Almost two years ago, I had a dream in the Sahara. And in it, I am about to marry a beautiful, young, very rich man. Dark, slightly curly hair, skin on the dusky side but not excessively so, a gaze one-quarter thoughtful, one-quarter melancholic, and one-half determined, ready to see us through any catastrophe our life together might bring. The absolute ideal by general standards, except that it is happening specifically to me. And there I sit in the middle of it all, willing, grateful, almost humble, looking like a doll wrapped in cellophane.

Before the wedding, we fly off on a trip with his friends and their wives. The men go off to do whatever it is men do—hunt pheasants or deer, I imagine—while the women flock around the pool of a rectangular villa on the shore of a dark-turquoise sea. I couldn't have chosen the plot or built the house better myself, and as for the taste with which every detail has been brought to perfection, I wouldn't dare dream of it even in a fever.

I'm wearing an emerald-green swimsuit in which I look chicer than in any swimsuit I've ever owned, I'm in top form, and my hair is the most gloriously maned it has ever been. It has a life of its own, yet every wave cooperates perfectly with the glints of the late-afternoon light, all gold and copper. Have I ever felt quite so blissful as I do there? Have I ever belonged anywhere more perfectly than in this display case of aesthetics and easy living?

And yet I feel out of place.

I can't help it. Something is off, and that something is in me, not in them or in the house, certainly not in the man or the season in which all this is taking place. I can't stay, and even less can I simply get up and leave. I am seized by sheer rupture and naked unbearableness.

They cut and lash and drill into me until I turn into a small grey-black creature with enormous paws. It takes me a moment to get used to my new appearance, though not very long—I like it! A mole in one of Andersen's fairy tales had little fingers exactly like these, and he even wore glasses. I don't, and admittedly I can barely see a thing, but somehow I don't mind.

The pebbles and soil move out of my way, flying aside like water in a salad spinner, and I scurry onwards nimbly through an ever-growing network of tunnels. I dig in every direction at once, and everything happens so fast that I can barely keep up with the frolicking joy coursing through every cell beneath my little coat of fur. And through the fur itself! And I'm not even sweating.

I cannot breathe enough of it, crave enough of it, have enough of it. I cannot stop burrowing and winding my way through these tunnels, so reinless is my happiness in them. And this despite the fact that there is nothing here but solitudarkness wrapped in chill, sodden earth. Solitudarkness and my little mole body, which feels more and more like home with every scoop of my paws.

Suddenly I break through into the middle of the sea in front of the villa. I aquabelle just beneath the surface, cavort in the waves to the point of complete refreshment, then burrow back beneath the seabed to the terrace in front of the house, where I raise a gigantic molehill in the middle of the exquisite cedar decking. I feel like the most magnificent mole the Earth's mantle has ever known, although today, as I write this, I do feel sorry for the decking. But back then? Not for a second.

The exceedingly pretty women I abandoned before my expedition are scandalised. Only for a moment, though—until a body pops out of the mound of earth—my body. Then they are even more appalled, yet at the same time everything about the situation is exactly where it belongs, and nobody, myself included, would dare question it. I have a little chuckle with them and immediately return to my dark and tangled pipework, which carries me into world after world, until it becomes perfectly natural to me that I belong to none of them.

Cut.

Yesterday I'm walking through the woods when, on one of my favourite paths, I find a dead mole covered in black beetles with mustard-yellow markings. Only when I get home do I learn that they are burying beetles. They crawl all over him, but more than anything they seem to be trying to lift him from underneath, as though they wanted to hoist him onto their shoulders and carry him. They brace themselves against him, heaving him towards my eye sockets, trying to get him as close and as high as possible, closer still to my face. It's as though they're saying: look, here he is, we're bringing him to you. You forgot about him. You forgot all of it. The perfectly rectangular villa, the immaculate women, the bombed-out decking, even the green retro swimsuit. Go on, when did you last wear it? You don't even know where it is now. And that man who started the whole thing—where did you leave him?

No idea.

Apart from the mole, I have forgotten almost everything that led me to him in the desert. And I would have forgotten him too if I weren't staring at him in disbelief right now. I confess without torture, and keep staring at the burying beetles, their black-and-yellow backs gleaming in the sun as they gently nudge the mole's body this way and that. Propping him up. Almost, almost carrying him all the way to me. I study his head without glasses, his tiny fingers, his fur, a little dusty but still almost fresh, in excellent condition, because surely he cannot have been dead for that long.

He cannot be dead when he rises and falls so elegantly, bit by bit, yet keeps inching slowly in my direction. He cannot be dead when he has dared to climb all the way up to the surface of the earth. He cannot be dead when he wants so badly, once again...

to make it all the way to me.

***

I owe this text to Bohdana Kabátová and Jaromír Typlt. And to other people, too, thanks to whom I can turn into a tiger-koala between bouts of writing.

Do you know people who also enjoy reading texts written by a human being, or possibly by an animal disguised as one? If so, please recommend my Library Letter to them. Despite my current taxonomic instability, I put everything I have into it.

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