Cold Sea Stories

by Pawel Huelle

  The next day, she had had to stand in the middle of the chapel and confess her guilt to everyone aloud. Then she had listened to Harmensoon’s reprimands: was she not ashamed to show disobedience to her father? Should she not disdain people who commit the gravest sin and have themselves christened for a second time? Did she not know that music, alcohol and elaborate attire are the atrium of hell? Had she never heard that it was forbidden to exchange a single word with those who had been excluded from the community? To say nothing of taking part in their lascivious, pernicious entertainments? Was she showing due remorse? Did she realise that next time no one would admonish her again?

  When he had finished, with her head lowered, she had had to go back to the gallery and take her place among the women. The congregation had started singing Psalm 130: ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord.’ She had wanted to join in with the chorus, she had wanted to be one of the pure, strong voices that every day for centuries had gone soaring up from here, straight into the presence of the Lord. But as soon as she opened her mouth, a hollow, husky moan had emerged from her throat. She had tried again, but the words had remained inside her, as if under lock and key. This sense of impotence was a hundred times worse than the fear she had felt as she stood before Harmensoon.

  ‘It will pass,’ she had thought, ‘it’s temporary.’

  But that moment had lasted for four years, and now, as she lay in the empty house, unable to fall asleep under the throng of memories, and also – she knew – because of the stranger’s coal-black eyes, she felt a rising wave of rebellion and despair. Did God really want to punish her quite so severely? If He was just, why had nothing like this happened to Hanna, but to her instead? And where was the Lord the day when the lorries and the people carrying guns had appeared outside the chapel? Maybe only things, houses, animals and plants were real – water, air, earth, the rising and setting of the sun, the clouds, and nothing else?

  At the Helkes’ house the owl hooted again. The mouse scratched in the wardrobe. The wind had died down entirely, and suddenly, in the immense silence that now lay over the roofs and trees like an invisible mantle, a terrible shout rang out, ripping the darkness apart. She went up to the window. The man she had fed was walking, staggering in the road. He was waving his arms about, clenching his fists, falling onto the sand, struggling to get up and shouting again, straight at the stars, as if there were someone up there who had to hear him out. From afar he looked like an intoxicated peasant who had taken the wrong road after the fair, and ended up not so much in a strange village, as in a completely different world.

  When she went out into the road, he was lying face down on the sand, muttering to himself. He no longer had the strength to stand up, even less to take another step. As she leaned over him and gently touched his head, she felt the angel of death – who had been hovering here for a long time – recede noiselessly into the darkness, letting her pass underneath its invisible wing. As she dragged the heavy, inert body straight into the house, another flash of anxiety ran through her. She had never met this man before, and yet she couldn’t shake off the feeling that his face, now bathed in the weak, amber light of the lamp twinkling by the bed, that this face was not unfamiliar to her, and that those two burning, dark eyes had closely followed her once before now. But she hadn’t time to stop and think about it: once she had removed his shirt and trousers, along with some scabs and a layer of dirt, once she had washed his open wounds, shivers began to make his body shake; his eyes stayed shut as he raved in a fever and refused to drink. It occurred to her that if the stranger died, she wouldn’t be able to manage without Willman. After all, she couldn’t make a coffin on her own, or lay the body in a grave.

  III

  He was amazed by everything, though he didn’t show it, and said nothing, rather than ask questions. The wardrobe, for instance: it looked as if all the men here wore the same waistcoats, done up not with buttons but sixteen inconvenient hooks and eyes. The dark trousers made of woven cloth and the jacket that looked like an old-fashioned frock coat were also not the most comfortable. He put them on, when she fetched her father’s clothes out of the cupboard, including shirts and underwear. But he refused the black hat, and did so with such a decisive gesture that the startled look in her eyes, which he caught for a moment, must have disconcerted him. Then, as she led him through the village, he couldn’t understand why she was taking him around the houses, opening doors, drawers and wardrobes, as if seeking his approval every single time, even though all the interiors, barns, kitchens and bedrooms, just like the clothes in the wardrobes, the household utensils and trinkets, were all so similar to each other. And why did she lose patience when in the final house, in reply to her clearly inquiring look and gesture, which he couldn’t understand, he had dismissively shrugged his shoulders?

