The Extinction of Irena Rey

CHAPTER ONE

We worshipped Our Author, and when she sent us an email telling us her masterpiece was done, we canceled our plans and packed our bags and flew from our cities to Warsaw, where, bedraggled and ecstatic, we took the train into town and boarded the bus for Białowieża.

It was our seventh pilgrimage to the village at the edge of the primeval forest where she lived. She had always lived there, five miles from the Belarusian border. She loved that forest as much as we loved her books, which, without a fraction of a second’s hesitation, we would have laid down our lives to defend. We treated her every word as sacred, even though our whole task was to replace her every word.

We arrived on September 20, 2017. It was a new moon, but the stars of the northern hemisphere transformed her slim sinuous home, converting the oak strips on the convex walls into quicksilver that momentarily held the frenzied shadows of the forest, slickening their inextricable shapes, and then engulfed them.

There were eight of us. Swedish was new, handsome as a red deer, and we knew at first sight that he would be her favorite. Not only because of the prestige of his language, a conduit to her inevitable Nobel Prize, but also because of his saunter, his stance, that gratifying invitation in his hot blue eyes. Because somehow, that evening, Our Author’s unshakable husband, Bogdan—whose lust, we believed, worked like kerosene on her authorial imagination—wasn’t there.

With Bogdan gone, she was different from how we’d ever seen her. She was ghost-white. She remained immune to shadow, but her eyes were black holes, and it hurt to look into them directly, like we were being torn apart. So we kept our eyes on her crossed arms, but even her arms weren’t her arms anymore, exactly—more like twigs half inhumed by her too-heavy, sludge-colored dress. Her neck lacked the onyx amulet she’d been given by her grandfather, the local black magician; without it, her collarbone jutted out like it wanted to break.

She didn’t say much; she said nothing about Bogdan. We chalked up all these departures from our routine to the toll of finishing a magnum opus. We felt certain we could help her. Not only because of Swedish, but also because we always had. Now we’d have to: Besides Bogdan, we were the only ones she truly trusted. If he was gone, that meant that all she had was us.

That night we simply tried not to tax her. Soon we adjourned to our usual rooms, while Swedish stayed downstairs with her. We assumed she would put him in Czech’s former place in the shed in the backyard. Perhaps if she had, there would have been no fire, no Tempelhof, no old revolvers. But back then we were still in possession of our greatest luxury: never questioning her choices, transmuting the form without so much as touching the substance, or so we believed.

Her staircase was a spiral of oak that dawn brought back to life; the third step up had a knot that brought good luck. We held many superstitions, which we’d teach Swedish in the coming months. We’d learn in turn that he had expert knowledge of much of what was hidden in the forest, underground networks, electric, that we never even knew were there, although we had always belonged to them.

On the third floor, Serbian and Slovenian shared the bedroom with the slanted ceiling and the skylight, two twin beds, and the balcony overlooking Belarus; English occupied the second-floor suite with the sleek tiled stove and private shower, a glass case in the middle of the room; German got the cot in the winter garden, where he’d sleep beneath the upside-down constellations and the Czech chandelier, surrounded by prayer plants and ferns.

The Czech chandelier was made of ten little skulls and too many bones for us to count. The house was filled with storied objects: dark portraits of her ancestors in scalloped, gilded frames; a grand piano, never played; massive chests with cavernous keyholes; a Bozdoğan mace; a solid-bronze candelabra, three feet high, with nine tendriling, gravity-defying arms. Around the living room hung suits of armor that fortified our feeling that her home was our fortress, our defense against the wrongheaded world.

When we were translating, which we did every day except for Sunday, we worked at a table for ten on the third floor; we took all our meals together at an identical table downstairs. When we had time to socialize, we did so in the other downstairs room, the one with the Lotto-like carpet, thick and bloodred with indecipherable black-and-white calligraphy. Atop the carpet were a mustard chaise longue and a ring of seven barrel chairs, bedecked by Bogdan in the orange and pink and blue Punjabi patterns from Our Author’s 2007 world tour. That was the room with the fireplace, where later we’d erect her shrine.

