Cold Sea Stories

by Pawel Huelle

  He climbed the ladder and kissed Teresa on the cheek, then on the lips. She held his head in her arm so that he had to lie down beside her. Both of them were shy, gentle, longing for love. Teresa fell asleep first, with her cheek against his neck. He stroked her hair softly, and as the night finally engulfed him, he realised he was starting a journey without end or beginning, beyond the curse of time.

  2 ‘Impossible’ [German].

  Ukiel

  For Maciej Cişlo

  I

  FOR MORE THAN twenty years Joachim had always come back from work the same way. He had less than a five-minute walk from the notary’s office to the metro station on Admiralty Square. There he got on the green line, and five stops later he was almost home. He passed the hulking edifice of the Geological Museum, which he had never visited, and turned into a small, quiet street, where there were some four-storey apartment houses behind a row of old plane trees. His was number eight. Long ago, when he and Julia had moved here, each building had had its own porter. And each porter wore a sort of livery. As the years had gone by, the last remnant of their rather theatrical uniforms were the caps, quite like the ones still worn by provincial postmen to this day. And then, in the era of universal automation, the porters had been replaced by entry phones.

  Sometimes the return journey took him about half an hour longer. Before going down into the metro Joachim would drop in at the Cosmopolitan bar to have an espresso with his glass of rum as he browsed through the newspapers – from the right-wing El Nacion to the left-wing El Mundo. His reading never absorbed him so fully that he couldn’t hear the conversations going on around him. The people holding them were brokers from the nearby stock exchange, and property dealers; naval officers were also to be found here. Sentences such as: ‘Look how badly Pepo has come unstuck, just when it was all going so fabulously well for him’, or, ‘But as I say, she’s a whore. I know what I’m saying, and that’s why I’m telling you,’ were like doors opening into other people’s apartments; not as though they were expecting any guests, but rather as though the listener happened to be walking up the stairs and chanced upon an accidental and briefly open chink into somebody else’s existence. Joachim did not find it unpleasant; on the contrary, sometimes he thought up a development to the stories he overheard.

  That Pepo, for instance: having staged his own death, he had been leading a new life in Patagonia, while his wife and three children were regularly putting flowers on his empty grave. Pepo’s happiness in the arms of his young secretary had brought along an infinitely prosaic disaster: reduced to despair by the betrayal and departure of his beloved with a fly-by-night surveyor, he had gone back to his wife, only to find her in the arms of an advertising salesman. Two fatal shots, and then a third, suicidal one, had decisively won the fortunate Pepo first place on the evening news and in the tabloids.

  Probably if he had written down the tales he invented, in a few years he would have had a complete set of short stories. With a brilliant title, let’s say The Secrets of the Cosmo Bar, it would have been a best-seller for at least a week. So Joachim was thinking to himself, as he descended into the subway one sunny November afternoon. He couldn’t forget what he had heard a few minutes earlier in the bar. An elderly fellow, a naval NCO, was relentlessly jawing away to his two mates about the insurgents from 120 years ago who still made appearances at his grandmother’s ranch. At night they stole cattle and horses, lit bonfires and fired their old popguns, but whenever the national guard were summoned, they never caught anyone. On the green line train Joachim considered several possible versions of this story, each one forking like the paths in a secret garden. But it wasn’t easy. Even the briefest description of the ghostly troop demanded knowledge that he didn’t possess. Who was their commander? Was it General Rojas, or someone else perhaps? Were they unionists or republicans? The history of the local dictatorships, coups, civil wars, crimes and sacrifices was like a sketchy diagram of a labyrinth he had never tried to enter. As he alighted at his station, he decided to get out the encyclopaedia and take a look on the internet, and even if making up this particular story proved too difficult, he would manage to stifle his evening depression. Lately it hadn’t given him a chance. He would wake up in an armchair when his half-drunk glass of whisky fell to the floor. He would switch off the television and drag himself to bed, upset by his own inertia. By life, which had long since lost its shine.

  However, back at street level, as he was passing the Geological Museum, something happened that made him forget about all that in an instant.

