Flights

The narrator tells the fictional story of a biologist returning to Warsaw to administer a lethal pill to her terminally ill former lover. The biologist first received an email from him around Christmas. She was shocked to hear from this man after 30 years and could only focus on her work, which involves eliminating pests along coastal regions through directed poisons.

She began corresponding with her former lover, who eventually revealed that he was planning his own suicide. The couple had attended a scientific high school in Poland but separated when the biologist’s parents chose to leave the country to evade communist rule; he never joined her, although—as his emails note—they had promised to see each other again. Reading his emails, the biologist considered their relationship in the context of biological theories on interdependency: “Living organisms give themselves to one another, permit one another to make use of them” (286). She decided to see her lover again and lied to her husband, claiming she would be attending a scientific conference in Europe.

The biologist lives in Australia or an island with similarly strict biocontamination legislation in association with travel; she must go through several procedures before boarding the plane. She arrives in Poland during the worst of winter. Her former lover is a divorced, disgraced political figure. His sister cares for him, and the biologist meets her when she finally arrives at the lover’s home. Because of his pain medication, the lover struggles to recognize and then interact with the biologist. 

Eventually, the lover is able to ask after the biologist’s work preserving the ecosystem of her island through poison. They agree that she will give him a lethal injection the next day without telling his sister. The biologist switches her flight to Amsterdam for the next day, unwilling to stay in her birthplace much longer. The next day, she arrives at her lover’s home. She puts a morphine patch on him. When he relaxes into sleep, she injects him with the poison, and he dies peacefully.

The biologist travels to Amsterdam and consciously forgets what happened: “All those memories now disappear” (305). She visits an anatomical exhibit when in Amsterdam and then flies home, where she must confess to the customs office that she has been exposed to biological contaminants.

The narrator recounts an interaction she had with a young man in Serbia. The man, Nebojša, talks of his need for movement and travel as rooted in distrust of the people who have come before him. When he settles somewhere, he begins to wonder about who lived there previously and experiences an irresistible urge to move on.

The narrator describes the Day of the Dead holiday that features continual radio broadcasts of Chopin, mentions a man who visits places that contain his deceased wife’s name, and explores her own love for the waiting areas of hotel lobbies. For her, life is best understood as a cross section in which “each slice is part of the whole, but it’s governed by its own rules” (312). The narrator points out that she will eventually need to settle somewhere permanently and wonders what it is she is searching for in the cities she visits.

The narrator begins a fictional story about the pianist Fryderyk Chopin. He dies in late 1849, having already made funeral and burial arrangements. His sister, Ludwika, oversees these requests. Chopin’s face and hands are preserved in plaster, and his heart is removed for preservation. The first funeral is held in Paris at La Madeleine, a prestigious Catholic church. Chopin requested that Mozart’s Requiem be played at the funeral, but as this piece requires female singers and La Madeleine does not allow women to perform, Ludwika encounters problems. Eventually a compromise is reached, largely thanks to the persistence of the actress hired to sing. This inspires Ludwika to take drastic action to fulfill her brother’s wish to have his heart buried in their birthplace of Poland. She smuggles the jar containing his heart under her skirt across the Polish border.

The narrator continues to describe her travel in fragments, highlighting her experiences when living off the grid, encountering another Polish speaker in a video store, and staying at a hotel in which the key for Room Nine is continually lost. She is given this same key and, though she tries not to lose it, discovers that she accidentally takes it with her when she checks out of the hotel.