Paweł Huelle

COLD SEA STORIES

Mimesis

I

SHE LOVED THIS road. The moss that covered the dunes was as soft as a carpet. Pine trees shot skywards on either side, and tall grass whispered in between them. Whenever the sun was hot for more than a few days, there was a strong scent of juniper in this spot, as heavy as pitch. Large and small bushes of it, some with fantastically twisted manes, grew everywhere here, like elves suspended in motion. Entirely different from over there, by the river, where the path kept sinking into a peat bog or muddy clay, and swarms of mosquitoes rose from the alder and osier leaves. And although it was much further to the sea across the dunes, year after year she took this route. Sometimes she came upon a roe deer. Then she would stop for a while, until the animal turned its moist eyes on her, and quickly vanished into the forest. Whereas the wild rabbits and squirrels entirely ignored her, as if they had never known any harm from man. She never ran into Willman here either. Not like by the river, where he used to graze his cattle. There he would bar her way on the narrow path and always recite the same silly little poem:

Springtime, winter, autumn, summer…

How’s the lassie going to answer?

Then he would produce a pine cone, a pebble or a wilted flower from the pocket of his patched-up trousers, and shove his gift under her nose on an outstretched palm. She had to smile at him, take the present and nod, which meant: ‘Oh, what a lovely day it is, Mr Willman’, and then he would let her pass, so close to him that she could smell the odour of his sweat and his nasty, sour breath. One time he handed her a little mole. The creature was dead. Horrified, she had run off through a hazel copse, all the way to the marshes.

But she wasn’t thinking about Willman now. The forest ended at the edge of the shifting dunes, and from behind the rise she could hear the monotonous roar. This sound always made her feel happy: she quickened her pace, and from the top of the dune, where she could see the sea, she let herself race downwards. Once on the beach, where the waves were licking her feet, she took off her sandals and then, with a quick, decisive movement, her grey dress. Although the water was still cool, she swam for a long time – to the sandbank and back again, as ever.

By the time she emerged onto the shore, the sun was quite high in the sky. In a few minutes her long, loose hair was dry. With her gaze fixed on the horizon, she sat still on the sand. Far away, above the mouth of the river, cormorants were circling. The summer was beginning. But just as last year, not a single boat had sailed out to sea. Nor had a single plough appeared that spring on the polder between the canals. And yet she felt safe here. She had never found any trace of a human presence on the beach. And it was a long time since any horse and cart had come down the road to the village.

Maybe that was why the noise she heard behind her frightened her so much? There was a distinct sound of sand grains crunching, coming ever nearer. She stood up, and turning round abruptly, she caught sight of his tall figure. Only a little later, when he stopped a few paces in front of her, did she remember to shield her breasts. When she screamed, he smiled, pointed at her dress and covered his face with both hands, while muttering a strange, incomprehensible sentence. She ran along the shore, splashing her feet in the water. She was out of breath. She fell onto the cold, wet sand. The stranger was approaching, holding her sandals. She wanted to run away again, and leaped to her feet, but just then he blocked her way and said something that she partly understood: if she didn’t help him, death would finally find him here or somewhere else; it would catch up with him and take him to a dreadful place.

His speech was not like the language of the people from the city. He had a foreign accent, he twisted words, and some of the phrases he used were totally impossible for her to understand. But he no longer inspired fear in her. She made signs to show him that she had been deprived of the gift of speech. She told him to follow her at a safe distance. Not once did she look round behind her. Only next to the van Dorns’ house, which was at the edge of the village, right at the foot of the dunes and the cemetery, did she stop for a moment to check he hadn’t lost her. He was standing hidden behind a pine trunk, afraid to come out onto the road. She turned and showed him that all the houses were empty, even the one next to the chapel, where Willman had spent the winter. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t understand this. He cried that she should give him away at once, for he had no more strength to go on running, and preferred to die here, under the tree, than in the middle of the village, reviled and set upon by dogs. She wasn’t able to explain to him that there weren’t any dogs here any more. And that as long as no lorries appeared, they were safe.

He sat down, leaning against the pine trunk. He had a beautiful, dusky face. She saw tears rolling down his cheeks from under his closed eyelids. His lips kept on whispering the same sentence, in the language that was nothing like the speech of the people from the city. It was strangely soft and sibilant, and inspired trust. She guessed it was a prayer. When he opened his eyes, she made signs to tell him to wait for her patiently. He followed her small, rapid footsteps, but didn’t even get up from the grass. He watched her disappear around the bend, sending up small white clouds of dust on the sandy road.

A chevron of cranes cut across the pure blue sky. Far above the meadows, a hawk was calling. No one appeared on the bend or in the yard of the nearest house. But once the sun had started to vanish behind the dunes he saw her, coming back towards him. In the first instant he didn’t recognise her: she was wearing a long, plain dress, her hair was tied back and covered with a linen cap, and on her feet instead of sandals she had some funny, high-laced boots.

First she laid a small white tablecloth on the grass. Then she took some fritters from her basket, a smoked fish and a bottle of juice. As he ate, ravenously and clumsily, without paying her the least bit of attention, she furtively watched him. He collected every crumb, even off the ground, and sucked them all up. Then he drank. Finally he said something about a hen: it was flying with blood-stained feathers, high, higher and higher. She showed on her fingers that she only had three hens, and that she wouldn’t kill any of them, because in winter there wouldn’t be any fish, or even fritters.

But no, that wasn’t what he meant. Somewhere in the neighbourhood he had crept up to a fisherman’s cottage and hunted down a hen. But he’d been afraid to light a fire, and the raw meat he had eaten had poisoned his stomach. He had lain in a hollow, covered by fern leaves. At dawn, probably on the third day, he had heard the distinct roar of the sea. He didn’t want to die in a pit stinking of excrement, bitten by flies and spiders. He had set off across the moss, soft as a carpet, all the way to the last dune, and there, from the top, he had seen her, just as she was emerging from the water.

The talking exhausted him. He leaned back against the pine trunk again and stared ahead of him, at an indeterminate point. She put the tablecloth and the bottle into the basket again. ‘Follow me,’ she indicated.

But he was afraid the people whose hen he had stolen were sure to recognise him as the thief. She tried to explain to him that the fisherman’s cottage was far away, not in this village. And it looked completely unlike their houses here, built using the axes of the Lord’s carpenter, according to the rules in the Book. But how was she to convince him? He didn’t even glance at the drawing she sketched with a stick in the sand.

Sated and distracted, heaven knows what he was thinking about. She threw a pine cone at him. Then he looked at her with eyes dark as coals, which soon, following the way she was pointing, turned towards the orange sphere of the sun. He understood that gesture. Tomorrow, when the sun rose on the far side of the forest, she would come here again, alone.

After the warm day, the air was settling in invisible layers. Low down, just above the ground, it drew in the cold and the damp. Higher up, a warmer breath of wind was distilling the essences of herbs and grass. Above all hovered the resinous scent of pines, carried from the sea on the evening breeze. By the van Dorns’ house, over which the storks were circling their nest, she felt a touch of anxiety. She thought she had seen the stranger’s face before, in the city. Could she be mistaken? And hadn’t Harmensoon been right, when, in his fiery sermons preceding the breaking of bread, he had spoken of corruption, sin and death, which always came from the cities? Just like the lorries, and the people who carried guns.

II

There hadn’t been any candles left for ages. And the stocks of oil she had collected from the houses had to be kept for winter. Meanwhile, although darkness had fallen, the appropriate number of verses had to be read aloud. Otherwise the day would not have its blessing, and as such would come to nothing. In fact it would only be a minor sin, but it was characteristic of sins that once committed, they liked to repeat themselves. If only her father were standing beside her, they wouldn’t have had to light the lamp. He knew the Book almost by heart and could recite the prophets from any point at random. But where was he now? Carefully she lit the wick and read a passage from Isaiah, the one about hidden treasures and secret hiding places. Then, to avoid wasting oil, she snuffed out the lamp and went to bed. But sleep refused to come, even though the day had been ended as it should. An owl was hooting at the Helkes’ house. A mouse was scratching in the wardrobe. A light gust of wind came flying in from the sea and set the branches in the orchard swaying.

On that day, four years ago, her father had woken her early, before sunrise. They had boarded the van Dorns’ boat, where they sat between barrels of butter and boxes of woven cloth. The journey had taken a long time: first along a canal, then down a river, until at last they had sailed out onto the sea. She remembered the large, grey sail, which tautened in the wind; she remembered the salty taste on her lips and the strange, dark-red colour of the bricks that everything in the city seemed to be made of: houses, warehouses, granaries and churches. The boat was moored at the quay, and Mr van Dorn was to spend the night on it, while she, her father and Rachela went to the house of a woman related to Harmensoon, who received them hospitably. She and Rachela had slept in one room. Next morning her father had taken them to a market, where she had found everything amazing: an electric tram came speeding along the street, there were automobiles hooting like mad, and the people didn’t walk, but ran in all directions, as if they hadn’t any time. At the quay, where dozens of other boats had appeared by now, van Dorn and her father had been busy selling their goods. She and Rachela could wander off a short way, but they weren’t allowed to talk to anyone – man or woman. She remembered that moment well: by a stall, where an old Kashubian woman was touting flounders, someone had touched her arm, and suddenly she heard a warm, familiar voice: ‘Is it you?’

‘My God, is that how my sister looks now?’ She was shocked. What would she tell her father? And what if Rachela had seen them?

But Rachela had vanished into the crowd, her father was helping van Dorn, and her sister, her older sister Hanna, was leading her by the arm, showering her with questions, every few moments kissing her on the cheek and hugging her. She didn’t even look back as they entered a narrow, cobbled alleyway, with horse-drawn carts rumbling along it. Then at some point the sisters had turned into a courtyard and, behind a chestnut tree, next to a cast-iron pump, they had gone through a gate, and up a staircase creaking with age, to the first floor.

Once in the flat, she had told Hanna about their father’s anger and distress: summoned by Harmensoon, he had stood in the middle of the chapel, and for everyone to hear him, had repeated after the elder the words of expulsion. The women in the gallery had covered their faces, the men had tugged at their hat rims, and then such total silence had fallen that you could hear the wax dripping onto the floor and the moths circling close to the ceiling. It was dreadful. After the service her father hadn’t slept all night, and in the morning, at breakfast, he had said: ‘I only have one daughter now.’

No one was even allowed to mention Hanna; thoroughly dishonoured, her name had to be forgotten in all the churches, for ever and ever. But she often thought about her. Why had she run away to the city? Was she so very unhappy with them? Was it true that the man with whom she was living in sin was the devil incarnate, like all Lutherans and Catholics? Wasn’t she afraid of the day when the Lord would come? For what she had done He might not resurrect her body, and her soul – damned for centuries – would wander in darkness and never know peace.

But Hanna wasn’t afraid of anything, least of all Harmensoon’s curses. She said how very happy she was here, where there were so many interesting things going on. Ludwig took her to the cinema, to dances and on outings, and the sin they spoke of was pure lies: she had adopted his faith, let herself be christened and they had been married in church. According to common sense, God was not a Mennonite, a Catholic, a Lutheran, a Methodist or an Orthodox tsar. According to common sense, the rubbish the elders taught in the chapel was nothing but fear of the world, which was changing, which was miraculously racing like mad into an unknown future.

She should have blocked her ears or run out into the street, she should have warned her sister what dangerous things she was saying, but she hadn’t done that. Hanna looked beautiful, and even the colour on her lips couldn’t change that. And at the same time she could be so loving and so funny. She seated her at the mirror, sat down beside her, took off her cap and let her try on some hats. Then they went out to the city, visited shops, travelled by tram, and in the small garden of a café right by the sea, where the men and women were dressed in white, they drank lemonade.

‘Is it a sinful life,’ said Hanna, smiling at her sister, ‘to do what gives you pleasure? You should try it too! You people are still living in the Middle Ages there!’

Luckily, it hadn’t gone further than words. She hadn’t let herself be talked into going to the cinema. She hadn’t glanced at a single man. And when they went home and Ludwig appeared, she had greeted him as custom demanded: with her head bowed low and her gaze dropped. If her father had seen her at that moment, maybe things would have turned out differently? Maybe his anger wouldn’t have been quite so great? But her father had arrived much later on, when the gramophone was playing tangos and foxtrots, when Ludwig and Hanna were whirling around the room, and there was an odour of cigars and Rhenish wine in the air.

‘These people have taken away my daughter,’ he said to the policeman. ‘Please start official proceedings!’

The policeman was distressed. He stood in the doorway, turning his peaked cap in his hands, and clearly didn’t want to step into the blind alley of domestic affairs.

‘Is anyone detaining her?’ said Ludwig, drawing up a chair for her father. ‘It’s just a visit to her sister, isn’t it?’

But her brother-in-law’s question hung in the air like an unnecessary flourish, and so it had remained in her memory for ever after, as had the image of the chair, sitting in the middle of the room and filling that long moment of silence with a sense of patent and utter redundancy.

The van Dorns’ boat had sailed long ago, and so they had walked to the Vistula Station, down a street that crossed a drawbridge. If only her father had tried to say – without avoiding words of anger – how very upset he was. But he had remained silent throughout the entire journey, and even when they had sat down in an empty carriage on the last train, which trailed across fields flat as a tabletop in the darkness, occasionally jumping a weir or a canal via a narrow little bridge, even when they were sitting so close to each other, staring into the gloom that stretched beyond the window of the puffing, narrow-gauge railway train, not a single word was said. She remembered the lamp swaying on the last carriage as it moved away from the empty little station. And the long sandy road they had walked for several kilometres to reach home.

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 page; 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 as 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.

‘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 before 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.’

In short, matter-of-fact sentences she told him about Hanna and Ludwig. She had seen her brother-in-law that day, by the officer’s car. She had seen him fire a shot straight into Harmensoon’s temple. A couple of months later, when she saw the old man in the chapel, with the same, open wound, with the same blood-caked lock of grey hair, she was sure she had lost her mind, but Willman, whom she had quickly fetched, had seen the same thing. Harmensoon was looking for something in the books, but failing to find it, he had flown into a rage and screamed, ‘A mistake has been made!’ then vanished, only to appear in the chapel again a fortnight later, light another candle and throw the books to the floor again. She was afraid that one day he would appear in her house, so she had begged Willman to do it – yes, he had finally gone to the cemetery to dig up the grave, but there was nothing wrong: there lay the coffin, undisturbed, and there was the puffy, already decomposing corpse, the same one they had laid there together the day after the lorries drove away, so they couldn’t understand why he kept returning, what he was searching for in the books, or what ‘mistake’ he was on about. But later, with cruel clarity she had realised: what Harmensoon – or rather the thing that appeared in the shape of Harmensoon – meant was sin: common human sin, which could never be eradicated, not even in places like this one, not even with laws such as they had had here for centuries, and if that were the case, then the whole world was steeped in it, there was no hope left, and what it said in the Book about the coming of the Lord, heralded by signs and oppression, might simply never happen, for how could it occur, how was it meant to come about, if the unjust could no longer be distinguished from the just?

He listened to all this with bated breath. The rage that flashed in her every word poured not just onto her or him, but onto the entire world as well.

‘In a couple of weeks,’ he said, ‘when the Russians drive away the Germans, we can get out of here, if you want to.’

‘Where will we go?’ she asked. ‘Is there a place for us?’

‘The world is enormous,’ he replied. ‘Bigger than we think.’

A few days later they were woken at night by a deep, incessant boom. The ice was cracking on the river. And further off, beyond the dunes and the crests of the forest, heavy artillery was grumbling on the plain. That morning, with the rain came the thaw. The snow was damp and stuck to Jakub’s boots in heavy wedges that immediately matted together into frozen clumps. Every few steps he stopped to prise it off his boot soles with a pointed stick. Each time he did, his bundle fell onto the wet snow, and he muttered a curse, picked it up, threw it on his back again and continued on his way. And every time it happened he looked behind him, as if he couldn’t really believe that his requests, pleas and arguments were just the sound of empty words to her. As if he still had a hope that she would change her mind, and that he would suddenly see her on the road, wading through the dreadfully slippery slush and heading after him.

But the road was deserted. Around the bend, when the familiar roofs of the houses and the rectangular block of the chapel disappeared from view, Jakub stopped to empty his bladder.

The golden stream carved deep grooves in the snow and melted the ice, until finally it broke through to the earth in a small corridor, at the bottom of which lay one of last year’s grey pine cones.

One final time he looked behind him, now regretting the forceful, impulsive words he had spoken in parting. Perhaps he was free to say: ‘And why do you talk such nonsense? No Messiah, neither yours nor mine, is ever going to appear!’ But did he have to add at once in a harsh, sneering tone: ‘We can only save ourselves – can’t you understand that?’ Now this remark was weighing him down like unnecessary baggage that he had to keep lugging around with him, like a stone put into his bundle. At last, when the dusk had laid long, purple shadows on the dingy grey snow, Jakub reached the spot where the road emerged from the forest.

The narrow-gauge railway line was buried in snow, and on the platform – where, apart from a signboard with an illegible name, there was a wooden hut – lay a dead horse. Someone had cut a few long strips of meat from the corpse, and the rest must have been torn at by the hungry dogs of passing refugees, for several days at least. Along the tracks, which he followed onwards, he came across various abandoned items: a coffee mill, an army knapsack, a child’s sledge, a chamber pot, a travel rug full of holes, and then, as he passed deserted or burned-down houses, he found some abandoned bodies. Some in uniforms, others in civilian clothes; they stared at Jakub in amazement, as if asking him if he were really the victor. The living did not have this boldness: too horrified by their own catastrophe, silent, meek and obsequious, they dropped their gaze and answered in monosyllables.

Only two days later, once in the suburbs, did Jakub run into a Russian patrol. When instead of documents he showed the number tattooed on his arm, the officer gave orders to let him through. The city reeked of burning, a corpse-like odour, early spring, the grease of armoured cars, wet dog fur, plunder, field-hospital carbolic, cheap tobacco, dust, blood, rape and hooch, and something indeterminate as well, something mysterious that Jakub only recognised and was able to name a while later, as he revolved like a beetle, wandering the chasms of burned-out streets. It was the very fine dust of Gothic bricks. Rising above the ruins of port warehouses, churches and tenements, it drilled into his nose and crept under his clothing; when he sat down on the melting snow it got into his hair too, tingeing it with the red glow of still smouldering embers.

For a couple of hours Jakub roamed the gloomy labyrinth. It looked as if the address he had memorised was out of date, something that belonged to a different city. Finally he found the alley: two surviving houses amid the rubble. In the courtyard, behind the chestnut tree next to the cast-iron pump, he turned through the gate and went up the staircase that creaked with age, to the first floor. A smell of overcooked turnips floated from the cellars to the roof, and in the blink of an eye, from somewhere in the deepest recesses of his memory, the dull but unique flavour of prison-camp soup came back to him. He knocked bashfully, but heard no response at all from inside the flat.

Sure he wouldn’t find anyone here, he took the letter from his pocket. The envelope was fat, but the slot with a flap and a sign saying Briefe was not that wide at all. As he was struggling with it, he was surprised to feel that someone’s hands – on the other side of the door – were helping him. Once the parcel had disappeared through the slot, Jakub knocked again. A chain grated, the door opened a fraction, and he saw Hanna. He had imagined the older sister quite differently. They were similar, of course, but if physical features had relevance here, it was secondary. Once she had reluctantly shown him into the living room, he closely watched her hand movements, the tilt of her head, and the look in her eyes as she read.

‘So you were there for all that time?’ she said, looking up from the page.

He started to regret not having read the letter. What did she mean by ‘there’? Without speaking, he shrugged his shoulders flippantly. But for now she didn’t ask any more questions. The sentences in her monologue, long and not very clear, in which the distant past was mixed with the events of recent days, were as tiresome as the March dusk, which was just falling outside. What did he care about the death of Ludwig, a couple of months ago, on the heroic front? Or her fears about what she would do when the Russians handed this city over to the Poles? Her concerns about her younger sister did not sound very sincere. Nor did the comments she threw in here and there about the atrocities of war, which she must have been making on his account. He wanted to leave now, but at that she took offence: wasn’t her sister’s request sacred to her? Besides, it was the curfew now and the Russians shot without warning.

‘There’s a room here that’s perfect for you,’ she said. ‘Can you speak Polish at all?’

He nodded, which could have meant: ‘Yes, very well,’ but instead of confirming the gesture verbally, he asked if her sister had said anything in her letter about Ludwig.

‘About Ludwig?’ she asked in surprise. ‘Why should she? She writes about you, almost the entire letter, didn’t she tell you?’

He was embarrassed. Especially when Hanna cast her eye over her sister’s screed again and asked him: ‘Do you love her? Did it come to intimacy between you?’

And when he said nothing, at once she added: ‘Don’t be offended, I’m modern, and it’s best to be straight about things like that, isn’t it? Do you think they’ll return from resettlement? She tells me she’s going to wait until autumn, and then she’ll come here, to the city, and she hopes to meet up with you. It’s lovely that you’ve made an arrangement – am I to understand she’s all alone there now? Yes, she always was brave. You probably don’t know this, but when my people excommunicated me, she was the only one who came to see me. My God, it all seemed so simple then. But now?’

Over supper Jakub told Hanna he wanted to go abroad. Maybe in a few months’ time there’d be liners setting sail from here? And if not, he was still determined to travel, even via Germany. He had an uncle in America; he would find him, and over there, on the other side of the Atlantic, he would start a new life. Because here, on the old continent, someone would always be wanting to excommunicate someone else, capture cities and burn down houses.

Hanna was watching Jakub with discreet curiosity. Whenever he grew excited and spoke a little faster, sparks flashed in his eyes. It took her a while to notice the astonishing similarity: Jakub’s face, and the face in the holy picture given her by the parish priest, were literally identical. Just as if her guest had posed for the unknown artist. Of course it was impossible, but it made her feel the oddness of the situation all the more. Jakub caught the glance with which was she unknowingly steering his gaze towards the wall. Between a wedding photograph and a picture of Ludwig, A Holy Baptism Souvenir was hanging in a golden frame. Jesus had his hand raised, and his transfigured body was shining with the glow of an unearthly light.

‘Now I understand why you keep looking at me like that,’ said Jakub, laughing.

She didn’t answer, so at once he added: ‘I never saw any icons there in the chapel, or in the houses.’

‘They regard them as a sin,’ she said, sighing. ‘Anyway, to them everything is sinful and immoral. They say they are emulating God. But can man even attempt such a thing? They’re aiming too high! Their life is a torment, because when they don’t succeed, they are cruel – please believe me, I’ve been on the receiving end of it.’

He nodded, with understanding rather than sympathy. Later, as he lay in bed, he couldn’t fall asleep for ages. Now and then he heard a stray shot outside, soldiers calling, and the clatter of boots. On the wall above the bed a clock was ticking, and from the next room came Hanna’s gentle snoring. He longed for the roar of the sea, the dazzling whiteness of the dunes, and the scent of pine trees and juniper. He remembered that summer evening, when she had led him to the shed where the shipwrecks’ belongings lay untouched: an hour-glass with Greek lettering, a Swedish sextant, a Russian jeweller’s scale, an unknown sailor’s shoe, a bale of silk, a decimated whisky box, some French port, a silk shirt of unknown origin, and finally some candlesticks, cutlery and plates, two canvases by Dutch masters and the Belgian captain’s chest, in which he saw pistols, a handful of silver coins, some decaying maps and a violin, of Italian make, as it would soon turn out. Later she had explained to him that a hundred or more years ago, when the reign of the Polish kings had ended, they had stopped handing in the things they found to the officials. They were to wait here for their owners, until the Day of Judgement – so it had been decreed in the chapel.

He remembered that autumn day, on the verge of October perhaps, when he had walked the length of the beach alone after a storm. Among the mussels, seaweed and amber he had found a shackle. It was not rusty, and he recognised it instantly: he and Willman must have forged it before completing the rigging. There was a piece of ragged rope protruding from the shackle like a fluffed-up tail. He shook the sand off his find, took a swing and hurled it far into the sea.

Now the constant roar of the waves had lulled him to sleep. He dreamed he was on his way home. The moss coating the dunes was as soft as a carpet. On either side pine trees soared into the sky, with tall grass whispering in between them. She was waiting for him at the edge of the road, wearing her Sunday-best black dress with the little white collar.

‘It’s time now,’ she said. ‘Everyone is waiting for you.’

There was a crowd of people in the chapel. He could feel the warmth of human breath and burning candles. Harmensoon handed him the violin and bow, and once he had taken hold of the instrument, the old man opened the Book. Instead of biblical verses it was full of staves, and instead of letters he saw the black swallows of notes. Never before had he read or played this music. It was as lucid as a fugue by Bach, as solemn as a phrase by Handel, as lively as a few bars by Vivaldi, and as melancholy as a song by Schubert. Before the coda had finished resonating, he caught sight of the two sisters’ faces: leaning over the gallery rail, they were following his playing in deepest concentration. When he stopped, there was no one in the chapel the King. The waves were beating against the walls. The Earth was shrinking. The wind was raging in the broken windows, turning the empty pages of the Book, and bringing in snow, withered leaves and grains of burning sand.

Next morning when Hanna saw the empty bed and the half-open door, she wasn’t even surprised. But the bright mark on the wallpaper where the clock used to be and the missing silver candlestick made her feel confused. How would she tell her sister about it? The word ‘thief’ didn’t seem appropriate, nor was ‘swindler’ exactly right. Maybe she should keep quiet about it? She couldn’t imagine the two of them together, at any time or in any place. Nor could she forgive herself for so recklessly letting him in, and once it had happened, for keeping him here like a friend. But Hanna’s confusion proved far greater when around noon Jakub came back from the city. He put two cans of army food on the table, a chunk of bacon, some smoked fish, a bottle of vodka, some salt, a little bag of buckwheat and some matches. From his pocket he produced a handful of tea in a twist of paper.

‘I see you are resourceful in any situation,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid I am,’ he confirmed.

They smiled at each other. Then Jakub showed her an official receipt; bearing the stamp of the city’s Soviet police headquarters, it looked quite ominous.

‘What does it say here?’ she asked.

‘That I live here legally, and as a result you are safe, at least for some time.’

Only a man called Molke from the ground floor stopped bowing to her. But she didn’t have to take the slightest bit of notice, just like Jakub, who simply failed to perceive any of the neighbours.

VI

‘Please take the D line and go as far as Bedford Park Boulevard. The lady will be waiting in the botanical garden. Have you got a map? What’s that? A guidebook, which one? Yes, perhaps. It’s called the Rhododendron Walk – do you know what those plants look like? The lady’s in a wheelchair, she’ll be holding the book, you are sure to recognise her.’

I was amazed. Where did she get my phone number from? And what an idea, to make an appointment through your secretary or someone of the kind who pronounced the simple word ‘you’ with such reverence?

I walked down 34th Street to Herald Square, and once at the station I wondered: maybe I shouldn’t go? But his words, after introducing himself as ‘Mr Hook’ and asking if he was talking to ‘Mr Helke, the writer from Europe’, that short sentence of his in which he said: ‘The lady read your story “The Table” and wants to tell you what it was really like’, that declaration of his in which there wasn’t the slightest doubt I would take up the invitation, had made my heart flutter. In the worst case I had disappointment ahead of me: a long monologue about an unsuccessful life, or questions such as: ‘Why did you write about the Mennonites?’

In Greek rhodos means a rose, and dendron means a tree, and indeed – the rhododendrons were blooming just like rose trees, in shades of crimson, white and red. Just as Mr Hook had said, she was sitting in a wheelchair with the book in her hands. She must have recognised me from afar, for as I approached, she raised the white cover and waved it to greet me in a very friendly way.

‘Thank you for coming’ – those were her first words. ‘I’m going to die soon, and what I read in here,’ she said, raising the book, ‘leads me to imagine you will want to hear this story, and that one day you will write about it, back in your own country.’

And at once, without any introduction, she started telling her tale. The English she spoke was coarse, but plain. Only occasionally did she put in a word in German, and then broke off at once, said ‘Excuse me,’ and went on with her story.

After about an hour, when Jakub and Willman were building the boat, along came Mr Hook. He looked odd: in a huge fedora and a summer suit, he was more like a character out of a Chekhov play than someone who lives in the Bronx. He brought some sandwiches and hot chocolate, straightened the rug on her knees and walked away, discreetly glancing at his watch.

My surprise was growing by the minute: how come no settlers were moved into the village once the Germans had deported everyone? Did Willman make a deal with Jakub that only the two of them would sail away together, or had there been a decision to escape as a threesome? Why couldn’t Jakub see Harmensoon in the chapel, when she claimed to have seen him many times after his death and burial? Was Ludwig, the one in the uniform, really her sister’s husband?

There were more and more questions on my notepad, but not once did I dare to interrupt the flow of her narrative. Every sentence was uttered with an effort she did her best to conceal, and had something final about it, as if after each full stop, marked with a short pause, the end of the world had come.

She had come to the city sooner than autumn. Hanna had greeted her warmly, Jakub coldly. Her idea of obtaining a Polish certificate for permanent residence had proved disastrous. Immediately she had those two and a horde of officials against her. How was she to prove she wasn’t a German? She had no documents, nor did she know Polish, and her statements that once, long ago, her ancestors - who were persecuted in the Netherlands - had come to this very place, prompted at best an embittered smile, more often irritation. Finally, one autumn day, amid a crowd of Germans, all three of them had turned up at the freight station. She recalled that there weren’t many men in the carriage. As soon as the train moved off, one of them started to hum a song, ‘Wer hat dich, du schöner Wald, Aufgebaut so hoch da droben?’[1]

Mr Hook invited us to lunch at the park restaurant.