  At a crossroads, right on the corner, he noticed an old woman. Her ragged cotton dress, the man’s raincoat thrown over her shoulders and the knitted woollen hat were enough of a signal to avoid her. And yet he slowed down and stopped next to her small plastic bucket, as if to inspect her decaying sandals.

  ‘What have you got there?’ he asked, pointing at a small sheaf of plants tied together with string. ‘Where did you find that?’

  As she only replied by smiling, he added: ‘So where does it grow?’

  The old woman started talking in a dialect he couldn’t understand. Her face was furrowed with scars and betrayed native Indian descent. Her toothless mouth resembled a sponge.

  He leaned over the bucket, took hold of a bunch of green foliage growing out of white roots, and slowly sliding his hand down the long leaves, put the unusual bouquet to his nose. He was not mistaken. It was Acorus calamus, simply known in his native tongue as tatarak – sweet flag. Never, not by any river, pond or lake, had he ever come across it in this country. He felt a strange charge, a tingling that ran the length of his body from head to toe.

  ‘Where does this grow?’ he repeated, reaching for his wallet. ‘Where did you pick it? On a ranch? At the botanical garden? It’s impossible! I know the botanical garden better than anyone!’

  But none of his words were getting through to her. She was staring hard at his hand as it fished out a banknote. She accepted the lavish payment in silence, with a nod. She poured the rest of the water from the now empty bucket, and without a second glance at him, shakily waddled off along the pavement, with a newly lit cigarette in her mouth. That was when he noticed that her ancient sandals didn’t match.

  II

  He put the sweet flag in a vase, which Julia had bought long ago. This fake version of Greek antiquity had really annoyed him at the time: did the donkey Hephaestus was riding really have to have quite such an erect tail? And as for the Silenus following the divine smith, did he have to have an equally prominent appendage? And what was that sack he was carrying on his back? None of the familiar myths gave grounds for this particular artistic vision. And there was the colour scheme too – garish and tacky, like the covers of the magazines cooks and chauffeurs loved reading. Julia had laughed at his objections.

  ‘Have you got something against folk art?’ she had asked.

  Now, after all these years alone, the sudden memory of her voice and her touch made him feel painful confusion.

  ‘My Silenus,’ Julia had whispered, ‘my lovely little donkey!’

  That night of love had been accompanied by distant volleys of rifle fire, the rumble of artillery and the whistling of aeroplanes over the city. The coup by the latest junta did not have the slightest significance in their lives. They had never meddled in the local politics. Although naturalised, they were foreigners here. In the darkened room Joachim lay in bed, gazing at the vase with the bunch of sweet flag and wondering where Julia was now, if her body had long since turned to dust? Or to be precise, did some immaterial particle of Julia, which all the religions call the soul – did her personality still exist somewhere beyond the confines of the coffin lying under the ground at All Saints cemetery, where the damp, maggots and bacteria had done their work long ago? Joachim had no illusions: all the religions told bare-faced lies. Bare-faced, because no one had ever given a sign from the realm beyond. Flying saucers, just like Jesuit tales about spirits, were a consolation for the naïve.
Julia’s present existence could only have two forms: a decomposing corpse in the coffin, or his personal memories, in which she appeared – as now – beautiful and alluring. And as she had no family, the moment when he himself would die would be her ultimate end: with no one left to remember her, she would finally sink into a black hole, non-existence, the abyss, like whirling specks of cosmic dust. And what would happen to him? He was not in the least concerned about the memories somebody might have kept about his life. He got out of bed, went into the kitchen, took a bottle of whisky from the cupboard, fetched some ice cubes from the fridge, went back into the bedroom with a full glass and switched on the television. In Saint Peter’s Square a mass was being said for the soul of the late Pope. A strong gust of wind turned a few pages of a Bible lying open on an ordinary, plain coffin. An emotive journalist announced that surely the Holy Spirit was manifesting His presence. Joachim sighed at this portent of a miracle, took a large swig, switched off the television and went to bed. But he didn’t fall asleep. The smell of the sweet flag was so strong and pungent that even the alcohol he had drunk could not dull the impression: he heard the clatter of oars being set in the rowlocks, the splash of a wave against the underside of the boat, the murmur of the wind in the reeds and the cry of the water fowl, among which he could unmistakably distinguish the sounds of the tern and the loon, and the long groaning of the bittern. He and his father were walking down the hill to the jetty. Around them there was a scent of the first hay harvest, mint and clover. Both of them were wearing their white, Sunday-best shirts, starched and ironed by his mother. Once they were aboard the flat-bottomed boat, his father took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeves, straightened his bow tie, and as he took his first swing at the oars he said: ‘Now don’t forget, this is a serious business. Music is what our souls need the most. Do you understand?’