Along the mantel, pictures of her as we had known her until now: regal insouciance in a soft red dress, sleeveless, worn without a bra; crouching to nuzzle a rescued bear cub (which legend had it she had rescued herself), her visible cheekbone aglow; gliding through a concrete passageway like a last black orchid bursting into bloom, a splendid endling in some abandoned factory, hurtling into eternity alone.

Pictures of her mother, lost to cancer fifteen years earlier, when Our Author was just twenty-eight. A picture from a winter hunting party, devastating in its desultory black and white.

Her home stood in the village’s center, surrounded by red glowing currants, a gigantic stork’s nest on its roof. We always wondered, since storks were symbols of fertility, why Our Author and Bogdan never had kids. But we put it down to the demands of stitching up the world’s wounds with language, which left no time for any other forms of care.

That night our sleep was heavy, and when she roused us in the morning at a little after five, our dark march toward the strict reserve bled back into our dreams. We passed through an expanse of weeds that reached up to our knees. The birds at that hour were deafening, mustering the forces of the sun. Rumpled from our journeys, our clothes soaked up the dew.

The strict reserve was the most protected part of Białowieża, off-limits to the public. But nothing was off-limits to Irena Rey. At its entrance she turned and pressed her trigger finger to her mouth. Then we all turned in silence to look out over the field. A pale halo on the horizon revealed pine islands, pinkish, awash in a web of fog; the field was filled with tiny starry flowers. We stood stock-still. The field responded to our quiet in kind, and, satisfied no one was following, we went in.

She’d been convoking us here, on the periphery of Poland, since 2007, the year after she published her third book. A hit in its original language, Lena soon gave rise to translations, first into German, then into Czech. That was how we were born, from the foam of a novel called Lena.

For the first time since she dropped out of college in Kraków after only a couple of weeks, Our Author started to circulate outside her native voivodeship. She was thirty-two years old. Enchanting at festivals, at conferences, at readings, she was often compared to a żar-ptak, the luminous peacock-like creature of Proto-Slavic myth that offered hope to the beleaguered and guidance to the lost.

Many tried to describe her indescribable aura. Some said it was akin to fine filaments of strummed silver that hovered over her dark cascading hair. Others were reminded of the southern lights, brilliant streaks that hissed across her deep-sky eyes. Still others said her fingers were like holy spinnerets, that her every nimble gesture was an act of brilliant, captivating love.

Irena Rey became a household name. But the more households she entered, the more rumors arose. Some people said she stole her ideas from an obscure Kashubian philosopher; others, from Wikipedia and Bogdan.

Her first book, Still Life with Still Life, short stories about the guards at Kraków’s Czartoryski Museum, had sold so few copies when it came out in 2000 that almost no trace of it remained, just a low-res image from the Archives section of the publisher’s website of a cover depicting flames that were devouring a portrait of a woman, likely da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, the most renowned object in that eccentric Polish collection, which also included mummies and an armory until unsolved thefts in the late 1980s forced the folding of those wings.

Published by a different house in 2004, her next book, Ad Nauseam, did not fare better. Then she got married, changed the spelling of her last name from the semi-Polish Rej to the more international Rey, wrote an action-packed, heart-wrenching tale of an Albanian girl named Lena trafficked to London whose desperate quest for freedom was hailed by critics as both scorchingly real and chillingly allegorical, and suddenly, everything changed.

A movie was made, and the movie made a fortune. It had everything: sex, guns, scenery—and even more importantly, Irena looked and sounded fabulous promoting it on TV. That was when she built the tallest house in Białowieża. She commissioned an architect from Yokohama to create a home in perfect harmony not with the village, but with the forest, and the result was a jigoku-gumi wonder, a three-story masterpiece of undulating, unscathed oak. It was alive, and it made you feel more alive just to look at it, let alone reside inside it. She never said it in so many words, but we always knew her house had been designed for us, for our work together, as a family.

The reduction of that wonder to rubble and ash, ineluctable in hindsight, was inconceivable that morning as she led us down a curving path deeper into the forest. On either side of us were stinging nettles, a couple of feet deep; past that, slender trunks that bowed under the weight of their fresh foliage. Some of the older trees were fallen, spiked, half covered by mosses, lichens, slime molds in bubblegum pink and neon yellow we could just make out in the escalating light.