‘Then, once they were all singing,’ she finished telling me at table, ‘though not as loud as their tradition bids the Germans, I noticed that Hanna and Jakub were singing too. Believe me, I alone was biting my lip to stop myself from screaming in horror, hatred and disgust.’

‘My dear, that’s enough now,’ said Mr Hook, laying his hand on hers. ‘I’m sure Mr Helke will describe it… It’s colourful material,’ he said, addressing me, ‘rich, but tragic, altogether fascinating for a writer, isn’t it, young man?’

I swallowed a chunk of steak.

‘No, Mr Hook,’ I said, ‘my name is not Helke.’

‘Really…?’ His hand, adorned with a silver signet ring, reached for the book. ‘Oh, yes, I’m sorry, but you are German, aren’t you?’

She shot him a black look. Withdrawing into the realm of rumination, he fell silent for a while.

‘What happened after that?’ I asked. For a moment she hesitated.

‘He betrayed me as soon as we arrived in the States. I couldn’t understand why, or what he saw in the obese piano tuner, who was quite a bit older than him. Later, when he left her too, I knew. He took Hanna away with him, and they lived together in Chicago. They had two sons, but he took to drink, and eventually Hanna ran off to the south with the children. He thought he was an artist. But here there were thousands like him. If they let him play in a bar it was all right. Hanna died five years ago. I wasn’t at her funeral. That day, in the train to Germany, I saw them holding hands. Can you believe it? From the moment I stood in the door of the flat holding the violin I knew he loved her, not me. I never told my sister about Ludwig. But he knew it from me, and I don’t know if he ever shouted it out in some drunken scene. If he did, she can’t possibly have believed him. After some time, when he wasn’t with Hanna the King, he called me and said: “Hello, this is Harmensoon, is Miss Wolzke at home today?” But I had stopped being afraid of ghosts long ago. And of damnation too. I no longer believe in anything, when it comes to that sort of thing. What about you? Do you believe in God?’

‘Don’t you think it’s time to go home now?’ interrupted Hook.

‘Do you believe in God?’ she repeated.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘in spite of all.’

Beyond the Rhododendron Walk there was a rose garden. As Mr Hook pushed the wheelchair it rolled along smoothly, almost noiselessly. She absolutely had to know what the city looked like now, whether bungalows had been built on the dunes, and whether the canals on the polders were regularly cleaned. The botanical garden ended at White Plains Road.

‘We both live near here,’ Mr Hook informed me. ‘My place is next to the gas station, and hers is above the bookstore.’

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, ‘and please mention Rachela van Dorn – she was the only one to survive the camp and the transports, and she wrote to me afterwards from France. She loved me, really.’

The light changed to green. I watched as they disappeared in the crowd, Mr Hook and she, on the other side of the river of cars.

Two years later, via my publisher, Mr Hook sent me her obituary. Only then did I imagine her, several decades younger, on the road she loved so much.

The Bicycle Express

For Ivana Vidović

THE ATTIC ROOM where Lucjan had been dying for a few months now did not smell of must or medicine, just antiquity. I knew that as soon as he heard my footsteps in the corridor he would immediately turn his armchair to face the door, so as I came in I would see his face, graced with a smile cultivated through long suffering. As I heated some food for him or washed the dishes he would ask me questions: ‘Do you remember what the Romans called a side road?’ Or ‘How would you translate this: Etiam periere ruinae?’ He was as pleased as Punch when I gave the right answers. ‘Diverticulum, as opposed to via,’ I said slowly. ‘It didn’t lead to the capital but to a country estate. Like the one Horace was given by Maecenas. Etiam periere ruinae? I think that’s from Lucan,’ I said, as I served him warmed-up pierogi, ‘and it means “not even ruins will remain”.’ Over the cake my mother baked for him each week, Lucjan talked about his final work. It was a commentary on The Aeneid, a sort of dictionary, in which he was making an alphabetical list of concepts that in his opinion were unclear, and had only ever been badly translated or completely overlooked by the Polish publishers. As we were finishing our tea, Lucjan moved his chair to the desk, where he showed me a page written in Braille, cranked out on a special machine. I didn’t know that alphabet and so, lightly tracing his right index finger over the bumps, he read me his output for the past few days. Afterwards I would help him to get up from his chair, and we would stand at the window where, outside, against the rooftops of Wrzeszcz and some slender poplar trees, the clouds were drifting by. And then Lucjan would take off his dark glasses, turn his face to the light and say: ‘Can you describe them for me?’

‘Today there are some nice, plump cumulus clouds,’ I replied, ‘but they haven’t any autumn heaviness yet. It’ll be a few weeks before they go grey.’

Sometimes, as I was on my way out, on the stairs or in the doorway I ran into Mrs Truda, who gave him his injections. I only attended this operation once, and I remember being quite unable to tear my eyes off her forearm, where a purple number from Stuthoff was visible. In the place where Lucjan had spent fifteen years they didn’t tattoo the prisoners, but his skin bore a record of the past too. On his hands and cheeks – to his great shame in the days when he could still see his face reflected in the mirror – the marks of frostbite showed.

That day, when I was due to meet Fredek by the shipyard at four, Lucjan did not ask me any questions. He was absorbed in his own thoughts, and not even my news about the strike could restore his energy. Only once we were standing in our usual place by the window, where outside in the bright blue sky not a single cloud was passing, did he softly recite a line of Virgil with perfect emphasis: ‘Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbras,’ and then asked quickly: ‘Hasn’t anything come from Israel?’ I had to sadden him with a negative reply, and I knew how greatly disappointed he was. When he went blind, Lucjan had donated his entire library to the university, since when we had been acquiring books in Braille for him with extreme difficulty, because Greek and Latin, like Sanskrit and Hebrew, were an absolute rarity among editions for the blind. Homer was sent to him from London, and he received the Gospels in Greek from Los Angeles. Virgil and Seneca arrived in Wrzeszcz from Bologna, and he was sent a selection of Aristotle’s works – by way of a Papal foundation – from Rome. Now he was waiting for a Hebrew Bible, which, like all the other major religious books, he already knew in the original language and could translate any randomly chosen extract on demand.

‘I’ll write to Tel Aviv again,’ I said in parting. ‘I’m sure they haven’t forgotten our request.’

The trams and buses weren’t running the King, so there was a terrible crush on the local train. There was no other way to reach the centre of Gdansk, and of course that was where everyone wanted to go, to the main station, from where it only took seven minutes to get to the shipyard gates. And either in a whisper or in a lowered tone everyone really was talking about the same thing: so far they’re not shooting yet! But they’re sure to start, there can be no doubt - the only question is when?

I too could remember that December, exactly ten years ago: my father and I had gone up to the loft to listen for noises from the city centre through the open mansard window. The frosty air carried the boom of single shots, ambulance sirens and the rumble of tanks. The glow of fire shone red over the city. Now and then a helicopter appeared in the gloomy expanse behind it, firing flares, and then, in the brief flash of light, we could clearly hear two or three bursts of heavy machine-gun fire. There were moments when all these noises stopped, and we thought we could hear the shouts of the crowd repeatedly rising and falling.

‘Just remember,’ my father had said as we made our way down two floors to our flat, ‘this is the beginning of their end.’ Naturally when he said ‘their’ he wasn’t thinking of the workers. A few days later I saw the burned-down Party headquarters from the tram window, once the curfew had been lifted. At the Hucisko crossroads, right by the tram stop, I found a shipyard helmet flattened like a matchbox. The stench of burning and tear gas was everywhere. The food price hikes had been withdrawn and people were hurriedly doing their Christmas shopping. Just as hurriedly the portraits of the leaders who had been ejected from their posts were being removed from all the classrooms at my school. Our art teacher turned a blind eye as we burned them on a big pyre next to the school dump. Cyrankiewicz took far longer to burn than Gomułka, maybe because his pictures were on worse paper. At home in the evenings it was the only thing people talked about: how the workers had sung the Internationale before the Gdansk committee, how they had been shot at in Gdynia, how those arrested had been tortured, how those killed had been buried on the quiet with the help of secret agents, how the Soviet warships were anchored off our city, and how on television the new Party Secretary was promising the whole nation peace, prosperity and justice.

It was all running through my memory like a long forgotten black-and-white film from childhood. Now, as the crowd of sweaty people poured from the train onto the platform and headed in the hot August sun towards the shipyard gates, it was hard to imagine anyone wanting to shoot at this colourful motley of locals, tourists and holidaymakers, and certainly not in daylight in full view of the foreign journalists’ cameras. Apart from the obvious advantage of summer over winter there was another, much more profound difference. This time, rather than come out onto the streets, the workers had shut themselves in the shipyard; it was the street that was now coming to them, bringing food, money and information all the time. At the shipyard gates, alongside bouquets of flowers and a Polish flag, someone had hung a portrait of the Pope. The communiqués read over a loudspeaker sounded like a litany: factories all over Poland were joining the strike, literally by the hour. The plaster Lenin in the shipyard conference hall was having to watch patiently as the demand was formulated: yes, we want a pay rise, but more than that we want to have our own, completely independent trade unions.

‘So far it’s like a picnic,’ I heard Fredek’s voice behind me, ‘but I wonder how it’ll end?’

I turned to face him and saw he had come on his bike. ‘If they’re going to crush them,’ I said, ‘they’ll only do it at night, when there’s no one there.’

‘Maybe so,’ said Fredek, who didn’t look worried, ‘but first they’ll have to force the gates with a tank. Then fetch them out from every corner of the shipyard. With a bit of passive resistance that’ll take hours. But what if the lads set off a few acetylene cylinders? Or get on board a ship and cut the hawsers?’ At last we had reached the fence right next to the gates and Fredek had parked his bike, leaning it against the wire netting. ‘Besides, there’s one more thing too,’ he said, pointing at the portrait of the Pope. ‘We’ve got him, and that’s better than the troops!’

‘I’d rather rely on a few dozen striking factories. And the others that are ready to join in.’

‘Well, it’s actually happening,’ said Fredek. He took out a packet of Sport cigarettes and we lit up. ‘It’s a real revolution, can’t you see?’

Like this we passed the quarter hours, smoking and chatting, that was all. More and more delegations were being let through the gates, greeted with applause. Communiqués, committee resolutions, poems and prayers came pouring from the loudspeaker non-stop. And the mood of the endless rally intensified when a worker wearing an armband appeared from inside the gates: hands black with printer’s ink, he threw leaflets into the rippling crowd. Not a single scrap of paper was left on the ground. Everyone wanted his own copy of the bulletin that the censor hadn’t vandalised in advance, if only as a souvenir.

‘Not a bad duplicator,’ reckoned Fredek, ‘but they’re using too much ink, they haven’t got the experience yet.’

‘If only they’d read it out on the radio too,’ I joked, ‘to the whole country, don’t you think?’

‘We haven’t got the radio yet.’ Fredek suddenly became serious. ‘But have you got a bike?’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘but you must have heard what they said,’ – I pointed at the loudspeaker. ‘At the committee’s request the railway workers aren’t going to stop the trains. So the city won’t be paralysed.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Fredek dismissively. ‘What do I care about the railway? I’m thinking of the bicycle express!’

And that was how, from Fredek’s simple idea, my own August revolution began. Next day I called at the shop on Holy Ghost Street.

‘They’re selling like hot cakes,’ said the salesman, smiling. ‘Or rather, we’ve sold out already – there’s just that one left.’ He pointed to a dark corner of the shop. ‘Rather a clunky import from Big Brother, and I haven’t got any spare inner tubes for it.’

Minutes later I was riding from Holy Ghost Street into Tkacka Street on a heavy but sturdy Ukraina bike, resistant to frost, cobblestones, rain, sun, sand and puddles. It had a very solid basket, a set of keys in a small box under the saddle, a dynamo and lights. Only the bell didn’t work, as if something inside its simple mechanism was welded together, but it didn’t matter. I rode slowly past the Arsenal building, the theatre, the market hall and the Academy of Sciences library, aware that the seat was a bit hard and would give me trouble unless I covered it with an old beret or a towel in the traditional way.

‘Good heavens!’ groaned Fredek when we met that evening on the corner of Łagiewniki Street. ‘It’s an armoured train instead of the cavalry! A propos, did you listen to Radio Free Europe yesterday? The Russkies are making noises about manoeuvres, saying they’re hurrying them up and things like that. Do you think they’ll enter the country?’

‘They’ve been here for the past thirty-five years,’ I said, barely managing to keep up with his nimble racing bike. ‘Legnica, Szczecinek, Borne Sulinowo, tanks, infantry, aeroplanes – they don’t have to enter the country at all, they only have to come out of their barracks!’

‘I meant crossing the border, an invasion, you know, all our brothers in the Warsaw Pact.’ He changed gear and rode even faster. ‘Like we invaded the Czechs with them in 1968.’

I had no time to answer, because Fredek was already braking outside the shipyard gates, where in the falling twilight the last of the gapers and passers-by were hovering; shortly after, we had collected some bundles of bulletins from Mikołaj at the pass desk, wrapped in the Voice of the Coast and tied with ordinary string. Then we slowly rode abreast, through the park along Victory Avenue, continuing our conversation about the possible, or impossible invasion, especially with the East German People’s Army participating, which here, in Gdansk, was sure to be given an enthusiastic reception, considering the traditional Polish-German friendship; Romania would definitely not take part, but Czechoslovakia was sure to be forced into it, whereas Hungary’s involvement – as we both agreed – was not a foregone conclusion, because as the Russian generals knew from previous experience, the Hungarians always sided with the Poles, just as we had fought in the Hungarian uprisings, so to sum up – we were just passing the Opera house – their leader János Kádár could sleep in peace, though we couldn’t say the same for the East German Erich Honecker, the Czechoslovak Gustáv Husák and Leonid Brezhnev, that exotic trio, who might be joined by the Bulgarians, as the world’s greatest Russophiles, if you don't count the French, of course. The tram depot, the construction firm base, the ball-bearing factory, then the paint and lacquer plant in Oliwa – that was our first route. It all went smoothly and very quietly: at each gate someone wearing an armband collected a wad of bulletins from us, and sometimes we shared a cigarette, chatting about the same thing all the time – whether they would finally send an authorised delegation from Warsaw to start talks, not about a pay rise, but about free trade unions, which no one had, from the Elbe to Vladivostok.

Our night rides had no hint of conspiracy or special mission about them: the workforce in each place received bulletins from the shipyard via their own delegates and couriers during the day, and we only delivered whatever was issued in the afternoon or evening, so next day at dawn everyone had the latest information – the late edition, said Fredek, handing a bundle of news sheets in at the gate, the evening bicycle express!

Sometimes, when we didn’t feel like chatting and we rode a long stretch in silence, I thought about Lucjan. He had just about witnessed my birth: in 1957, when my father brought me and my mother home from the hospital to Chrzanowski Street in the Opel he borrowed for the occasion from Mr Hoffmayer, Lucjan was waiting outside our door. Thin and haggard, in an old raincoat and a railwayman’s cap, he looked like an arrival from the spirit world. His name had always been remembered on All Soul’s Day, but no one believed he was still alive anymore. In September 1939, when the Soviets occupied Lwów, he had been arrested and deported to an unknown place. He had not turned up in any of the Polish armies later on, not Anders’, nor Berling’s, nor in post-war London, nor on any Red Cross list. ‘He was killed at Katyń,’ my father thought, ‘or in one of the Gulags, like millions of anonymous people.’ Meanwhile, here was Lucjan standing in the stairwell; seeing my mother’s surprise, he took from her the quilt I was wrapped in and asked, ‘A son or a daughter?’ Afterwards, when he and my father were sitting in the kitchen, and my mother was washing me in a baby bath before the burning stove, Lucjan took a good look at me and said: ‘Well I never, what a wee scrap of a fellow – where I’ve come from he wouldn’t last as long as five hours.’ I was to hear this remark from my parents many times, and forever after in my mind his figure was shrouded in a gloomy aura that never lifted as the years went by. It wasn’t to do with the facts themselves, which he did relate, though rather reluctantly. That one remark of his contained a grim reminder, like a dull thud from an abyss that emanated total and utter emptiness. Even in later years, when he was living in Warsaw and used to visit us every summer by the sea, as I became more and more aware of his amazing linguistic genius, I still kept running into that indelible mark in his personality. Perhaps that was why he rejected the permanent job offers that came with time. In Warsaw he was the bookkeeper at a coal yard. In Gdansk, where a few years before retiring he eventually moved to our neighbourhood, into a small attic room with a kitchen, he settled for a job as a night watchman. In this final period he gave up the radio, didn’t read any newspapers and even stopped going to church; he only came to our flat for Sunday dinner once a month. Once blindness, and soon afterwards a progressive illness, had chained him to his bed and an armchair, he refused to move in with us, and gave any help a cool reception. Nevertheless I could tell he enjoyed my visits, perhaps for the exact reason that - after coming back from hell - he had seen me on the very threshold of life. Now I was seeing him on its other threshold, the final one, and it felt as if we had both ended up in the same circle, but at different points along it.

A few bicycling nights later I visited him again. He asked me to tell him our exact routes. Rather than details of the strike, he was more interested in the look of the port from Siennicki Bridge where my chain came off; the driver of a police radio car who went past us had slowed down noticeably at the sight of two young men fixing a bike halfway across the bridge in the middle of the night. Were the tugboats at anchor illuminated? What about the wharves? Can you see the rust on the tramlines at night, or only in daylight? Those were Lucjan’s questions, but when I read to him, one after another, the strike committee’s resolutions, and then selected information from the bulletins saying that the whole country was on strike, or ready and waiting, that human solidarity had never been so genuine or so profound in our country, and that we would win, because after all one day we had to win, since we had always kept losing, at least for the last two hundred years, he just nodded politely and said: ‘All right, that’s all politics. But what are you going to do afterwards?’

‘But you know that,’ I said, a little irritated, ‘I’m going to write my dissertation on Iwaszkiewicz and how his Ukrainian stories echoed Romanticism.’

‘And then what?’

I didn’t really know what he meant. What could happen then, except life? Marriage? Work? Travel? I had never lived in terms of the future, I didn’t like projects, plans or specific ventures, because anyway, as Lucjan knew perfectly well, in our everyday reality nothing ever came entirely true, and at the drop of a hat it could all change, suddenly collapse, be destroyed, wiped out or smashed to bits. So how could he ask questions like ‘then what’? If Lucjan weren’t blind I’d have answered by asking: ‘Do you think I’m clairvoyant?’ But it wasn’t appropriate for me to say that, so after a short silence I simply replied: ‘I don’t know.’

He looked worried by my answer. For a moment his furrowed face wrinkled into a mask of concern.

‘I mean your dreams. Oculos habent et non videbunt, you understand? “Eyes have they, but they see not.” Psalm 115. Towards the end it clearly says: “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence.”’

I shrugged my shoulders. Did he mean my religious beliefs? We had never touched on that sort of topic, not even when he had occasionally explained an extract from the Bible to me because I needed it for an Old Polish literature class. In any case, I was already late. At the shipyard conference hall the talks with the government delegation were just starting, and I wanted to be there on the spot and not miss anything; the negotiations broadcast by cable radio could only be heard at the shipyard gates. As usual I left him the cake my mother had baked, and we said goodbye until next week.

The next few bicycling nights were warm and starry. After delivering the bulletins Fredek and I would ride to the beach at Brzeżno or Jelitkowo, and there, waiting for the sunrise, we would chatter away like souls possessed about what was going to happen – next day, month or year. Things that had been quite unthinkable for years on end now seemed within reach. Sometimes we reminisced about our school days, including the student chaplaincy on Czarna Street, where what attracted us was not so much religious need as the charms of the girls. Whenever Alicja sang ‘Ma-ra-na-tha’ from the altar in her beautiful contralto voice, to the sound of a guitar, a flute and a violin, there can’t have been a single boy who didn’t want to take communion in her company. Joanna had a lovely black plait, and as she read Saint Paul’s words about love, our desires, though not originating from the soul or the Scriptures at all, filled the chapel with sexual tension.

We had other memories too, of the City Parks Service and Scout Brigade IIIb on work camp in 1974, tidying up the old German graveyard. When the excavator scoop rose yet again, a white stream of skulls and bones had come pouring out of an enormous heap of sand – they were the SS-men shot by the Soviets, probably in 1945, lying in an unmarked mass grave. Iron crosses, helmets, and especially death’s head insignia from the officers’ caps enriched more than one collection of militaria in our city that summer. We managed to stuff our pockets and plastic bags with them before the prosecutor arrived. That same year, before the holidays began, Fredek and I had scrawled a message on the wall at our school: ‘We’ll get revenge for Katyń!’ How surprised we were next day when instead of a maths test we had a special assembly for the first lesson. Accompanied by two secret policemen, the headmaster threatened to expose and punish the guilty parties. Afterwards, as a historian, he gave us a half-hour lecture that proved without question that the tens of thousands of Polish officers and civil servants who died there were killed on the orders of Hitler, not Stalin.

At dawn, as the sphere of the sun rose over the bay, I was riding my Ukraina home. The quiet, empty suburbs were still dozing as I thought about that mythical journey of my father’s, which Lucjan was so fond of asking about. My father had paddled an ordinary canoe more than six hundred kilometres along the River Dunajec, then the Vistula, to Gdansk. In literally the heart of the city, on the Motława, he had put down his oar, picked up his rucksack and set off through the burned-out, silent streets, where brick dust and the smell of people burning were falling like a mist on the remains of the thousand-year Reich. He never liked to talk about it; all I knew, which was obvious, was that he had gone in search of a new life, because the old, pre-war one had ceased to exist in any way, shape or form, but why did he choose that particular route and direction? Only now, 35 years after his early morning march through the gutted streets, as I rode through almost the very same places on my bike, did I think he might have been like Abraham, who had received a summons from God: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy father’s house’. And if, I continued to fantasise, he might have been Abraham, I would have been Isaac, and then the remark Lucjan had made just after I was born – ‘Where I’ve come from he wouldn’t last as long as five hours’ took on a completely different meaning and significance; it would be like a prophecy, not a commentary on an ordinary situation defined by history. But what on earth did that change in my life?

The bicycle express soon came to an end, on the day when Lech Wałęsa the electrician was carried on the workers’ shoulders and declared the end of the strike. Not long after I got my first job as a journalist at the Solidarity union information office. Fredek was in charge of the printing. The revolution was having ever wider-reaching effects, and for lack of other goods, had become the number one export item, as a while later the Czechs, Germans, Hungarians and Slovaks came to believe, and finally the Russians themselves. Whatever my thoughts about it later on, often critical, nothing could change the miraculous fact that it brought freedom, without so much as a single hair falling from the heads of our opponents – even those who had more than once fired, or given orders to fire at people merely because they were demanding bread and liberty. In fact they only quailed with fear once, when the television showed the execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu.

The clunky Ukraina went on providing excellent service. I rode it to work and to the university, where instead of writing my dissertation I was helping my colleagues to set up the Independent Students’ Union. One October day as I was organising a rally, Lucjan died. The funeral did not draw a crowd. A few old men – former Gulag prisoners, the priest, my parents and I said the prayers. The day before the burial, when Lucjan’s body was lying in the mortuary, my father and I went to his attic to start sorting out his flat. In the letterbox I found a delivery note, and that afternoon I collected the parcel. It was the Hebrew Bible, published by the Landau Foundation if I remember rightly.

‘What shall we do with it now?’ my mother fretted. ‘They don’t keep Braille in normal libraries, and I’m sure no one knows Hebrew at the ones for the blind!’

‘We’d best send it back,’ my father reckoned.

But I had another idea. In the chapel at Srebrzysko, before the coffin was closed, I placed the Book in Lucjan’s hands, with his right index finger just under the cover, touching the first letter of Bereshit, or the Book of Genesis. As the gravediggers were flattening the small mound of earth with their spades, I remembered a line from The Aeneid that I had heard my cousin Lucjan quote in the first days of the August strike: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbras. Distracted by the funeral, for lack of a dictionary I couldn’t translate it properly, and afterwards I plain forgot about it. Years later, as I was leafing through a beautiful translation of Virgil in a bookshop, I found that extract, which goes: ‘On they went, those dim travellers under the lonely night, through gloom…’

Depka and Rzepka

IN THOSE DAYS buying anything – even fish – rose to the status of a problem. There was even a joke about it that used to do the rounds in our city. Why before the war was it possible to buy fish as far inland as Drohobycz? Because in those days Poland had only just over a hundred miles of coastline. And why since the war is it impossible to buy fish even in a port? Because these days Poland has more than three hundred miles of coastline.

A second, quite accidental piece of comedy on the same subject was provided by an advertising cartoon shown on our cinema screens at some point in the mid-1970s, after the obligatory newsreel and the so-called extra. A fish appeared on the screen, marked with the symbol of the Central Fish Processing Plant, and addressed the audience, saying: ‘No fish will tell you this himself, but eating them’s good for your health. Come and shop at the CFPP!!!’ The whole audience gathered in the cinema used to roar with laughter at this ad, because the shelves in the shops – including the fishmonger’s – were glaringly empty. Why do I mention this?

Because I’m thinking about Christmas Eve. And as I’m thinking about Christmas Eve, there’s no way of avoiding the subject of fish.

In my family, unanimity had reigned in this respect ever since – by decree of Stalin and the rest of the Big Three – we had been resettled in Gdansk. As a result of this enforced emigration, a certain basic change in culinary predilections had taken place. It wasn’t carp (which stank of silt), or pike (which was awfully bony), but cod, huge and fresh, that had become the main feature of our Christmas Eve menu. My father, who had arrived in the city on the bay in 1946, would speak with a tear in his eye of his expeditions to Bonsack (in other words, Sobieszewo Island), where in the forties and fifties you could buy fresh and smoked fish from the fishermen – outside the framework of the Central Fish Processing Plant, of course. I remember the large fillets of cod my mother used to fry, and not just for Christmas Eve, and the chunks of smoked eel, whenever Uncle Henryk – hero of the Warsaw Uprising – came to see us on my father’s name-day. Zander too, delicate and delicious, brought home by bus from Bonsack for all sorts of family occasions.

However, this was in the 1970’s, when buying fish – even at Bonsack – was harder and harder. In short, days of want. And Christmas Eve was approaching.

I was delegated to make the journey like a secret agent: on one piece of paper I had the address of the fishermen from near Jastarnia. On another I had the train timetable, there and back, for the line between Gdynia and Hel. A third contained a shopping list, eventually crossed out by my mother, who had simply added: ‘get whatever there is.’

Mr Depka lived in a shed. It was a cross between the typical Kashubian cottage and something like a workshop and a storehouse: as much a fishmonger’s as a boatyard. He wasn’t even surprised when I came inside and revealed my references: ‘from Mr H, the engineer, who fixed your fishing boat motors’. But we didn’t talk about engines. Alojz Depka was excited, and over a glass or two of vodka he and Mr Rzepka were discussing something that had happened a few weeks ago, when Józk Konkel, a skipper from the maszoperia – as the Kashubian fishermen call their association – had sailed out into the bay. So, first of all, it wasn’t the time for fishing. Secondly, something had happened on the water that made Depka as well as Rzepka talk in hushed tones.

This phenomenon had haunted the fishermen in the bay for years. Sometimes – no one knew exactly why at this rather than any other moment – an orange ball appeared on the water, especially in the vicinity of the old German torpedo launch platform. Like ball lightning – wieldżi, as the Kashubians would say – enormous. No one knew what it really was. This ball had been known to collide with a fishing boat, burning it and its entire crew to ashes; it happened in 1963, in the days when Ponke was in the maszoperia. No one was saved.

Sometimes, the orange ball would stick to the prow and drag the boat a good ten miles or more at dizzying speed, to smash it to bits somewhere far off, near the Russian border or close to Gdańsk. So this particular demon couldn’t possibly have come from a decent Kashubian family of devils – home-grown and controllable. This was a truly evil one, on which nothing worked – none of the age-old prayers, nor sprinkling with holy water or casting spells. Just as I entered Mr Depka’s shed, he and Mr Rzepka were discussing the latest unfortunate incident. Józk Konkel had not sailed out far – within eyeshot, as they say. Even Hanka could see him from the shore – he hadn’t cast his nets, but just a couple of lines and was trailing them at a slow speed, trolling. The harbinger of a biting frost was rising in the glassy air, but the water was not yet full of the icy porridge forewarning that the bay will freeze.

‘Well,’ said Mr Depka, ‘it happened so quick!’

‘We only saw a flash,’ added Mr Rzepka, ‘and that’s all that was left of Józk.’

Regaled with a glass of moonshine of at least 70 percent proof, I listened to their conversation. After every accident of this kind a special commission always came, as in the Führer’s day, and before that the Kaiser’s. But no commission, whether from the military, the police, or the secret service, had ever managed to explain this enigma by filing a description of the incident and interviews with eyewitnesses in their cavernous secret archives.

‘When the Russkies tried sniffing about in Khrushchev’s day,’ continued Depka, ‘they closed our entire waters to fishing for a month. They sailed one way in that Soviet U-boat of theirs, then back the other, and found nothing.’

‘But one night,’ Rzepka was quick to add, ‘we were awoken by a terrible boom. The entire Soviet U-boat had flown sky-high, and there was nothing left but an oily slick floating on the water for a few days after. As ever, a huge, fiery ball appeared from over by the torpedo launcher.’

