Cold Sea Stories

by Pawel Huelle

  ‘But which God is Hersz talking about?’ asked Polanke, raising his head from the table top. The Jew was already approaching the door, but he did not want to show the gendarme any disrespect.

  ‘That’s not the right question,’ he said after some thought. ‘But there is another question, on that topic, that is the right one.’

  ‘Well?’ said Polanke, knocking back his sixth glass, which he hadn’t yet emptied, ‘so how would it sound?’

  Hersz put his hat straight. ‘The right question,’ he said, ‘is the question: which person does the Lord God forget about? And why does He forget about him?’

  Once Hersz had left the inn, Polanke shrugged. Why should he care about the salesman’s pearls of wisdom? His licence was in order. Now, as the Jew drove his two-wheel trap towards Zabrody, and the strange woman huddled in the broom bushes, Gendarme Polanke was devising a plan to ensnare Squire Gulgowski. The wind was raging over the Wilderness, casting waves of rain onto the land, the scrub was plunged into darkness, and the publican Gasiński had put a bottle of vodka and some snacks on the table. Before the salesman reached the turn in the road where the thick, tall broom bushes grew, a little more time went by. Polanke was already surrounding the house at Wdzydze with a cordon of iron helmets, the rifles were cocked and the whistles were at the ready. The seventh glass kicked off the start of the action. At the eighth Hersz cracked his whip, and Squire Gulgowski was already behind bars in the local lock-up. As the Landrat himself was delivering his commendation, Hersz was passing the stone marking the way. At the ninth glass, which was like a judicial seal on the verdict, the salesman slowed his horse down a bit, because here the road dipped and the wagon was bouncing dangerously in the potholes. The tenth glass was heralded by fanfares. The gendarmes’ orchestra played the anthem as the Landrat pinned a shining medal on Polanke’s chest. That was just when Hersz all but fell out of the trap, and almost paid for that moment with his life. His heart was in his mouth and the reins nearly fell from his hands. If he had seen the glittering knives of bandits or the barrel of a handgun facing him he could not have been more terrified. Out of the thick bushes on the roadside something black came crawling, something that wasn’t an animal, but wasn’t human either. Then this something grew to human dimensions, and stood there, evidently waiting for him, Hersz, who was only a travelling salesman, who respected the Lord God and had never cheated anyone. If it is the dybbuk, he thought feverishly, I am lost. For there could be nothing worse than the spirit who wanders the roads and lurks in wait for human souls. A ghost returning from the world beyond could enter his body, and from then on Hersz would no longer be Hersz, but someone completely different. Nevertheless, as though another man’s mind were guiding his hand, Hersz reined in the horse and, shouting loudly at it, stopped the trap. What he saw calmed him down at once – he might have been afraid of spirits, but not of a woman who was lost and needed help. Streaming wet and shivering with cold, there she stood in front of him, in a black headscarf which covered her hair, so haggard and wretched that Hersz, who had seen plenty of poverty in the world, felt a sharp stab in the region of his heart.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked, shouting over the wind and rain. She said nothing, as if his words were incomprehensible. ‘Well, where were you going to?’ he went on shouting. ‘Where were you trying to get to?’ There was no need to be afraid of Hersz. Not even children were afraid of him. But she gave no reply. The salesman could see her face and her eyes, fixed intently on his person, and suddenly he felt fear embrace his soul. For if the creature he was addressing would not speak, she might in fact be a spirit or a phantom. Just to make sure, he decided to touch her arm, against his better judgement – and once again something strange happened. Instead of retreating or disappearing, the woman took a step forwards and slumped to the ground, right at Hersz’s feet, making the mud splash. He leaned over her face and asked again where she was going and what she was called, but even when he shouted right into her ear, ‘Who are you?’ and shook her shoulders, she did not offer a single word in answer. Only now did Hersz notice that the strange woman’s brow was burning and her body was being consumed by a high fever. He picked her up and laid her in the trap like a child. He swiftly fetched a travel rug out of the box and covered her body with it so she wouldn’t be drenched a moment longer. Now he was racing at top speed to Zabrody, without sparing the whip or the exhortations. As he passed Herr Knitter’s cottage, at the point where the hamlet began, Gendarme Polanke was already on his thirteenth glass of anise and, propped up by the publican, was entering the imperial palace to receive a special nomination from the hands of the Kaiser himself. The guardsman in the sentry box gave a formal salute, and in the corridors and halls that followed he could hear the whisper of the courtiers, most pleasing to the ear: ‘Here’s Polanke! The very same! What Polanke is this? The Polanke who keeps the eastern provinces in check! Is he really that Polanke? No other - he’s the one going to see the Kaiser!’ As Hersz lashed his horse next to the Konkels’ house, for Dutch courage before his audience with the Kaiser, the gendarme knocked back his fourteenth glass. And as the salesman drove up a small rise, and at the spreading oak trees turned into the Zabrodzkis’ manor, the doors opened before Polanke and His Imperial Highness himself, Kaiser Wilhelm, rose from his armchair, waved a hand benevolently and from a crystal decanter, as a mark of his regal benevolence, poured his guest the fifteenth glass, with fine strips of gold floating in it. Before Polanke had managed to stand to attention and drink it, Hersz had driven up to the porch, which had brick foundations and small wooden columns crowned with a gable roof. The barking of dogs and the shouts of people were drowned in streams of rain as Mr Zabrodzki gave the farmhands some swift instructions, the women prepared hot water and a herbal spirit, Hersz waddled about in the hall, the wind roared over the Water, and Gendarme Polanke swallowed the contents of the fifteenth glass, threadlike slivers of gold and all. This time however he did not put down his glass, though the butler held out a silver tray, which was dancing around him like mad. The glass fell from his hand and hit the floor with a crash, and although Polanke saw it happen, he could no longer hear a sound. For a terrible thing had happened. The Kaiser’s face quivered into a familiar grimace. The monarch’s moustache was growing more and more like another moustache, well-known and hated. Yes, it was not the Kaiser, but the squire from the sandy farmlands, Gulgowski, who was standing in front of Polanke as large as life, handing him a cigar, and laughing in a genial bass. Suddenly everything went quiet and Polanke was falling into a deep chasm, where there was no more Kaiser, Gulgowski, sand, stones, Landrat, shepherds’ and fishermen’s dialect, Corporal Szulc, reports, or silent conspiracy by the local residents. It is possible that Polanke was falling into the abyss of the lake, deep and unfathomable, until finally he settled at the very bottom, down where there is no longer any memory or anything at all. The publican laid his massive body on a bench in the alcove, rested his rifle and helmet against it and, stooping over the flickering light of the tallow candle, browsed with interest through the gendarme’s latest reports, written in sloping, calligraphic Sütterlin script. At the very same time Mr Zabrodzki was chatting to Hersz about grain prices, the approaching winter, and what they were saying in the papers nowadays. Next door in the kitchen, where the fire was roaring away, old Mrs Zabrodzka was rubbing the unconscious woman with spirit and, with Hanka’s help, was wrapping her body in a heated sheet. Once they were ready to call the men, and once they had carried the insensible stranger to a side room, old Mrs Zabrodzka sat down on a stool and gazed at the fire. The woman was young and lovely. The mistress at Zabrody had never seen such a beautiful girl before. This thought stabbed at her heart like an invisible pin.

