by Pawel Huelle
‘All these days we’ve been a stone’s throw from here,’ said Sabina. ‘What if someone was spying on us? How awful.’
‘No one has been in here for ages,’ he said, pointing at their own footprints in the thick layer of dust and sand from the beach. ‘Look.’
But Sabina did not want to see any more. Through an empty door frame she went out onto the porch, ran down to the meadow and back to the tent. It was only the crash of rotten floorboards that stopped her in her tracks. As he was coming down from the porch, he had fallen almost up to his neck into something that must once have been a small cellar. He had ripped his trousers, banged his knee and grazed his elbows. But as he scrambled out of the hole, he felt a sort of package under his feet, in a niche in the brick foundation wall. Soon he had extracted a metal box, wrapped in a long-decayed piece of cloth.
‘Leave it,’ she asked. ‘It looks like a doll’s coffin. Are you that curious? Do you know how many microbes there are on those rags?’
‘More like a booby trap,’ he joked, separating the fabric from the tin lid with a knife. ‘Adek’s farewell kiss.’
‘Adek?’ she asked uncertainly.
He used two fingers to give himself a toothbrush moustache, and they both laughed.
A day later, on the return journey, as they were riding along the canals, weirs and state-farm stubble fields again, it was the only thing they could talk about.
Why had someone taken so much trouble to hide a badly scorched Bible? From the Russians? To whom did it belong? Was Harmensoon the owner of this copy, for that was the name – unless it was a surname – written in fine calligraphic script which they had read on a yellowed slip of paper placed among the pages of the Book of Daniel? Printed in Königsberg in the year of Our Lord 1794 - it must have had previous owners. Why had it been hidden under the steps? As they were waiting for the ferry across the Vistula, he explained to Sabina that this Harmensoon could not be a pastor if he belonged to one of the local chapels.
‘They did not recognise the clergy,’ he added, as the steel platform cut across the slow current of the river, ‘and elected their own chiefs.’
She said he should write something about it. A love story. So that the half-charred Bible had some direct connection with it. And also that he should describe the road down to the sea they liked so much. He shrugged his shoulders at the idea. He had no intention of writing anything. But he decided to keep the Book for ever. Just like the August light and the scent of her hair, it belonged to that summer.
III
During the night his sleep was interrupted several times by the thudding of the disco. The oomph – oomph – oomph of the bass line literally made the walls of the boarding house shake as it boomed away among the pine trees like a series of explosions. Now and then a car alarm went off. Then the upper floor came alive too. He could hear doors slamming, people running about the corridors and calling each other, loud laughter, and the shatter of breaking glass. Eventually he took two strong pills and sank into a heavy, ridiculous mist of abruptly ending dialogues, alien faces and unfamiliar places. He woke up late, before eleven. He ate breakfast in the tidied-up, rather empty dining hall. Yesterday’s decorations were lying in a heap in the corner: with the air let out, the plastic toys looked even worse than the day before. The tired waiter had not had time to ventilate the restaurant properly; the stale air smelled of alcohol, sweat, incense and marijuana, clearly smoked quite intensively. If he had been here with Sabina, he’d have felt awful. At the reception desk he announced that he was leaving and paid his bill. He threw his bag in the boot of the car, took his camera and set off on foot to the sea. But what was he going to photograph? The boarding house stood on the site of the abandoned house, and was not interesting in itself. The meadow where they had pitched the tent that time had disappeared under the car park, a site for a barbecue and a concrete sports area. Along the access road from the village the old trees had been cut down and, on the tiny, shredded allotments, the building blocks of summer cottages had been erected. The path he had followed yesterday and twenty-five years ago looked no better in the harsh sunlight. The benches and lamps placed at the head of it had been vandalised. There were mountains of litter pouring out of the rubbish bin, and a swarm of wasps was buzzing around the remains of fruit and empty juice bottles. Completely trodden away in the middle, the moss only grew on the sides of the dunes now. In its place, to prevent the rainwater from washing away the sand, slabs of concrete had been set in here and there, just like the ones at the parade ground he remembered from military training.
The way down to the beach brought him an even bigger surprise. Yesterday’s company from the Stokrotka, perhaps in its entirety, was gathered around the pastor, gearing up to make a home movie. The sight of so many naked men – hugging their own bodies, flexing their muscles or just as willingly revealing their sagging bellies, private parts and buttocks – among whom the director was diving about with a camera, was rather a shock for the other beachgoers. Dressed in bathing costumes or swimming trunks, they were bypassing the large semicircle of nudists as quickly as they could, most of them with eyes averted. He did not take any photos. He walked almost a kilometre along the shore to the next way down to the beach and went back up it, through the woods to the road, then along the road to the boarding house car park.