‘Oh no…’ Depka disagreed, ‘not at all. That time it came from the north.’

For a while they argued this point, but calmly, as if for pure pleasure.

‘But what is it really?’ I asked naïvely. ‘Is it some strange atmospheric phenomenon? Never recorded anywhere on earth before?’

Alojz Depka and Ignac Rzepka gave me a look of pity. Could a townie ever understand anything?

The glasses were filled again as we snacked on smoked Baltic cod. And suddenly, as if I had opened the pages of a great book, a story unrolled: amazingly vivid and very old.

Why did Hel – as this peninsula is called – mean the same thing in all the sailors’ languages, quite simply hell? Because the people living in the local hamlets, eternally buried in sand, were hell-raisers, real servants of the devil. During the autumn storms in particular they used to light fires on the beach as misleading beacons. The wrecked ships provided the locals with plenty of goods. They were aware of the ducal shore rights, and they knew perfectly well that everything tossed up by the water belonged to the Duke. Therefore after every disaster they caused, all the shipwreck survivors were killed – so there wouldn’t be any witnesses. Even – as happened extremely rarely – if the survivor was a woman.

Evil spirits favoured this practice. No punishment, no misfortunes ever befell these land pirates.

Only when a man in bishop’s robes escaped to shore from a tempest was the iron rule broken for the very first time. No one dared to kill a high priest. He was chained up in one of the cottages, where for ten years he was made to turn a millstone, until an official of Duke Świętopełk came riding by. He heard the prisoner chanting Latin psalms, then returning to the village with an escort, freed Bishop Sedenza, who ten years earlier had sailed as a legate of Pope Innocent IV to the Danish King Eric, and during a storm had ended up in Hel – in other words, in hell.

Duke Świętopełk’s sentence was cruel, but just. Every other man in the village went to the gallows. And a certain Depka – the pirate chief – was first tarred, then tied to the mast of his ship, where this grim figure was piled with brushwood. Right before the eyes of all those who lived on the shoreline (including the ones dangling on ropes by now) the burning ship cruised the water for a long time, propelled by an invisible current. And ever since, Mr Depka ended his story, anyone who meets the burning ship is doomed to die. Whether he’s ours, a German, a Swede or a Russki.

There were two days to go before Christmas. As I stood at the railway halt in total darkness by now, all alone, hearing the roar of the sea on both sides of the narrow, sandy spit, it occurred to me that this story had in fact been recorded by the chroniclers: it must have happened to the legate between 1243 and 1254, because those were the years of Innocent IV’s reign at the Holy See, and he was the pope who sent Sedenza to Eric IV, king of Denmark.

In the empty compartment it smelled of fish: in my bag lay some herrings, three fair-sized cod, and also a turbot – which we had never eaten before, not even on Christmas Eve. Whether Alojz Depka was a descendant of the pirate whom Duke Świętopełk’s sentence made into a living torch, I never did find out. I remember that as the train rolled slowly along the very seashore, getting close to Puck, that year’s first, thick flakes of snow appeared outside the window. The turbot was fabulous, and outstripped the cod by miles.

Öland

For my friends

“I see him, but not now;

I behold him, but not near.”

Numbers, 24:17

I

THE SEA HERE is always severe. Even on sultry summer days, when the rocks are as hot as a tile stove, the bright blue surface is eternally coated in the same, forbidding chill. Bjorn was thinking about it as he drove his sheep out of the croft. There weren’t many of them – two young ewes and one old one. A year ago he had had more, but after a hailstorm, when lightning bolts had struck the plateau in quick succession, only three of them were left. Does fear destroy an animal’s sense of direction? That he did not know, but the image of the disaster endured in his memory down to the last detail: the ram – the bellwether – had run straight for the precipice and disappeared, with almost the entire flock after him. Then the stupid, black-horned ram had lain at the foot of the cliff, under a pile of other dead animals, with the waves licking at them. Bjorn had had to report it, and the entire way across the plateau he had trembled with fear. The steward was a bad man, whose lips cast nothing but curses from under his thick, flaxen moustache. So it was this time, too – when he finally grasped what had happened, he flew into a dreadful rage, seized Bjorn by the scruff of the neck, pinned him to the ground and hissed: ‘For such a big loss you will stand before the master – the master will have you hanged!’ But the squire from Ventlinge – whom Bjorn had never seen before – proved merciful. He heard out the steward, stood up from his chair, pointed to the crucifix and said: ‘He tells us to forgive’; then after a pause for thought, addressing the culprit he added: ‘For each ewe you will work out a year, and for each ram two. Then you will leave my land for ever.'

That evening, when Jansen came to the bottom of the cliff with a helper to dress the carcasses on the spot, all three of them had laughed about it. No peasant or even a tenant farmer here had a lifelong right like that: there had been twenty-five sheep and four rams, including the bellwether. Bjorn listened avidly to their stories about the master from Ventlinge. Since returning from the war on the other side of the sea, he spent long evenings alone by the fireplace, reading the Bible aloud. Sometimes he could also be heard through the closed door, calling for his comrades who were killed in battle – those from Dalarna, those from Uppaland and those from Scania. Surrounded by the enemy cavalry, they had fought like lions, but as well as their sabres the Poles had the force of Catholic incantations behind them, and it was those that caused the field by the river to be strewn in hundreds of Swedish corpses that day. Maybe that was why the master from Ventlinge, since returning to Öland from the war, never took part in the royal hunts, had hung his rapier on the wall and read the Bible aloud? At around midnight they finished the work; Jansen loaded a cart with all that could be saved, which belonged to the estate, and the rest they laid on a pile of brushwood. A great, sizzling flame lit up the cliff, and the odour of burning tallow and innards trailed along the stony beach until morning.

However, some odds and ends had been left over from that feast of the gods, and now as he gazed at the pasture, the sheep and the clouds, Bjorn could smell the long forgotten aroma of roasted meat, and with it he felt a gnawing pain in his stomach. He reached into his sack for a piece of dried fish. As he chewed it, he walked up to the precipice. The daily view of the open space where water and air merged together somewhere very far away had never consoled Bjorn, for although the hues and shapes of the clouds often changed here, as did the colour of the sea, the empty void was always the same, unencompassed, like the wind roaring in the grasses on the plateau and the waves splashing against the boulders. Only occasionally, when the visibility was good, could his eyes spy out in the distance the small outline of a ship heading for Kalmar, or south to Karlskrona, but Bjorn had no telescope and was spared the joy of identifying the flags or the sight of the full sails.

But since last year the edge of the precipice had changed out of all recognition. Where the plateau ended, as if cut off by a knife, and the cliff fell away at an almost vertical stroke, a low stone wall had arisen on the orders of the steward, the fruit of several months’ work, and now almost finished. Bjorn leaned his hands on the stones and gazed at the sea. From the southern side, on the dark-blue line of the horizon a small dot had appeared. It was too far away to tell what kind of ship it was, and anyway, what did it matter? The island was bypassed by merchants and mariners. Bjorn turned away from the stone wall and made himself comfortable upon the grass. The sun was already quite high, seagulls, larks and siskins were calling to each other shrilly, the last patches of snow had disappeared from the plateau a couple of weeks ago, and the smell of thawed earth was finally heralding some long, warm days. Bjorn thought about the master from Ventlinge: how noble he must have looked on his charger, rapier in hand, beneath the fluttering banner of the royal ensign, as he gave the order to attack. But what could be the meaning of the incantations Jansen had mentioned? Were the Catholics in a pact with the devil? And if so, why had God given them the victory? Under his drooping eyelids Bjorn could see a nameless river, with the corpses of the masters from Dalarna, the masters from Uppaland, and the masters from Scania floating along it. Their proud emblems, estates, jewels and titles – what were they now, as they lay dead in a foreign land? For a while longer Bjorn’s thoughts revolved around the tumult of battle, until at last, to the tune of the sea’s monotonous roar they lost focus, imperceptibly crossing the border into a dream.

It started with the light, quiet strokes of long oars. The boat was long too, and both ferrymen, dressed rather gaudily, rhythmically leaned forward from the prow and the stern over the calm water, in which the façades of churches, the arcs of bridges and the gates of palaces slowly shifted in mirror image. The passengers – a man of about thirty-five and a small boy – were not talking to each other. Only when the boat had sailed away from the city and its cupolas were glowing honey-gold in the distance did the man place a hand on the boy’s arm and repeat the word: ‘Serenissima!’ The boy began to cry. The boat came alongside a galleon at anchor in the bay. The boatswain’s whistle sounded, and the sails were set. The ship moved off majestically, and the city disappeared in the dawn of the rising sun as suddenly as if it had never existed.

Bjorn awoke with a vague sense of happiness and sorrow all at once. The city was beautiful and the waters in the bay were warm, but the journey – or rather that departure – carried the burden of irreversible events. Bjorn knew that dreaming was dangerous, because dreams offer impossible things, and so after waking it is best to set to work at once. So he did, heading for a small pyramid, where the stones he had gathered from the pasture were heaped on top of each other. He carefully chose a large, angular rock and picked it up in both hands; once he had positioned the point of gravity on his right shoulder, like an athlete he slowly carried the stone towards the precipice. The wall was almost finished now, and Bjorn reckoned with satisfaction that in two, or at most three days he would make his way to the steward to report it to him. He was sure to hear a stream of abuse, but what did it matter, if they entrusted a flock to him again? For the past year he had too often gone hungry, and for the sight of the shed with sheep’s-milk cheeses ripening on long shelves inside it, for that nourishing hope, he was ready to put up with far worse things.

As he pondered it all, he fitted the angular rock into the exact spot where the wall seemed weakest, and then with a sense of satisfaction he looked up at the sea, only to let his jaw drop in amazement at almost the very same instant. The small dot which had been visible on the horizon three-quarters of an hour ago had not moved towards Kalmar as usual, but had most evidently deviated from the common route and was approaching the island. A middle-sized three-mast ship in full sail was growing before his eyes. Now Bjorn could clearly see the crow’s nest with the tiny figure of a sailor; the bowsprit, with yet another observation basket hanging underneath it; and several guns with covers over their muzzles. Two stone’s throws away from the rocky shore the ship made an abrupt turn, furled its sails and stood at anchor parallel to the cliff, which allowed Bjorn, crouching behind his wall, to make out its name. On these waters the name ‘Doña Juanita’ sounded rather unusual, but swallowing his saliva, Bjorn did not stop to wonder about it. His gaze and attention were entirely riveted by the rapid activities amidships. A windlass creaked and the sailors lowered a sloop, in which he saw two rowers and a man dressed in a trailing black coat. There could be no doubt he was the one giving the orders here. In one hand he was holding a hat adorned with feathers, while with the other, as soon as the sloop was bobbing on the water, he made urgent gestures. Their meaning was obvious: cast off the rope, take up the oars, and follow the shortest course to the shore. This hurry seemed strange on a bright, sunny day, when neither wind nor waves could threaten a safe landing. There was a strange silence on board the ship. The sailors at the yardarms and the anchor lines were evidently waiting for the sloop to come back, but this readiness, as if enforced by iron discipline, was being conducted in stillness and total silence. No one called out to anyone else, nor did anyone abandon his post for a moment. But strangest of all was what happened a little later on the shore: the two sailors put down their oars, pushed the sloop onto a gravel bank, disembarked their master, handed him a large sack-like saddlebag, then fetched a chest with iron fittings out of the sloop and set it down in the middle of the beach.

Bjorn froze. He realised the meaning of the fact that there was no flag flying from the ship’s mast. Once, long ago, in a castle dungeon, he had heard some blood-chilling stories about robbers on the high seas. Of all the evildoers in this world they were the cruellest, showing no mercy even to their shipmates. If the ship really did belong to pirates, there could only be one explanation for their visit: there was treasure in the chest, which these people – no doubt being pursued by the royal navy – wanted to hide quickly. Bjorn’s conjecture was confirmed by the man in the hat: now he was walking along the beach, raking up sea kale on the tip of his cane, pausing now and then and looking all around, as if searching for a suitable spot for a hiding place. At the point where the cliff ended, dropping abruptly towards a plain, and the beach bordered on a pine forest, the man stopped beneath a sturdy tree and shouted something to the sailors. They grabbed hold of the chest. It must have been very heavy, because as they carried it they halted several times. Bjorn had to lean over the wall to see exactly what was happening under the tree: the sailors took a pickaxe and shovels out of the chest, closed the lid and set about digging a hole. Damp and stony, the ground did not give way easily, but the work proceeded remarkably quickly. Bjorn was also surprised by the ingenuity with which the chest was finally hidden. The lid was not covered with stones, but camouflaged with turf and some small juniper bushes planted on the spot. Like this it would be easy to get inside the chest without extracting it from the hole.

Eventually the man in the hat went back to the sloop, and the two sailors, wielding the pickaxe and the shovels, followed a few paces behind him, but none of the things that crossed Bjorn’s mind actually occurred on the stony beach at the foot of the cliff. Neither of the pirates fetched his chief a blow on the back of the head, split his skull or stuck a knife in his back, nor did the leader produce pistols from under the tails of his coat, suddenly turn around to face the sailors and fire at them point blank, mowing them down. But instead, on the stony beach at the foot of the cliff something happened that Bjorn could not understand at all. The sailors pushed out the sloop and started rowing towards the ship, on which the sails were already set, while the man in the black coat remained on the shore, taking no notice of the departing vessel, but inspecting something in his saddlebag. Once the ‘Doña Juanita’ had gathered wind, the newcomer threw his bag on his shoulder, drew a fantastic flourish in the air with his cane, glanced up at the rocks and, after finding a narrow gulley in the cliff with a path leading upwards, briskly set off ahead of him. As the path came out on the plateau in the exact spot several dozen paces from the precipice where Bjorn’s stone cottage stood, and in two or at most three minutes the stranger was bound to see it, Bjorn stepped back from the wall, ran across the pasture and hid behind the corner of the empty sheepfold, from where he could watch the newcomer without hindrance.

And the man was behaving very oddly. As soon as he was on the plateau, although he had undoubtedly caught sight of Bjorn’s cottage, he ignored this discovery, and instead of looking around the yard or calling for the farmer, he took a telescope from his bag and for some time watched the sea, following the departing sailing ship. Then he aimed the telescope inland, but what he could be looking for on the island remained an unfathomable mystery to Bjorn – all around stretched a bare plain, and even an eye equipped with a spyglass could not have seen the pinnacles of the church in Ventlinge from here, the smoke from the village or the large oak trees surrounding the squire’s estate. Finally the man folded the telescope, checked the position of the sun and only then, after a few dozen paces, did he investigate Bjorn’s yard. He peeped into the pigsty, went into the forge that hadn’t been active for years, and then finally without hesitating stepped inside the cottage, from where he quickly emerged, finding no one in. He briefly glanced towards the sheepfold, at which point Bjorn began to tremble, feeling as if the stranger’s gaze was capable of penetrating walls. Fortunately the man turned his eyes back in the direction of the plain, and eventually he headed that way, disappearing among the grasses, stones and juniper bushes of Alvaret plain. Bjorn busily noted a few more details in his memory: the newcomer was wearing tall boots, just like the royal reiters; under his coat and doublet he had a white shirt finished in lace; he wore no wig, but his long, raven-black hair was tied in a pigtail by a shiny silver hairpin, and he must have used expensive scent too, because a strong, musky odour lingered for a good few moments wherever he had paused.

Two days later, as Bjorn was coming down from the plateau towards the Ventlinge farm buildings, his mind and soul were full of anxiety. Had he done the right thing by lifting the turf and peeping inside the mysterious chest? What could the fact that it was empty mean? Had he concealed the lid well enough again? Who was the weird stranger, who had strode across the plateau with his saddlebag, telescope and cane, as if taking a stroll about the royal gardens? Why hadn’t he appeared again since then? Yet worst of all was the doubt – should he report it to the steward? The king’s and the squires’ law was clear on this point: no outsider could appear on the island without their knowledge. Anyone who saw a newcomer or a castaway was duty-bound to report it immediately to the steward or the pastor. And now as he descended towards the Ventlinge crofts, Bjorn suddenly imagined all the immense commotion. On hearing the news, the steward would instantly run to the squire’s rooms. The master would send a messenger to the hunting estate at Ottenby, from where the royal reiters would come at a gallop with a force of thirty people. They would have what was needed: dogs, torches, muskets, rapiers and long pikes. No clump of grass, copse, cave or rock, no shepherd’s shack on the plateau or abandoned hut would then be a safe, secure shelter. How would it look? The stranger, running between two riders with his hands tied behind his back and a noose around his neck, would finally reach the spot where the chest was hidden. But what then? Here Bjorn’s imagination let him down, for what could be expected from an empty chest buried between two pine trees? The king’s men would fly into a rage and thrash the prisoner – let him admit the truth and confess his crimes. But could an empty chest be a crime? In the end they’d be sure to hang the man on one of the pine trees. Bjorn had once seen this sort of execution, which the reiters called ‘gee up, pony’. Made to stand on the saddle, the condemned man had been hopping on tiptoes like a dancer, struggling to keep his balance, while the laughing soldiers swigged hooch. Then as if by the way, the officer had made the nag jump, and that was the end of the poor wretch: he was left dangling from the pine tree like a heap of old rags.

So once he was finally standing before the steward, reporting most obediently that the wall above the precipice was finished, and that in this connection, after a year’s break he, shepherd Bjorn, was ready to take on a flock again, with the gracious consent of the steward and with the blessing of His Lordship the squire, and when he heard the bubbling stream of invective that poured over him like pigswill, he decided not to let out a single squeak about the newcomer. Then everything happened according to the old rules. As he made a record in the register, the steward ordered Jansen, the chief herdsman, to count out thirty-three sheep for Bjorn; once that had been done, Jansen gave him a dog too.

‘With a sheepdog,’ he said, ‘it’ll be easier for you. And he’ll always warn you of outsiders!’

This last remark made Bjorn feel extremely anxious. Could Jansen have guessed something? Strictly speaking, it was impossible. The chief herdsman only visited the shepherds in particular instances, and at the time when the stranger had landed at the foot of the cliff he must surely have been occupied elsewhere. On the other hand, what if he had come that way by chance and seen the unusual sailing ship that day? Jansen had uttered the word ‘outsider’ so specifically, as if he knew everything. Perhaps he was trying to test Bjorn? In any case, the dog really was helpful. On the way back from Ventlinge he remained so alert that Bjorn took to him at once. Every time he rounded up the flock, the year-old, fully-grown sheepdog ran up to Bjorn wagging his tail and barked merrily: ‘All in order, we can carry on!’

That evening, once he had shut the flock in the sheepfold and lit a fire in the hearth, Bjorn realised that the dog should have a name.

‘All right,’ he said, patting him on the nose, ‘you’re going to be called Harald. Just like our proud squire.’

Harald licked his new master’s hand and stretched out before the fire, while Bjorn scooped the remains of the millet porridge from a clay bowl, which, boiled without a single speck of fat, he and the dog had eaten earlier. There was nothing in the house to eat now, but the summer – with its lush pastureland – was only just setting in. Bjorn closed his eyelids, and brought all its wonderful abundance to mind: rabbit meat roasted on a bonfire, sheep’s milk and curds, the scent of juniper in the sunshine, the aroma of honey from wild hives, and also the unusual taste of the water from one particular spring on Alvaret plain, to a mug of which he liked to add a few mint leaves.

‘If such is the will of God,’ he sighed, laying down to sleep, ‘we shall live to see it all.’

For the first time in years he had used the plural. Perhaps the dog could sense it somehow, because as soon as Bjorn was lying on the bench with his sheepskin coat covering him, Harald jumped onto his master’s legs, rolled into a ball and went off to sleep with him.

II

A few days later they caught sight of the stranger. He was coming up from Alvaret plain along the gravel road, straight towards the farmyard. He looked exactly the same as the other time, after landing on shore. When he was only three paces away, instead of barking at him, Harald began to whine and fled into a corner of the yard. Bjorn felt a strange, piercing chill in his heart. Wherever this man had spent the last few days, his clothing, saddlebag and boots were not at all dirty.

‘Are you alone here, shepherd?’ he asked in a deep voice.

‘Yes,’ replied Bjorn, ‘I am always alone.’

‘Can you find room for me?’

‘I have no bed for myself, let alone for such a gentleman.’

The stranger nodded politely, as he was not expecting any other answer. He pointed his cane at the old forge building, and without looking at Bjorn, headed towards it, adding: ‘This will do for me, shepherd.’

In the dark interior, abandoned for years, golden pillars of dust went spinning like the beams of a lighthouse as the stranger reached up on tiptoes to open a tiny window.

‘I have no blanket, jug, candles or food. In a few days I’ll be off with my flock to Alvaret. I’ll be back when the grasses turn yellow. You should not stay here alone, sir.’

Bjorn was not sure if the man was listening to him.

‘I do not need a servant,’ said the stranger, examining the anvil and a tattered pair of bellows with interest, ‘but for these four walls I will give you a piece of gold.’

Bjorn quickly withdrew his hand as the man took a shining metal disc from his bag.

‘You must get out of here when I leave for the pasturage, Sir. Unless you ask the steward. Everything here belongs to the squire. Everything,’ Bjorn repeated emphatically, ‘do you understand?’

‘Including the stars and the sea? And your soul? Does that belong to the squire too?’

It was a strange remark. Bjorn shrugged his shoulders and left the forge, pushing away Harald, who was now fawning on him.

‘Next time you’re to bark at him, not tuck your tail under, got that?’

The dog’s good, wise eyes showed understanding. But for the next few days the stranger gave the sheepdog no cause to bark. Until noon he never came out of the forge at all. Then he spent long hours on the cliff top, as if waiting for a ship or watching the seal herds. At night he came out in front of the forge and gazed at the stars: now with the naked eye, and now through his telescope. But if there really was something unsettling about his behaviour, it was his silence. Not once did he ask Bjorn a question. He never lit a fire or took water from the spring. He must have slept on the dirt floor covered by his coat. But what did he eat? How did he quench his thirst? Maybe he had some provisions in his bag, but how long could they last him for? Bjorn noticed that the stranger never once went down to the foot of the cliff. Yet there, under the pine trees, his empty chest was buried. So he was waiting for something, not guarding it. This obvious fact suggested an idea to Bjorn, and suddenly all the strange elements came together into such a striking whole that the very thought of it took his breath away.

At the end of each spring, a ship sailed in to the island from Kalmar, carrying the King and a small number of his courtiers. Small, because the hunting lodge at Ottenby could not have housed so many idlers and servants. Apparently that was the very reason why the King liked this place: he could gallop across the sprawling grasslands of Alvaret on his own, hunting deer. And as the island was narrow, but also extremely long, several miles from Ottenby the King had had it bisected by a wall, from shore to shore – since when no deer could escape him the King. One time Bjorn had seen His Majesty on the other, royal side of the stone wall. He looked like an ordinary reiter riding up to the stag, but when the animal fell and a horn sounded for the end of the hunt, the royal game warden from Ottenby, who had finally galloped up from behind a hill, kneeled before his master and bowed his head. What if the stranger were waiting for just such a moment? To kidnap the King here, on the open plain, would be easy. His accomplices from the sailing ship were sure to appear at a given signal. Bjorn was afraid to think who these audacious men might be. One thing was without doubt: such people do not leave witnesses behind. Yet if at the terrible moment he were already at the pasturage, deep inside the island, could he then see, know or hear anything? Suddenly, however, he imagined this scene too: the reiters with their hunting dogs in the forge, where they find a clue – a lock of the King’s hair, a strip of lace, or the buckle from a shoe. Oh, and this too – two pieces of gold deliberately placed in an obvious spot by the stranger. How long would he withstand the torture? In fact there was not much, absolutely nothing he could have explained. So after several days of anguish, Bjorn adopted a clear plan. Before going to the pasturage, before heading to Alvaret with the sheep, he would make his way to Ventlinge and tell the steward everything, in Jansen’s presence. That was in case the angry man tried to lay charges against him afterwards.

That night he could not sleep. He thought the stranger was coming out of the forge and walking around the house. He got up, went to the window and stared at the farmyard. But there was nothing going on. In the soft, diffused light of the stars the dark walls of the building looked the same as ever. The sea was roaring and the wind was whistling in the plant stalks. Finally, when he fell asleep, he saw great shoals of salmon glittering in the sunlight. He was one of them. He was a silver-scaled, iridescent fish, travelling thousands of miles in the deep with millions of other creatures like him. He was torn from this journey with no goal or beginning by the dog’s hollow growling. His coat was bristling; he was quivering as if in a fever. The room was flooded with white, unnatural light, the source of which was outside. Bjorn went up to the window and squinted. Only in the first instant did he think the forge was in flames. But it was not a fire. A bright glow such as he had never seen before was coming from inside the forge, pouring through its tiny window, illuminating the yard, the walls of the sheepfold, the pigsty, the pine trees, juniper bushes and individual stones, and beaming into the sky; at times it looked just as if the column of light were falling into the stone building from up there, radiating onto the entire vicinity as it did so. Harald crawled up to the window behind his master, licking his feet and whimpering.

‘Stay here,’ whispered Bjorn. ‘I’ll go on my own.’

Only after a few paces, as he came near to the forge, did he feel fear. The wind had dropped, the sea was silent, and there wasn’t a sound, not even the slightest noise to disturb the unnatural silence. Bjorn crossed himself, then hauled a chopping block up to the wall, stood on it and pressed his face to the little window. There he saw the stranger. With his back towards Bjorn, he was leaning over something that looked like a sheet of copper, a page from a missal, or a portable book-rest. Whatever the object lying on the anvil was, the source of light was emanating from there. He was astonished that it could produce so much brightness without blinding. Reaching a hand into the field of light, the stranger extracted something small and flat, which he then held between finger and thumb, and turned high above his head, like someone inspecting a captive dragonfly. This black flake, which looked like the symbols Bjorn had so often seen carved on the stones on Alvaret plain – symbols which the pastor from Ventlinge, and also the pastor from Mörbylånga said were demonic because they were pagan – this small black leaf the stranger was holding in his fingers began to move and shine, until finally, when the letter in that satanic script appeared to be white-hot, the stranger let go of it, allowing it to float to and fro, like a jay’s feather, straight into the field of light. This action, repeated over and over again, had something of a ritual about it, and although Bjorn had never heard of black masses, he felt the insane thumping of his heart, prompted by fear. One time a flaming letter went slightly off course and failed to come down like the previous ones, so to stop it from landing on the dirt floor, the stranger blew with all his might and uttered a phrase, which did not help, or at least not enough to guarantee it a safe landing, and so he had to cross to the other side of the anvil and quickly repeat the operation; at that moment Bjorn caught sight of his face, and it was terrible. He screamed, jumped off the block and ran home, certain the stranger would race after him to punish him. In panic he latched the door shut and started looking for the wooden crucifix he had found here many years ago, among the items left by the unknown owners. The cross was nowhere, but nevertheless he fell to his knees and prayed in his own words, ardently, opening his eyes every few seconds, only to see the devilish light still shining outside. He would certainly have waited it out until dawn, if not for a storm that came over the plateau, blowing a swift gale. Flashes of lightning, almost one after another, ripped the sky apart. Thunderbolts struck the rocks with such force that the entire island shook to its foundations. Bjorn threw his jerkin over his head, called the dog and without looking round at the forge, ran to the sheepfold. He calmed the sheep, walking from one to another. Finally, as streams of rain lashed down on the world and total darkness prevailed, he fell asleep. Next morning, as he drove the flock out to the nearby meadow, he noticed nothing suspicious in the farmyard. When at around noon the stranger failed to appear on the cliff top, with his heart in his mouth, Bjorn looked inside the forge. It was empty. The anvil was sitting in its place, coated as ever in a layer of dust. Nor did he find a single trace on the dirt floor or on the pieces of equipment abandoned long ago. What did he have for the steward now? What was he to report to him? That evening, once the flock was in the sheepfold, he went down to the bottom of the cliff and checked the spot where the sailors had buried the chest. He started to tremble when under the layer of turf he once again felt the lid of the box, which gaped empty as before. It was a sure sign that the stranger would return. But when, and what for, Bjorn had no idea. He merely sensed it had nothing to do with a conspiracy, because the forces that had appeared on the island would have had a thousand opportunities to commit a crime in a far simpler way. Yet he wanted to wipe out the evidence, so under cover of night he dug up the chest, chopped it to pieces, threw all the fittings into the sea, and set fire to the boards in a rocky niche, where a year earlier the animal pyre had burned; at last, to finish he filled in the hole under the pine trees. But it didn’t make his heart feel any lighter. Maybe only Jansen, who knew many old tales, could have heard him out, understood and given advice. But how was he to describe that terrible face? Wrinkled, the skin tanned almost black, with sparse locks of hair falling onto it, it looked as if dug out of the abyss. All this was too hard for Bjorn, and for the first time in many years, his loneliness lay on his shoulders like a huge burden. In the end he did not go to Ventlinge. He wrapped his shepherd’s odds and ends in a linen sheet, and although the grass on the Alvaret plains was not yet fully grown, at dawn he drove his flock from the farmyard, jamming broken yew twigs into the doors of his house and the sheepfold according to the old custom. He set off deep inland, hoping to encounter no evil before autumn.