Suddenly the tallest trees started to crackle and lick. We felt no wind—down where we were, besides the tits and woodpeckers, the nuthatches and siskins, there was only the quiet drone of tiny insects always on the verge of getting stuck in our eyes. We were ceaselessly swatting at mosquitoes; being in the forest, just like being with Our Author, meant always being on our guard.

In the wake of Lena, especially the movie version, trolls went after Our Author’s every word. Her next book, 2007’s Kernel of Light, told the story of a nonbinary scientist who tries to steer clear of corruption at a research station in Antarctica where symbiotic communities of fruticose lichens already taxed by climate change are being decimated in the interest of pharmaceutical research. By this time, everyone either hated or adored Our Author. There was no in-between. Kernel of Light prompted thousands of death threats, rape threats, and threats of deportation. It also got her nominated for every literary prize in existence; with the money from the ones she won, she finished furnishing her house, our summiting place, and created a communal account for us to use to pay for flights and trains and bus fare. To Czech and German were added English, Serbian, Spanish, and French. And Catalan, but somewhere between Barcelona and Białowieża, that translator disappeared.

We came to a fork marked by a ragged stump. In Polish, these vegetable wrecks are known as złoms. They are created by rime—the frost formed by fog—or by very strong winds, or by hail. The word złom can also mean an old car no one wants, one bound for the scrap heap, or any useless piece of junk, like a washing machine that won’t work or a hefty home phone. It is related to the word załamanie, meaning fracture, crash, collapse. A person who is załamana is psychically broken—like Irena Rey, who stood stooped over the stump as though scrambling to decide how to proceed. Stress shot through our bodies and made our extremities ache; she’d never hesitated in the past, especially not on an opening day, and she had certainly never gotten lost or confused in her own forest.

At last she went left, and we passed through a swamp we knew well, our footsteps resounding on the primitive bridge, unleashing splashing and scampering that shook the primordial ferns. We took deep breaths and were soothed by the scent of urine and stinkhorns and rot.

If you take away the m, złom becomes zło, the Polish word for bad, or evil, which would start to feel more apt to us over the coming weeks, when we’d happen on these and other rough-hewn ruins in all the phases of the moon, praying we would find her, leaving no snail, no stone, no scarlet elf cup unturned. We’d come to understand the forest wasn’t a place that could be searched like any other place. It was a million unconnected events in the process of connecting, some advancing in time, some going backward. It was as many unentanglings, unpredictable and unstoppable. It was all time condensed into a moment at once so fleeting and so unfathomably vast that if a person wished to disappear in it, there would never be anything anyone could do to recover her.

Unless, of course, she’d never been there in the first place.

But none of that could have occurred to us that morning. We were book people. We had yet to truly concern ourselves with earth.

We came at last to a little clearing, and Our Author positioned herself in front of a massive, ancient oak. Our eyes moved from grass, dirt, and our feet to her feet, and from there up the scant remnants of Our Author’s body, past her caved-in face, entering the crevices and ridges that formed the bark’s great maze, up, and up, and up, and up, twenty meters to the beginning of its branches, which then shot out in all directions, swerving and spiking and exploding into leaves. Our Author bent and rustled a bundle out of her small olive green backpack, then straightened up and flicked her hair back, leaned against the tree, and cleared her naked throat.

"Szara eminencja," she said in a disconsolate gurgle, yet in our minds we invested her voice with our own ecstasy and vigor, made it pronounce this new title in our languages: Éminence grise, Siva eminenca, Graue Eminenz. Grey Eminence.¹ But then she didn’t read.

When we had translated Kernel of Light, and then Perfection, Matsuura, Sedno I: The Sacher-Masochists, Future Moonscapes of the Eocene, Sedno II: The Hopefuls, and Pompeii Catalog, we had kept to a certain routine. As we had taken our places around our table on the third floor of her home, Irena at its head, presiding, Bogdan had placed a spiral-bound copy of her new manuscript before each of us in turn and pronounced a few discreet words—of welcome, of praise—before leaving us alone together. First she would divulge the title of her latest work. Then she would wait a little for the title to sink in, and we would marvel over it. Then she would read us the first paragraph, which ranged in length from just a couple of words with a semicolon (in the case of Pompeii Catalog) to thirty-five pages (in the case of Perfection).