  Abulafia

  THE SAND WAS everywhere. Not just under the miserable bed or in his bowl. It was in his eyes too, the pores of his skin, under his fingernails and in his hair. Sometimes he felt as if his entire body were nothing but grains of sand, joined together by som
e strange means, and that one day they would fall apart and then he would die. He longed for it. A year had passed since he was locked up in here, maybe even more. He had long ago lost track of time; when the guard who brought food and water had noticed he was marking the days on the wall, just above the dirt floor, the chain shackling him to the bed had been shortened. Since then, he’d been unable to go to the window, stand on tiptoes and watch the world go by. Below was a square, where once a week there was a slave and camel market. Beyond it, on the other side, stretched the walls of the city, which looked like a small fort with an entrance gate. The walls were very high, made of stone. With their clay coating, and especially in the sunlight, they looked like a sand castle from the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Only two towers rose beyond this line – the minaret of a mosque, and, as he guessed, the turret of the ruler’s residence.

  Long ago he had tried to communicate. Using signs, he had asked the guard for an interpreter, or a textbook for learning the local language. Or anyone he could tell about himself. The toothless man nodded, and sometimes tossed him a handful of dried dates or an extra ration of manioc, but that was all.

  He did not know who was keeping him prisoner, why here, or how long it would go on. As the months went by he had to come to terms with the thought that one day he would die in this hole; they would take his body out to the edge of the desert and throw it in a rift like the corpse of a rabid dog.

  His only real life was his memories. But he could not summon them up the way one takes photographs from an album. They came according to a logic of their own, and disappeared in just the same way. Sometimes this caused him even greater pain, as the image of his mother, or just of the track leading across the dunes and pine groves by the sea suddenly faded and vanished.

  He realised he would go mad if he did not employ his mind on some fixed occupation every day. He began to compose elegies, first in his own language, then translated line by line into ancient Greek, and finally into Latin. It was a demanding exercise, as being unable to write he had to entrust it all to memory. On the third elegy something dreadful happened. He woke up and could not remember the phrases he had worked on for the whole of the previous day. The few simple words had disappeared without a trace. In vain he repeated the incomplete poem over and over again, up to the critical moment; in vain he recited the two previous elegies, but he could not go any further. The more variants of the new line he devised, the more the old one, lost and missing, seemed the only correct version. There was no way out of this blind alley. He spent several days in total apathy. And when he got down to work again, he found that the trilingual verses etched on his memory with such an effort had got muddled together, losing entire pieces here and there, so finally they were more like a heap of rubble than a carefully erected construction.

  He assessed the situation with his characteristic cold eye of judgement: if his mind was letting him down, he could no longer count on anything. The only way out would be to starve himself to death – without letting the guard notice – to limit his already paltry rations of food. Like a yogi he had once read about in a book by Werfel.

  In the end he decided to have one more try. Sentence by sentence, he would write out the book of his life. It must be short and ascetic, not as complicated as the elegies, so that his memory could open it every day. He discovered a new method for this. Before darkness fell in his cell, he noted down the last sentence added to his book in shorthand. The sand on the dirt floor came in useful.

  M f, e d a a, e m a c s i S, etched out with his finger, meant My father, ever drunk and angry, enrolled me at cadet school in Stolpen. In the morning, before the guard brought the food and water, he read back the sentence aloud, after reciting all the previous ones from memory. It brought him great relief. From then on the images of the past no longer came to him randomly and painfully: now he had control of them, he could call them up and set them aside at his own desire. The stark, rhythmic prose contained something that the wordy elegies lacked.

  In the mist-filled, October dawn, the men set out to hunt. Horn the gamekeeper bowed low to his father and said,‘Herr von Kotwitz, everything is ready, but those Kashubian swine got drunk yesterday, I don’t know if they’ll be any good as beaters…’

  Sixteen Prussian landowners by the bonfire, already drunk; the smell of roast meat, mushrooms, smoke, and gin, mixed with a patriotic song about a marksman or a hunter who would give it all up for his fatherland. Then the jingle of his father’s spurs zig-zagging across the hall and the drawing room towards the bedroom. His mother. Slapped in the face, because once again he had caught her talking to the servants, those Polaks, in their language. His mother, who one day had screamed at his father, ‘Without my estate, my dowry, you would be Kotwitz the zero, Kotwitz the German zero! Without me you’d be no one, like all your little lordlings in Pomerania, Kotwitz.’

  The day he was expelled from cadet school in Stolpen; Captain von York-Gostkowsky holding his exercise book and sneering, ‘So we’re writing poetry? The young squire wants to become an officer and he’s writing poetry? Let’s have a listen!’ then immediately slapping his senior officer, his arrest and court martial, the journey home in a hired chaise and his father’s rage.