III

The pasturelands here had no set borders, and if he had to move on, he chose a route where it was easy to move between sheltered spots. Devoid of trees, Alvaret offered some hollows which, though shallow, were numerous. Shielded from the wind and overgrown with juniper, they were the only places on the island unreached by the constant rumble of the sea. By day he heard the sheep bleating, the larks singing, and sometimes Harald barking. The dog quickly learned to hunt rabbits and they were never hungry by the campfire. At night Bjorn spent hours staring at the stars, and was sorry he didn’t know their names. Nevertheless, as every summer, he felt almost happy. Almost, because sometimes, against his own will, he thought about the stranger’s visit. These considerations led nowhere, and tormented Bjorn, but under their influence he did take certain precautionary measures. Even by day he avoided the large boulders standing in circles, which he knew to be even older than the oak trees at Ventlinge. Formerly, especially on moonlit nights, he liked to lie down in the very middle of a circle and gaze at the sky, feeling the ground breathing and the ring of stones safely encompassing him. He had never believed in elves or devils seizing people’s souls right here. Now he was afraid of these places, copiously scattered over the plain, and if one of the sheep happened to stray into a stone circle, Bjorn called the dog and told him to chase it out, while crossing himself as in church. But nothing evil happened. Bjorn wandered with his flock first to the north, then went back south again; once every five days Jansen and his helper tracked him down without difficulty, to take away the curds on a two-wheel cart and give him some clean milking pails. Usually as well as bread, they brought fresh news from Ventlinge. A fine Polish-bred steed had broken a leg beneath the King; the accident caused no harm, but the reiter officer had had to kill the horse with a shot in the ear. The wife of the pastor from Mörbylånga had happily given birth to a seventh daughter, which was celebrated by communal singing of psalms. The fishermen from Degerhamn had caught such a large cod that the entire village had had a sumptuous supper. Bjorn listened, nodded his head, and replied, but he was glad when they went away. Now, even if Jansen had come alone, without the helper, he would not have wanted to talk about that incident. It was left further and further behind him, and although the chopped-up, burned chest was a real and painful element in all this, the rest might be wished away – a delusion.

He headed north again, along the eastern edge of Alvaret, to the hollow where his favourite spring was located. As no saint had ever visited the island, it did not have its own name. Yet Bjorn knew that with the addition of mint leaves, its water had great power. It only took a few sips for his tired body to feel new strength. But he could not enjoy refreshment straight away. There at the dip in the rocks, master and dog stopped dead at the sight of a deer. The animal raised its mighty head and reluctantly stepped back a couple of paces from the spring. Harald barked, Bjorn called him to heel, and the stag, as if he were the rightful owner of this place, slowly moved onto a hillock, from where he looked round at the intruders once again, before disappearing among the juniper bushes. Bjorn was in no doubt: the animal could only have ended up in this part of the island if he had jumped the King’s wall, yet he had never heard of such a thing before. Unless the stag were older than the monarch’s whim and had spent his entire life at liberty, on this side of the wall, but in that case how old must he be? Bjorn remembered that when he was brought to the island, before becoming a shepherd, he had spent almost two years with the prisoners, finishing building the wall. But it was long enough ago for him to have lost track of time.

He lit a bonfire, told the dog to keep watch, and headed downhill to the seashore, which on this side of the island was almost flat, grassy and swampy like a peat bog. He attached a stone to a mesh net and cast it far into the sea, carefully fastening the line on shore. Halfway back he met Harald. The dog cringed at his feet with his tail between his legs, blocking the path, and when Bjorn tried to move ahead, he began to bark.

‘Has our stag come back?’ said Bjorn. ‘All right, all right, I know that’s no morsel for us! For meat like that you go to the rope! Stop barking!’

The words stuck in his throat. By the bonfire sat a man, the one who had disembarked from the sloop at the foot of the cliffs. Bjorn could not take another step. He was sure that when the stranger turned his face from the fire, he would die, for no one can look death in the eyes twice; but what happened was different. He did turn to face Bjorn, but Bjorn did not die. The face was the one he remembered from before the night in the forge.

‘Do not be surprised,’ said the same, deep voice. ‘Do not be afraid. It is I who need your help.’

‘First I want to know,’ said Bjorn, barely advancing a step, ‘who you are. If you won’t say, I will leave. What I saw then…’

‘Was not for you. Each man may see only as much as he is destined.’

‘So first I must know what I am destined.’

Having said this, Bjorn was surprised by his own boldness. He no longer called him ‘Sir’, he had raised his voice, and yet this man, if he was a man, was capable of far more than a hundred squires from Ventlinge; if he was not a man, things could take an even worse turn.

‘Believe me, it is better not to know. He who knows the future suffers doubly, and sometimes four times over. You do not deserve that.’

‘Your speech is not clear,’ said Bjorn, approaching the bonfire, ‘so who are you?’

‘One of the three, though not the first or the last.’

‘You do not wish to say much. Where do you come from?’

‘We wandered from a far distant country. It is the land of the wise men, so they say. And our return was foretold at the right time. But,’ he said, looking hard at Bjorn, ‘you cannot always return to a city by the same gate.’

‘Do you live in Kalmar? Can’t you get back there? No, you must be from far away. Somewhere much further than Kalmar,’ said Bjorn, and paused for a moment. ‘Are you from Venice?’

‘I was there very long ago. But Venice is not the land of the wise men.’

Only now did Bjorn approach the fire. Slowly he sat down opposite the stranger. He was hungry, so he broke some bread and handed it to his guest. The man took a wineskin from his bag and two silver cups. Bjorn savoured the drink very slowly.

‘Have you never drunk wine before?’ asked the stranger.

‘Never,’ replied Bjorn. ‘Sometimes, after the harvest, I have tasted beer. This,’ he raised his cup, ‘is better than beer.’

The stranger smiled, and it occurred to Bjorn that anyone who ate bread and drank wine in such an ordinary way could not really be a demon, even though his speech was rather unclear. But he did know that gentlemen could be terribly eccentric, so if not for that moment in the forge, now he would no longer have been at all afraid.

‘So what does your city look like?’ he asked, as the man poured him more wine.

‘It has twelve gates. Three at each point of the compass. Before that one must cross a desert and climb a mountain.’

‘And you cannot return by either?’

‘Sometimes the gate is too tight, the road too narrow.’

‘What is the desert like?’

The stranger poured more wine in silence as he sought a definition. Finally he drew an arc in the air and replied: ‘It is almost the same as here, except that instead of moss and grass there is sand everywhere.’

‘Did you travel through so many lands to find me? And what,’ asked Bjorn, gulping, ‘what was that, there in the forge?’

‘I will explain everything. But first could you tell me a story? Your story? What you remember.’

The request amazed Bjorn. No one had ever asked him about his life. Nor had he ever confided in anyone. Occasionally he went back to the past in his dreams, but it caused him pain. He regarded his fate as closed, as if a large, invisible hand had stamped a heavy seal on it. But at the same time there was something tempting about this proposal, some inexplicable hint of hope, which prompted his first words, and then a lot of simple, shyly uttered sentences.

It was hardest of all for him to talk about Venice. He was four-and-a-half when he and his father, a painter of urban alleyways and human faces, had boarded a ship and set off for the Swedish king’s court. For several years they had done perfectly well, although his father had not gained the title of court painter. He was a Catholic and refused to change his faith. However, he had commissions and money. He told his son, soon we will have saved enough to afford the return journey and a happy life. But good fortune had turned its back on them for ever. Arrested on a charge of conspiracy and tortured, he had taken poison, which friends had provided. From them Francesco – for in those days he was not yet Bjorn – had learned that the officials had taken everything his father had put aside. He had been taken into service, first to a stable, then to a pastor. He had had to adopt their faith and take a new name. He ran away from that house, became a vagrant and ended up in prison. The pastor had bought him out, but when the plague had devastated whole villages on the island of Öland, and people were being sought to work there, he had handed the disobedient boy to the estate at Ottenby, taking compensation from the royal game warden. Bjorn had sailed to the island with some prisoners, with whom he spent almost two years putting up the King’s wall. Then, taken into service at Ventlinge, he could choose himself a house to live in. Many of them still stood empty after the plague. He chose the one on the cliff top, at the edge of Alvaret plain, situated furthest away from people and from the village. He did not have the money to be a tenant farmer or a smith. The steward needed shepherds, so he had become one. For the first few years he thought about giving it up, but he had nowhere to go back to. Later on he came to like solitude, and so a good fifteen years had gone by, if he had not made a mistake in the reckoning. The kings had changed, so had the squires of Ventlinge, and the royal game wardens at Ottenby, while each year he followed the same clouds and the same stars in the sky.

‘Sometimes,’ Bjorn concluded, ‘I dream of strange things. A year ago, when I lost the flock, I saw a city with four gates. Apparently it stood here, in the middle of Alvaret, before the people left it in long boats. Jansen heard that a thousand years ago they built a kingdom in the south and that they captured Rome. And now,’ he said, drinking up the wine, ‘I shall listen to your tale.’

What the stranger talked about was not simple, because it had no definite beginning. There was some sort of quarrel in Edessa, during which he had hoodwinked two avaricious Persians. Then there was a conversation with a Sufi in Smyrna, convoluted, too complicated; next a voyage by ship to Tagaste, with no results. Bjorn listened avidly, but understood little. His attention was riveted by a recurring word: the Book. Found, but lost forever, as if it were everywhere and nowhere all at once. He did not know if he had understood properly, but it emerged that this Book was older than the Bible, and that it contained everything that has been, is now, and has yet to be, from a grain of sand at the bottom of the sea to the boundlessness of the starry sky, from the word that was in the beginning, to the terrible riders of the very last days. Something else had been worrying Bjorn ever since he had vaguely yet adequately understood that if the stranger were telling the truth he must have witnessed events so remote in time that he could not possibly be an ordinary mortal. He had seen other great books, forgeries and copies, sometimes so perfect that his mission had seemed to be over. As he described examining these pages and symbols, time seemed to flow by in his story like an unfolding, moving image of something that never actually changed. Imperceptibly he passed into explanations: in a prophecy unknown to him before, which he had found in the scriptorium at the monastery of Notre Dame d’Aiguebelle in Provence, he had come upon a description of the island and the shepherd. He had hired a ship and headed here, to the North, where he had never set foot before.

Bjorn listened in extreme concentration. And when the stranger had finished, he asked to hear the prophecy.

‘Neither Ahuzat, nor Abimelech, nor Phichol, but still one of the three, a son of the Orient, a son of the Supreme Light, the one who, having made obeisance with the others lost the Book on the way, this one, I declare, who for all time has never set his bones to rest, will travel across the cold sea to an island. Its shape a wingless butterfly, its countenance rock and pasture, and girdling it the wall of an irascible king, that fawn nor hind may not leave it.’

The stranger’s lips quivered as he uttered these words. Bjorn tossed another log on the fire and leaned forward to avoid missing a single word.

‘You will take a lone shepherd from a foreign land, pure and just, who will not crave gold, who will break bread with you, and will accept your wine. By a spring at sunrise let him send forth a lamb to pasture; I shall guide it, and wherever it stops, you shall seek that which I sealed in the beginning, until you shall find and I shall open the gate, and wide will be your road again – so say I, whom you worshipped in the form of fire, before I opened the Word to you.’

Bjorn furtively wiped away his tears. Although they contained so many mysterious things, names and expressions, he sensed that these words were referring to him. Someone, maybe as long as a thousand years ago, had known more than even he did about his life, a life which was like slavery, about the King’s stone wall and the pastureland, and about solitude. The stars were still shining overhead, but above the eastern side of Alvaret the first, narrow strip of dawn had appeared.

‘Can you tell me,’ he asked timidly, ‘about what was not destined for me?’

‘I must gather various books along my way.’ The stranger poured them both wine. ‘The one that you saw is the Book of Light. Some take it for the Jewish Zohar, but they are wrong. It is much older and comes from Kashan.’

‘What story does it tell?’

‘Not every book tells a story. This one contains the words of all the languages in the world, but only those in which there is the brightness of truth.’

‘And your face?’

‘You saw the real one. Old age, as it is. Among people I must look different.’

They fell silent. Then, when the sun rose, Bjorn tied on a linen belt and drove a young ram out of the flock. For some time they followed it together: the shepherd with a wooden stick, the stranger with his saddlebag on his shoulder, and the dog.

‘I’d like to go with you,’ said Bjorn, ‘to leave here for ever – take me on board your ship.’

‘Where I am going you cannot follow me. But one day you shall leave the island and you will be happy. As it is written in the Bible: “I shall depart from a foreign land across a which the Lord shall build.”’

These were the stranger’s last words. Bjorn called Harald, and blinking, watched as the man’s silhouette, heading after the ever smaller figure of the lamb, disappeared against the burning disc of the sun, somewhere in the middle of Alvaret.

IV

Towards the end of September, the reverend pastor Jons, parish priest at Ventlinge, found Bjorn standing outside his door. He asked humbly if the pastor would possibly be willing to lend him a Bible. He promised to come to church on Christmas Day and to return the book undamaged. If needs be, he would work in the reverend’s field for as many days as he saw fit. The pastor said nothing, but told him to wait outside, and vanished into the house. He came back with a half leather-bound family Bible and handed it to Bjorn.

‘Open it at any page and read aloud, if you are able to!’

It was Chapter Twelve of the Book of Daniel. Bjorn, who had last pieced together the letters of Swedish script many years ago, stammered syllable after syllable, but with each sentence he found it easier, and when at the end he read out fluently: ‘But you, go your way till the end; for you shall rest, and will arise to your inheritance at the end of the days,’ the pastor, somewhat amazed, nodded benignly. Then he asked: ‘What do you need it for?’ and at once added, as if to himself, under his breath: ‘If such people begin to prophesy too, what will it come to?’ However, he lent the Bible, sternly instructing him to treat it like a treasure, for although he had not bought it, merely inherited it from his predecessor, it was still worth a lot of money.

When, like the others, he drove his flock to the great barns at Ventlinge where the sheep spent the winter, a different time set in for him. He only went to the estate to work off his debt five days a week, and had two for himself. Until the snow fell, he caught and smoked fish, and chopped a supply of firewood. After work he read by the fireside: first the Gospels, the Letters and Acts of the Apostles. He was a little disappointed that only Matthew wrote about the Three Kings. He mentioned gold, frankincense and myrrh, but did not say a word about the lost Book. And he only added that ‘they returned another way to their own land, the land of the rising sun.’ Afterwards, to find the sentence about the ‘fragile bridge which the Lord shall build,’ he carefully read book after book, starting from Genesis. Days went by, his eyes were watering from the flickering firelight, but so far there was nothing about any sort of bridge, let alone a fragile one. Sometimes, when he awoke after a short doze, fearing that he may have overlooked something, he went back two or three chapters and read them again – in vain. If not for the silver cup, he might have thought he dreamed it all one balmy summer’s night, when he fell asleep outside the shelter, stupefied by the scent of herbs and grasses. He set aside the Bible and picked up the vessel. The letters running around it in relief were intertwined with the leaves of a plant he did not recognise. He raised the cup to his nose and slowly drew in air, as if at the very bottom a dried-up drop of wine might give him any sort of explanation.

The day before Christmas Bjorn finished reading the Bible. In none of the books had he found the sentence with which the stranger had so deeply moved him. But the next day he did not return the book to the pastor. There was such a strong blizzard and the snowdrifts were so high that even in the village no one could possibly have dared to go outside. It continued to rage and to snow for the next few days, until finally the sun came out, the wind dropped and a biting frost took hold. Bjorn went out onto the cliff and saw a white expanse, stretching all the way from the island to the distant line of the mainland. The sea had frozen. Never before, since he had been on Öland, had he seen the strait ice-bound. He went home, wrapped some food, the cup, a shirt and foot cloths in a bundle, placed the Bible at the very centre of the table, put out the fire, tied some short, wide slats to the soles of his winter boots, put on his sheepskin coat and hat, called the dog and for the last time closed behind him the door of the house that had never been his property.

He glided across the creaking snow, occasionally sinking up to his knees, but the further he was from the island, the easier the going, because the drifts were smaller. He also crossed places where the layer of snow blown in by the wind was only a few centimetres deep. At those points he paused, swept aside the snow and looked at the ice, under which was the sea. Harald followed along the trail he cut, pleased not to be sinking up to his belly. The red sphere of the sun had passed midday when they came onto the mainland. Bjorn was not sure whether the trickles of grey smoke rising beyond the hill belonged to Brömsebro or perhaps another village, but it didn’t matter. He had no goal, he felt joy in his heart, and he never once looked behind him.

They spent a long time climbing up a hill, now master before dog, now dog before master. And once they were at the top, standing beneath the boughs of trees stripped of their leaves, they could see the roofs of a village and fields covered in snow. There were small, dark figures moving along a frozen river and on ponds. The shouts of children, laughter, the grating of skates and the clash of curved sticks could be heard from afar on the crystal-clear air. Sleighs in harness were driving along the road, with people in fancy dress riding in them. On a bonfire outside a tavern, the innkeeper and a woman were roasting a pig. Harald tensed like a string as he scented the smell of fat mixed with the odour of burning bristles. Perhaps it would induce the master to take them there, perhaps for chopping wood and carrying water the master would be given a bowl of pig’s blood soup and a black pudding, and the dog a bone and some gristle; but Bjorn, whose gaze was following a bird soaring over the valley, had spotted something he couldn’t tear his eyes away from.

At the edge of the village, outside a small building that could have been a stable or a forge, or both of them at once, some horsemen were riding up; there were people crowding among them, and some musicians were approaching. A man in a turban was driving a camel covered with a saddlecloth, another was leading a laden donkey by the halter, a drunkard lying in the snow was singing a serenade, a cripple was hobbling along on a crutch and some beggars were plying their trade. Bjorn headed down the hill, with Harald after him; they crossed a stone bridge over a river, passed a few houses, and finally reached the gathering. Snow began to fall in large flakes, despite which more and more people kept coming, trumpets blared, pipes wailed, cymbals crashed, and a pair of village ragamuffins started to dance. Bjorn pushed his way to the entrance, but the local strongmen would not let him through, demanding a penny in payment for this unexpected show; finally by some miracle he managed to slip inside, but only to the door, from where, on tiptoes, he could see something. The same man, one of the three, was kneeling down, holding a long copper canister. Bjorn recognised him, in spite of the fact that he was wearing a shining coat richly shot with golden threads. From his tube he removed a scroll, unfurled it a little and, bowing his head, showed it to the child. The brilliance that shone out in the chamber dazzled everyone, but not Bjorn. People were coming outside, some astounded, some already bored by this spectacle, and now he could go nearer. The King held the scroll up so close to the child that he could touch it with his small, chubby finger. And just then, on the unrolled page Bjorn caught sight of himself and his father, disembarking from a galleon into a gondola. Slowly they went sailing past the church of Santa Maria della Salute. A bright, warm morning heralded a beautiful day.

‘How good it is to be home,’ said his father. ‘We shall never go to the North again.’

In the shimmering mirror of water Bjorn could see time. Images kept coming forward one after another: walking across the frozen sea, reading the Bible, the campfire on Alvaret, the brilliant light in the forge, the ship sailing in, building the low wall above the precipice, the flock of sheep running straight to their death, moving to the deserted farm, working on the King’s wall at Ottenby, the pastor’s house in Stockholm, prison, vagrancy, serving in the stable, his father’s funeral, their departure by galleon from the place where they now were. The images collided with each other like canoes; time had closed its circle and stopped. Bjorn knew that he no longer had to wander. He felt deep, ineffable happiness.

In spring a coast guard from Brömsebro found the remains of the shepherd from the Ventlinge estate in the partly thawed, frozen snow. He was buried in the local cemetery, from where there stretches a beautiful view of the island of Öland. The parish register records that he was caught in a snowstorm, after walking across the frozen strait for inexplicable reasons. The coast guard from Brömsebro did not confess to anyone that beside Bjorn the shepherd he also found the remains of a dog. Improbable, devilish tales could have arisen from that fact. Nor did he admit that in the dead man’s bundle he found a silver cup. And next spring the reverend pastor Jons recovered his valuable Bible when, on the steward’s orders, the house on the cliff was searched.

Doctor Cheng

I

ONLY ON THE plane did it dawn on him that the decision to make this journey, taken a good fifteen months ago, was a reckless one. Nothing really drew him to the country where he had spent the first twenty years of his life and which had no positive associations for him. Or at least positive enough to long for and dream about. All right, once, when he was on his way down to Luigi’s diner in the lunch hour and had passed two pretty girls twittering away in his native language, something had shuddered inside him. But it was barely a twitch. No more at any rate than the time when, flicking from channel to channel, he had chanced upon the image of the Pope and a cheering crowd whose singing reminded him, as if through a fog, of a blazing hot day in June and a Corpus Christi procession.

To tell the truth, right from the start – if only there were such a possibility – he would have loved to press the button marked ‘instant rewind’ and then watch the passengers’ stunned expressions. But there was no such button. So he considered another, entirely realistic possibility. Straight after landing he would check the return flights, buy a ticket and if necessary even spend half a day at the airport. Perhaps if they had a hotel near the terminal he would take a room, stretch out on the bed and sleep through the time until departure.

Like a pendulum over the Atlantic, he thought – why on earth not?

But at once he came to his senses. As he was returning to his home country rather half-heartedly and for no real reason, how was he supposed to explain to himself this next, even more rapid return, or rather escape? And what in the end would he be running away from?

A little bit of common sense, he mused, with his eyes closed, never does any harm!

Eventually he decided that everything would proceed just as he had so precisely planned it: a taxi from the airport to the train station, then four hours travelling in a rickety train – an express in name only – and finally a walk by the sea, where he would recognise two lighthouses, a few miles apart: the one at the entrance to the port and the one that cast its light over the roofs of an old health spa. Then he would look for a boarding house for two or three weeks, and live from one day to the next, perhaps taking the opportunity to renew some old acquaintances, but with no obligation and no expectations. His plans went no further than that. He was single and wealthy. He could just as well spend the rest of his life on exotic journeys, or settle in some quiet spot in the south – as far as there were still any quiet spots left on earth.

The lighthouses were the same as years ago, the boarding house was perfectly suitable, and his daily walks along the sandy beach afforded him immense pleasure. He immediately noticed that there were far fewer of the small, yellow fishing boats than in the past. But the number of fish bars and restaurants had increased, stretching along a new promenade. From dawn to dusk, roller-skaters and cyclists went racing along a dedicated path that ran parallel to it. Where coastal meadows run wild had once given shelter to truants and lovers, there was now a city park. The tower in the pine forest, from which the military used to monitor the state border delineated within the waters of the bay, had disappeared. But not everything had yielded to such thorough change. When he alighted from the tram on the main avenue of his old neighbourhood – and he only made his way there after a couple of days – literally two steps beyond a strip of banks and elegant shop fronts, he could tell that although much had changed here, in actual fact almost nothing had changed. He was greeted by crumbling garages, rubbish bins full to overflowing, sickly little gardens and peeling plaster. From gateways, courtyards and toolsheds yawned the same, eternal odour of drunkards’ piss, mothballs, weeds, puddles that never dry up, vegetable soup, fag ends and feline nuptials. On the other hand, there were definitely more cars and dog mess. Instead of sentimental sighs, a few of which he had been expecting in this place, he felt rising disgust. He did not take a single photo, and when he returned to the boarding house by taxi, instead of heading off on his afternoon walk along the sea, he sat down in a bar and drank vodka, while browsing the papers. The politicians annoyed him: a child could have told lies with more charm than these gentlemen, casting aspersions at one another. They were like drunken, sweaty porters, competing to snatch the suitcase of the only passenger at a badly lit, provincial station, long after hours. In hope, he reached for the local supplement, furnished with the heading ‘kultukultu’, but this time too he was disappointed. Everything that over the past thirty years had been devised, consumed, masticated and excreted as art in the city and the country he came from, the entire phantasmagoria of installations, videos with genitals and without, sawing grand pianos in half, smashing violins to smithereens, drinking or excreting urine in full view of the public, in short, all those passé entertainments had been produced here as the revolutionary doings of local geniuses. As, with a stifling sense of weariness, he put the supplement aside, he noticed an announcement on one of the advertising pages: ‘Doctor Cheng has a wide selection of dreams to offer.’ There wouldn’t have been anything unusual about it, if not for the fact that there was no address or even a phone number given in the advertisement. He came to the conclusion that it must be one of those adverts that develop: in a day or a week, let’s say, the reader would find further information in the same spot. A description, for instance, of the hypnotic state in which a patient encountered her dead husband. Or found out the numbers that would win her the jackpot on the lottery.

Next day when he looked through the new edition of the paper he was quite surprised. The announcement had not been repeated, either in a fuller form, or in its previous, useless version. From then on, every day at breakfast he scoured the small ad columns, but to no effect: no one called Cheng ever advertised again. Moreover – and he checked carefully at the reading room in the local library one rainy day – this strange message had not been printed earlier either. In short, it only appeared once, and that was the time he had read it. He felt anxious, as if an invisible hand had opened a door into the past.

II

He didn’t believe in God. He regarded the idea of the afterlife, and of resurrection, as a fiction as ancient as it was extravagant. And yet, every year since Sophie had died, he had conducted his ritual on the same day in September, and at the same time. He would go to Chinatown, and at the spot where his wife had fallen to the sidewalk he would stop for a few minutes, summoning up the brief moment in which he had seen the last spark of life in her eyes. It was the only form of prayer he was able to muster. When he told his psychoanalyst about it, Dr Esterhagen had defined this act as a spontaneous search for the vagina of eternity. He never went to see the doctor again. Whereas he did read every book and pamphlet he could find on the Book of Changes, which at the time he and Sophie had been on their way to buy at Tung Chung-shu’s famous store. Sixty-four hexagrams, in endless combinations, from which one could interpret the fate of both individuals and entire countries, continents and galaxies, seemed to him a mental delusion. Poetic enough to be called mad. That was no consolation, especially when he remembered the enthusiastic way Sophie used to tell him about it all, and how pleased she was when he suggested they buy the Book not at one of the elegant bookstores in their neighbourhood, but right at the heart of Chinatown. If at the time they had reached Tung Chung-shu’s store, which was barely a block away, would the final expression in her eyes have been any different? The cold look that had stuck in his memory expressed a feeling of utter loneliness, as devoid of complaint as it was of hope. But on the other hand, what value could there be in supposing that if her heart attack had happened after entering the store, she might have died happier? He could sense the absurdity of such speculation, but he couldn’t entirely free himself of it, because always, somewhere at the back of his mind, a sense of guilt stirred in him. As if it was he himself who had chosen the time and the place. He realised he would never free himself of it if he didn’t make some sort of change to his annual ritual, or abandon it. So why shouldn’t he consult the Book? He didn’t actually believe in its merits, and fortune-telling – if one could define the arrangement of a hexagram of scattered sticks in this way – had no greater value than the toss of a coin, in which we leave everything to chance. And so he went ahead and did it. Having no experience, however, he fell into a whirlpool of contradictions, which he failed to interpret. For what on earth did the element of fire mean in conjunction with being forbidden to climb? It wasn’t as if he was planning to go hiking in the mountains during the summer season of forest fires. And on top of all this – a man disappearing into a chasm! What sort of interpretation could this possibly offer for his affairs? It was no different at the second attempt: the element of water was supposed to lessen the severity of hurricanes, yet the death of a bird augured a never-ending, ever greater threat. He did not make a third attempt, which could only have confirmed his worst suppositions: interpreting the hexagrams made no sense at all if you were not a Chinese man from the time of the Ming dynasty. As he put the sticks back in the red lacquer box, he decided he would go there one last time. He would stop at the spot where Sophie had died, and then go into Tung Chung-shu’s store, because he had never actually visited its interior. By the beginning of September one more detail had come into play: he would put his apartment up for sale and, without taking any souvenirs with him, would leave for northern California, or anywhere at all.

What he remembered most was that sense of compression: as if from at least a hundred and twenty television channels a single one had been made. And as if on this single channel a malevolent goblin were running the same tape over and over again: the second plane crashing into the second tower. At once he understood why they kept showing that second one non-stop, less often returning to the first. When the second one crashed, the cameras were already in place: the plane flew in, decelerating, turned a semi-circle, speeded up and finally smashed its beak into the slab of glass, only to come flying out the other side as a jet of fire. The first plane was like a stone hurled accidentally. The second contained the elegance of an agent who, not satisfied with just killing, makes a show of it into the bargain. Between the replays there was live coverage. In bars, in stores, before window displays and at gas stations people were watching what was happening in the very same city, just a short distance away. Tiny figures were jumping downwards. A pillar of smoke was gushing upwards. Finally, this entire inferno slumped like volcanic lava, filling the labyrinth of streets and avenues with heat and dust. Just at that moment he crossed the street to enter Tung Chung-shu’s store, but it turned out that this repository of all kinds of wisdom and ancient knowledge, familiar from guidebooks and esoteric links, in whose display window he had seen the same golden Buddha each year, had closed down. In its place, a tacky painting of a dragon, with the royal letter wang hovering above it for some unknown reason, invited guests to enter an antique store.

He spent a long time wandering a narrow, badly lit labyrinth between dozens of wardrobes, dressers, screens, tables and cabinets, made chaotic by accumulated knick-knacks, until finally he spotted the storekeeper at the far end of all this junk. The old man was wearing a long silk gabardine and his white hair was covered by a little round hat, from under which a tacked-on pigtail spilled onto his shoulders. Reluctantly he turned his gaze from the television screen, where no doubt for the hundredth time that day, the plane full of passengers was on the point of crashing into the second tower.

‘You looking for something?’ he asked, glancing at the screen again. ‘Cheng have everything genuine, genuine porcelain, genuine fan, Canton, Shanghai, nothing fake!’