She wanted us to translate fresh, uninfluenced by any reviews or propaganda we might read, whether for her or against her. She refused to send her manuscripts to her editor, now at the largest publisher in Poland, until our translations had passed the halfway mark. This meant that Our Author did not write rough drafts, only final ones, and that gave her work an appealing unevenness, akin to the oak bark behind her, that other literary figures’ slicker coproductions lacked.

On every previous occasion, after she had finished reading the first paragraph, Our Author would drink. Near her left hand she always kept a glass of mineral water into which Bogdan would release three drops of some dark tincture before leaving us each morning, a procedure he repeated at four in the afternoon. The tincture would sparkle and unfurl, a liquid galaxy, and we’d watch Bogdan watch it with reverence for exactly six seconds before turning sharply toward the door and gliding out of the room to clean or cook or garden, chores he performed with obsequious, lascivious joy, even making our beds despite our protests.

But now there was no tincture, and there was no paragraph, and there would be no made beds, and the absence of a manuscript was a sudden precipice in the forest, as if a fault had yawned open and would swallow us. With her thumb and forefinger, Irena made the slightest movement over the oddly shaped bundle she had extracted from her backpack, and the fabric that had covered it fell away, becoming a miniature tablecloth draped over her skeletal hand. Upon this broken table lay a severed hoof.

The air in the clearing, formerly abundant, thinned. We held our breath. We scrutinized her object. It was hideous: deformed and inexplicable.

She said a word in her language—in our shared language—and our minds scrambled, fumbled, failed. We dedicated our lives to understanding her. But all of a sudden, we didn’t understand.

She said another word, similar to the first one—something like hoo, something starting with hoo—and then a phrase, but it wasn’t a Polish phrase, and none of it made sense to us.²

Then she went on, saying something about mushrooms and something about fire. But because we had panicked, we didn’t see the connection, however unbelievable it seems to us now, given what came later: the pyre that sank into the snow, the loss of every line from her majestic library; how we took Białowieża’s fate into our own hands, creating an ending Irena could never have written, or wouldn’t have.

Unless, of course, she did.

When she stopped talking, we all looked around, blinking back confusion. The sun was higher, a white light between the birches that arched and bared their lenticels, shimmering their leaves. The chill in the air had dissipated; the general cacophony had broken into hushes and occasional incontestable shrieks. Then, in the distance, a brief roar became a rumbling, followed by a crash, and to our utter bewilderment, Our Author strangled a sob.

She knelt and rummaged around in her backpack. We tensed, praying she wouldn’t reveal a horse’s severed head. Instead, she took out eight red velvet pouches and distributed them to us. Each pouch featured a miniature version of the executioner’s axe of her family’s coat of arms, a familiar symbol that whetted our anxiety now. When she had gone all the way around the circle—when all of us were holding tiny axes embroidered in gleaming purple thread—Irena moved to stand at our center and wait.

We tugged at the pristine white cords until they gave. Inside we found lumps of a hard substance the color of sawdust. We looked up at Our Author, at her perfect profile, or her once-lustrous hair, now scraggly, playing host to gray. She didn’t offer any explanation. She bowed her head and shed two tears that crashed into the humus, and although we worshipped her, and although we rejoiced in the forest because it was her forest, we were then overtaken by terrors.

First there was the fear that she would fire us, replace us with younger, smarter, faster translators able to supply her the elixir of being fully understood. But then there was something even worse. What if there wasn’t any magnum opus? What if the novel Grey Eminence was just a hoof and some nuggets of compacted sawdust, and nothing more?

That would mean the end of literature, maybe even of language, at least for the eight of us.

Just then, Swedish turned his back to her. All of us, including Irena, stared. He got down on one knee, making a fist over his red velvet pouch, and with his other hand, he drew back some ferns to reveal a split elm lying rotting on the ground. We squinted.

Come, he said over his shoulder, smooth. I can’t believe it.

