Cold Sea Stories

by Pawel Huelle

  ‘But that Harmensoon fellow is dead,’ he said. ‘Willman told me you buried him.’

  For a while she hesitated over the paper, until finally she wrote: ‘I am afraid, because one day, when Ludwig comes here again...’

  He asked who Ludwig was. But she pushed away the notebook full of sums and hid her face in her hands. He started saying gentle, tender words to her, but he wasn’t sure if she could hear him. She was emitting quiet, muffled sobs, like the whimpering of a little dog. She didn’t turn away when he laid his hand on her head. It was only when his fingers removed her linen cap and instinctively sank into her hair the colour of bright, burning copper that, without looking up, she raised a hand, found his touch between her tortoiseshell hairpin and her bared nape, then made him let go and sit up straight again.

  ‘There’s little time,’ he said. ‘We have to make great haste. Do you know,’ he added in parting, ‘why they didn’t burn your houses down?’

  IV

  Willman was hungry for his stories. In Andress’ boatyard, where they now worked from dawn to dusk, Jakub spread images before his eyes that were enough to make his head spin. Often, without putting down his plane or axe, Willman would interrupt him to demand an explanation. What is an overture? Can the baton be made of yew, or is it better to have it carved from a pine twig? Is the orchestra pit, where Jakub used to sit each evening, something very deep? What does anyone need the conductor for, if the musicians already know what they are meant to play? Do they sing psalms on stage? What is the second violin?

  Golden coils of wood shavings flowed to Jakub’s feet one after another, while his voice rose to the rafters of the shed, ringing with Almaviva’s laughter, Don Jose’s lament or Faust’s curses. Willman particularly loved the stories where someone dropped dead, and love – just like death – was draped in a robe of destiny.

  ‘And did all that really happen?’ he asked every single time.

  Clearly and patiently, Jakub explained what a libretto was, a part and a score. Willman kept nodding his head, but he suspected that Jakub did not want to reveal the entire truth. How could you present something that had never actually happened anywhere? And to people who sat on elegant chairs and armchairs each evening? Why should the musicians and singers want to deceive them?

  Jakub, on the other hand, was not expecting to hear any stories. The questions he asked rarely, and as if by chance, were aimed at determining essential facts. Willman did not know if patrol boats ever appeared at the mouth of the river. He had no idea in which communities deportation had taken place. But he did know that in Tiegenhagen, where the elders were the brothers de Veer, Jan and Piotr, where Bestvater had put up electricity posts and where they wore waistcoats with buttons, they had decided that the men could swear oaths, put on uniforms and carry weapons, but only when people from the city demanded it of them.

  ‘That was long ago,’ pronounced Willman after some thought, ‘a year before war was declared.’

  Jakub also wanted to know whether any of the locals had any sort of map, best of all the kind used to navigate on the sea, but Willman couldn’t remember anything like that. If they ever did go sailing, it was only to the sandbar, and if someone, such as the van Dorns, made the journey to the city by water, it was always in daylight, without losing sight of the shore.

  Meanwhile their work was going faster than expected, and somewhere near the end of August, when the tails of falling stars flared in the night sky, the hull of the ship was ready. They painted it with pitch and launched it onto the dark depths of the canal, full of weeds and algae.

  ‘I thought you were only good at talking,’ said Willman at the time, ‘but you have strong, skilful hands.’

  Jakub could not hide his satisfaction, but the funny, humorous remark he wanted to say in reply hung on his lips like a fruit killed off by hoarfrost, when at once Willman added:

  ‘But do you have to keep going to see her?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, and at once, almost instantly regretted the question, because he realised that Willman’s gaze, the cold look in his light blue eyes, did not just follow him here, while building the boat, but wandered after him each evening when, work-weary, he said: ‘Until tomorrow,’ and set off down the canal path, amid an oppressive odour of stagnant water, sweet flag and water lilies; at three oak trees he turned and then, following the sandy road, at the very end of the dunes and the cemetery he came to the van Dorns’ house, which for a brief while had been his, Jakub’s house, though it wasn’t now, because he didn’t go up the creaking porch steps, but walked on, past the small, silent windows of the chapel, all the way to her doorstep, where Willman’s gaze did not stop at the peeling paint on the door frame, but continued to delve, through the walls, the whispers and silences, as if he had a right to do so, granted him by the widower or by some blood relationship unknown to Jakub.