‘I’m looking for Tung Chung-shu’s store,’ he said. ‘Has it moved? Or closed down?’

Now on the screen he could see a fire truck disappearing into a dark cloud of dust.

‘You not see Tung Chung-shu?’ The old man shook his head. ‘No one see him.’

‘I saw him last year,’ he said, also glancing at the screen, from which a reporter leaning over a blood-stained stretcher was speaking. ‘I was standing just over there, on the other side of the street.’

‘Tung Chung-shu,’ said the old man, sniggering, ‘die long time ago. Very long time ago. Han dynasty.’

He knew nothing about the Han dynasty. The storekeeper, like many old people, was living in his own, insulated eternity, where this particular morning some aeroplanes made into missiles had joined in. He headed for the door, casting half-hearted glances at the imitations of lacquer, silk, or woven paper, made in Taiwan or Indonesia. And just then, on the surface of a small rectangular table, with columns of imprinted gilded Chinese characters in a wavy style running across it, he caught sight of a model of a cottage. He stopped beside it, gazing in disbelief at the intricately reproduced windows, the hip-roof and the small veranda with an architrave and a pergola. There was even the head of a china doll set in the middle window of the upstairs bedroom. All that was missing were the snow and the sledge, on which he could have seen himself. One after another, images released from the storeroom of his memory came passing before him as he picked up the model, gently ran his fingers over the red roof tiles, closed the white shutters and touched the chimney.

Opposite the former German barracks, in a row of officers’ villas built at the turn of the century, this one single house had always aroused his curiosity. It was mysterious. It caught the eye, like a visitor from a faraway land. The adults simply called it the Chinese cottage, though no one knew why some Prussian had come up with such a bizarre idea. In summer the house was fenced off from the street by a hedge. In autumn one could see a garden pond, with golden chestnut leaves floating in it. Yet it was at its loveliest in winter. Now he was remembering that evening, when under the Christmas tree he had found a copy of Mr Inkblot’s Academy and the sledge he had been longing to receive. Outside thick snow was falling. How wonderful! His father had agreed to let him try it out at once. They walked, or rather glided across the city like a pair in harness. His father was the reindeer and he was Father Christmas, come all the way here across the frozen Baltic from Finland. Beyond the last, narrow little street were the woods and the first hill. They slid down it a few times. On the way home he asked his father if they could make a short stop outside the Chinese cottage. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the illuminated windows, the snowy roof that looked like a pagoda and the little girl’s face that appeared for a moment in an upstairs window.

‘Who lives here?’ he asked.

‘Maybe a great Chinese scholar,’ joked his father. ‘You’ll read about him in a book.’

As they set off again, the girl waved goodbye to them.

He put down the model cottage and left the store. The city was living and breathing nothing but the catastrophe, yet as if it were the most important matter in hand, he was trying to remember the name of the Chinese scholar from the book he had found that time beside the sledge beneath the Christmas tree. But in vain. Once he reached home, not without some transport problems, he switched on the television, and as he watched the plane crashing into the second tower, he decided that none of it had any real meaning any more as he couldn’t tell Sophie about it.

III

By now he had been to a get-together with friends from his class, gone sailing in the bay, made a trip to Kaliningrad by hydrofoil, spent a week by a Kashubian lake, visited his parents several times at the cemetery, given an interview to a local newspaper, had an evening at a business club, and even seen a performance of Hamlet at the town theatre, which he was already trying to forget about before the curtain fell. He had visited his old neighbourhood several times, and the first impressions had subsided under the influence of the ones that followed, which were not as unpleasant. He took a photograph of the Chinese cottage, which had been restored by its new owners, and he took lots of snaps of the tenement house where he used to live with his parents. Just as he had decided at the start, he lived from day to day, without attaching any great significance either to renewed, or entirely new acquaintances. Just occasionally, as he gazed at the sea from his boarding house window, he wondered why he wasn’t leaving.

Towards the end of the summer an important change occurred in his peaceful, maybe by now even boring existence. He bought a flat in a small, new apartment block and had a pleasant time furnishing it. He was rather amused by the fact that he had taken the decision on impulse. The block was situated on the edge of the woods, at the head of a valley, where people used to go mushroom-picking, but now just went for walks. Fifteen minutes by taxi from the boarding house with the same, single suitcase with which he had flown across the Atlantic – that was his entire move. Gradually the rhythm of his day also began to change. He got up early and jogged around the wooded hills for an hour or so. On the way home he bought the newspapers and some bread. After coffee and a read he took a shower and sat down at the computer. He had no need to increase his money, but nevertheless, as in the days when he was earning it, he liked to check the share prices and the fund quotations. Sometimes he sent an e-mail to one of his old partners and brushed off their answers with something like: ‘What the hell are you doing, if you’re not doing anything?’ Then he would walk to the university, where he’d spend a little time in the reading room, or he’d take the tram to the seaside. Equipped with more than a dozen culinary compendia, he cooked his own dinners. If he hadn’t arranged to meet someone at a pub, he would spend all afternoon and evening reading philosophy books, which he bought with the passion of a neophyte. He found Plato, with whom he had come into contact in his student days, just as absorbing as Wittgenstein’s treatise, and he leafed his way through Pascal’s bitter truths with the same attention as the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius. He had no definite aim, and maybe that was why he derived such great pleasure from it.

One night he had a dream about Sophie by the seaside, in which all he did was tell her about what he had been reading. Quite a long time went by before he realised he wasn’t talking to her in English and that she couldn’t understand a thing, but when they shifted into their common language, she disappeared, and at that point he awoke. As he couldn’t get back to sleep, he got up, went into the kitchen, put the kettle on, and with a sweater thrown over his pyjamas, went out onto the balcony. The sun was not yet peeping out above the hill and the crest of the woods, but it was already light. Amid falling trails of mist two roe deer were nibbling the grass in the middle of the valley. He fetched his camera from the living room, adjusted the zoom and released the shutter. The animals raised their snouts and went bounding into the woods. There was a man coming down the path leading from the old oak trees, pulling a two-wheel cart loaded with a hefty package covered in tarpaulin. He could have peeked at him through the zoom lens, but as this man had scared the animals away, he stirred nothing but irritation. Half an hour later, as he was trotting along his usual route, he was sorry he hadn’t done it. The man he had seen from the balcony was now spreading out some large canvas sheets in the middle of the meadow. It looked quite like a hang-glider, or maybe a balloon being unfolded, but it was impossible to check, as he didn’t want to seem like an intruder by stopping and staring in the man’s direction.

After all, there was nothing quite so extraordinary about it.

But that afternoon, when he came back from the seaside, he changed his mind. There at the centre of the meadow stood a capacious oval tent, the kind seen in old-fashioned prints of Turkish military camps. In front of the tent, on a small colourful rug sat a Chinese man. Later, when he discreetly aimed his lens at him from the balcony, the Chinese man distinctly smiled and waved a hand. At that he withdrew inside. Yet he searched the Internet and the newspapers in vain for advertisements or information. Nowhere could he find anything announcing a miracle-worker, a folk performer or an Asian doctor who was going to pitch his tent in a suburban meadow, in a conservation area within a park. That evening, on his way out to the pub, he glanced across at the valley. The tent was standing in its place, but its owner had vanished. There were some children running around, and a dog barking outside the wind-stirred entrance flap. That night, when he came home from the city, the tent stood out like a grey stain against the black backdrop of the woods. But in the morning the meadow was empty again. He made a slight detour from the route of his run to look for traces of it. They were irrefutable: a hole left by the tentpole, an area of grass trampled flat, and some smaller holes made by the tent pegs. ‘But that’s impossible,’ he thought, ‘quite idiotic!’

He thought he ought to leave this place, but at the very thought of a journey he felt utterly despondent. He wrote a diplomatic e-mail to Dr Esterhagen, asking if he would like to take up a conversation on some completely new topics, but the analyst didn’t answer. Luckily, towards the end of November there was heavy snowfall, and a new occupation distracted him. He bought some cross-country skis and, with a map and a thermos of hot tea in his backpack, he set off on long daily outings, identifying the old routes of his suburban hikes among the forest tracks and clearings. He was particularly fond of the places that gave a clear view of the city and the bay. This was just how he wanted to spend the approaching Christmas Eve: a couple of hours on a ski run, come home, have supper, and then head off to Midnight Mass. Besides, it was better than being alone in that apartment, where everything reminded him of Sophie. But then came a sudden thaw, and there was no question of skiing. When he looked out at the meadow that morning, not a single patch of snow was covering the tawny-grey grass. Rain was drizzling out of heavy, low-drifting clouds. But in the very same spot as before, the same tent had been pitched. Calmly, as if he were just off to the corner shop, he put on his hooded jacket and boots and left the house.

‘Is there anyone there?’ he asked, standing outside the loosely laced-up entrance. ‘Should I speak in English?’

‘No, I can speak in any language,’ he heard someone say. ‘Please come into the vestibule.’

Inside an extremely cramped space a small spirit lamp was burning. His host’s face looked unfamiliar, though it may have been the same man he had seen through the lens.

‘So you are Doctor Cheng? Did you place an announcement in the newspaper?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why are you looking for me? What do you want from me? Why are you hounding me?’

‘I want you to believe.’

‘In what? Trading in dreams? Predictions? It’s nonsense.’

‘I do not sell dreams, I merely offer them. Do you remember your hexagram, in which the element of fire warned against climbing?’

‘That still doesn’t prove a thing.’

‘I am tired. I have little time. If you want to try, say yes.’

‘Try what?’

‘A dream is not a daydream. Or a reflection. It is the other side of your shirt.’

‘But what am I supposed to believe in?’

‘In what you will see.’

‘All right. So what do I have to do?’

Doctor Cheng gently moved him half a pace aside and put out the lamp. Suddenly he raised the inner tent flap. It looked just as if inside, beyond an invisible threshold, there was a very different space. He saw a mountain stream, a footbridge, and some distant peaks. If it was an illusion, it was perfect. The stream was thundering over the rocks, and he could feel a fine mist of water spraying his face. Clean air filled his lungs. The doctor gave him a small push forwards, and suddenly he found himself inside the scene that seconds earlier he had been watching. Some people were calling to him from the other side of the footbridge, and soon after he recognised them as his parents. His mother was signalling to him, and his father was smiling, as ever. He crossed to their side of the bridge; they shook hands and chatted. He understood that in a while they would want to move onwards, but without him. They had backpacks and suitable boots, but he didn’t have any. Now he realised how he had got here, but he looked around in vain: neither the meadow outside his new home nor even the tent he had entered were anywhere in sight. His mother and father were already far away; he could see their tiny figures on a rocky path, waving goodbye to him. He bathed his face in cold stream water, and then he caught sight of the inner tent flap closing in front of him.

‘Beautiful,’ he said to Doctor Cheng, ‘but it’s just a trick. I saw them, I touched them, but they aren’t alive. You cannot resurrect them.’

‘If you know something, speak of it. If you do not know, do not speak. That is the principle. And indeed you do not know what they desire.’

The doctor lit the lamp again, and put it out again.

This time he was in Chinatown, in the spot where Sophie had died. But it was she who was leaning over him, not he over her. He could see her tears and her lips rapidly uttering the words of a prayer that he couldn’t hear. An excruciating pain in the region of his sternum was making any kind of movement or response impossible. Finally, once the spasm had abated, in total darkness he felt her hand on his face and heard her whisper – better me, better me than him, me, not him, O God, O God…

‘What is the point of your mission?’ he asked, when he found himself back in the vestibule again. ‘What is it meant to prove?’

‘I really have very little time now. Others are waiting. Sometimes it is better to break free of one’s thoughts and accept reality. If you had come the first time, you would have learned far more. Do not seek me here, or anywhere else. You can only meet me once.’

As he said this, Doctor Cheng drew aside the outer flap of the vestibule and pushed him out of the tent. He must have spent a long time inside it, because the meadow was now in darkness and a lot of snow had fallen. Evidently, on leaving the house, he hadn’t flicked the light switch, because he could see bright light shining in his windows. He walked towards it, with the feeling that everything that had happened really had occurred. Just like that Christmas Eve when he and his father had stopped outside the Chinese cottage. And suddenly he remembered the name from that book: Pai Chi Wo – he kept shouting at the top of his voice, overjoyed, until people on their way to Midnight Mass started anxiously looking round at him. Then he ran fast, not realising that a crack of blinding light, ever brighter, going deep into the earth, was engulfing him.

The Fifteen Glasses of Gendarme Polanke

IN THE YEAR 1909 or 1910 golden dust was falling on the Wilderness, slowly and idly, heralding a severe winter. Gendarme Polanke was riding his horse across the fields, but before he noticed the strange woman, he was thinking back to yesterday’s visit to the chief official, the Landrat. This matter could brook no delay. Squire Gulgowski, ‘that damned Pole’, had been riding about the local villages ever since he arrived from Danzig, distributing some sort of news-sheets and leaflets to the peasants, as well as the landowners (of whom there were not in fact many hereabouts). Polanke did not actually know the nature of these publications, for each person interrogated on this circumstance had held his tongue and shrugged his shoulders, but there could be no doubt it was a political matter, which he, Polanke, must immediately report to the Landrat. All the more, since the police station at Wiele was not trustworthy. Corporal Szulc took no notice of any reports at all. It was a known fact that instead of demonstrating a spirit of vigilance, Corporal Szulc held intense carousals every night, in which Kosterke the butcher and Blum the shopkeeper also took part. If only Polanke had access to a search warrant and several men to help. Meanwhile ‘that moustachioed Pole’ had set the dogs on him. But he, Polanke, had not failed to notice the plaque above the threshold, which was not there before, saying: ‘No entry for German cockroaches or any other vermin.’ That was what was written there. In Polish. If only the Landrat would wish to give it his consideration… Polanke gave a deep sigh. He adjusted his helmet and took in the reins. That was when he noticed the strange woman. He could tell at once that she was not local, and immediately spurred on his horse to cut across her path at the roadside crucifix, from where a path led off to Herr Knitter’s cottage. It did not take long.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked in German. But the woman did not take the slightest notice of him. ‘Can’t you hear what I’m saying to you?’ shouted Polanke, blocking her way. ‘Are you deaf?’ But at once he regretted his words and his insistence. The stranger stopped half a pace in front of the horse and looked up, staring at Polanke. In her eyes there was something that prompted instant anxiety. The gendarme did not know how to define it, but somewhere in the small of his back he felt an unpleasant tingling. ‘Only witches look at you like that,’ he thought, ‘or criminals.’ But he didn’t say that, of course, because the moment was dragging on unbearably and her gaze, not his, demanded a response. There they stood facing each other, she in shabby rags, he in his shiny helmet with the black eagle, she with a bundle tied on a stick of pine, he with his Mannlicher rifle slung over his shoulder; the golden dust continued to fall on the Wilderness, heavy rain clouds were drawing in from over the Water, and high overhead they could hear the cry of a hawk. Today it is hard to say who spoke first. But the main thing is that the words that followed – for they did say something to each other – were uttered in a harsh, grating language which Polanke did in fact know, but found repulsive: the dialect of fishermen and shepherds. He burst out laughing when she said she was looking for work and a place to stay. The work was out there, in the north and in the west, in the cities or at the houses of the vulgar rich, but not here, where not even potatoes could flourish in the sandy soil and where the only thing not in short supply was stones.

‘Admit what you have stolen at once,’ he said, leaning out of the saddle. But she answered that she hadn’t stolen anything. ‘In that case you’ve run away from your husband,’ he said even louder. She replied that she had never had a husband. At this point Gendarme Polanke adjusted the strap under his chin, sat up straight and delivered a speech – about the fact that wherever the imperial authority reached, no crime would ever escape justice. And as he, Polanke, was the natural extension of that authority in the local area, all vagrants and suspicious types who appeared in the Wilderness, in Zabrody or by the Lake should be on their guard. The gendarme turned his horse towards the Zabrody inn and without a word of farewell, without even looking at the stranger, rode away. Meanwhile the woman set off in the opposite direction. A few moments later she was standing at that point on the plateau where the view opens onto the thatched roofs of Zabrody, hidden among the hills, and further, as far as the eye can see, to the great Water cut across by the contours of islands and the woods on its borders. Here she halted beside a field - stone marking the way. She sat down and extracted a piece of dry bread from her bundle. Now she was tearing at it with her teeth, steadily working her jaw to chew it up. There was no more golden dust in the air, because the sun had dropped low behind the woods. As Gendarme Polanke approached the inn, the woman finished eating. She gathered all the crumbs from her skirt, scooped them out of her cupped hand with her tongue and set off straight ahead, along the road to Zabrody. And she surely would have found room in an abandoned barn or a fishing shed right on the Lake, or maybe she would even have been offered a warmer corner to sleep in at one of the cottages, if not for the sudden wind that fell on the Wilderness from all directions, driving in clouds heavy with rain and cold. She had to shelter anywhere she could, and at the edge of the scrubland it was not easy. She ran on, until at a turn in the road she came upon a thick clump of broom. She hesitated, wondering whether to flee further, but then the wind, raising twigs and leaves into the air, almost knocked her off her feet, so she crawled into the tangle of roots. As she tucked her head into her arms to hide from the lashing rain, Gendarme Polanke was knocking back his first glass of anise. In the dark chamber of the inn, empty and lit by a tallow candle, Gasiński the publican was leaning over his guest, telling him how two days ago Mr Samp and Mr Skórzewski had been coming home this way along the road to Juszki. They had been to the moustachioed Pole’s place in Wdzydze, but not for a name-day party or a family celebration. They had stopped a while at the inn, to give the horses a rest, had each drunk a glass of vodka and chatted in hushed voices, over there in the corner. Only a few words had reached the publican’s ears, rather odd and devious ones; oh no, it wasn’t a conversation about business – these words did not concern leasing, taxes, buying or selling. Then the gentlemen had parted and each gone his own way. Polanke downed the second glass of anise. Yes, he would very much like to know what sort of words they were. But Gasiński did not remember them well, so the gendarme drank a third glass and remembered the strange woman on the Wilderness. At the very thought of the look in her eyes, a shudder ran through his body. No, she had not come through this way, or at any rate she had not called at the pub. Gasiński laughed and shook his head. He didn’t give credit to beggars and tramps – he’d have sent a woman like that to the four winds, and that was that. What could she be looking for here?

‘That’s no ordinary beggar,’ said Polanke after a pause for thought. ‘Vagabonds don’t have that sort of look in their eyes.’ After the fourth and fifth glasses, which the gendarme downed in quick succession, he tried his best to explain to the publican what that look was like. But he said nothing specific. If that woman had stared at him for longer, she could certainly have driven him to an attack of fury. A look like that deserves a smack across the face, or to be locked up in jail. For not only does it go against imperial power, it is also an affront to the entire order established by the Creator. Gasiński sighed understandingly. He guessed the woman had said something offensive. Yet in any case he did not ask for details, he merely poured the next glass of liquor. Before Polanke had managed to tip it down his throat, there in the doorway, dripping wet, stood the bearded Hersz, a travelling salesman. Usually, if night caught up with him on his way to Zabrody, he stayed here and set off at first light across the Wilderness. Today he wanted to go further. If Gasiński had any business in Zabrody or Wiele, where Hersz would be heading the next morning, let him say quickly, for time was short. Although Gasiński had no business for the people of Zabrody or those of Wiele, he did wish to invite Hersz in; he poured the Jew a drink and encouraged him to stay, especially in weather like this. Why put your wagon and your goods at risk? No more than three weeks ago some robbers had attacked Czapiewski as he was coming back to Wieprznica from the city. They had taken all his money and his watch. Hersz nodded. Water was dripping from the brim of his felt hat and from matted wisps of his hair. He agreed that Gasiński was right – it was dangerous to travel at night in such a bad storm. On the other hand, if it were God’s will, not a hair would fall from his head. But then if it were His will, the horse would bolt in broad daylight and Hersz would break his neck in the nearest ditch. It was all predestined, up there on high.

‘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 some 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.

Amid such thoughts, he gradually finished his book. Each day he recited it from the beginning. He did not make any amendments. Changes might bring undesirable confusion into his memory.

One morning two messengers entered his cell. They undid the chain and gave him a new burnous. Then all three set off on horseback across the desert. He was not tied up, but where was he to escape to? After two days and nights, when the landscape took on a rocky aspect, they told him to get off his horse, gave him a supply of water, then pointed to the nearest, low hill and rode away. He walked onwards, exhausted. In a small gully he saw a spring, with a tent pitched nearby. Inside, three old women were sitting on stools at a spinning wheel.

‘So that’s how it looks,’ he thought. ‘There are always three old hags at the end.’

He watched as the thin thread wound around the spindle. Then he lay down by the spring and gazed at the stars. He fell asleep. At dawn, when the sun was already blazing down mercilessly, he noticed that the tent had gone. He was alone, in total, perfect silence. He could smell the sweet scent of grass, clover, mint and wind, mixed with the familiar odour of seaweed, wet sand and fish. He had never been so happy.

In the chronicle of Pomeranian Junkers it says that as the last of the von Kotwitz clan, Joachim set off on a journey to the Sahara in 1899 and went missing there, probably murdered by one of the Berber tribes. The chronicler does not say a word about Abulafia and the universal language, the one spoken by Adam and Eve. Nor about Joachim von Kotwitz’s mother, née Obuchowska. In a second-hand bookshop I once found an essay from their manor-house library, by a Professor Mangoldt, on ‘Dante and Abulafia’, published in Berlin in 1869. Umberto Eco brings up its main points in several chapters of his book, The Search for the Perfect Language. So Joachim’s alleged madness inspired by Mangoldt’s pamphlet would be the antithesis of Eco’s rational discourse. But that’s quite another story…

The Flight into Egypt

AS THE WOMAN with the child in her arms alighted from the bus and walked towards the border guards’ cabin, a sudden gust of wind raised her headscarf. At that moment on the television screen he saw the beautiful, delicate face of a young mother, maybe about twenty years old. She walked the last few metres to the border at a rapid, determined pace, slightly bowed, avoiding the television cameras. But the cameramen had sensed a good story. In the procession of some fifty people, she was the only one carrying a child, which was bundled in a blanket. She briefly handed it to the officer so she could fetch her documents from under her coat – a passport and a loose sheet of paper, printed and stamped. Just then, for a few seconds, all the lenses caught her glance. There was something ineluctable in it: a deathly exhaustion and – only just managing to shine out from under it, nurtured for weeks on end for this very moment – a small ray of hope.

A day later, when all the newspapers printed a portrait of the woman in the headscarf on their front pages, he noticed another thing too: even though it showed uncertainty, her expression had enormous strength of pride in it. The article described the refugee camp in Ingushetia, a journey lasting several months and several paragraphs across various borders, at the end of which they got out of a Ukrainian bus and quite literally walked – because they had no transport – into Poland. Anyone who had been through all that should not have to regard the immigration officer as if he were God, ready to frustrate the entire ghastly ordeal at a stroke by sending them back. And indeed, she didn’t – instead her eyes were saying, ‘I wouldn’t go back now even if you drew a gun on me.’ But of course there was no question of drawing a gun; the officer merely checked her documents – maybe taking a bit long over it, but not long enough to stop the refugees from reaching their destination that same day, towards evening, a former Soviet army training centre thirty kilometres from the capital.

Over the next couple of hours, as he took his usual daily walk, now and then he was conscious of the fact that his thoughts were centred on the Chechen woman. She intrigued him. Once in the tram, he tried to imagine her voice. Perhaps in contrast to her facial features, which were slightly sharp, her voice was soft, almost velvety, and surely only when she sang one of those ancient mountain songs with the other women did it sound like a blade cutting the air in two. On the dunes, as he gazed at the forlorn greyness of the November sea, he also wondered what their first meeting would be like. He was sure they would speak in Russian.

‘Zdrastvuytye,’ he practised greeting her, bowing gallantly as he swept aside some sand and dried leaves with the tip of his shoe, ‘menya zavoot Andrei Stanislavovich, a vam? – My name is Andrei Stanislavovich – what’s yours?’ But perhaps, he thought, as he stood on the very edge of the shore, it’s correct to ask ‘a vas?’, not ‘a vam?’ He spent much longer speculating about her name, but finally for lack of even the slightest knowledge of any Caucasian language, his efforts ended in failure. Only once he was in the local shop for his daily groceries did he sober up a bit. ‘My God, ancient mountain songs – what on earth am I thinking? What if she lived in a tower block in Grozny, loves disco music, and her voice has gone hoarse from smoking and drinking?’

But once he had cut her picture out of the newspaper, that sort of doubt seemed absurd. He knew about people’s faces, and could tell how far the look in someone’s eyes conceals the goodness or badness in their soul. With some difficulty he searched a storage space in the ceiling for some brushes, tubes of paint and primer he hadn’t used for years. He spent a good quarter of an hour in the cellar fetching out an easel and a dusty canvas stretcher from under a pile of junk. As the lift was out of order again, he carried them up the stairs to his seventh-floor flat. To have a good spot by the window, he moved the sofa bed and the television. Finally he fixed up the stretcher and primed the canvas, carefully, taking his time, and concentrating extremely hard, as if this simple activity were more than just a technical preparation. Then he did his first sketches on some sheets of wrapping paper. The oily smell of the primer soon pervaded the little flat, bringing him an unexpected throng of memories. The academy he no longer attended, the studio he no longer possessed, the wife he had left, friends he no longer saw, exhibitions he had long since forgotten – it all came back in a chaotic stream of sounds and images. He had no regrets, not even those dreadful mornings at the Actors’ Club when, with savage hangovers and not a penny between them, he and a few friends would emerge onto the grey street, only to bump into an army patrol just around the corner. His present life, solitary and well-ordered, was no escape. If the desert had stretched away just beyond the city boundaries, he would have settled right there, to have a daily view of nothing but endless plains that seemed to converge on the horizon. What still bothered him, when he finally set aside the sketches a few hours later, were not the memories, but the fact that after fifteen years he was going to start painting again.

By the time he finished the painting four months later, it was spring. He left the keys to his flat with the neighbour, Mrs Z, and drove his clapped-out old Beetle to the lakeside cottage he had inherited from his parents. Never fully finished and rather neglected, it stood amid the pampered homes of the new generation like a relic from the mid-1970’s when First Secretary Gierek seemed to have achieved an economic miracle. He was surprised to find that this winter the thieves hadn’t stolen anything. As he was lighting the stove, he came upon an old newspaper from several years ago. He noticed a picture of Limonov, the Russian writer, firing off a round from a machine gun somewhere down into the streets of Sarajevo under siege. Beside him three grinning Serb riflemen were taking a break. He looked at the flames consuming all four men and the range of hills behind them. Then he unloaded his stretchers, paper and easel from the roof rack. He had no particular plans except to study the light – reflected off the surface of the lake, diffused in cobwebs of juniper, or spilling across the broad stripe of a clearing. He spent days on end sitting on the jetty, lying in a drifting boat or wandering about the sandy tracks in the ancient forest. Then he feverishly painted his canvases, as if in a short time the whole scene would sink into darkness, for ever and ever. It was a long time since he had felt as happy. Sometimes, at moments when he least expected it, he could feel the gaze of the woman in the headscarf on him. And that was when he managed to capture the light in his pictures. He was grateful to her – without her, he was sure he would never have recovered on his own.

In mid September when he rang Mrs Z’s doorbell, she was beside herself with joy.

‘At last!’ she said, ‘I was beginning to think something had happened to you!’

‘But I wrote postcards,’ he said, smiling as he picked up his keys, ‘about two a month.’

‘Who sends cards from such a short distance these days? Couldn’t you have called from the, er, mobile? Or dropped by once a week?’

But she didn’t wait for an answer. Over a cup of tea she had lots to tell him. Did he remember the gardener’s house? Their housing blocks were built on an old nursery garden, and that house, or rather brick hut, had been left there for the workmen. Later on it had been a greengrocer’s, and finally a hang-out for tramps. ‘Now we’ve got immigrants in there!’ she said as she passed him the jam.

He didn’t show enormous interest as Mrs Z added a few more details: the housing cooperative had given the old ruin to the city, the city had paid for the roof to be repaired, and now there were two people living there, a man and a woman.

‘Do you know, the people from our blocks had a collection for them. Father Sieniewicz made an appeal, and at once a used washing machine was found for them, a TV, some furniture and a pushchair for their child. I didn’t have much to give,’ she sighed, ‘so I sorted out a few dishes from the kitchen and that was it!’

Back in his own flat he went straight out onto the balcony, leaned his elbows against the railing and gazed at the port canal. Stripped of their paint and eaten away by rust, tugboats, pushboats, scows, barges, motorboats and cutters, tightly clustered in the same spot as usual, were waiting for their final voyage. The shipyard dock, where they were cut into sheet metal, was visible beyond a forest of cranes on the other side of the water. In the middle of the canal two tugboats were leading a Norwegian freighter out to sea. Closer by, between the blocks, a gang of boys was playing football. Above a grove of pines, which by some odd stroke of fortune had not been cut down, the orange sphere of the sun was pumping an incredible amount of light onto this whole composition. The former gardener’s cottage would have looked abandoned, if not for a clothes line hung between two withered apple trees: shirts, sheets, blouses, trousers, tablecloths and underwear announced that normal life was proceeding along its usual course.

