drive your bones over the plow of the dead

The horn responded sadly, like a summons. I pressed my face against the steering wheel. With a sigh of relief, the Samurai stopped outside the house, as if it were on my side in everything.

My hands were shaking, and now I knew this would end badly. I drove home, weeping out of helplessness. I got into the car and sat still, with my hands on the steering wheel, but it was a while before I was capable of moving. Soon after that I heard shots again they were shooting at the Birds. Meanwhile the line of hunters had disappeared into the low brushwood, young willows on boggy terrain. That’s what he said: “within the law.” I brushed off the snow and headed for my car. He’s a dermatologist, but he knows about everything and understands it all. I’d throw them a snowball, they’d take it as a green light for all sorts of high jinks and immediately be off on their chaotic chases, in which the pursuer suddenly turns into the pursued, so the reason for the race changes from one second to the next, and finally their joy becomes so great that there’s no way to express it other than by running around the house like mad.Īgain I felt tears on my cheeks-perhaps I should go and see Doctor Ali about it. I went outside, and again I felt as if my Little Girls were running out ahead of me, straight into the snow, thrilled that the day had come, showing their joy so openly and shamelessly that I was bound to be infected by it. The Sun was dazzlingly bright, it had only just risen, and still red from the effort, was casting long, sleepy shadows. I came to a halt in the middle of the room, tangled in my sweater, suddenly feeling helpless-what was I to do? As usual on such days the weather was beautiful the weather god clearly favors hunters. More of them followed, so I hurriedly started to dress, though not entirely conscious. I sat up in bed with a terrible foreboding that something bad was happening, and that this noise might be a sentence on someone’s life. Antonia Lloyd-Jones is the 2018 winner of the Transatlantyk Award for outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad.Ī thump, a distant bang, as if someone in the next room had clapped an inflated paper bag. She has been translated into a dozen languages.

Olga Tokarczuk won the 2018 Man Booker International prize for her novel Flights, and is one of Poland's most celebrated and beloved authors, earning the country's highest literary honor, the Nike. The following is an excerpt from Olga Tokarczuk's novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Drive your bones over the plow of the dead