,” Tokarczuk said. “Not in the head. We think we live in the head but we live in the stomach, the knees, the tendons. When I travel — and I travel constantly, which is really what I’m here to discuss — the first thing that changes is the body. The digestion adjusts. The spine remembers a different chair.”

I said something about how this was interesting, the body as a kind of instrument that registers displacement, and Tokarczuk gave me a look that suggested I had repeated her point back to her with less precision. She was right. I sat down and tried to say what I actually meant.

“What I’m trying to get at,” I said, “is whether the story we’re making together should be about a journey or about a body.”

“A body in a ditch,” Beckett said. “A body crawling. The journey doesn’t need to go anywhere. In fact, it mustn’t. The moment you give a journey a destination, you’ve given it a meaning, and the meaning eats the journey. What’s left is just the gap between A and B, and who cares about that? The gap is the whole thing.”

“But I do give my journeys destinations,” Tokarczuk said. “Warsaw, Amsterdam, airports. The destinations are real. It’s just that arriving teaches you nothing that the motion didn’t already know.”

“Then why arrive at all?”

“Because the ticket says so.” Tokarczuk smiled. “Because the timetable exists. I’m not interested in your formlessness, Sam. I’m interested in the form that turns out to be empty. The schedule that delivers you to the wrong city. The anatomy textbook that catalogs an organ that doesn’t exist.”

Beckett made a sound that might have been a laugh. “The organ that doesn’t exist. I like that. Molloy has a body full of organs that barely exist. The legs don’t work. The bladder does what it pleases. At a certain point the whole enterprise of having a body becomes a kind of dark comedy. You’re dragging this sack of failing parts toward somewhere, and the somewhere keeps receding, and still the sack insists on its needs. Feed me, empty me, let me lie down in this particular ditch.”

“Your ditches,” Tokarczuk said. “I’ve always admired them. They are very specific ditches.”

“Specificity is all that’s left when meaning goes.”

I leaned forward. “So the story has a body. A failing body. And the body is traveling. But the travel doesn’t have a — ”

“Don’t say ‘point,’” Beckett said.

“Destination?”

“Better. No destination. Or a destination that keeps changing. He’s going to his mother’s house, except he’s forgotten which house, and the house may have been demolished, and his mother may be dead. But he keeps going. The legs keep working, after a fashion. The legs are the last optimists.”

Tokarczuk leaned back. “I want to disagree with something, but I need to find what it is.” She thought for a moment. “Here. You say specificity is all that’s left when meaning goes. I think meaning is what you find inside specificity. The marble in the Hagia Sophia came from a quarry in Phrygia — Docimium. Purple veins in white stone. They shipped it across the Mediterranean, carved it, polished it, and set it into walls a thousand miles from where it was born. The stone doesn’t know it’s meaningful. But the veins in the marble are a kind of map — a record of the pressures that formed it, millions of years of geological accident. You can read the stone’s history in its coloring, the way you can read a body’s history in its scars.”

“You can’t read anything,” Beckett said. “You can look. Looking is not reading.”

“Fine. You can look at the veins in the marble and imagine a history. The imagination is real even if the reading is not.”

“The imagination is the least real thing there is. It’s a dog chasing its tail. A dog who has forgotten it has a tail, chasing something it thinks is separate from itself.”

I was trying to keep up. “What about the relic?” I said. “Tokarczuk writes about Chopin’s heart in a jar. A piece of the body separated from the whole, carried across borders, preserved. Could our protagonist be carrying something? A piece of something? Not delivering it anywhere, but carrying it as a kind of — ”

“Compulsion,” Beckett said.

“Practice,” Tokarczuk said.

They looked at each other. For a moment neither spoke, and the silence had a quality I want to describe as productive but it was more like the silence of two people who have just realized they are talking about the same thing from opposite ends.

“The diamond,” Tokarczuk said, abruptly. “The Daria-i-Noor. The Sea of Light. It was looted from the Mughal treasury and carried to Persia, and before that it was dug out of a mine in Golconda, and before that it was carbon under pressure for a billion years. Every hand that held it added a story. The diamond doesn’t care about the stories. But the stories are the only reason the diamond matters to anyone. Take away the journey and you have a rock.”

“A rock,” Beckett said. “I have sucked rocks. Molloy sucks rocks. Sixteen of them. He works out an elaborate system for rotating them through his pockets, ensuring he sucks each one equally, and then he realizes he can just throw fifteen away and suck one rock, and the experience is identical. The whole system collapses into a single stone.”