  That sunny summer when he lost himself entirely in reading, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, poetry and love.

  Her name was Hanka. He saw her at haymaking, as he came home from the coast on horseback through the dunes and the pine wood. She smelled of clover, wind from the sea and clouds, and knew barely a couple of sentences in German – her comical accent attracted him as much as her lips. ‘Young master,’ she confessed, ‘this is all for nothing. I’ve got my schiffkarte and in the autumn I’m going to Hamerica!’

  His father on the night of the fire, in front of the manor house, in his underwear, pointing his shotgun at the sky: ‘The Polaks are setting us on fire again, Bismarck was right, we must finish them off once and for all!’ A week later his body was lying in the hospital in Stolpen: Herr Landau, the doctor, spread his hands and said: ‘There’s no known cure for a cerebral stroke.’

  And a month later his mother, from pneumonia. She took her greatest secret with her: the language she had never passed on to him, which would always bring him the scent of haymaking, clover, a wind from the sea and clouds.

  Then came solitude in the manor house, which he hated, though he renovated it after the fire raised by the Polaks. The von Krokowskis paid an occasional visit, or other petty nobles from the neighbourhood. He hated them as well – they were too much like his father.

  And finally obsession. Madness. The first time he read an article about the primordial, universal language, and about Abulafia, the Jewish sage who discussed it with Dante, he started getting in philology journals from Berlin, London, Petersburg and Paris. He imagined Rabbi Hillel writing to Rabbi Zerahia of Barcelona: ‘If a child were brought up with no people around it, it would be sure to speak Hebrew, because that is the primal language, given us by nature.’ Rabbi Zerahia laughs at that and says: ‘Such a child would bark like a dog, because no language, not even a sacred one, is given to man by nature.’ And so thousands of phrases ground in the philological mill attracted, fascinated and amused him. In what language did Adam and Eve converse? Certainly not German, which, as Schottel wrote in 1641, was closest to the language of Adam, in view of its purity. The truth must lie elsewhere, so he studied everything written on the topic, corresponded with members of the Academy, and finally, weary of the lack of an unambiguous answer, he dropped the whole issue and went back to writing poetry. Until one day…

  Until one day he read in a Berlin paper about the language of a tribe related to the Berbers, the mysterious Saharan No people. According to Wieland, it was there, in their speech, that the kernel of all other possible combinations lay. Not in Sanskrit, not in Hebrew either. In the desert, at an oasis also called No, there were supposed to be three standing stones with inscriptions. No one had seen them, but Pliny and Herodotus wrote about them. These
inscriptions contained the universal pattern for all alphabets and languages – the ancient speech of Eve, Adam, Gilgamesh, the Teutons, the Slavs and the Tatars.

  He sold the estate. He made deposits at banks. Finally he reached Genoa, from where he was to sail on a British freighter to Alexandria. On the café terrace he talked to an insurance agent, a Russian called Goncharski. Thanks to his contacts, this man was to arrange the journey. ‘In the desert, Herr von Kotwitz,’ he repeated, ‘once you are riding with those savages, please tell them you are a Greek from London, let’s say Ariston Nikiforos, and that you are looking for ancient sculptures and souvenirs: that will be best.’

  He said he was a Greek from London, looking for sculptures and souvenirs. It was no use: robbed, beaten and tied up, he spent a few days travelling with the robber caravan to the city where now he was writing down the book of his life instead of the failed elegies.

  If they kill me, he mused, or if I expire here, nothing will be left of me. Who was I? Someone who read a few articles by German philologists that inspired him to set off on a journey. Isn’t that proof of the power of philology? Or of my own weakness. How stupid. The people holding me here have never even heard of such a person as Abulafia. Adam and Eve certainly didn’t talk in their language. Abulafia finally proclaimed himself the Messiah. But nothing changed after his death. And even less will change after mine. Nothing at all.