  She ran outside, leaving him amid the hazy presence of the people who once lived here. Timidly he touched the table top, walked to and fro about the large room, and drew his fingers across the cool oven tiles. Finally he stood at the window and waited, God knows what for. Flooded with sunlight, the road was empty. Not one, not even the smallest rural sound disturbed the total silence. Pervading the grass-choked vegetable beds, last year’s bean poles and the wild, dried-out sunflowers, pervading the moss on the sill, the dust on the casing, the furniture, the objects and the air, there was a clear, ever more threatening shadow of abandonment. If only a single shattered windowpane, a toppled fence or an open and partly pillaged chest of drawers could verify the facts that he was slowly starting to guess, his anxiety would not have been so sudden and so violent.

  In a headlong rush he raced back from house to house, now opening door after door himself, looking into larders, sheds and summer houses. But all the objects lay quietly, indifferently, in their places, and the cruel peacefulness seemed to hide an enhanced threat, lurking in every cranny. In the dairy at the edge of the village, which he timidly entered through a creaking gate, there were small pails, sieves and ladles standing on the shelves, as if at any moment streams of milk were just about to gush into the wooden vats. A similar sensation came over him in the weaving shop; as he walked slowly through striped beams of light that fell into the dark interior through narrow little skylights, as he touched the immobile shuttles or gently moved the looms, it felt as if all this archaic machinery were just about to start clattering, rattling and whirring, as if women in long, impractical dresses, or men in black hats were going to emerge from behind the pillars and bring this place to life, ready at any moment for its daily labour. There were scraps of cloth lying in a wicker basket, and a bolt of homespun material sitting on a shelf. The dust that rose from under his fingers swirled in crucibles of sunlight, faster and faster, higher and higher, until finally millions of rapidly moving particles vanished up in the roof, under the rafters, where despite the daytime, total darkness reigned.

  Squinting, he came out onto the road, flooded with brilliant light, and instead of heading back in the direction of the buildings, he walked towards the dunes. Only when he noticed the large, motionless sail of a windmill did he stop, wondering whether to turn round. But his curiosity won, and he climbed the last few metres of the slope, wading up to his ankles in cloying, hot sand. To his amazement he found himself looking at transmission belts, cog wheels, a dynamo and a transformer, through which no current had ever flowed. Someone had never finished their work here, as proved by some rolls of wire waiting to be unwound, and some insulators and transfer boxes resting against the walls.

  Yes, this was what he wanted to ask about, when, tired by the heat and by trudging round the village, he quietly entered her house. He patiently accepted the chair she offered and sat down at the kitchen table, but she wouldn’t listen to his short, measured sentences, each followed by a long pause; she wasn’t going to explain away his doubts, and he was surprised when, instead of setting a plate or a bowl of steaming buckwheat on the table, she put down a thick exercise book, from which she tore a half-blank p
age; yes, he was surprised by her childish handwriting, so different in style from the sums set out on the top half of the page, among which from the corner of his eye he noticed the items: ‘glazing – 4 gulden 75 pfennigs’ and ‘fence paint – 2 gulden 43 pfennigs’ (which together made 7 gulden and 18 pfennigs, if he hadn’t made a mistake in his addition); yes, he was surprised by the expression in her eyes, which she raised from the sentence she had just written to look straight at him – it was imperative and insistent.

  ‘A man and a woman cannot live in the same house together unless they are married or related,’ he read, ‘so you must choose another house for yourself, there are tools everywhere, you need to dig the garden, I have some seedlings, please come for dinner each day at noon .’

  All he said was: ‘Yes, but of course.’ And before she had finished writing the next sentence, he had left, muttering under his breath: ‘A thousand thanks, young lady.’