Next day, as he passed that way, he was quite surprised to see a man hanging a wooden sign on the concrete wall, reading: ‘Furnitures. Carpentary renew and produceon.’ He tore a page from his notebook and wrote on it in block letters: ‘CARPENTRY. FURNITURE MANUFACTURE AND REPAIR’, then handed it to the somewhat surprised author, who was still up on the ladder. He might have been about forty-five, with a quiet, rather sad smile that did not leave his face.

‘Spasiba,’ he thanked him in Russian once back on the ground. ‘Zakuritye – you smoke?’

The cigarette made his head spin. He very rarely smoked nowadays, only occasionally with a drink, but the carpenter’s offer was so natural that he couldn’t refuse. Somehow the conversation did not take off, so they stood side by side and smoked, like during a break at work. Only when the door of the gardener’s cottage opened and the woman came out with the child in her arms, did the man say: ‘Maya zhena – my wife!’

And as she passed them by on her way to the tiny garden, where two sunflowers and a bed of dwarf beans were growing, in perfect Polish but with a slightly lilting Russian accent, she said: ‘Good day, sir! Isn’t it a lovely bright day?’

‘Yes,’ he said in total amazement, ‘it’s lovely.’

He watched as she gently spread a blanket on the grass, sat the child on it and then started picking beans, gathering them into a shopping bag.

As if she had only got out of the Ukrainian bus yesterday, he detected a shadow of anxiety in her furtive gaze. But wasn’t he just ascribing his own state of mind to her? That was what he thought, and didn’t feel too pleased with himself. He barely nodded to say goodbye, and went on his way. The fact that he hadn’t seen the man, either then, in the television shot, or next day among all those press photos, gave him an excuse to concoct various versions of their story. She might have arrived in Poland with the child at a point when he was already here, or vice versa – perhaps she had come first, and he only got here later. There was another possibility too, which for some unknown reason, intrigued him the most: twice her age, the man was not the child’s father and hadn’t known her earlier at all before. They’d met at the camp. She’d made a choice, knowing by instinct that it would be easier as a threesome, at least to begin with. But could he ask any direct questions? And was it really appropriate to do so? A few weeks later he saw all three of them from his balcony, getting out of a square-nosed Wartburg. Holding the child in a sling, the woman was taking the shopping out of the boot. The man was untying some neatly cut planks from the roof rack. Thanks to the old East German limousine, life in the gardener’s cottage seemed to have picked up speed. More and more often he heard the sound of an electric saw, the squeal of a drill and the knocking of a hammer coming from over there.

When he and Mrs Z invited them to supper at her flat, they did not appear to be particularly excited. They brought a bottle of Hungarian wine and a basket of peaches. During the second course the baby started crying and griping. Once his mother had fed him, he finally fell asleep, laid on the sofa in front of the television. Mrs Z showed them photographs of her children, grandchildren and late husband, who had sailed on tramp steamers for over thirty years. Aslan turned out to have been a driver and supplies officer for a firm producing mineral water. When after the second war, in Putin’s time, neither the firm, nor his home, nor his relatives still existed, he went into the mountains. That was all he said. Almira told how they had escaped the bombardment of their village, by fleeing into a valley and up a stream. It was impossible to carry the wounded, because the riflemen, who could see them from their jeep a hundred metres above the narrow road, were just waiting for the chance. They were surrounded at the pass. Boys over the age of fifteen were separated off to be searched. Two who had been found with firearms were led away into a cleft and shot. Then the colonel made a speech: those who went back to the village were guaranteed safety. Those who crossed the border into Ingushetia might get killed, because there were lots of bandits everywhere. They had reached the overcrowded camp beyond the pass next day, but no one had given them a friendly welcome. They had no tents, water, food, sleeping bags or cigarettes. A French doctor with a Japanese assistant handed out the last of the aspirins. She had been lucky, because when a helicopter carrying food landed on the campground, the Frenchman had insisted that she and the child be taken to a hospital. The pilot didn’t want to know, but after a terrible fuss he finally gave way. That was the last time she had ever seen the people from her village. He noticed Mrs Z discreetly wiping away a tear. Aslan, who must have known the story, blew a stream of tobacco smoke towards the ceiling. Then there was a silence. As they were to drink coffee in his flat next door, where he had promised the guests something special too, it was a convenient excuse to change the atmosphere along with the place. However, that did not prove possible.

When he unveiled the portrait of the woman in the headscarf, Aslan flared up in anger. Taking no notice of his host, he went up to the painting several times, turned to Almira and rapidly uttered a string of curt remarks, getting louder and louder, full of evident outrage. She tried to calm him down and reason with him, but this infuriated him even more. The violent exchange of remarks in their own language went on for about a minute, then Aslan took her by the hand and led her back to Mrs Z’s flat, where quite unaware of all this, Mrs Z was standing in the doorway with a baking tin full of cake. They collected the child and, without bothering to call the lift, began to make their way down the stairs.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Almira as they left, averting her gaze. ‘Izvinitye.’

He stayed on at Mrs Z’s, where they sat up for ages over a bottle of brandy and some tea. If he was cross, it was only with himself. There was something he had failed to foresee, with disastrous results. He did not bear them a grudge, but he would have felt better about it if he had been told, even in unpleasant terms, exactly what his mistake had been.

‘Perhaps it’s Islam,’ said Mrs Z, nodding hesitantly towards the portrait, ‘because you’ve painted her almost like the Madonna. But why is there that desert in the background? I’d have painted over the sand and left it at that!’

He shook his head. ‘He’s not a fundamentalist. I don’t think he’s religious at all, it’s not that.’

But as the days went by no other explanation came to light. As he passed the cottage on his way back from the shops, the two of them were just on their way out to the car.

‘Good day,’ he said.

‘Good day,’ they replied almost simultaneously, and she added: ‘How are you? Everything all right?’

He nodded to say it was. Then he kept thinking to himself: ‘Well I never, it’s as if nothing had happened at all! Not the slightest ripple!’

When at the beginning of November the first snow fell, some unknown miscreants threw stones and smashed all the windows in the gardener’s cottage. With the help of several of the neighbours, he collected some money and dropped by to deliver his donation.

‘You see, he has gone to the glazier’s in the car,’ she said, standing in the doorway. ‘Please come in.’

But he refused, so she held him by the arm and said that time, with the painting, there had been a misunderstanding, that many times before now she and her husband had wanted to apologise to him, but they didn’t really know how to do it, so now, if he would like to come by that afternoon once they had put in the glass, they would be happy to hang the painting above the chest of drawers.

He came back an hour later, when he saw the old Wartburg and the glazier’s van from the balcony. They split the work three ways: two windows at the front, two at the back facing the copse, and two small ones in the side extension. The glazier took the money and drove away. He leaned the painting in its plastic wrapping against the chest of drawers and tried to leave too, but it would have been wrong to refuse a cup of tea. Behind a partition made of boards there was an entire workshop. The area where they were sitting served as the kitchen and bedroom. In a cubby-hole by the toilet stood the washing machine.

‘Aslan was so angry,’ she said at last, ‘because he thought I had met you earlier. But where? I couldn’t explain. Only when I showed him the picture, the one from the newspaper, did he stop. That day, when I was here on the border, he was still in Chechnya.’

They shook hands as they said goodbye.

Almost a month later, when the first Molotov cocktail landed on the roof of the gardener’s cottage, probably everyone on the estate was still asleep. Only the glow of the fire and the fire engine sirens awoke the people living in the blocks. Lots of them looked out of their windows. Several, like him, ran to the scene, but it was already too late. The woman and her child were sitting in a police car. Aslan, who at the final moment had managed to drive the Wartburg to a safe distance, was now walking towards his wife, in the company of a fireman and a policeman. Soon after, once the firemen had finished putting out the burning ruins, the police car drove away.

He called the local police station from home and said he wanted to talk to the victims of the fire. He was asked for his name and whether he had any connection with the case. He explained that he could offer them accommodation for a while. Then he was asked if he had seen anything suspicious, and if so, would he like to make a statement. He left his phone number and asked for it to be passed on to the fire victims. But by dawn no one had called, nor after. He heard on the local radio that an intensive investigation was under way, aiming to identify a potential ring of suspected perpetrators. The county administration had assigned the victims a safe place to live, at one of the holiday centres in the north.

As he was coming home from the shops next day, he could see the old Wartburg from some distance. The car was standing in front of what was left of the gardener’s cottage, its two-stroke engine whirring away. Aslan was poking about in the charred remains with a long pole, and next to him, with her head wrapped in a thick scarf, stood Almira. It was snowing. As he approached, she nodded to him, and soon after she got into the back seat of the car, beside the child. Aslan hadn’t found anything. He threw aside the pole and went behind the cubby-hole, from where he brought out a small box of tools.

‘I’ve got this left,’ he said. ‘As I was running for the car I threw it into the snow. Well,’ he offered his hand, ‘as you say here now, Happy Christmas. Uyezhayem – we are going away, i budyet kharasho – and it will be all right.’ He slammed the door and drove off slowly, so the wheels wouldn’t spin in the snow.

As he walked along that same path in the spring, a bulldozer was clearing the remains of the rubble. In a heap of rubbish, between a broken brick and a coil of wire he noticed a bit of reddish-brown material. He took it in his fingers and crumbled off a crust of ash. He hadn’t any doubt: the fibres rubbed across his hand were from a scrap of the canvas he had primed more than a year ago.

‘You won’t find any gold here like the Yids left behind,’ said one of the workmen. Two others chimed in with laughter.

But he wasn’t listening to them. The picture of the man and the woman with the child, driving alone in an old East German Wartburg across the white desert would haunt him for many months to come.

Franz Carl Weber

A FEW MINUTES before reaching the main station the train slowed down. The carriage began to rock as the wheels rattled over the points and crossovers. His chance travelling companion, a woman who had boarded a few stations ago and immediately gone to sleep in the comfortable seat opposite him, now opened her eyes.

‘Are we already in Zurich?’ she asked in Italian.

He barely knew that language, but the question was so obvious that he replied: ‘Si, madame, Zurich naturlich ich glaube.’

She smiled at this Volapük, took a small mirror and a lipstick from her handbag and started correcting the contour of her lips. As he furtively watched, he confirmed that one of the alluring features of her beauty was the result of a simple procedure, not nature. It was to do with her mouth, or to be precise, her lower lip. In fact it was no more prominent than the upper one, but by applying her lipstick in the right way, she gave it a defiant quality, as if the open invitation to a kiss held contempt even for a man bold enough to plant one.

He turned his gaze on the window, but the train had just entered a tunnel, and now he caught a glimpse of her face lit from below. That particular shape of the lip made her look like Basini’s Madonna, even though the woman painted in Rome four hundred years ago as Mary was not wearing any lipstick at all. Where did this comparison lead? Nowhere. The train applied its brakes as it slowly rolled in between the platforms.

‘Do you know how to reach the Hotel Gotthard?’ This time she asked in English.

‘It’s nearby. It’s not even worth taking a taxi. Just one stop by trolleybus. Seven minutes on foot. The Hotel Saint Gotthard is at 87 Bahnhofstrasse – you can see it in the distance.’

‘You know the city,’ she said.

‘In a way,’ he replied, on the platform by now, as he fetched down her luggage from the carriage step.

She nodded, and was rapidly on her way. A buckled wheel on her suitcase squealed at every turn. A little later, when the woman had disappeared in the crowd of passengers, he walked up to a notice board displaying the timetable on the platform. He always did this when he alighted at a station in a foreign city, even if he already had a return ticket. Then he checked it once again inside the building. He proceeded no differently now, slowly sauntering towards the ticket hall where, craning his neck a little, he stood in front of the main information board. It all made sense: he had three possibilities for the return journey, not counting multiple connections of course, which he did not have to take into consideration.

If he had been one of those people who use their journeys to produce endless, unrestrained prattle, he would immediately have jotted down in his notebook that Zurich welcomed him with the smell of hot chocolate and over-ripe mandarins. He drank the chocolate standing up at one of the buffets, still in the station concourse. Whereas the extremely mouldy fruits came spilling out of a wooden box, which a Turk was shifting as he closed his stall. He unintentionally stepped on one of the mandarins, and it was a very unpleasant sensation: instead of springing out from under his shoe like a tennis ball, the fruit literally fell apart beneath it, making a boggy squelching noise. As he strolled along Bahnhofstrasse, which in this city ran slightly uphill, he could not avoid the sensation that this bitter-sweet smell was keeping him company, past the shop fronts, banks and tenement buildings. Less than ten minutes later he put down his small suitcase right beside the reception desk at the Hotel Saint Gotthard, where a man with a sad face handed him a registration card and asked: ‘What is the purpose of your stay?’

He did not know how to answer. Finally he mumbled, ‘Tourism,’ and at once added, without concealing his annoyance, ‘tourism and business, but why should I have to write that down?’

‘Not at all,’ said the receptionist, taking the card and handing him the key to room 305. ‘We are simply told to ask that question. You understand, sir,’ he smiled confidentially, ‘security.’

A further exchange of remarks was pointless. But once he had sat down on the bed in his room, taken off his shoes and wiped the remains of the mandarin mush from the sole with a handkerchief wetted for this purpose, he suddenly felt genuine irritation. What sort of terrorist declares the purpose of his mission to the hall porter? And if so, what was that question meant to be? A test? A warning? A Swiss greeting?

He switched on the television but it did not bring him the relaxation he was hoping for. He surfed the channels, only stopping for a moment longer on CNN. The ripped-apart bodies of some Shi’ite pilgrims recalled a war going on somewhere in a country full of sand. He could not remember the name of the blinded king, in chains, being beaten with sticks on a desert road. But in any case, this image, which he remembered from a religious education class at school, was going on here and now in television history. As he tapped out a laconic message on the buttons of his mobile phone – Got here, everything OK – a number of prisoners with their eyes blindfolded filed past the reporter’s camera. But that was not what riveted his attention. It was that suddenly a high-pitched female voice rang out from the room next door. After practising some scales, a beautiful, extremely resonant soprano produced a song. It was the Magnificat.

He realised that instead of a back wall, the wardrobe in which he had hung up the shirts he had unpacked from his case had a door into the next room. It was probably locked, but the fact that he was living in one half of a shared suite – not to mention the none too soundproof acoustics, of course – came as rather a nasty surprise, as if he had bought a first-class ticket for a train entirely made up of second-class carriages. Yet it didn’t matter a jot because of the music: its pure beauty compelled him to admire it, even in this strange manner, with his upper body plunged into the wardrobe and his ear pressed to a cracked wooden slat. With the Magnificat ringing out, he was about to withdraw from his uncomfortable position, when some intriguing changes took place in the next room, and the singer let forth a whole torrent of angry remarks. This was most evidently an exercise, a rehearsal, because none of her curses and expletives was met with an answer. When the stream of shouts abruptly broke off, laughter erupted in hysterical cascades, ending with somebody’s name being invoked. Louis? Luciano? He could not hear it precisely, nor could he recall a libretto like that from the operas he used to know long ago.

Finally, when it had all gone quiet, he backed out of the wardrobe. Whether it was the uncomfortable position with his head lower than his body, or the stuffy smell in there (a combination of the odour of anti-bedbug disinfectant and the residual acrid smell left in there by the vests, socks, slips, stockings, shirts and slippers of hundreds of his predecessors), suffice it to say that he was feeling rather dizzy and was seized with the desire for a breath of fresh air.

Less than five minutes later, he emerged into the small square in front of the hotel. Without a second thought he set off on the route that for some fifteen years he had taken in his dreams, and in a slightly more realistic way on a map of the city. First he passed Saint Peter’s Church, and went downhill to the river along the narrow Schlüsselgasse. At the foot of it he remembered perfectly well not to confuse Zinnengasse with Storchengasse, because if he had gone down the latter, instead of reaching the lawyer’s office he would have come to Weinplatz, from where the pleasure boats left by day. So he correctly chose Zinnengasse, and soon after, on the corner of Wühre, right on the river Limmat, he caught sight of a tenement building on which a modest plaque announced that in this house, at number 33, was the office of law firm Henri & François Rosset. For a while he stood on the pavement with his head slightly raised, gazing at the row of windows on the first floor, behind which, tomorrow morning, his life was to take on colour. The windows were dark and silent, with only the lights from the far bank of the Limmat sliding across them, as if over large, mysterious mirrors.

He went back by a slightly different route, and only now did he notice that not far from his hotel there was a two-floor department store. There wouldn’t have been anything remarkable about it, if not for the name, written out in very special lettering, as if dug up from the late 1940s: Franz Carl Weber. He slowly strolled past the illuminated window displays. As he gazed at the boxes of computer games stacked in a huge pyramid, from which the eyes of hundreds of Batmans and similar characters were looking at him, he felt an uncanny emotion. Franz Carl Weber – those three words, repeated in his mind a few times like a mantra, opened before him the invisible gates of time.

In his parents’ sitting room, the candles were burning on the Christmas tree. He and his brother were standing in the passage, not sure if they could go in there yet, but everything was ready, and as soon as they got the signal they sat down at table: their father, grandmother Maria, the two of them and their mother. During the reading of a passage from the Bible and the sharing of the holy wafer – as every Christmas Eve – they were already glancing at the boxes of wrapped-up presents. This time there were more of them than usual, and they were large in size. Over each festive dish in turn, he and his brother exchanged knowing looks.

Cautiously, to be sure not to damage anything, they laid out the complicated system of tracks under their father’s watchful eye: long straight pieces, bends, points, signals, as well as mountain tunnels, station buildings and viaducts. When they finally switched on the transformer and the goods train with the steam locomotive set off on its first run, while at the same time, from the same station, the international express marked Geneva-Ostend moved off in the other direction, their delight was boundless.

The Märklin models were made to perfection. Examined under a magnifying glass, the buffers, the little ladder, the springs, wheels or headlamps were like perfect prototypes for real train parts. They were especially thrilled by the express train’s central sleeping car. Through one little window with the curtains open, they could see an unfolded bed, a night lamp on a little table, and a lady and a gentleman drinking tea at it. They were wearing patterned dressing-gowns and evidently belonged to a different, better world.

Both trains sped up and slowed down in response to a turn of the transformer knob. On the sharp bends they had to slow down to at least second gear, otherwise the trains fell off the tracks.

‘Seven more circuits to Paris,’ said Grandmother Maria.

They believed her. Before the war, before Poland was cut off from Europe by the Iron Curtain, she had travelled a lot.

‘And what about to Ostend?’ he and his brother asked simultaneously.

‘Twice as many times, but don’t go speeding onto the beach!’

As they leaned over the little coaches and changed the points at the right moments, holding back now one, now the other train at the signal, they hardly took any notice of the adults’ conversation.

‘Now perhaps they’ll let people go abroad,’ said Grandmother Maria.

‘A three-month placement doesn’t make a spring. Of course I’m pleased,’ replied his father, ‘I couldn’t have dreamed of such a thing only a couple of years ago. The moustachioed monster had us locked in a cage.’

‘With the whole world’s consent,’ added his mother, ‘don’t forget.’

‘It was strange,’ he said, ignoring her remark, ‘as I walked along Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, apart from trolleybuses I saw nothing but signs announcing banks. And in the canteen at Zulzer’s, where I was employed, the workers ate the same dinner as the managers. Can you imagine that here? The shipyard manager eating with a welder? Unmöglich!’[2]

‘There it’s möglich, here it’s unmöglich,’ replied Grandmother Maria.

The boys associated the moustachioed monster with Antoni Zielonka, the caretaker at their apartment house. He smelled of shag, spirits and sweat. He was always insulting them for being intelligentsia. He especially hated their father, whose bow he never deigned to return.

‘You’re only fit for the camps,’ he would occasionally shout, shaking his fist at their windows. ‘Off to Solovki with you! You should be exterminated!’

So they packed Zielonka the janitor into the refrigerator car and transported him to Siberia. Twenty-four circuits.

‘Maybe even further?’ asked his brother.

‘What do you mean?’ he replied. ‘We’ve got to get home, haven’t we?’

Their father showed them how to disconnect the tracks without damaging the joints. The coaches were put away in special slots in their boxes.

‘Look after it,’ he said, ‘an opportunity like this one might not come along a second time.’

Now as he looked at the display, almost forty years on, he remembered that very remark. It was prophetic: his father had never been given another passport after that, and had never brought back such a wonderful toy from any distant journey; the Swiss electric railway beat the East German Piko trains, the Soviet young engineer’s set, the Czech little doctor’s set and the Polish model aeroplane kits into the ground.

As he walked across the square towards the hotel, he remembered another thing too: at the time, as well as the railway set, their father had presented them with a fat tome in a soft, black shiny cover, similar in shape to a school exercise book. It was the catalogue for Franz Carl Weber’s store, the only one in the world that sold nothing but toys. On autumn and winter nights in particular, when for economic reasons or because of anti-aircraft exercises the lights were switched off all over town, he and his brother would sit at the kitchen table over a candle stump, slowly and reverently turning the thin pages.

They had no doubt that this book comprised a list of all the toys in the world. The black-and-white photographs of them, with short descriptions, filled three hundred and sixty-four pages. With great appreciation, first they examined the cranes, diggers, lorries and bulldozers, then moved on to a more interesting section: passenger limousines. Here particular emotions were stirred by the Opel Kapitän, and utter delight by the Porsche sports model. Yet the most important bit of The Book, as they pored over it in adoration by candlelight, was the world of railways.

Steam trains, electric trains, diesel locomotives, dozens of varieties of passenger coaches, special mountain rolling stock, and all possible configurations of goods trains filled their imagination, not just with the clatter of wheels, the lights of signals and the whistle of locomotives. Over this entire world of stations, timetables, signal boxes, tunnels and viaducts there floated a veil of mystery. They did not realise at the time that it was a yearning for a distant journey that would change their lives. As they pored over the mail-order catalogue from Franz Carl Weber’s toy store, they sensed that one day they would simply set off into the great wide world, and that what they were doing now, leaning over the printed pages in the flickering candlelight, was merely preparation.

When he got back to the hotel, he was greeted at the reception desk by two gentlemen who looked like twins and introduced themselves as Hugin and Munin – the former was Peter, the latter Paul, as they informed him in the bar, where the three men sat down together.

He was unable to conceal his surprise when Hugin put a photograph on the table, taken a few hours earlier at the main station, and Munin claimed in a confident tone, ‘We know you had never met her before, but she may have revealed something to you.’

‘She said nothing remarkable,’ he muttered reluctantly, as he gazed at the photograph, in which he was handing his beautiful fellow passenger her case, ‘and anyway, what is this about? Am I being accused of something?’

‘You soon may be,’ said Munin gruffly.

Before he had a chance to react to this incredible impudence, Hugin whispered almost ingratiatingly: ‘If we ask for your discreet cooperation, it is because this woman’ – he tapped a finger on the photograph – ‘is a particularly dangerous terrorist.’ Hugin gave a friendly smile, at which Munin immediately hissed: ‘There’s no joking, any detail might be important to us. Did she talk to anyone on her mobile phone? Did she send any text messages?’

He looked at Munin, then at Hugin with sincere doubt.

‘If she really is a terrorist, there can be no texts or conversations you aren’t already aware of. Why are you questioning me?’

‘She is a terrorist in a special sense of the word,’ said Munin.

‘A very special one,’ added Hugin.

‘She might have confided something,’ Munin continued, ‘which in your view is not of the least significance, but as we have known her for years, we are perfectly aware that in a conversation with a stranger she can sometimes say something about her plans.’

‘Unwittingly,’ put in Hugin.

‘Exactly,’ agreed Munin. ‘For instance that tomorrow she would be performing. Didn’t she say anything like that?’

‘No. She just asked how to get to the hotel. Can you please explain what this is about?’

‘Not just yet,’ said the plainly disappointed Munin. ‘But in any case, we would be grateful for your discretion. For understandable reasons.’

‘If she were to accost you in the corridor, let’s say, or at breakfast in the restaurant,’ said Munin, handing him a business card on which there was nothing but a phone number, ‘if she were to say anything at all, please call, alright?’

‘But you are not from the police,’ he stated confidently, ‘are you? What strange machinations. Perhaps I should actually call the police? I am a foreigner here and I came on business. I don’t want any trouble.’

After saying this, he stood up and headed for the lift without looking behind him. On the third floor, as he was walking down the corridor to his room, he saw the stranger. She was walking towards him, dressed in a blue coat and a lovely, old-fashioned pillbox hat.

‘Excuse me,’ he said almost in a whisper. ‘Please be careful. I was stopped downstairs by two fellows, I think they’re detectives. They questioned me. At the station, as I was handing you your case, they took our picture.’

‘Really?’ She did not look surprised. ‘And what did you tell them?’

‘Nothing. I told them to get off my back. After all, I don’t know you in the least.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘it’s very kind of you. Please don’t let it bother you. They probably said I’m a terrorist.’

‘Yes, how did you guess?’

‘Because I know them. Luigi hired them. I wonder how they introduced themselves?’

‘Hugin and Munin, Peter and Paul, or maybe vice versa.’

She giggled. As she walked off to the lift, she waved to him and loudly added: ‘You can sleep in peace. I don’t plant bombs!’

Standing behind the open drapes he saw the stranger through the window, getting into a taxi in the hotel forecourt. Moments later, Herr Hugin and Herr Munin were piling into the next one. Only now did he notice that he could see the neon sign for Franz Carl Weber’s toy store from this window. He decided that tomorrow, on his way back from the Rossets’ office, he would drop in there and inspect the model trains. He wouldn’t buy anything – his son was already over twenty – but he would certainly ask for a catalogue.

It would be an extraordinary thing, he thought, if at one of the counters I were to find an express train set, just the same as the one my brother and I drove so many times from Geneva to Ostend, though it was rather unlikely: since that era, long ago, everything had undergone radical changes, including the outside appearance of passenger and sleeping cars.

He was the sort of person on whom travel fatigue and new impressions do not have a soporific effect, but quite the opposite, and now, in a state of extreme tension, he could not get to sleep. After a shower, as he lay on his back in the comfortable bed, idiotic thoughts kept coming into his head. For instance, if Sebastian Rosset were to throw up his hands tomorrow and say that unfortunately he wasn’t going to pay him the money because some scrap of paper was missing, would he stay here a couple more days, or leave Zurich and Switzerland at once? Or if Herr Hugin and Herr Munin were to force their way into his room right now and subject him to elaborate tortures in the bathroom, for how long would he protect the stranger from the other side of the wall by concocting some ad hoc fibs?

Her scent was strong, but also had something very subtle about it, which reminded him of Grandmother Maria’s garden in the south of Poland. On August days, intense with light and heat, the odour of some plants, especially the flowers, hung around the solid block of the house like an invisible cloud, and towards evening, when its sun-warmed stonework began to return the warmth to its surroundings, those invisible waves of strong fragrance would float into the sitting room through the open windows, the large doors onto the veranda and the glass walls of the conservatory almost fully unfolded. That was why, as he now realised, his fellow passenger had instantly seemed close to him. However, although he very much wanted to, he couldn’t remember the actual name and species of flowers whose scent was the main ingredient of her perfume. Phlox? Wild rose? Carnation? Definitely not lily-of-the-valley, because those flowers bloom in spring, and he was only ever at the house in the south in summer, during the school holidays.

Briefly, under his closed eyelids he saw her figure amid a broad strip of irises. She had a sari flung about her. Just then in the garden an oriole began to sing, and turning towards the bird, the stranger let the floaty white fabric fall to the lawn.

He lit a cigarette and extracted a small bottle of claret from the mini-bar. If her naked body looked like that in reality, he thought, as he went back to bed with a glass of wine, she is quite simply beautiful. Extremely beautiful.

But he did not want to surrender his imagination to the mercy of unrealistic sexual desires. He tried to think about anything else. It wasn’t easy. For a while longer her face, reflected in the train carriage window, continued to tempt him with the shape of her brightly painted lips. Only a little later did he manage to summon up a different image from his memory: he and his brother were sitting on the floor of their small bedroom, amid railway tracks, stations and junctions. His brother opened the world atlas on his knees and announced: ‘Chile, highest railway line in the world. Thirty-six tunnels, fifty-three viaducts. Let’s go across the Andes! All aboooard, we’re off!’

With the aid of a compass and ruler they calculated the length of the route, and then painstakingly divided it into the number of circuits. They already had Africa under their belts, numerous journeys to Istanbul, the Trans-Siberian line from tsarist times, the route from London to Edinburgh, and also a long journey across the prairies on the United Pacific line.

They would ask each other questions on their knowledge of the routes: Next city? Regional capital? The river we’re just about to cross? Name of the lake? Highest peak in the mountain range?

For hours on end they were utterly absorbed. Sometimes their father would quietly enter the room and watch their journeys for ages without being noticed. Then he would gently say: ‘Time for bed, you can travel onwards tomorrow.’

Sometimes they awoke at night, and in silent agreement, without a word they would lay out the tracks, to ride across the Asian jungle or the African savannah by the light of a few well-positioned candles. Wild animals would come up to the tracks, and the brilliance of the speeding express would be reflected in their eyes. The boys were happy, though they only understood that years later.

When several men in long overcoats took their father from the flat late one evening, the moon was shining over the woods and above the roof of their house at the edge of the suburbs.