Behind the wheel, as he passed one holiday home after another, he thought about Sabina again. After her first year of studies she had gone to spend the vacation with her family in Chicago and stayed there. It wasn’t even a break-up: they hadn’t had any serious conversations, or exchanged any letters. He hadn’t suffered because of her. But when he and his first wife had separated after several years of marriage, he had come upon that Bible while packing up his things, and had felt a stab of pain in his heart, perhaps for the first time in his life grasping the meaning of the word ‘irrevocable’. Now he felt deep sorrow, with weariness stacked on top: he was tired of himself, of life, and of this entirely unnecessary outing to a place that didn’t actually exist any more. At the ferry the queue of cars was so long that he turned around and drove about twelve kilometres up river to the bridge. Half way across it, despite the sign forbidding it, he stopped the car, got out and opened the boot. He took the Mennonite Bible out of his travelling bag, threw it into the water and watched it change into a smaller and smaller, almost invisible dot. The drivers who were forced to go around his car hooted their horns furiously.
At home he did not open the computer until after supper. Sabina had written to inform him of her daughter’s death. Now that she would have to take care of her grandsons, she could not even dream of coming. ‘I hope,’ she wrote, ‘at least you are able to be happy. Apparently only two or three moments in life determine that, the ones that give light. The rest is meaningless.’ He closed his mailbox. He didn’t like such categorical statements. Before sleep Joanna asked him why he had come back from the school reunion early. After a short silence he replied that a gay rally was being held at the boarding house and a row had erupted over the reservation, as a result of which they had decided to cut their stay short. As he was falling asleep, he thought he could see Pastor van der Ecke finding some soggy pages of the Bible on the seashore, putting on his glasses, reading a few verses in the language of his forefathers and bursting into loud, ever louder laughter, which neither the wind nor the roar of the sea could stifle.
Afterword: An Interview with Paweł Huelle by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
ALJ: Although each one is independent, the Cold Sea Stories have some common themes and a shared atmosphere. What inspired you to write them, and how intentional are the echoes that resound through the collection?
PH: I wrote them around the age of fifty, in the realisation that I am a man of the Baltic – all the stories are set in my own native region, Gdańsk and the surrounding coast, except for ‘Öland’ which is set on a Swedish island, but still in the Baltic Sea. And that means I belong to the culture of the north, which is sad, melancholy,
nostalgic, bleak; there is not much light – hence several of my characters search for the light, and ultimately disappear into it. This is the culture of herrings, potatoes and vodka, not wine, and this is the place that has shaped me, like it or not.
This collection of stories is a sort of synthesis of my life here, and they feature some of my obsessions, such as the cyclical nature of time, and where life starts and ends. And the significance of great books as an authority in human life, from religious books including the Bible – which has such meaning for the Mennonites in ‘Mimesis’; mystical, ideal books that may never actually have existed – such as the Book of Light brought by the mysterious stranger in ‘Öland’; or the toy shop catalogue that was so immensely significant for the hero of ‘Franz Carl Weber’ in his childhood.
ALJ: ‘Mimesis’ is an example of how stories fill a gap in the history of your region. Who exactly were the Mennonites?
PH: They were a religious minority who were forced to escape the Netherlands when the Spanish Catholics persecuted them in the sixteenth century. They came to Poland because it was a very tolerant country in the days of King Sigismund August Jagiełło, who gave them land on the Vistula delta. Many of them also settled in Russia, but left after 1917 when their farms were expropriated by the communists, and then moved to Poland - in the story, the elder Harmensoon mentions the Russian villages they have been forced to leave. They were very good entrepreneurs, and also experts at reclaiming the land from the sea, creating polders and so on. Not all the Dutch who came to this area were Mennonites, but many of them were. When fanatical Catholics asked the king why he tolerated advocates of other religions, he said: ‘I cannot and will not be the king of your consciences.’
Mennonite culture was destroyed by the Germans in the Second World War and finished off by the communists. According to their faith, the Mennonites were not allowed to make oaths to anyone, so the orthodox ones who were pacifists and refused to join any army were sent to labour camps and murdered. Some of them did join the army as medical auxiliaries. In the communist era the only survivors went west with the Germans who left what is now western Poland. Since first reading about the Mennonites, and since seeing the film Witness, which is about the Amish people in America, whose origins are the same – I have wondered how these people’s way of life was possible. Could you really live outside the mainstream of society, and create a utopian, noble existence? It can’t really work, but its history is interesting, and it is inspiring to me that they lived near here. They are People of the Book, like Orthodox Jews or Muslims.
There are several villages that they left behind, some entirely abandoned. It is a dramatic sight to walk along a village street where there are as many as twenty houses that have been empty for more than fifty years. You hear ghosts there, voices from the past, and that was my inspiration for the story.
ALJ: How much of your own biography is concealed in the stories? I know that as a student you were involved with Solidarity, but to what extent is ‘The Bicycle Express’ autobiographical?
PH: ‘The Bicycle Express’ is almost entirely autobiographical. It describes my part in the revolution of 1980, when there was a general strike. I really did have a heavy, ‘armoured’ Ukraina bicycle, made in the Soviet Union. There was no public transport, so bikes were selling like hot cakes, and I got the last one in the shop. Then for two weeks I rode around with my friend Andrzej, who had a racing bike, delivering anti-communist Solidarity leaflets. We would collect them from the shipyard gates each evening - more than ten thousand leaflets - and then tour all the factories in the entire Tri-City of Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot, distributing them.