  She watched him through the window. He stopped by the Helkes’ yard, but after a brief hesitation, just as if he didn’t wish to live close to her, he moved on, only disappearing from view at the van Dorns’ house. She was surprised when he didn’t emerge from it for a good quarter of an hour for, as he was living there now, he could and should come to dinner. But he did not come. Nor did he deign to appear the next day, as she waited with nettle soup. Of course she kept seeing him, marching towards the river with some fishing pots, or bustling about in the garden, around the shed, but never with a spade in his hands. She grew more and more curious about why he would disappear into the forest for whole afternoons on end, and what he did at home in the evenings, with no candles or oil, all on his own, just as she was.

  Imperceptibly, day after day went by, and suddenly she realised that she wanted to hear the sound of his voice, whatever it might mean, and that she was longing to tell him everything, with the help of pencil and paper. But she lacked the courage. Her father would surely have been glad that she had given him help, but paying a visit to a strange man – without higher necessity – could only mean one thing: a breach of the law and yet another sin.

  ‘Would that still be the case if I took him some fritters and watermelon salad?’ she asked herself, and then an inner voice instantly reminded her: ‘An unmarried girl does not meet a man without witnesses, if he is not a member of her family.’

  Meanwhile the newcomer was behaving eccentrically. He never worked in the garden, usually slept until noon, then disappeared somewhere on the river or in the forest, and in the evenings, if he wasn’t hammering in the shed, he would sit under the van Dorn’s great lime tree and motionlessly stare at the sky, waiting for dusk. One day, as she was spreading out the sheets in the orchard, he came up unexpectedly quietly and left a fair-sized bundle on the porch. It was a wild rabbit: dressed, roasted and wrapped in a burdock leaf. Another time she found a bag full of fish on the threshold: zander, roach and pike, gutted and interlaid with herbs; although it was summer, they smelled to her of autumn and the past. But how was she to tell him about it? About the full nets, the smoke over the waters and the barrels the men would roll into the larders when the first chilly weather came? And anyway, what concern of his could such matters be?

  Suddenly she sensed that that old world, which had literally vanished before her eyes, would never return to its former shape. She could, as until now, comfort herself with hope; she could mentally repeat Harmensoon’s prophecy that the righteous would return to their dwellings, but right now, as she cut the fillets of zander into even white strips, the awareness that what had happened already could never be undone cast chaos and doubt into her soul.

  Towards evening, with a pot full of stew (there would have been enough for two families), she set off for the van Dorns’ house. But the voice she heard coming from inside was not the stranger’s. Willman was talking loud and uninterruptedly, with the other man just asking him the occasional question, so quietly that even if she leaned her head towards the open window, she couldn’t catch the details, which flew away like insects into the warm, all-embracing dusk. She didn’t want to eavesdrop. Nevertheless, as she entered the cool hallway, something stopped her on the threshold of the room. Wasn’t the hero of their tale Bestvater, who had been driven out and excommunicated just like Hanna? The men had taken a vote, but before that Harmensoon had made a long, angry speech.

  ‘Isn’t there enough depravity for you in other communities?’ he had thundered. ‘Do you imagine, you naïve people, that it will stop at machines for churning butter and lamps in your homes? Your sons will bring wireless sets here, and your daughters, wives and daughters-in-law will bring in hats with ribbons! Is that the proper way to emulate the Lord? Our axes, ploughs and nets, our chisels and our planes, and finally our hands and our prayers – aren’t they enough for us?’

  Willman fell silent; the stranger shifted restlessly on his chair and asked: ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Then,’ sighed Willman, ‘those who had agreed to electricity raised their hands, but there were only three of them: Helke, van Dorn, and the widower.’

  ‘What widower?’ There was a note of despondency in the stranger’s voice. ‘Have you already told me about him?’

  ‘Yes, Wolzke, the father of that idiot,’ said Willman, sniggering. ‘And Bestvater too, but he had no right to vote, because the windmill and all that electricity were his doing, so he dropped it all and left the next day.’