  ‘What do I mean?’ Willman repeated like an echo. ‘The fact that she won’t be sailing with us.’

  ‘No,’ said Jakub, looking him straight in the face, ‘she’s not as stupid as you think. I’ll soon persuade her...’

  Willman burst into loud laughter.

  ‘Her mother,’ he said, catching his breath, ‘went traipsing about on the seashore too. And even Harmensoon was afraid to forbid those oddities, that bathing. Do you know why? Because he was afraid of her. And do you know why? Because she was a witch. Luckily she drowned.’

  ‘I thought witches were a Catholic speciality,’ said Jakub, ‘but clearly I was mistaken.’

  Willman did not answer. He got on with the rigging, muttering a little poem to himself:

  The wave it rolls, the wind it roars,

  Who will let you come on board?

  I will not, and nor will he,

  Stay at home, my lovely.

  For several days they worked in ponderous silence. But when, as every afternoon, she turned up at the canal with a basket of food for them, Willman simply took his share and ate it, chewing steadily and systematically. Jakub ate faster, always rescuing the tiniest crumbs from the ground, gathering them in his hand and sucking them up with his lips. She liked to watch his long, fine fingers. She liked the moment when he raised his eyes and cast a furtive glance at the basket, where there were still apples from the orchard, or blueberries she had picked in the forest.

  And although life went on as before, without any changes to the daily ritual, she could sense an invisible wall of antipathy growing between the two men. Once it was absolutely solid, she wrote on a piece of paper: ‘What happened?’

  And when Jakub appeared at her house after dark, she put her question on the table.

  He pretended he couldn’t make it out, so she turned up the wick. He pretended he couldn’t understand, so she wrote: ‘You and Willman.’

  ‘It’s nothing serious,’ he said.

  So she added: ‘I can see.’

  But he refused to say, and his face, usually lit by a smile in the evenings, was tense and focused. He ate next to nothing, didn’t even thank her, and quickly left the room. She heard the stairs creak as he climbed them at a slow, heavy pace to the attic. But this time the bustle upstairs only lasted a short time. He gathered his odds and ends, and before she had finished tidying the kitchen, he came downstairs again.

  ‘I’d better be going now,’ he said. ‘Willman and I will be trying out the sails in the morning.’

  She nodded. But once he had gone, she took the lamp and slowly went upstairs. The bed he had put here was neatly made. In the chest that served him as a wardrobe she found a change of underwear, a handkerchief and some socks. There was a violin case lying beside the pillow, not fully closed. Carefully she took out the instrument, and just as blind people do, she touched it with her fingers. Willman had provided Jakub with hair for the bow, the strings and a lump of rosin. But the violin itself, which had lain for a hundred years or more amid a firearm, some maps, some shining chronometers and a handful of silver coins in the chest that had once belonged to a
Belgian captain, was a present from her. Jakub would play at night, up here, and then every last sound of the music ran right through her – nothing mattered any more, not even the rules she was breaking with some degree of fear. Sometimes her father came to her in her dreams, sat on the edge of her bed and silently pointed a finger at the ceiling, as if asking her: ‘What is the meaning of all this?’

  But she was not sure what she really wanted, and her thoughts, full of vague presentiments and images, were burdening her with a weird, chaotic aura of alien things she had never known before. The violin floated back into the mossy shell of its case. Holding the lamp in one hand and the instrument in the other, with a heavy heart she slowly went downstairs. Only in the main room did she realise that Jakub had come back, and that she must have missed him by a whisker going through the hall. Now he was silently standing by the door, gazing at her. She showed him the case and gave him an inquiring look to ask if that was what he had come for.