There was a pleasant lilt to his Polish, but as a rule, we rarely ventured comments on anything other than Our Author in the presence of Our Author, and on opening days we didn’t usually say anything at all. We glanced at Irena and saw she didn’t know how to react, either. Her renewed hesitation made our toes curl up inside our shoes.

Somewhere in the middle distance something snapped. She nodded us forward, but just when we were about to come close enough to see whatever he was enraptured by, Swedish looked up. He smiled at Irena, and we felt her thrill. He held her gaze for a beat, and then another, then reached out blindly for the cadaver of the elm.

He leaped back with a gruff and provocative howl, dangling a snake from his free hand. It was enormous—from head to tail it must have been three feet long—with links like black diamonds up and down its skin, and its belly was bulbous like it had just finished innocently gorging itself on some innocent thing. We screamed and then were paralyzed. After what felt like an eternity but must have been no more than a beat, the viper dropped, coiled with its head cocked back and its jaw still open, hissed, then shot off into the undergrowth.

As one, we rushed to Swedish’s side, some of us seizing his uninjured wrist. Someone said, Let’s go, and we all raced back through the forest the same way we’d come. Swedish kept saying he was fine, and it was true upon inspection that the two small points between his right thumb and forefinger barely even bled. But by the time we reached the meadow, large white discs had formed around them, and the back of his hand was swollen, and he told us it was tingling, and then it went numb, and by the time we reached the house, he could no longer move his fingers.

He doubled over in pain in the living room. Two of us stood on either side of him and helped him to the chaise longue, where he reclined while we debated what to do, savoring his emergency proximity. Given what had happened to his predecessor, Czech, we had every reason to fear for his life. Irena had disappeared into her room, and we were looking up clinics and cursing the village’s cell service when she returned with a wicker basket of purplish flowers with spiny, ethereal centers and bright floppy leaves.

Irena knelt before Swedish and ordered us to bring her a bottle of sunflower oil, a large bowl, a pestle, and a dish towel. We flew off in all directions after her instructions; when we reassembled, we observed that his whole forearm was swollen, all the way to his elbow, but that he and she were calmly conversing, so softly none of us could hear. She barely broke eye contact with him as she slid her glistening paste over his inflamed and gilded skin.

Does it hurt? we finally heard her whisper, and in that moment, she was achingly beautiful, beautiful almost beyond belief: She was warmth, she was moisture, she was light, she was the adamant perfection of a million billion snowflakes in a split second’s descent, she was tender, she was eternal, and she was memory, she was love. She was everything we’d ever wanted, all anyone could want in the world. And she was kneeling before him, and he bit his bottom lip and moaned a breathy mmm.

And yet, at this, Irena fled. We heard her lock her office door. A few minutes later we heard a crash and then a muffled yowl.

We never meant her any harm. How could we have? All we wanted was to follow in her footsteps, making them our own. We were all in love with her. I was in love with her, too.

1  A sizable excerpt of my translation of Irena’s novel Szara eminencja first appeared in a Romanian magazine that adopted U.K. spelling for all words, including the first word of the title, Grey. Perhaps due to the outsize success of that excerpt, the U.S. publisher made the unusual decision to preserve that spelling here (Trans.).

2  Here I will refrain from making any significant comment, but perhaps it will be useful to the reader to know that the author liberally employs a very royal we throughout (Trans.).

CHAPTER TWO

It was noon now. After our unsettling meander in the forest, we were hungry, but we didn’t mention it. I had searched for hoo words all over the internet and consulted the ancient volumes on her living room shelves, but so far the only thing I’d found was an entry for huba, which meant polypore, and that seemed to be a red herring, because according to Google a polypore was a fungus that releases its spores through its pores which sounded both disgusting and irrelevant.

Yet it was soothing to be sitting at our working table at the top of Our Author’s curving house, Swedish in Czech’s seat to the immediate left of Irena’s, waiting for her to emerge. We all clung to the hope that our summit might yet resume its usual course. We didn’t speak, and we didn’t look at one another, but we were nonetheless unable to keep from sensing the throbbing of Swedish’s hot, pomiform hand.

We were affected by Our Author’s style, which coursed through us as though it were our own, and as we felt the beat, beat, beat of Swedish’s blood, we made the connection Irena might have made if this had been a scene she’d written: Swedish’s engorgement reignited our grief over Czech.