“But the system was beautiful,” Tokarczuk said. “The system is where the mind lives.”

“The system is where the mind wastes itself.”

“Is wasting different from living?”

Beckett didn’t answer that. He turned back to the television. The weather map had been replaced by footage of a highway somewhere, cars streaming in both directions, and for a while we all watched it together. I had the sense that we were approaching something and that neither of them would be the one to name it.

“The protagonist,” I said finally, “is a cartographer. Or was a cartographer. She makes maps — ”

“He,” Beckett said.

“She,” Tokarczuk said.

“She,” I said, because Tokarczuk was looking at me and Beckett was looking at the television. “She makes maps, but the maps are of places she has never been. She works from satellite imagery, from measurements other people have taken. She has never visited any of the territories she has mapped. And now she is traveling — actually, physically moving through space — for the first time, and the experience is nothing like mapping suggested it would be.”

“Too neat,” Beckett said. “The irony is right there on the surface. Cartographer who has never traveled. Very clever. Very dead.”

He was right. I felt the idea collapse in my hands like a structure made of wet paper.

“What if she isn’t a cartographer?” Tokarczuk said. “What if she works in a museum? A museum of anatomical specimens. She catalogs preserved organs — hearts in jars, skeletal preparations, wax models of diseases. She knows the body as a collection of objects. Separated, labeled, shelved. And then she has to travel — some errand she can’t quite explain, something about retrieving a specimen from another collection — and the travel forces her into her own body. The specimen she’s collecting may not exist. The museum she’s bringing it to may be closing down.”

“That’s closer,” Beckett said, and the concession clearly cost him something. “The errand. The obscure errand that may have no purpose. That’s Moran and Molloy. You receive the assignment: go and find this person, bring them back. But the person you’re looking for may be yourself, and the place you’re bringing them to may be nowhere. The legs keep moving. The trains keep running. And the body — the real body, not the specimens — the body is doing what it always does, which is failing, slowly, in specific ways.”

“Not failing,” Tokarczuk said. “Changing.”

“Failing.”

“Changing. The body changes. It is not a machine that breaks down. It is a river that finds new channels when the old ones silt up. The knee stops working and the hip compensates and then the hip stops and the spine curls and the whole shape of the person changes, and they are still a person. They are perhaps more of a person than they were before, because now the body has character.”

“Character,” Beckett said. “Molloy’s body has character. It has too much character. It is a character who has swallowed the plot.”

I laughed, and then I wasn’t sure I was supposed to.

“So she is traveling,” I said. “She works with preserved bodies, cataloged specimens. She’s been sent to retrieve something from a collection that may or may not still exist. She takes trains. She carries something in a bag — not the specimen yet, but something personal. Something she sucks on, or fiddles with, the way Molloy sucks his stones.”

“A marble,” Tokarczuk said. “A piece of pavonazzetto. Purple veins.”

“A pebble,” Beckett said. “Don’t make it beautiful. A pebble from a parking lot.”

“A pebble,” I agreed, though I wrote down both options.

“And the language,” Beckett said. He sat up straighter, and I realized he had been paying more attention than his posture suggested. “The language has to fail. Not fail badly — fail precisely. The sentences start out whole and then they erode. By the end, the grammar should be coming apart the way the body comes apart, the way the errand comes apart. The language is another body, and it is also making this journey, and it is also not arriving.”

“I disagree,” Tokarczuk said. “The language should accumulate. Fragments building on fragments. A sentence about a knee, then later a sentence about a tendon, then later a paragraph about the anatomy of cartilage, and together they form a body the way my fragments form a novel. The reader assembles the meaning. The writer provides the parts.”

“Entropy,” Beckett said.

“Constellation,” Tokarczuk said.

“Both,” I said, and they both looked at me with expressions that suggested this was either the truest thing anyone had said all afternoon or the stupidest.

The television was showing a departure board now, white text on black, flights listed and then canceled, one after another, the board refreshing with fewer and fewer options until it was nearly empty. Nobody in the waiting room seemed to be watching except us. A nurse came to the door and called a name — not any of ours — and someone got up from a chair across the room and shuffled through the door and was gone.

“The title,” Tokarczuk said. “What will you call it?”

“Something with the body,” I said. “And the schedule. Cartilage and timetable.”

“Ugly,” Beckett said.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I like it.”

Tokarczuk wrote something in her notebook and closed it. Beckett was looking at the departure board again, where the last remaining flight had just been removed, leaving the screen perfectly, luminously blank.