  ‘No,’ he said. And before she had time to reach for her pencil and notebook, he quickly added: ‘There’s someone walking about in the chapel – I saw a light in there.’

  She went up to the window and pointed at the moon.

  ‘No,’ he whispered, ‘the light is from inside, I saw it myself just now.’

  She grabbed his hand, nodded for him to sit down and opened the notebook.

  ‘You imagined it,’ he read, ‘stay here.’

  ‘Willman,’ he asked, ‘what’s he doing there at night?’ She refused to write him an answer. ‘Why are you hiding something?’ he cried. ‘If it’s not Willman, who is it?’

  But her pencil said nothing, nor did the look in her eyes.

  Jakub went outside. After a short walk he was standing outside the chapel. The moonshine really was reflecting in the windows, and no other light, at least not now, was illuminating the interior of the dark block. Yet he couldn’t have been mistaken: as he was heading from her house towards the van Dorns’, someone had been walking about in the house of prayer holding a lamp or a candle; there had been a flame moving between the walls, casting a flickering shadow into the windows.

  Jakub timidly pushed the heavy, double door. In the very faint light he could make out some benches and a table about eight yards long, which towered above him on a platform. Old books with wooden spines, coated in cloth worn smooth by generations, gave off an odour of prayer and time. He was not alone in here, he sensed in terror, when from a corner of the room steeped in total darkness he heard scraps of muttered phrases, some tapping and rustling.

  ‘I am Jakub,’ he said loud and clear. ‘Who are you?’

  No one answered. The sounds stopped, but only momentarily, for barely had he taken two steps forward than a noise erupted in the corner, as if lots of objects had been thrown violently to the floor all at once. He approached the point where the two walls ran together, but found no one there. But he did discover some large books, which lay scattered beside a huge cupboard with glazed, open doors. Cautiously, carefully, he picked them up one after another and set them on an oak shelf. Thick dust rose from the parchment pages, the leather spines, the sacred letters and the metal fittings. It pierced his nose and stung his eyes, but Jakub could smell another ingredient in it too: candles that had only just been extinguished. He went up to the table. The congealed wax on the candlestick was still warm. Next to it stood a vessel that looked like a cup. Carefully he touched the skin of the liquid at the bottom with his thumb, and then put it to his tongue. The bare hint of moisture, less than a drop, had a taste of cheap red wine.

  ‘I am Jakub,’ he shouted into the darkness. ‘If there’s someone here, let him speak!’

  There was no reply. He could hear his heart continuing to pump blood within the vaulted silence of his body, could hear the woodworm endlessly boring a labyrinth of gloomy corridors in hard veins of wood. He moved towards the exit at a slow, quiet pace. When he was halfway across the chapel, a noise like the previous one rang out behind him. But now the books were not just falling out of the cupboard – now they were being furiously hurled to the floor, one after another, with a resonant thud as each one landed. Amid these sounds he could hear a verse from the Bible – about fire and burning – spoken over and over again like an incantation. Jakub didn’t want to hear what sort of fire it was, nor whom, or what it was meant to burn. He ran outside terrified, and the vision of the falling books chased him up the road. He felt as if they were flying after him on the outspread wings of their pages, brushing his arms and face in flight, and falling under his feet like stones, while he had to jump across them like streams in the mountains.

  He rushed into the room, pale and shaking, but refused to say a word, or to read a single one of the patiently elaborated sentences which she had just finished writing; perhaps he suspected she had a hidden aim, to avoid giving him proper warning; perhaps he thought that the someone whom he could not see in the chapel, terrifying and dreadful, was acting in league with her and, throughout the whole of his time here, in this small, strange, abandoned village, had been covertly spying on him, giving her orders; or perhaps he wasn’t thinking anything of the kind, because he could still hear the rumble of the falling books, terrible thumps, louder and louder, sending clouds of silvery dust into the air and ringing in his ears like the breath of Abbadon, carrying the wind of destruction; perhaps he didn’t want to tell her all this because he would have to raise his voice, he would have to shout at her, and so, once he had calmed down and swallowed a mouthful of water from the jug, all he said was: ‘Wake me up early tomorrow, Willman can’t bear it if I’m late at the canal.’ And then, on the stairs by now, he added not his usual ‘Good night’, but ‘Nevertheless, good night .’