Their mother left them on their own. She had to go to the neighbour’s house, where there was a phone. They did not set out the tracks, but lay in their beds, paralysed by fear, until sleep came. Awoken in the middle of the night, he heard his brother’s regular breathing and saw the pale light of the moon breaking through the thin curtain. Quietly he went into the hall and put on his shoes, sweater and jacket. A light was still on in the janitor’s flat on the ground floor, and through the exposed window he caught sight of that guardian of the proletariat, leaning over a newspaper. He was dozing with his elbows propped on the kitchen table, when his wife came in from the living room. The ugly, wrinkled woman flicked a dishcloth at the janitor’s egg-shaped, bald head to punish him for some offence or other. He shooed her away like a fly, then finally got up, straightened his string vest, seized his wife by the throat and picked her up like a rag doll before disappearing into the depths of the flat. Perhaps he would have remained at their window a little longer, amazed at the sight of these people tormented by hatred, but the whistle of a locomotive summoned him away from the courtyard, a sound he had never heard here before.

Their house stood not far from a defunct railway line. The bridges blown up by the Germans, which he and his brother used to climb as if they were rocks, the sleepers overgrown with moss and the tracks gone rusty amid the ferns had always attracted him with hypnotic force, and yet now, as he clambered up the steep slope of the embankment, he felt genuine fear. He wasn’t dreaming, though what he was seeing was totally unreal. Coupled onto a locomotive, which was puffing out steam, was a single carriage with a row of doors along its entire length.

‘Are you getting on board?’ said a low-pitched voice right beside him. ‘We’re off in a minute.’

At the sight of the uniformed conductor, holding a torch in one hand and a block of tickets in the other, he mustered his courage.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘Wherever you like. This is your train.’

‘But how will I get home?’

‘On a circuit you always end up at home again.’

He let himself be persuaded. Once he was sitting on a hard, wooden bench, he saw the conductor jumping onto the carriage steps: he gave a signal with the torch and put to his lips the whistle that was hanging round his neck. They moved off with a slight jerk, but the carriage rolled along smoothly for the next few metres, picking up speed. He didn’t even notice when they drove into a tunnel. On the other side it was already day. The flood of bright light made him squint, but once his eyes had got used to it and finally took in their surroundings, he almost cried out in delight. They were travelling along a sandy riverbank, across meadows and scattered copses. Here and there sheep, horses and cows were grazing. Over the water, on the other side, rose a chain of majestic mountains. There were eye-catching villages and towns lying in the valleys, with stone churchtowers, a patchwork of red roofs, and avenues of trees. The vineyards and orchards were full of lively activity as people with baskets on their backs busied themselves among the greenery like hard-working beetles. Cargo ships were sailing up and down the river. A little girl waved to them from the deck. Far away, on some of the peaks, fortified castles lurked below the snow line. He had once seen a similar landscape on an old postcard.

‘Is that the Rhine?’ he asked the conductor.

‘No,’ he replied, looking up from the book he was browsing, ‘it’s the river of all rivers.’

‘I don’t understand that. Please can you explain?’

‘One day you will. Today I’ll just tell you this: each thing in this world has its prototype. Take my whistle, for example: there are millions of whistles – ones for scouts, for sportsmen, policemen, or ones like mine, for conductors. You see?’

He nodded.

‘They’re similar to each other, yet different. But all of them without exception must have had their original model. This is one of them. It contains the features of all the others.’

‘Do you mean a blueprint?’

‘More or less.’

‘So this river…?’

‘Is the model for all the other rivers in existence.’

‘But on our river there are no mountains or vineyards!’

‘That’s right, but look at the riverbank. Sand and meadows. Even some willow trees. Doesn’t that remind you of something?’

Indeed it did. But it was a difficult conversation, and he didn’t ask any more questions, for fear of hearing some even more difficult answers. He pressed his face to the window, beyond which, on the other side of the water, there were no more mountains, just a vast wilderness as far as the eye could see. Here and there he could make out riverside clearings where, amid log cabins, people were moving about by campfires. He also saw canoes dug out of tree trunks, with men dressed in skins catching fish from them. After an indeterminate time the landscape had changed beyond all recognition. Now they were travelling along the vast flood basin of a boundless plain, flat as a table. At the mouth of the river where it entered the sea, the train turned a corner and glided right along the beach, passing widespread dunes. Then they drove into a tunnel, after which the locomotive began to brake.

‘You see?’ said the conductor. ‘We’re back at our starting point. Run off home.’

‘Will you take me on another journey one day, sir?’

‘It’s impossible to predict,’ he replied, opening the door for him, ‘but be prepared.’

When he got back to the flat, there was a light on in his parents’ room. His mother was not asleep. He could hear her anxious footsteps as she paced a short distance to and fro. As he nodded off, there, before his eyes, he could still see far-reaching views of the river, which made him feel thrilled and threatened all at once. And now, lying in his hotel bed, he would have fallen asleep under the spell of that memory, if not for a loud noise from the other side of the wall.

The stranger had returned to her room and was talking to someone non-stop, in a very strident voice. A chair scraped as it was shifted. He could not resist the temptation, and as before, he put his ear to the back door inside the wardrobe. He found it astonishing that the someone – whoever it was – never responded at all, while the room’s occupant let loose more and more words by the minute. Until finally he heard an answer: a male baritone made a short, abrupt remark in Italian, at which the woman burst into laughter, and then shouted – now he could hear it clearly – ‘Stupido Luigi! Stupido Luigi!’

As he pressed against the door even harder, he lost his balance and grabbed an old brass doorknob. Although he didn’t turn it a millimetre left or right, the door gave way and he fell headlong onto the floor of the other people’s room. He lay there for a few seconds, weighing up the seriousness of his position: he was in pyjamas, his bare feet were still stuck in the wardrobe by the tips of his toes, and his head was all but touching his neighbour’s feet, clad in court shoes.

‘I’m extremely sorry,’ he said, getting up, ‘I was just hanging my suit in the wardrobe, I leaned against the wall, and it’s a door! And it’s not locked either! How embarrassing! I really am extremely sorry.’

As he said this, he approached the door, and as proof of his veracity, extracted from behind it his jacket, which was hanging on the rail.

‘Here it is!’

There was no man in her room.

She eyed him closely, and then finally replied, in the same baritone he had heard a little earlier: ‘Please put that in its place! Do you always step inside the wardrobe to hang up your suit?’

And then, in her own voice, she added: ‘Really, what are the hotels in this city coming to?’

And laughed out loud.

He bowed, said ‘I’m sorry’ once again, and was about to go back into his room through the wardrobe when she said: ‘How about a glass of champagne? My name is Teresa. What’s yours?’

‘Piotr.’

‘That’s not very original either.’

While she went to fetch some glasses, he returned to his room, pulled on his trousers, put shoes on his bare feet and threw a jacket over his pyjama top. He took a small bottle of sparkling wine from the mini-bar.

‘It’s all because of Luigi,’ she said as they clinked glasses and sat down. ‘What a bastard he is. He ruined my life and he’s still setting detectives and the police on me! Can you imagine? The police! In Mainz I spent three days in custody. they wouldn;t even let me go to church!'

Her English was much better than his, though occasionally she dropped a complete Italian word into her sentence.

‘I’ll be after him as soon as he emerges from his lair! What about you? You probably haven’t come here for the skiing. Are you a Czech?’

‘No, a Pole.’

‘My God, like the Pope.’

‘There’s not much I can do about it.’

This time they both burst out laughing.

‘I’m here to collect something that belonged to my father.’

‘Was he an émigré?’

‘He was on a work placement. Long ago.’

‘You must think I’m a madwoman. Were you eavesdropping?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I wanted to hear you singing again.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘Very much.’

‘Do you know what it was?’

‘The Magnificat.’

‘For Luigi. I am a madwoman. I don’t love him anymore, but I still pursue him. Bishop Luigi. Do you see?’

‘Not entirely. Is he a Catholic bishop?’

‘The youngest one at the Vatican. He was promoted thanks to his uncle who is a cardinal. The old Roman family of the princes of Conti. I’m a Roman too, but so what? He dropped me like an old shirt. Can you imagine it? Purely because I fell pregnant he ran away in terror to the seminary. It was just after high-school graduation. I thought it would pass, he’d get bored, but no – he stuck it out and became a priest. And straight after that a bishop! Men are such monsters! I’m thinking of Italian men, but in your country, in Poland, you’re probably just the same, right?’

‘Even worse.’

She wasn’t sure if he was joking. But when she saw his smiling face, she immediately added: ‘No men are worse than the Italians.’

And straight after that confession, as if urged on by some inner compulsion, she quickly began to tell her story.

‘I promised myself I would never let him get away with it. Even if he becomes a cardinal. At every church he enters for his apostolic visitations he must reckon with danger! In Milan – that was the first time – he almost fainted when he saw me in a side alcove by the altar. I always disguise myself as a statue. Baroque, Renaissance, Gothic – it’s all everyday fare for me. He recognised my face and went pale. Perhaps he thought he was seeing things? He was so horrified he furtively looked up from the pages of the Bible a few times, as if trying to break my spell. But there I stood, stock still – a Madonna carrying a child wrapped in cloth. When Vanessa started crying,’ she rambled, ‘I put her down at my feet and began to sing the Magnificat for Luigi. I threw off my robes as I did so, until they dragged me out of there. You get the idea?’

He nodded understandingly and poured more champagne.

‘Do you often do that?’

‘Every time Luigi is on a visitation. Padua, Verona, Pesaro, Einsiedeln, Freiburg, Munich, Regensburg. I can’t even remember all the places anymore. I’ve had three sentences already. I served two of them. They wanted to give me money. I declared that I shall only stop when my love dies out.’

‘Just now you said it had.’

‘Yes, but I can’t get out of the habit. When I see that same horror and astonishment in his eyes at the fact that I have succeeded once again, I feel as if I’ve grown wings. Luigi stupido! I always shout that as they cart me off to the police car.’

‘And tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow Luigi is to say mass at the Liebfrauenkirche. I’ll be disguised as an old woman. And underneath I’ll have my Madonna’s robes. Before they arrest me I’ll have time to sing the opening bars of the Magnificat and throw off my clothes.’

‘Do you bare yourself completely?’

‘Yes. Only then do my performances have meaning.’

‘May I come along tomorrow?’

‘Of course,’ she laughed loud, ‘the performance is free, especially for Poles!’

They heard a noise coming from the hotel corridor. Several drunken voices were shouting over each other in Russian. Luggage banged against the door of the room.

‘You’re very patient,’ she said, putting down her glass. ‘You didn’t interrupt me once. And you don’t talk about yourself. But men love to do that. When we were together, Luigi used to spend hours expatiating on the sufferings of his soul. I don’t know anything about you.’

‘I have spent my life in a different world,’ he said slowly, as if having trouble finding the right words, ‘and it wasn’t at all interesting.’

‘There is always a story to be told,’ she said, looking him straight in the eyes, ‘even if a person spends his whole life sitting in one room staring out of the same window all the time.’

‘We thought we were fighting for something,’ he replied after a pause. ‘But in fact we were totally dependent on our jailers. Even when they were gone we could talk about nothing else. Can you understand that?’

‘Perfectly.’

But when a little later he said: ‘Thank you very much,’ and disappeared into the wall, closing the cupboard door carefully behind him, he wasn’t at all sure if she had really understood him. Some fifteen years after the regime collapsed, people in his country were still very keen to talk about who had informed on whom and who was, or was not, a secret agent for the political police.

A few months after his arrest, their father had suddenly appeared in the courtyard. He was walking at a slow, lumbering pace, bowing his head as if afraid of being hit. Zielonka had blocked his way and screamed: ‘Well, how was it there, Mr Engineer? Did they teach you some respect?’

Their father went past him and entered the staircase in complete silence, which later on, in the flat, once he had taken a shower and eaten supper, weighed upon the entire family. Immersed in his own thoughts as if in a labyrinth, he refused to answer any of their mother’s questions.

At the time he was sure his father did not want to talk in front of him and his brother, and was keeping silent – as had often happened in the past – just because of the children. But once they were lying in their beds, listening to every sound from their parents’ room, the only thing they could hear was their mother, calling louder and louder: ‘Why won’t you tell me anything? Say something, for goodness sake! Talk to me!’ Then they heard his loud snoring, which seemed funny to them, as he had never suffered from that affliction before. Meanwhile their mother got up several times and clattered about in the kitchen, looking for pills and pouring herself water. Their father’s silence went on for several weeks, during which he took his meals apathetically and lay on the sofa bed, staring at the ceiling. He didn’t read any newspapers or books, and didn’t even listen to the radio. Finally he got up, drank a cup of raspberry tea and left the flat in nothing but a jacket – the very one he had brought back from Zurich. Its woollen, slightly too baggy tails flapped in the wind beneath the spreading crown of that great oak at the foot of the defunct railway line embankment, from which their father hanged himself.

Grandmother Maria discreetly sent them money, their mother found an office job at the municipal sewage company, and the silence in their flat seemed to linger on, like an invisible tent pitched above them.

He no longer enjoyed playing games with his brother. The Märklin electric railway set reminded them too much of their father. Whereas at night, once everyone was asleep, he would slip out of the house and down to the old railway embankment, where the Great Conductor would be waiting for him with his block of tickets and a shiny puncher for making holes in them. In his hands he held a thick, bulky book. It was the universal timetable for all possible railway lines. He admired the Great Conductor’s subtle, almost alchemic art of finding connections, transfers and return concession fares: under his finger and his gaze the dumb list of figures and symbols suddenly came to life, like the promise of a great journey which was actually fulfilled as soon as – after a short discussion – they had boarded the rather antiquated carriage smelling of soot, steam and the old plush covers of the first-class seats. He would come home before dawn, quickly get into bed and fall asleep almost immediately, then dream of the memorised landscapes, deserts, mountains, cities, river bends and waterfalls.

What could he tell her about all this? Could he say that his father, accused of spying, had broken down under interrogation and signed a piece of paper? Or on the contrary, that he hadn’t signed anything? That his nocturnal expeditions with the Great Conductor came to an end one autumn night? They stood beside each other at an abandoned signal, watching the goods trains roll past one after another. People were poking their hands out of the barred windows, and occasionally a face flashed by.

‘They’re going to their death,’ said the Great Conductor in a whisper.

‘Can’t we do anything?’ he asked.

‘We have no influence on the timetable. For the time being all the connections are cancelled.’

After that night the railway line never came to life again, and neither the elegant old carriage coupled to the panting locomotive, nor the Great Conductor, had ever appeared again among the rampant weeds and rusted points. He had never revealed that secret to anyone. In the dark hotel room he now realised that the only person he could tell it to was his neighbour from behind the wall, or rather from behind the wardrobe.

‘I’ll go to that church tomorrow,’ he decided, as he fell asleep.

The next morning he was received with extremely subtle courtesy by both Herr Rossets. Once his identity had been confirmed with the aid of his passport – which was a pure formality – it was necessary to state that he was his father’s only heir. His mother and brother were no longer alive, as shown by the relevant documents, long since forwarded to the office. He signed an additional declaration.

As the younger lawyer, Sebastian Rosset, began to read out the document, he gazed through the large office window at a pleasure boat gliding up the Limmat. On the other side of the river, above the city, stretched the purple range of the Alps. He was expecting in the best case about thirty thousand francs. Even increased by capitalised interest, the total amount should not be greater. But what he heard was staggering.

‘Could you say that again?’ he interrupted the lawyer, ‘I can’t have understood.’

‘Yes, of course. The total sum, minus the annual costs of tax, service expenses and our commission, now comes to one million nine hundred and ninety-six thousand seven hundred and fifty-four euros.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘Absolutely. The sum your father won on the lottery was enormous for those days – over two hundred thousand dollars. In accordance with his wishes, we invested the money in three ways: in trust funds, real estate and shares. As you can see, our firm achieves superb results. If the prize money had lain in a bank, even at the best rate of interest, you would not have even half that sum today. More than thirty years have gone by.’

‘What we’re talking about,’ the older, François Rosset now continued, ‘is of course the money which, after disposing of the securities, we deposited in three different banks, in keeping with your suggestion. But there is also the real estate.’

‘Indeed,’ said the younger lawyer, handing him a file of documents, ‘here is a list of the properties, with valuations and all communication with the administrators. If you should so wish, our firm is willing to continue to manage them. We have prepared a contract. Of course you can sell, but not immediately.’

In total silence he looked through the list.

‘Fiorenzuola?’ he asked bashfully, pointing at one of the items.

‘A beautiful property. Last month the lease expired and Mr O’Brien and his entire family went back to the States, as far as we know. We haven’t looked for a new tenant, as you mentioned in your letter that once matters were settled here you would like to take a holiday in Italy,’ explained Herr Sebastian. ‘The administrator, Signor Corelli, lives on site.’

‘Are you feeling unwell?’ The older lawyer summoned the assistant. ‘Please bring some water!’

He really was feeling odd, and gladly took the glass. He thought it was all a sort of game, which he had accidentally got mixed up in without the involvement of his own free will, a game for which he would have to pay through the nose eventually.

‘The accounts I mentioned,’ said Herr François, ‘are already active. You only have to make your way to any of the banks and submit examples of your signature. We thought of that – here are the phone numbers. They are expecting you.’

‘As you wanted a small sum in cash,’ added Herr Sebastian, handing him an envelope, ‘here is that too. Please count it.’

He was surprised to find that once he had counted out twenty thousand francs in new notes and put the envelope into his jacket pocket, no receipt was demanded of him.

When after two hours he finally left the offices of Henri & François Rosset’s legal firm, having entrusted it with the continued management of his real estate, he felt he should go straight back to the hotel to change his shirt – it was wet with perspiration.

However, he stopped at the first little café on the Limmat. He ordered mineral water and a sandwich. He took out his mobile phone and wrote: We really are rich, then selected his wife’s number. He failed to press the send button, because at almost the exact same second, a couple of tables along, he spotted Herr Hugin (though it could just as well have been Herr Munin) pointing the lens of a small camera in his direction. He got up, went over to the detective, and as loud as he could, said: ‘Please call the police! This man is stalking me for no reason!’

Several people looked up at them.

‘Are you sure?’ said a passing waiter, stopping in mid-stride. ‘What’s this about?’

But Herr Munin (though it could just as well have been Herr Hugin) immediately walked off, disappearing among a group of Japanese tourists, who had just alighted from an pleasure boat.

He returned to his table, deleted the unsent text message, swallowed his sandwich, paid and set off along Wühre and up to the old town. It was noon, and the bells began to ring from several churches. He had no trouble reaching the small square where, on the façade of the two-storey toy shop, he could see the familiar sign saying Franz Carl Weber, with the company logo – a rocking horse, and the date of its foundation – 1881. On the ground floor there were lots of departments which did not arouse his interest. Hundreds of computer games, and squeezed in among them here and there, Barbie dolls or their relatives – that was really all. He roamed about in this labyrinth, unsure what to do next. Finally he came upon a sales assistant. His white shirt, black trousers and waistcoat betrayed a hesitant kinship with the elegance of former years.

‘Excuse me, please, ’ he asked. ‘Are there any electric railway sets here?’

‘What’s that?’ The young man hadn’t heard properly, or hadn’t understood his German.

‘Model trains. Locomotives, carriages, signals, stations.’

The assistant was surprised.

‘Do you mean a computer game? A railway one? We haven’t anything like that. There’s only Murder on the Orient Express. Interested?’

‘No, that’s not it. An electric railway set, dear sir. Models. Miniature, perfect replicas. Made by Märklin, for example. They travel on tracks like real ones. Have you got any like that?’

‘Yes,’ replied the young man after some thought. ‘Please go upstairs and ask the manager. I’ve only been working here for a month,’ he said, smiling disarmingly.

A moving staircase silently carried him upwards. But even here, among pyramids of Lego bricks, space stations from the Star Wars era and all possible mutants and cousins of the Matrix, he couldn’t find a single railway set. He also spent a long time looking for anyone who might be able to provide information. Finally, from behind a stack of colourful boxes, a young girl emerged, dressed the same way as the assistant on the ground floor.

‘May I help you?’ she asked.

‘I’m looking for trains, Märklin models. The kind powered by electricity. Have you got anything like that?’

‘Please go to the far end of the floor. There should be something on the left hand side, by the window.’

But it wasn’t quite so obvious at all. For a few minutes he searched for the right department, until finally, behind yet another pyramid of remote-controlled racing cars, he found a dusty display case, in which there was a short track laid out in a figure of eight. On it stood a locomotive with three little carriages. For some time he inspected the exotic train. The model locomotive represented a type of steam engine from the late 1950s, still manufactured in those days in Germany. Each of the carriages belonged to a completely different decade. Here a flatcar from the 1920s kept company with an entirely modern refrigerator car and an old-fashioned passenger coach with a long row of little doors down both sides.

‘Would you like to buy it?’ he heard the sales assistant say behind him.

‘Are there any other models?’ he asked in a hopeful tone.

‘That’s the last one. Trains aren’t fashionable these days.’

‘No. I was thinking of the Geneva to Biarritz express or something like it.’

‘In that case you should look on the internet. There are collectors who have their own special sites. Do you want an address?’

‘No thank you,’ he replied. ‘Maybe next time.’

As he was leaving Franz Carl Weber’s toy store, he didn’t even look behind him to say goodbye to the rather old-fashioned letters on the shop sign, which had, after all, brought a few moments of real happiness into his childhood on the cold sea coast. Suddenly he started thinking about his father: had he made the purchase after winning on the lottery, or had the present been the fruit of profound and numerous sacrifices on his part? As far as he still remembered anything, his father’s character would be more indicative of the second possibility. If he could imagine it, the decision to buy a ticket had probably occurred to him earlier, in the first few days of his stay, as he read an advertisement for the lottery in the window of one of the tobacco shops, but with an extremely modest sum of money at his disposal, with every last penny accounted for, he must have thought he might take a gamble shortly before leaving, and then only if he turned out to have a little change left. It must have been just like that: he had counted every franc so that he would have enough for the Märklin carriages, both locomotives, a good supply of track, and also the points and signals. If he had bought a lottery ticket earlier, this purchase would have been improbable, or in any case much more modest. After all, he couldn’t possibly have assumed he would win anything, and only then buy them this unusual present.

As he waited a dreadfully long time for the sluggish waiter at the hotel restaurant, he tried to imagine his father’s tall, slightly stooping figure entering Franz Carl Weber’s toy store, only about forty metres away from here. First he must have taken in the sight of dozens of trains speeding around several enormous model landscapes that filled the greater part of the ground floor. Then, after lengthy observations and calculations, with the catalogue in hand, he must have eventually chosen suitable models and asked for them to be shown to him properly, until finally there came the packing stage and a visit to the cash register – which in those days was still mechanical, with a crank handle, making that part of the store look like a shop out of Dickens.

His father is very pleased, even though sleet has been falling on Bahnhofstrasse for several minutes and a bitterly cold wind is blowing. He presses his hat more firmly onto his head, turns up the collar of his old raincoat, carefully knots his scarf and sets off in the direction of the station with two enormous packages under his left and right arms. But moments later, literally after only fifteen metres, he turns around and goes back past the liveried doorman and into the toy shop again. ‘What’s the matter?’ asks the senior sales assistant. ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘Not at all, everything’s fine,’ replies his father, putting his parcels down on a counter top. ‘I just wanted to ask for your mail-order catalogue, because you see, it occurred to me that I might order something else, from home, from Poland.’

‘Of course,’ says the senior sales assistant, handing him a fat book in soft, shiny covers, similar in shape to a school exercise book. ‘It costs fifty francs,’ he says, and watches the customer open his coin purse and count out the requested sum in twenty and ten centime coins; he is exactly five centimes short, so the senior sales assistant waits calmly. Meanwhile a train ticket falls out of the purse, the receipt for the toys bought a little earlier, a dry cleaning ticket for a jacket, but not the missing five centimes – because his father simply hasn’t got it. The banknote lying at the bottom of his wallet is absolutely not to be touched: it must last him for the final two days.

‘What kind of a salesman am I?’ says the senior sales assistant, picking up the company receipt from the floor and handing it to his father. ‘Anyone who makes a purchase worth more than fifty francs receives the catalogue for free. Here you are, sir,’ he says, handing him the book, ‘you spent several times that sum,’ and helps him to pick up his parcels from the counter. ‘Happy Christmas!’

‘Happy Christmas,’ replies his father, and heads towards the station at a faster pace than before, because the train to Winterthur is leaving from platform two in just under fifteen minutes – Happy Christmas – he repeats to himself now, under his breath, in Polish, as he buys a lottery ticket at the station tobacco shop, splitting that final banknote in the process, which he should only have split the next day – Happy Christmas.

As the Alps pass by outside the carriage windows, invisible in the darkness, he feels quiet satisfaction. By denying himself every third lunch and every fourth supper, as well as small treats like hot chocolate or a trip to the cinema, from his modest allowance he set aside enough for two magnificent trains and ten complete tracks. Exactly enough for the boys to be able to encompass their entire bedroom with them, including a route under the old wardrobe and behind the chest-of-drawers. The next day, when he picks up a newspaper at the hotel reception and reads the number of the lucky winning ticket, he cannot believe his own eyes. He has just enough cash to buy a one-way ticket to Zurich and reach the legal firm, which – as he has read in the very same newspaper – provides services for ‘foreign clients and complicated financial matters’. Henri Rosset confers with him at length in his office, until finally, after signing several agreements and letters of authorisation, he pays him 100 francs – on account, a sum guaranteed by the lottery win.

‘Perhaps you need more?’ he asks at the end.

‘Absolutely not,’ replies his father. ‘In my country that means serious trouble.’

The solitary dinner dragged on for an unbearably long time. Over coffee he looked at his watch: it was already almost half past three, and mass at the Liebfrauenkirche was due to begin at six. In his room he pored over a map of the city. The church was situated at number 9 Zehnderweg, and thus not so far from the hotel and even nearer to the station – on the other side of the river. Only now, as the emotions fell away from him, did he feel how very tired he was; for that precise reason he did not take a short nap, but after a quick shower and a change of shirt, set off past the luxury shop-window displays of Bahnhofstrasse. But the jeweller’s baubles, the most expensive watches in the world and the fur coats imported from Siberia did not interest him at all. He went into an antiquarian bookshop and briefly looked through some old, seventeenth-century maps. On one of them, by Jean Bleu, he saw his home city, the bay, and the long, sandy peninsula which the sailors had called ‘Hell’ since mediaeval times.

‘I don’t have to go home tomorrow,’ he thought. ‘I don’t really have to do anything.’

He didn’t buy the map, though at the start, when he first examined it, that had been his intention. On the bridge he remembered the visit he and his mother had paid to the parish office before his father’s funeral.

‘Please, please, Father, I beg you,’ his mother had almost burst into tears, ‘if only for the children’s sakes!’

The curate was young and clearly sympathised with them, but he had his orders.

‘There’s nothing I can do for you. Canonical law is quite clear about these situations. We do not refuse to say mass for the unfortunate soul, but a funeral service conducted by a priest is out of the question. Please understand us. After all, it was suicide,’ he lowered his voice, ‘plainly, without any doubt.’

Only many years later had he found out from his mother that the older, retired priest, whom no one knew in their parish, and who had appeared at the cemetery at the very last moment, driving up to the gate on an extremely dilapidated moped, had been his father’s commander in the underground youth resistance movement during the war. He himself had never mentioned his wartime activities. As he was nearing the church, on Zehnderweg already, he saw himself in that cramped, cluttered flat, examining and sorting his parents’ papers. His brother hadn’t come back from America for their mother’s funeral. He had had to take care of everything on his own, but the worst thing was all that tidying, which took him several weeks to deal with. What tired him the most were the photographs of people he could never know anything about anymore. In one of the boxes he found a large, grey envelope. It was lying at the very bottom, stuck down and unidentified. It contained documents issued by the legal firm in Zurich. There was nothing in them to say how much money his father had deposited, and he could only confirm that Henri & François Rosset will make every effort to increase the values entrusted to them, and that these may only be acquired upon the application of the interested party in person, those authorised by him or his legally defined heirs. For several years he had corresponded with his brother on this topic – gently and cautiously. His brother had promised to take care of it, and even to fly to Zurich, but in fact he had never intended to lift a finger to deal with the matter, which he regarded as some obsolete whim not worth the expense. When they finally opened the borders, his brother was no longer alive. For the next few years, as he set up his own company and threw himself into a whirl of rather bad business ventures, the envelope lay in his desk among his school certificates and his diploma from the polytechnic. He found the legal firm’s email address on the internet, and after one short message, to his astonishment, he got the answer that on the matter in question he must appear in person, equipped with the relevant documents. There followed a list.

He was expecting trouble, legal loopholes, expressions of doubt, and for the whole process to be strung out into infinity, but now here he was, entering the Liebfrauenkirche edifice as someone who had inherited an extraordinarily large fortune. It was a strange feeling: in the city from which Lenin had left for Saint Petersburg in a sealed carriage, the city where the Dadaists had proclaimed their manifesto, and much earlier Zwingli had issued his, here in this city he had received a win on the lottery, which his father had once happened to play.

The mass was preceded by an announcement read out by the priest from a sheet of paper: the bishop they had been expecting, Luigi Conti, had not come, laid low by sudden and severe flu. He sent the congregation his blessing, which – along with a specially composed pastoral prayer – would be read out after the Eucharist. He walked along a side nave to the altar, and then went back towards the choir, casting discreet glances in search of Teresa. But he could not see her anywhere, nor anyone whom she could be cunningly impersonating.

‘What could be sadder than a cancelled performance in a foreign city?’ he thought as he left the church.