  He didn’t entirely. But he was happy. Marta and Andrzej had stayed at home, with their mother, doing normal things. Meanwhile he and his father were cutting across a wide arm of the lake, as if united by an extraordinary secret. A large, dazzlingly white cloud hung motionless over the water, but it wasn’t obscuring the sun. It was reflected in the green water like the face of an ancient divinity.

  ‘It is the best thing a man can experience,’ said his father, plying the oars steadily. ‘Music! So far you have heard the piano at home. Or the violin, when Jonatan comes. And the radio too,’ he added after a pause, ‘but now we’re going to a real concert. I’d like you to remember it forever. This actual day.’

  On the shore, on the other side of the water, there were some men hanging about outside a wooden shed. Among them the fishermen were identifiable by their high rubber boots, which they never took off, not even in the hottest weather. They were all swarming around a small, bald fat man, who kept shouting: ‘The betting’s over! Let’s draw cards!’

  His father took a while to spot someone familiar in the crowd. Finally he called: ‘Mr Nowacki, Mr Nowacki, if you please!’

  Nowacki was wearing a baggy checked jacket, a nylon shirt, a yellow tie with blue stripes, a gold watch and an even more golden signet ring on his right hand.

  ‘Just a moment!’ he shouted back to Joachim’s father.

  But he hadn’t won anything in the deal.

  They got into a humpback Warszawa car. With a sure hand, Nowacki drove it across the hillocks and around the sandy bends.

  ‘Blimey,’ he said at last, once they had driven onto the paved highway. ‘Nothing will ever change here, not in a hundred years! The Russkies and Americans are sending up sputniks, but I tell you, gents, we’re going to be stuck in this left-over German shit for another whole century! Nothing ever gets built around here but new army barracks – there aren’t enough whores to service them all, are there?!’

  His father nodded. By now they had driven into the city. Tenements, several storeys high with balconies and loggias, flaunted their past. When the car stopped outside the theatre building, Nowacki asked: ‘So what time am I to be here?’

  ‘At ten o’clock,’ replied his father, ‘not a minute later.’

  Why had they gone by car that night with someone like Nowacki? Only now, after all these years, did it seem completely obscure to Joachim, astonishing even. After all, even if they had left the house a little later, they could have walked across the usual way, past the grave on the mound, past the copse, then the three oaks, and down the avenue of pines to reach the sandbank and the swimming hole. Tram number one left from there, and went straight through the undulating hills, fields and copses into the main street of the city, where at a junction, the theatre stood. Why had his father conjured up this Nowacki fellow? He must have arranged it with him in advance, given him a deposit and paid him. And listened to his piffle, uttered with the facial expression of the village know-all. Could the point of it have been to cross the lake twice on that day? If that was what his father had decided to do, he must have made some mental connection between music and water. But what on earth that could have involved, all these years on, he didn’t even try to untangle.

  Everything at the theatre had seemed extraordinary to Joachim at the time, as if created just for that one evening. The doormen in red, the musicians’ black-and-white costumes, the flashes of light on the brass instruments, the subtle shapes of the cellos and violas, and the tails of the conductor’s frock coat, which reminded him of a bird’s wings. Throughout the concert he was in another world: he was wandering through bright, then dark, gloomy gardens, descending terraces of stone into a strange labyrinth, soaring over a great expanse of water, seeing green islands, fishing boats, the roofs of houses and the manes of forests. As the final applause resounded, Joachim realised that he was back in the auditorium sitting next to his father, that the musicians were now leaving the stage, and that two stagehands in dark-red aprons were carrying the chairs and music stands into the wings.