Our colleague Czech had been killed in a freak accident in 2014. Something to do with electrocution, we never found out what. It wasn’t in the papers in Prague or even Uničov, where—as we learned upon his death—Czech was from. Irena was the one to let us know, in person, when we gathered together to embark upon her Pompeii Catalog.

It was a major blow to us, and although she never so much as hinted at it, we didn’t doubt it was a worse blow to her. If anything, Irena wanted more translators, never fewer. She most earnestly desired translation into Japanese. Many of her favorite writers, the people she considered her peers, hailed from that country where she had never, she told us one evening over delicate cabbage-swathed groats, existed. After losing Czech, we tried to recover our equilibrium by reaching out to our Japanese colleagues, inviting them to our next primeval summit, but in the end, alas, none came.

It was in the midst of Pompeii that Our Author issued her famous ultimatum (made famous by an interview that English gave): either we could translate her and no one else,³ or we could draw upon the whole of Polish literature, with the exception of any of her past or future works. According to Irena’s teachings, intelligence is the ability to choose between, and on this point we were instantly intelligent, or at least as smart as slime molds, whose pulsating pathfinding is able to rival the accomplishments of human engineering, despite the fact that slime molds don’t have brains.

We knew something about slime molds because Irena had described them in Perfection. They were gooey, variously colored beings that formed expert maps over tiny serpentine terrains, including here in Białowieża, where many slime molds existed that existed nowhere else. They were a favorite of Japan’s longest-reigning emperor, who, born just two years after Borges, shared with my compatriot a love of labyrinths. Borges wasn’t in Irena’s book, of course—no other authors ever were. But what was mentioned—I remember when I first came across it, sitting at our working table between English and French, because I read it again right away, in wonder—was that if you tear apart a slime mold, even if you shred it into a thousand tiny pieces, it will always coalesce again. All it takes is time.

Even now, I sometimes picture the emperor, alone in his lab, sundering his slime molds just to watch them heal. I wonder if he ever hoped they wouldn’t—if he wanted to invent an unsurmountable rupture, if that seemingly impossible achievement might have made him feel more whole.

Perfection was the first book we had all—aside from Swedish—translated together. Only sitting waiting for Irena on September 21, 2017, did it occur to me that even if there was a magnum opus, someday, there would have to be a last book, too.

But all of a sudden Our Author was here—she’d come up out of her office and blown into the room, smelling pleasingly like petrichor—and she appeared more collected, or sturdier, at least; her ribbed brown dress that hit just below the knee even seemed to fit her better, as if it issued from her instead of merely overhanging her, although its ballerina neckline continued to emphasize the absence of her grandfather’s black magic ring. She might have been in crisis, but some people flourish in crisis, and we had always assumed that she’d be one of them. She was holding three thin pages that were covered in words. So there was a book to translate—here was its beginning—and our bellies’ anxious rumblings were quelled.

Over the course of its more than ten-thousand-year lifespan, she proclaimed, "Białowieża Forest has offered shelter not only to Europe’s sole surviving megafauna and the royals who legislated its exclusive use, but also to boreal owls, dwarf marsh violets, black storks, gray wolves, snakes (as we have witnessed), the world’s only population of Agrilus pseudocyaneus, around two hundred types of moss, two hundred eighty-three kinds of lichens, and over eighteen hundred fungal species, of which nine hundred forty-three are classified as being at risk. Of which two hundred can be found nowhere else in Poland. I am saying that there are two hundred different kinds of fungi here in Białowieża that are, everywhere else, probably already extinct."

She scanned our faces. This is not the novel, she admonished us, and our gazes scattered, and the thick glass distorted the shapes of the small objects in the cabinets arranged around the room, turning seashells into goiters, little books into hunchbacks, teacups into death caps. Swedish’s hand was on the table near the loose coil of beige gauze it had just shed.

Scowling, she went on: What I am trying to tell you is that Białowieża lost its last endemic bison to German soldiers, Polish poachers, or Soviet rogues in the winter of 1919. This has everything to do with the novel, but it isn’t the novel. She wrung her once-beautiful hands, looked back up at us, and squeaked, I never should have written the novel.

And yet