  ‘He left...’ the stranger interrupted. ‘That is, you mean to say you expelled him, just like that?’

  But in Willman’s words there was no doubt, not even a shadow of regret: Bestvater himself had loaded his belongings onto a horse-drawn cart, slammed the door of his cottage, and as he drove past the chapel, he had screamed for everyone to hear him: ‘Harmensoon, you fool, you’re not interpreting the Book, you’re poisoning it with your venom, and everyone here is going to die of it!’

  She listened to this with greater anxiety than on that day in the past, outside the chapel, whence her father had dragged her home, away from the din and hubbub of outraged voices. Now, learning for the first time about the hand Bestvater had raised, his gesture opposing Harmensoon, suddenly she was stunned, driven into a bizarre state of confusion she had never felt before. And although Willman went on to say how Bestvater had moved to the Tiegenhagen community, where there weren’t actually any dunes or sea, but the men’s waistcoats did have buttons instead of hooks, where electricity had just been installed and where the elders were the brothers de Veer, Jan and Piotr, not many of these things got through to her. Finally, when Willman had finished and silence reigned in the room, she pushed the half-open door, left her pot of stew on the table, and made such a rapid exit that the two amazed talkers hadn’t even the time to stop her in the hallway.

  She wanted to cry, but not a single tear came flowing down her cheek. She wanted to scream out all her pain, but not a single word, not even the simplest, could break free of her lips.

  By the light of the moon, she seemed to see the lorries driving noiselessly up to the chapel again, and just as on that day, when she was coming back from the sea, she stopped at the edge of the forest. Once again, she seemed to see the people in uniforms, only waiting for Harmensoon. Finally he appeared, and just as before, he was carrying some charters, folios and parchments, of which the oldest, set in wooden frames, bore royal seals. He went up to the officer, waving the wad of documents under his nose, and said at the top of his voice that this was a violation of the law. A gentle murmur ran through the crowd, and just as before, the officer crushed his cigarette-end under his heel, then gave a signal. Obeying the armed men, they boarded the lorries. Harmensoon raised his voice, and just as before, tried to persuade the officer that the Russian villages of Molochno and Chortytsa had long since ceased to exist, that their ancestors had travelled there voluntarily, and that the land on which they were now standing had never known violence, for the followers of the Lord never carried or used weapons, just as they never swore oaths. Just a
s before, she saw the lorries driving away, one after the other, Harmensoon went on talking, the officer kept nodding his head and clapping Harmensoon on the back, and just as before, once the transport had disappeared around the corner, the officer gave a signal, the soldiers fired once, and again, Harmensoon fell, the officer raked up the pile of documents and parchments with his boot, set it on fire with a petrol lighter, took a good look all around, gave a signal, and just as before, drove away in a small open car, escorted by two motorcycles, overtaking a line of cattle being herded down the dusty road by guards on foot.

  Just as before, she pressed her face to the smooth, moss-coated beech bark. But this time she couldn’t hear the dogs barking like mad at the cattle herders until rifle shots silenced them for ever. Now she was afraid of ghosts, not people. Maybe that was why, when she saw a light in the window of her house, she went inside at a confident, rapid pace . She knew he would be waiting for her. She knew he would talk. She turned down the wick in the lamp, which was sending up too much smoke, and sat down facing him. He said his name was Jakub and he had seen hell. He said she shouldn’t be afraid, because he, Jakub, son of Aron, was going to build a boat with Willman’s help, and they would sail far away, to the other side of the sea, where people did not throw other people into ovens or onto lorries. She wrote on a piece of paper that there were boats on the canal. He said those boats were too small and too old for such a journey, and that Willman thought the same. She quickly added that she wouldn’t sail anywhere, because she was waiting here for her father, for Rachela, for the Helkes and all the others. He said they would never return. She wrote that they would return. He asked how she knew they would return. She wrote that she knew it from Harmensoon. As he raised his eyes from the sentence he had just read to look into her face, bathed in the twinkling light of the oil lamp, she saw alarm and anxiety in them.