  They travelled back in the car, through the almost deserted city, in silence. By the lake, no one was playing cards at the long table any more. Somewhere at one end of it, fading from sight in the gentle June darkness, loomed some boxes, a landing net and a few fyke nets. Nearer the middle, in the light of an oil lamp, a couple of faces leaned over a large bottle and some small glasses that used to be mustard pots. A few tired card players were asleep in the tall grass next to some old boats that were never launched on the water any more.

  ‘Nowacki,’ said someone from the pool of lamplight, ‘want one for the road?’

  Without a word the driver went up to the table, there was a clink of glasses, and the gurgle of a bottle being tilted.

  ‘What about you, Engineer?’ asked another voice.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Joachim’s father, gently pushing him towards the jetty. ‘We still have our Ocean to cross!’

  The boat moved slowly. There was no wind, and it was so quiet that they could hear the sound of individual drops of water falling from the oar blades into the dark mirror of the lake.

  ‘Did you like anything in particular?’ asked his father.

  Joachim didn’t answer, but just whistled the last few bars of the finale.

  ‘That’s very difficult,’ said his father, who didn’t know how to praise him. ‘A virtuoso performance – I don’t think you missed out a single note, beautiful!’

  Now they were both gazing at the sky. The stars seemed very close, within arm’s reach. His father put down the oars for a while, and pointed first at the Big, then the Little Dipper, and finally at the North Star.

  ‘The sea is over there. Not so very far from here. The people who once lived here called it the Cold Sea. They used to go there to collect amber.’

  ‘The Germans?’ asked Joachim.

  His father took up the oars again.

  ‘The Prussians.’

  ‘But who were they?’

  ‘How can I explain it? Maybe something like the Red Indians? They used to catch fish in these lakes, and hunted in the forests. They built settlements.’


  ‘Where are they to be found?’

  ‘Nowhere any more.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘They died out. Wars. Rebellions. Famine and diseases.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘The ones who survived were forced to be christened. They became Germans. Apparently several dukes from the Warmian clan escaped to Lithuania. That’s the legend.’

  ‘And what about their ghosts?’ asked Joachim.

  ‘They must be somewhere here. Maybe they’re hovering around our boat right now – aren’t you afraid?’

  Even though he could sense the irony in his father’s tone of voice, Joachim replied very solemnly: ‘I’m not afraid of ghosts!’

  As he got out of bed again to fetch ice for another glass of whisky, he thought how strange the workings of memory are.

  He couldn’t begin to fathom who that man, Nowacki, was, who owned the humpback car, yet his father must have known him somehow, and he must have frequented their house. On the other hand, every sentence they had spoken in the boat on the return journey from the Philharmonic still rang clear as he remembered that night, dozens of years on, thousands of kilometres from that spot, and with such precision, as if he had heard and uttered them only yesterday. Or maybe it was a sort of reconstruction; maybe it was just his way of imagining that conversation, which had actually gone quite differently? But that was even less likely: why should he have suddenly thought of the murdered Prussians, their ghosts hovering around the boat, or his father’s remark about the Cold Sea? Yes, they had definitely talked about exactly that, and more or less in that way, more than half a century ago, when steam engines and platform-ticket machines still reigned supreme at the railway stations. Gazing through the window, he swallowed another sip of alcohol, but this time the whisky seemed disgusting. He poured the contents of the glass into a rubber-plant pot. Along the street came an old convertible, gradually slowing down, until it finally stopped outside number four. A man and a woman got out of it. They embraced and said their farewells with long kisses, then finally she went inside the house, he got back into the car and drove off without switching on the headlights. Somewhere from another house a strident chord on an out-of-tune piano burst into a tango, but after a couple of bars it fell silent. Suddenly, as if over there, on the other side of the street, where there was no trace left of the nocturnal lovers, a gate opened into another dimension. He saw himself and his father walking over the hill past the three oaks. Behind them they had the lake, the old pine forest, and the mound with the grave on top. In a shallow dip a few dozen metres ahead of them the house was already waiting: small, brick, with two mansards above a small veranda. Separating it from the pond and the lopsided woodshed was a mighty old ash tree. In the lighted window of the living room, his mother’s shadow flashed by. At the pond they turned and sat down in the doorway of the woodshed. Tobacco smoke blended with the smell of sweet flag and wood shavings as his father lit a short pipe.