  And yet she was happy. In the end he had stayed here, not at the van Dorns’. Now as she lay in bed, she would be able to hear him moving his chair, walking about the room, playing the violin, taking off his shoes, sometimes laughing to himself, opening or closing the window, or yawning lengthily – perhaps at deliberately high volume – and then lying down to sleep. She could wake him before dawn, watch him eating the same old fritters for breakfast, putting on his shoes and going off down the narrow track towards the three oak trees. She was happy, though there were no bustling noises coming from upstairs now, and the violin was down here.

  Meanwhile, upstairs, in Jakub’s dreams, his father had suddenly appeared. He sat down on the edge of the bed and whispered into his ear: ‘When you went to join the orchestra and abandoned your home and your tradition, I told you it was bad, but as for this – this is sheer catastrophe!’ He pointed down at the floor, and asked: ‘What is the meaning of all this?’

  But of course he wouldn’t listen to a word of what his son had to say to him. From under his black coat he took out his Book and slowly leafed through it, hesitating, frowning and muttering. Then he removed some individual letters from the pages, raised them in his fingers like thin flakes of soot and carefully blew on them; without changing shape they slowly glided across the room and landed on Jakub’s face, on his lips, his brow and his eyelids.

  This scene absorbed him so fully that he lost sight of the border between sleep and waking, and failed to notice the woman’s presence at all. Meanwhile she laid the violin case next to the bed, leaned over Jakub, and wherever a letter appeared, she placed a kiss. The symbols vanished like snowflakes at the touch of her lips. Jakub woke up. Besides the absence of his father, and besides her so unexpected presence in his room, he had an even bigger surprise – she was whispering tender words full of emotion to him. She could speak. When she noticed that he wasn’t asleep any more, and at once tried to leave, he stopped her with a firm, decisive gesture.

  A couple of hours later when, sated by love, she woke up at Jakub’s side and gently, without interrupting his sleep, touched his face with her fingertips, she heard the distant, rising rumble of the sea. Along with the first storm, the summer was relentlessly approaching its end. The dozen or fewer warm days they still had befo
re them could change nothing here, although everything had changed between them. Less than an hour later Jakub came back from the canal.

  ‘Willman,’ he said, his voice faltering, ‘loaded up the supplies and sailed away last night.’

  ‘Did he leave a stupid little poem?’ she asked.

  V

  The day they saw the plane was no different from the ones before it. The frost held just as firmly as it had all winter, for almost four months now. Jakub came out of the woodshed and looked up to follow the flight of the reconnaissance biplane: it flew in from the east, turned a circle above the dunes, flashed over the village and headed west, towards the mouth of the river. She spotted it too: there was no black cross on its wing (like the one on the officer’s car, which instantly came to mind), but a red star instead.

  ‘What does it mean for us?’ she asked at supper.

  Jakub thought hard over his watered-down soup.

  ‘I think it means we can kill a hen and make chicken stock,’ he said, ‘but not today, maybe in a couple of days’ time.’

  From then on the nights became a torment. Jakub could understand her anxiety: now, more than strangers, she feared the return of her own people, in which she believed so strongly and firmly that even his tales of what he had met with there, in the camp and on the transports, his casual hints, which he had avoided earlier, were incapable of undermining this dreadful hope. There were moments when he could feel the fear and antipathy rising in her. She would stifle it with outbursts of passion, ever more ardent and insistent, but Jakub knew that like this she was only driving away the thought of the moment when she would stand before the entire community, merely in order to be judged and expelled.

  ‘You can’t keep on thinking about it!’ he finally erupted. ‘Sin is a relative concept.’