August 1980 was the first Polish rebellion against the communist regime, when Solidarity came into being. The atmosphere was euphoric, because it was the beginning of the end of communism. That summer was my first experience of revolutionary activity; I was only about twenty, and it was a fabulous feeling that I remember well. The clamp down came in December 1981, when martial law was imposed, and was followed by the dismal 1980s. But nothing could ever be the same again.
Although I have changed Lucjan’s real name, his story is true too. He was my father’s cousin, who came back from the Gulag in 1957, when everyone thought he had died at Katyń(where the Soviets massacred tens of thousands of Polish officers and intelligentsia) after being arrested by the Soviets in Wilno (then in Poland, but now Vilnius, in Lithuania) in 1939. It’s true that on his return he saw me as a baby, and was pleased to find that in spite of what had happened to him, life in Poland was carrying on. He was never willing to tell us any of the details of his fate in the Soviet Gulag, but he spent eighteen years in Magadan and other Siberian prison camps. Before the war he had worked as a translator for the Ministry of Affairs – he was a genius who knew eighteen languages perfectly. But the only way to survive the forced labour, felling trees in the Siberian forest on an inadequate diet, was to drink spirits, and it turned him into an alcoholic. After he came back he went blind, and read books in Braille. He was extremely erudite, a great and sensitive person.
ALJ: Is the story of the burning pirate ship in ‘Depka and Rzepka’ your invention, or is that a real legend?
PH: I first heard that story from my father when I was about five years old. My father was a ship mechanic, and he really did repair small fishing boats – he heard it from the locals, so it does come from traditional Kashubian folklore. I’m fascinated by the Kashubians – they are the people who have always lived in this part of the world, throughout history, regardless of which other nations took control of it or fought over it. The Poles, Germans, Russians, Dutch and French have all had an influence on Gdańsk and the region, and as the Free City of Danzig it was an international place, but through all these historical eras the ethnic locals have always been the Kashubians.
Bishop Sedenza is a real historical character, and the story of his captivity is recorded in the mediaeval chronicles. Of course there really were pirates on these waters too. The Hel peninsula is the long spit of land that sticks out into the Bay of Gdańsk, a place where ships were often wrecked on the sandbanks. And it’s also true that I was sent to the fishing village of Hel to buy fish for Christmas (the Polish traditional meal is carp, or at least fish of some kind). There was often nothing to buy in the shops, so you had to go and get it from the fishermen.
ALJ: ‘Öland’ is an unusual story for you, because although it is set on the Baltic, it happens on an island off the Swedish coast, not anywhere in northern Poland.
PH: I spent three weeks on the island of Öland, and I found the landscape mystical. At the very centre of the island you can hear the roar of the sea coming from every direction. It’s quite empty, with no people, and there are some mysterious stone circles, tall grass, and the wind. But no woods or trees. There I listened to the wind, the grass and the sea roaring – there were no other sounds. I wanted to write a story connected to an apocryphal legend about the Three Kings, which says that after their journey to Bethlehem two of them went home peacefully, but the third one wandered for centuries, unable to find his way back.
ALJ: ‘Doctor Cheng’ seems the most mystical story of all – why the Chinese theme, and why did you feature the 9/11 tragedy here?
PH: The 9/11 disaster stands as a caesura that divides our era in two. Meanwhile, the hero is searching for the ghost of his dead wife, whose death marks the division in his life.
The Chinese house in the Wrzeszcz district of Gdańsk is based on a real house, on Szymanowski Street, built in the Secession era and stylised to look Chinese. The I-Ching, the Chinese fortune-telling book, is seen by some to have a bad influence on Chinese culture, as the prophecies it contains are considered fatalistic. The book the man remembers receiving as a Christmas present in childhood is the Polish classic children’s novel, Mr Inkblot’s Academy by Jan Brzechwa, in which one of the characters is a magical Chinese doctor called Pai Chi Wo.
ALJ: ‘The Fifteen Glasses of Gendarme Polanke’ has a different at
mosphere from the other stories, is set in the early twentieth-century and is the only story not to feature a large and important book, be it a Bible or a toyshop catalogue. Why is it so different?
PH: I originally wrote it twenty years ago as the start of a novel about Kashubia, which I never finished. As a child I was taken on holiday to a Kashubian village, where there was no electricity – it was like in the nineteenth century, people still used oil lamps and candles, and were self-sufficient, making their own bread, butter and sausages. They went to the city by horse for three things only – salt, oil for their lamps, and nails. They made everything else themselves. There was no radio, and no TV, and in the evenings people drank weak beer and told incredible stories for hours on end. It was wonderful for me as a child, I have a mythical memory of it, and I still dream about it. Kashubia has changed now, but the people there still speak their own language, Kashubian – I have a passive knowledge of it.
I might still write that novel one day, so I won’t say what it is about, but the woman who is rescued has a very big secret. Polaske is the universal policeman who represents all historical regimes in this part of the world. In this story he is a Kashubian policeman before Polish independence, before 1918. Then in the inter-war period, when Poland was a republic again, he becomes Polański, a Polish policeman. During the Second World War and the Nazi occupation he is Polaske, a German, Nazi policeman. Then after the war, in communist People’s Poland he is called Polski, and he’s a Polish communist policeman.