If his neighbour had gone back to the hotel, he might call her from the reception and invite her to supper. But at once he imagined Herr Hugin or Herr Munin disguised as the receptionist. Ultimately, considering the unusual friendship they had formed, he could also press ahead and knock at her door as he came down the corridor, and then suggest an outing to the city. Unless she had decided to leave at once, as the performance had not come off. Convinced that was probably what she had done, he stopped a taxi and told the driver to take him to Spiegelgasse, to the restaurant which was once home to the famous Cabaret Voltaire. Once there, he ordered a salad and some wine, but he did not enjoy the meal: surrounded by a raucous crowd of people, he spent the entire time gazing at the couple opposite – the young man was wearing a pointed Bolshevik cap with a red star and a collarless brown Russian shirt draped over his trousers, and his girlfriend was dressed in the leather jacket of a People’s Commissar. For a while he even wondered whether to address them in Russian, but he dropped the idea and left the noisy place with relief.

He went back to the hotel on foot, only once checking the route on his city map. At the reception, as he paid his bill, he noticed that the key to room 304 was not in its pigeonhole. Back in his room, he put his ear to the door inside the wardrobe and heard her footsteps. She was pacing to and fro, clearly upset. Should he knock on her door to tell her he had been at the church? He didn’t really have anything else to communicate: he was leaving the next day at about noon.

He stepped back out of the wardrobe and switched on the television. As he watched the CNN news from Iraq, he remembered the name of the king who was exiled from Jerusalem: it was Zedekiah. The victors had first made him witness the execution of his own sons, then they had blinded him, put him in chains and driven him into captivity. This had no direct connection with the news, so he was all the more curious to know why on earth he had been thinking yesterday about the religious education lesson at which, many years ago, he had been read the story of the last king of Judah. Maybe he associated the blinding of the ruler with the sight of the prisoners whose eyes had been blindfolded?

He was already on his way to the bathroom when he heard a noise coming from the corridor. Someone knocked at his neighbour’s door. Once and again.

‘Please open up!’ he heard a man’s voice. ‘We’ve got a warrant!’

Without hesitation he went into the wardrobe, opened the back door and beckoned to her to come into his room. She managed to grab her handbag and her coat. As he closed the wooden door panel, the key in her lock turned with a dull rattle and several men entered the next-door room – probably policemen – with the help of the hotel staff. While they were searching her luggage, she sat beside him on the sofa. He gently took hold of her hand, which she did not withdraw.

‘So what now?’ he whispered.

‘They’ll arrest me, as usual.’

‘But nothing happened. You haven’t done anything.’

‘That’s just how it looks. You know what it’s called? An attempt. In Italy I would lie my way out of it and only get a few days. In Switzerland I might get more. They’ll find a picture of Luigi in my case. The old woman’s costume and the saint’s robes. Newspaper cuttings. That’s enough. Three years ago I was arrested in Einsiedeln, so I’ve already had a sentence here. Suspended.’

‘We can run away if you like,’ he said.

‘Of course I do, but how? They’re sure to post someone at reception for the whole night. But I’ve no reason to go back in there now,’ she said, pointing at the wall with the wardrobe.

‘First let’s wait a bit,’ he said, turning up the television, ‘then I’ll go and reconnoitre.’

After an hour, during which they sat huddled together shyly like a pair of school children, he went down to the hotel bar, slowly passing the reception. There were two men sitting in armchairs in the lobby, clearly on duty. He drank a small whisky and went back to the lift. There was no one in the corridor on the third floor, and there were no sounds coming from behind the door of her room.

‘Put on my coat, trousers, shoes, scarf and also… my glasses. It’s a pity I haven’t got a hat. But you can smoke my pipe. Yes, like that. Keep your hands in the pockets. Here’s a rain hat, I brought it just in case. Wait, a man’s shirt under the coat, with the collar done up, and a tie – you must have a tie, so it shows under the scarf. Just walk through at a calm pace and get in a taxi, as if you were off for a late supper. But wash off your make-up. We’ll pin your hair up under the cap – like that, look. You can hang my bag over your shoulder. I’ll put your handbag in my suitcase.’

‘All right, but then what?’

‘You’ll take a taxi to the station. The night train from Geneva to Rome departs from platform three at half-past midnight. Let’s meet at the platform entrance. Stand facing the timetable board and don’t look round. I’ll be there ten minutes after you.’

‘We haven’t got much time.’

‘If you’re not on the platform, I’ll go back to the hotel.’

‘If they detain me, they’ll ask who helped me.’

‘So tell them.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You will, but only after noon. I’ll be far away.’

‘And will we ever meet again?’

‘You’ll send me a letter from prison.’

‘To what address? I don’t even know your surname!’

‘Here’s my card.’

‘No, because if they catch me…’

‘They won’t catch you. Take it. But let’s hurry.’

When she went out into the corridor with the bag slung over her shoulder, in his raincoat with the collar slightly turned up and with his cap on her head, adjusting the glasses and puffing on the pipe, he thought the shoes might give her away more than anything: they were too big, and despite her efforts, every second or third step she distinctly shuffled them in a funny way. But there was no time for practice. He packed at lightning speed, highly amused by the situation. In just his suit, and with his small case, he appeared at the reception desk to hand in his key.

‘Are you leaving?’ asked the young man.

‘My bill is paid,’ he said in a confident tone. The two gentlemen in the armchairs cast him furtive glances, but neither of them so much as raised a finger.

‘Yes, of course,’ confirmed the receptionist. ‘Bon voyage.’

He gave him a nod, and just outside the hotel he got in a taxi. He glanced at his watch: the night express was leaving in fifteen minutes. He still had enough time to stop at the ticket office and buy two first-class tickets for the sleeping car. Teresa was standing in front of the platform timetable; one of her rolled-up trouser legs had come undone, hiding her shoe. The train was just pulling in. They were walking alongside each other, when suddenly one of the wheels on his case began to squeak.

‘I don’t have a large flat in Rome,’ she said, once they were in the compartment. ‘I don’t know if you’ll like it.’

‘But I don’t want to go to Rome at all, and I’m not planning to stay at your flat.’

‘So what are your plans?’

‘To stop in Venice.’

‘For how long?’

‘A week or two.’

She went behind the screen to wet her face and neck in the sink.

‘But can you stay a day with me?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You’ll meet my daughter. She isn’t mad like me. Luckily I did manage to pay for the hotel,’ – she changed the subject – ‘but for this luxury here I will be in your debt. Until next month, if that’s all right. Why don’t you say something? Perhaps you just want to sleep with me? Are you expecting something?’

‘I’d like to have a cup of tea.’

‘Hand me my blouse. Tea at this time of day? That’s a Russian habit. I’m sorry, perhaps I’ve offended you. So did you take care of your business in Zurich?’

‘Yes. I won’t be going back there again.’

They sat facing each other and drank the tea served by the steward. Outside the lights of passing stations flashed by. Finally they lay down, each in their own bed.

‘Do you know of a boarding house in Venice?’ she asked in the darkness.

‘No. I’m staying at the Hotel Danieli.’

‘Do you know how much that costs? A fortune!’

‘Tough. Unless you come with me and help me find something cheaper.’

‘I’d have to bring my daughter.’

‘So bring her.’

‘Are you serious? Or are you just…’

‘I’m serious.’

Once again they were silent, until finally he said: ‘I’d like to kiss you. When I first saw you in the train to Zurich I dreamed of kissing you.’

‘And I asked if we were already in Zurich, as if I didn’t know where we were. I wanted you to embrace me. I want you to now, too.’

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.

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.

‘From this year,’ he said, looking up at the sky, ‘you’re going to study music – Jonatan will come to us three times a week. You have plenty of time until the autumn to make your choice.’

‘But,’ I asked rather uncertainly, ‘what am I to choose between?’

‘What do you mean? The violin or the piano.’

He definitely preferred the piano, but he didn’t say a word. Only when his father was tapping out the ash from the bowl of his pipe against the wet edge of the pond did he inquire: ‘So what about the Prussians? Did they live in our house?’

His father laughed long and loud.

‘But I told you, there’s nothing left of them. Well, almost nothing. Just a few words, that’s all. For instance, our lake has two names, even in the official atlas. Krzywe and Ukiel. And the Prussian name, Ukiel, means just the same as Krzywe: “crooked”.’

Back in his tiny bedroom in the loft, as he listened to the endless croaking of the frogs punctuated by the hooting of an owl, he kept mindlessly repeating: ‘Ukiel-dukiel, crooked crook-iel’, as if it were a sort of incantation.

Now there were some belated party-goers driving down the street. A dirty Land Rover was dragging a chain of strung-together cans behind it. One of the drunken passengers kept firing a shotgun again and again into the sky and shouting: ‘Socialismo o muerte! Venceremos! Viva Fidel!’ Somewhere nearby a car alarm started to wail and some stray cats began to yowl, which the new, centre-right district administration had been battling with for a few months to no avail. He fetched his address book and chose Marta’s number, which he hadn’t called for about seven years. After a long wait he finally heard a ringing tone, and straight after that a soft, female voice.

‘Hello?’

‘Marta?’

‘No, it’s not Marta. Who’s that?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. This is Joachim. Is Marta there?’

‘I’ll just fetch my mum.’

Finally he heard his sister’s voice.

‘Is that really you?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing. I just wanted to come. For a few weeks. Is there a chance you can put me up?’

Marta did not reply immediately. Only after a few seconds, as if she had to have a good think about it, did she answer in a hushed tone: ‘But yes, of course, come over!’

III

The snow came like salvation. On the third day after the wet, grey holidays, large flakes of it began to fall on Jesionowa Street, coating the overflowing dustbins, cluttered little gardens and dog messes at the edge of the bald lawns. Joachim was delighted: the whiteness engulfed not just the world of things, but also spread itself like a soft mantle over his skittish, anxious thoughts. Even the places he had missed, and which immediately after his arrival had seemed to him hideous and unrecognisable, now took on a neutral softness thanks to the fluffy white snow. In fact, from the slightly bow-shaped street, built up on either side with angular terraced houses, he’d been unable to reconstruct the old road that passed the pond and led to the woodshed; but once a thick layer of snow was covering them, the ugly, identical houses no longer looked as awful. Even the mechanic’s workshop, which had been erected on the site of the old pond – a heavy concrete lump with a row of dirty glass bricks running under its flat roof – did not offend Joachim’s gaze as painfully now that it was covered by a white hat.

It went on snowing for four days. Then, along with a cold, icy wind from the east came a powerful frost. At last it all calmed down and, at a temperature of minus fifteen, the sunlight brought an austere brightness out of the wintry landscape.

Joachim went down to the cellar. Among the empty jars, cardboard boxes, broken furniture and piles of magazines he discovered a pair of old ice-hockey skates. They had probably belonged to Andrzej: his brother had the same shoe size as him. As he was perching on a small stool in the hall polishing the leather – dried stiff by time – Marta came out to him from the kitchen.

‘Are you angry?’ she asked, lighting a cigarette.

‘No, why should I be? But your son-in-law is an awful yob. Fancy sending away the piano tuner the day before Christmas! I’d have paid him, since I ordered him. Couldn’t you have called me down from upstairs?’

Marta took a small glass jar from her apron pocket and tapped ash into it.

‘And those comments,’ he calmly went on, without looking up from the boot, ‘those stupid allusions. So I’ve come here to get my money back, have I? Couldn’t you have told him I gave up my share in your favour long ago?’

‘I did tell him,’ said Marta shaking her head, ‘but you can see for yourself. He bosses everyone around. With four children.’

He wanted to add that in his view all four of them were dreadfully badly behaved and nasty, just like their father, or rather not brought up at all, but as soon as he looked at Marta, he went straight back to his interrupted job. There were tears in her eyes.

‘You have no idea how hard it is,’ she said, slowly stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Ever since Marian died, I’ve lost all my energy. Are you really going to skate on those?’ she asked, changing the subject. ‘Wait a moment, I’ll get you some woolly socks.’

As he walked down hill to the lake, Joachim felt depressed. He couldn’t shake off the stifling, unpleasant atmosphere in the house. He felt sorry for Marta, but he had no influence on her life. Everyone, including her daughter, seemed to ignore her. And exploit her. The retired librarian cooked, washed, ironed and did the shopping, but was shown absolutely no respect for it. She was like an old servant who is only spoken to in case of need. All these days she had avoided talking to him one-to-one. He’d noticed that as soon as her son-in-law appeared, she fell silent. And yet there was at least one thing they ought to clarify. For years on end, month in, month out, Joachim had sent her 150 US dollars. Nowadays it was an almost ridiculous sum, but under the communists, converted into the zlotys of the day, it was rather a lot. When he wrote to say he couldn’t support her any more, that he was having some temporary problems and that he hadn’t been able to pull himself together since Julia died, she hadn’t answered, nor had she written for several years. He realised she had her own troubles, but after all this time shouldn’t she at least – even just a word or two – say thank you?

Luckily the sun was shining, and the powdery snow was crunchy underfoot. Down by the lake Joachim spied out the abutment of the old landing-stage, where he sat down and quickly changed his boots. The wind, which had been raging the previous night, had formed deep drifts in some places, but there were also whole expanses of ice that were free of snow, as if specially cleared for him. He raced ahead at great speed, turned wide circles, spun large and small figures of eight, and felt a surge of happiness. As he was returning to the house, the violet shadows of early dusk were already being cast on the snow. The family dinner was over by now, but Marta was waiting for him specially, and they ate together, the two of them, in the kitchen.

‘Do you remember the old, abandoned barn on the hill?’ he asked.

She did. The three of them, including Andrzej, had crept up there on the dot of noon. The air was rippling in the heat as they ran round the wooden skeleton chanting: ‘Bare-bottomed man, come out of the barn! Bare-bottomed man, come out of the barn!’ As soon as something moved inside, they raced off all the way to the grave, shouting at the top of their voices.

Why exactly had they called that place the grave? Old Maudzis, who did his ploughing every spring with a horse harnessed to a ploughshare, was always finding disintegrating clay pots there. Then he would cross himself and shout against the wind: ‘By Potrimpe, by Patollu, by Verszajte divine, touch thou not this grave of mine!’ Andrzej did the funniest imitation of him. First he crossed himself just like the old man, then he stuck his bum out in his direction, puffed up his lips, and let out a monstrous, raucous fart. Maudzis would yell swear words and throw clumps of earth at them. Sometimes he threw a shard from a clay pot.

‘I’m paying him back now,’ said Marta about Andrzej. ‘We haven’t seen each other since Mother died. Do you correspond?’

Joachim said no. Zdzisław, the son-in-law, entered the kitchen. In a conciliatory way he set a decanter full of fruit liqueur and two glasses on the table.

‘Don’t be angry,’ he said, pouring a glass for himself and Joachim. ‘If I’d known you ordered the piano tuner, I’d even have paid him myself. But the man was standing in the doorway, I’d just dropped in from the workshop for a moment, and I thought he was some sort of conman, a Jehovah’s witness or something. So what happened, happened. But I’ve ordered him for tomorrow. At my expense.’

‘Well I never, sir!’ Somehow Joachim couldn’t get onto first-name terms with Marta’s son-in-law. ‘Why not pour a drink for your mother-in-law? Marta, will you have a drop with us?’

Without a word, Zdzisław fetched a third glass from the sideboard.

The cherry brandy was weak and too sweet.

When Joachim made a move to go up to his room, Marta grabbed him by the wrist.

‘Just tell me one thing. Why did you stop playing? Actually, why did you never start? I mean the stage, your career – well, why?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You were the only one of us who could have achieved something. Teachers, lessons. Just you. You went away, and nothing came of it! Nothing!’

‘Well, quite,’ said Joachim, kissing Marta on the cheek. ‘Nothing worked out for me either. But is that such a big sin?’

As he lay in bed, he thought about the nightmare Christmas Eve from a few days ago. The television switched on, the teenagers bickering, Marta forever on the go, and finally the piano that hadn’t been tuned for years, at which he had pointedly sat down and furiously played a carol that sounded dreadful.

Now he regretted it, like a schoolboy prank. But soon he was dreaming. Large snowflakes fell silently on the ash tree, under which his mother was arranging some gift boxes. Above the large, old tree a star was twinkling. The Pole star, not the Star of Bethlehem.

IV

The piano tuner rang to say he was ill and could only come in a week at the soonest. Zdzisław tried to find another one, but with no result. Joachim was not in the least upset. Every day, taking advantage of the frosty, sunny weather, he went out skating. He toured ever more distant corners of the lake. In some places the new estates and housing districts came right down to the shore, wound around the bays and occupied the hills. He often passed speeding ice yachts, or nearer the buildings, boys playing hockey. One day, a single skater separated himself from one of these groups and, to Joachim’s amazement, started to keep him company. It was a very strange impression: the man was skating in parallel to him at a distance of about thirty metres, copying his every movement like in a mirror. When Joachim stopped abruptly, so did that fellow, and he slowed down in just the same way. When Joachim turned a figure of eight, that man turned one too. When he skated on just his left foot for a while, holding his right leg up like a crane, that fellow did the same.

‘I haven’t gone mad, have I?’ wondered Joachim, glancing into the bright blue sky (the man glanced skywards too). ‘He’s not my lookalike!’ Indeed, he didn’t look like Joachim at all; he was smaller, with a slight build, and he was dressed differently too. From afar he seemed to be wearing rather theatrical, old-fashioned clothes. But it was impossible to get any nearer: whenever Joachim moved towards him, the fellow immediately moved exactly the same distance away. When he did a low, rather clownish bow, the fellow bowed back in an identical manner.

‘Once I press him to the shore,’ the simple idea dawned on him, ‘he’ll have to go past me. Unless he flies off straight onto dry land. But then I’ll catch up with him…’

First he sped off towards Likusy, then he made an abrupt about-turn in the direction of the Old Manor, and finally built up incredible speed as he headed straight for the Podlesie shore. And it happened; with no space to escape into, right by the shore the stranger did in fact turn round and glide straight towards him. But it was an unnaturally rapid manoeuvre, devilish quick somehow; at the last second Joachim dodged, but not soon enough to slow down, so he crashed headlong into the shore, luckily landing in a deep snowdrift.

He even found the situation amusing.

Could I really have encountered the devil? Things like that only happen in stories, especially nineteenth-century, and best of all, Russian ones, he thought as he wiped his face, pleasantly cooled by the snow.

He had seen that figure somewhere before: in a black frock coat, with the white splash of a cravat, in a fanciful hat, and with those funny skates, which were strapped on to some flat-soled boots. But where and when?

The whole way home he kept looking behind him, but the stranger had vanished. As he was climbing the rise to the estate, he turned to look at the lake again, and then he caught sight of the fellow, standing on the ice a few dozen metres from the shore, bowing and politely tipping his hat.

‘I haven’t gone mad, have I?’ Joachim said to himself several times over, as he walked down Jesionowa Street. ‘Someone’s having a joke at my expense. Must be some local oddball. There always were plenty of oddballs around here.’

That evening Marta gave in to some painful memories. One single word was like a concentrate containing the ultimate cause of all their family disasters and failures: Wadąg. That was the name of their father’s favourite lake, where he had his own boat, where once – probably in 1966 – he caught a fifteen-kilo catfish, and where, in a small, wooden cottage on a headland, lived the pastor’s wife, widow of the Reverend Eberhard Jellinek.

‘What did he see in her?’ said Marta, pouting with contempt. ‘That Evangelical old witch! That hussy! That Protestant whore!’

Joachim tried to calm her down. Why get upset, why curse, when none of them were alive any more? What could it matter nowadays?

‘Maybe you don’t remember how much Mother suffered!’ – Marta was not inclined to forgive the pastor’s widow – ‘And how embarrassing it was when he died there, at her place, in that house, in their marital bed, apparently!’

Joachim had forgotten that detail. Whereas the sight of his father, always cheerful – as he drove up to the house on his powerful Zundapp motorbike after a night or two at Wadąg, as he walked across the yard with a net full of handsome pike and zander, still flapping – that sight brought back pleasant memories.

‘Well of course,’ said Marta, refusing to give up, ‘you men always prefer to remember nothing but the pleasant things. Hush it all up and sweep it under the carpet!’

Despite their difference of opinion, somehow their conversation was affectionate. Marta admitted that they had cut down the big ash tree illegally; it was well over a hundred years old. Marian, her husband, had started building the workshop adjoining the house.

‘There was no alternative,’ she said, suddenly downcast, ‘but you know, once it was gone, once they had taken away the chopped-up trunk and the branches, I felt it was a bad omen. And that came true. Marian never finished the building. Only our son-in-law, years later. And it’s not so great now either, there’s too much competition.’ Marta drank a sip of tea from a chipped cup with a gold stripe. ‘They’re all lowering their prices, as if they were deliberately conspiring against us.’

Joachim spent half the night sitting over his laptop, online. He searched for all sorts of different things, from images of the devil, through to the history of skating. But in vain. Only when he remembered a visit to the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, where he and Julia had once been, did it finally dawn on him. And how simple it proved to be! Sir Henry Raeburn’s painting of ‘The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch’, that ironical image of the skating minister, was exactly what he was looking for. The same black stockings, the same jaunty hat, cravat, flat-soled boots and strapped-on skates. But after a brief moment of satisfaction, he suddenly felt troubled: was it really possible, in this remote corner of the world, on Lake Ukiel, for someone to have come up with such an insane and yet sophisticated idea? To make himself look like the Reverend Robert Walker he must have obtained the right costume, the boots and the old-fashioned skates. And why was he following Joachim, of all people? Perhaps, he rationalised, this oddball had simply headed onto the lake and picked out the first skater he met to play all those mirror-image tricks on him. And if so, Joachim decided, he really must catch up with the joker and have a chat with him: how had he come up with this idea? Did he only know the image of the skating Reverend Walker from a reproduction? In spite of these probable, if eccentric theories, or rather attempts at an explanation, Joachim felt rising anxiety. No, it wasn’t normal. To meet someone on the ice at his home lake who made himself look like a figure from a little known Scottish painting was something bordering on mental aberration.

Next day, on the dot of noon, he set out onto the ice. He passed bays and inlets, and ran across some wrinkled patches of snow. Nowhere did he meet the bizarre eccentric. At one of the jetties he ate a sandwich and sipped from a thermos of hot tea. He was tired by now. Fine snow began to fall from clouds, which were drawing in from Gutkowo. Before he knew it, only minutes later, he found himself in the middle of a blizzard. He had lost his sense of direction: he might just as well be skating towards home now as in the opposite direction, towards the Old Manor.

‘That’s all I needed,’ he thought, ‘I’ll keep going round in circles until dusk, and then they’ll find me on the shore, or somewhere in the middle, frozen to death like a soldier retreating from Moscow…’

He wasn’t afraid of death, but the thought that it could come right now, when he had lost his way out in the open, was very annoying. It was snowing more and more heavily, and he was probably turning circles. He slowed down, and heard someone else putting on the brakes beside him.

‘Reverend Walker,’ he shouted. ‘Please stop fooling around! Where are we?’

He was answered by laughter. Ringing, female laughter.

Straight towards him, out of the white mist came Julia.

She was wearing a down jacket and a woollen hat, the ones they had bought for their trip to Patagonia.

‘That’s impossible,’ said Joachim, ‘That’s contrary, that’s entirely contrary, not just to my notions – it’s contrary to the laws of physics!’

‘Are you sure?’ laughed Julia, looking him straight in the eyes. ‘I’ve waited so long for you.’

‘So I’ve died,’ he sighed. ‘At last. So this is what it’s like?’

Julia took off a glove and touched Joachim’s cheek. Her hand was warm and smelled of almond lotion. He remembered that smell. He kissed her fingers.

‘Can you explain it to me?’ he asked.

‘There’s a special point,’ she said, putting on the glove, ‘where all the laws of physics are broken. The crooked lines of time run together. It’s like a sort of loop.’

‘You mean to say there’s a point like that just here?’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said, putting a sweet, which she had taken from her bag, into her mouth. ‘Just here. There are very few of these places. Very few indeed. But you silly boy, you refused to come over here. I had to work pretty hard at it. First the sweet flag outside the Geological Museum.’

‘So that was you? In those sandals that didn’t match?’

‘Let’s say it was.’

‘And that oddball in the hat and the frock coat?’

‘Do you remember us looking at him in the museum? You liked him so much. I thought when you saw him you’d get the whole idea.’

‘So where are we going?’ He took Julia by the hand. ‘Where to now?’

‘That depends on you. You can go back to your sister’s house. She’s waiting for you. Or we can go off and turn a new circle together. It will take a while,’ she said, laughing. ‘Here, time is nothing but the image of eternity set in motion.’

They headed off together, holding hands like a pair of high-school kids at the ice rink.

‘Can you see the past from here?’ he asked.

‘It’s not that simple,’ said Julia, frowning. ‘Here there is no past and no future. You’ll soon understand.’

They emerged from the blizzard. All around the lake he saw the rising, distant chains of soaring mountains. A little later they passed a man hunched over a hole in the ice. He was wearing a hat with earflaps, and a quilted jacket thrown over his shoulders. He was just pulling a small fish out of the frozen depths. Next to him, a frying pan was already heating on a lighted Primus stove. On the ice behind the fisherman stood a rusty old humpback Warszawa, completely disembowelled.

‘Look,’ he said to Julia, ‘that must be Nowacki. I forgot to ask Marta if he used to frequent our house by the pond. Perhaps I’ll ask him.’ Joachim slowed down.

‘No,’ said Julia, pulling him forwards, ‘it’s not worth it.’

Ukiel-dukiel, crooked crook-iel, hummed the happy Joachim.

And then they both hummed the little rhyme together.

First Summer

I

IT HAD ALL fallen through. Two days before she was due to arrive, Sabina wrote to say that her daughter’s state of health had badly deteriorated. Instead of Poland she was flying to Boston to take care of her grandsons. She was very sorry. All the more since it was she who had had the idea for them to meet up. ‘I don’t know how to apologise,’ she added at the end. ‘You must be disappointed and angry, but think of me too – you can go there whenever you like, but I may have lost my only chance.’

He wasn’t angry or disappointed. He wrote a short, sympathetic reply, and as he was switching off the computer he merely wondered where the business card with the number of the Stokrotka boarding house had got to. He would have to call and cancel his reservation for two rooms. At last he found the small yellow card right by his desk, on the reference shelf, stuck to the spine of Herder’s Lexicon. When he heard the receptionist’s ringing voice in the receiver, without a second thought he changed the order to just one room. As he drove out of the city the next day, he felt as if Sabina had made the decision for him. In fact he had no desire for a weekend alone, at the close of summer, in a boarding house found via the internet. He decided to take lots of pictures and send the best ones to Sabina. The thought that he would photograph the road between the dunes – which she loved so much – first at dawn, then at sunset, suddenly seemed a perfectly adequate reason for this trip.

But he couldn’t remember this path. Perhaps at this particular spot the dune ran an entirely different way; in any case, he had to go a lot further before he finally found a way down onto the beach. The sun was already very low, there was a cool breeze blowing, and he only spotted one couple lying in a hollow out of the wind. He had seen them earlier, emerging from a brand new Mitsubishi at the boarding house car park: a well-known film director and his youthful boyfriend, who looked like a hitchhiker picked up on the highway. Now they were waving at him. He had no desire to chat, and gave their lair a wide berth, barely raising a hand in greeting. They shouted something, but their words were drowned by the roar of the waves. As he walked up to the water’s edge, he did not turn round in their direction again. He plunged his feet into the water, feeling the pleasant relief of not thinking about anything, but it was short-lived. His mobile phone rang, and on the screen he recognised his wife’s name. Joanna was already home – she had come back from her mother’s earlier than planned. As ever he had forgotten to take out the rubbish, and he hadn’t locked the balcony door. Were they already drunk? There’s no point trying to deny it, she joked – that’s what those old school reunions are for…

As he returned to the boarding house in total darkness, he felt ashamed of the lie, but the thought of what he would have had to say to his wife if she had found him at home was even worse. Somehow he couldn’t come up with a single credible reason why you might cancel a school reunion, even now, when he had had the time to think. A few dozen metres ahead of him he could hear voices: the director’s baritone mixed with the boy’s falsetto. Now and then they stopped and burst into laughter. He stopped too, not wanting to catch up with them. In the cool, still air between the dunes he could smell distinct trails of cigar smoke and a pungent cologne. Sabina had written the first letter a year ago, when by chance she had found his email address. He had replied at once. Then they had exchanged photos too, as if wanting to make sure that after twenty-four years they would be able to recognise each other. On a city street they would probably have passed each other by: she had grown thinner, he had put on weight. Her once chestnut hair with a copper sheen was now hidden by black dye. Not much of his hair was left, but now he had a double chin covered by a closely trimmed beard. She had lost her husband in a car crash. He was married for the second time. When they cycled along the dirt road twenty-five years ago, breathing in the damp scent of the stubble fields, they were completely different people from now. He had thought about it with no regret, but rather curiosity, as he had imagined tonight’s dinner, after which each would go to their own separate room. On the other hand, after all these years he couldn’t imagine their goodnight kiss, even if it were only on the cheek, in the corridor, like something from another time, another world, another story.

The couple in front of him vanished through the lighted doorway of the boarding house. In the car park where, since dusk, more than a dozen cars had managed to accumulate, there was still lively activity going on. Two Land Rovers had just driven up with yellow, Dutch registration plates, one from Breda and the other apparently from Utrecht. He did not know their language well, but it was obvious that both drivers, who were the first to jump out of the cars, were arguing about the route they had taken: it was meant to have been one way, but they had gone another and got lost. A third and fourth man who suddenly appeared in the headlights, were trying to make peace, and then two others, who got out last, started urging them to unload the luggage. There was an incredibly large amount of it. By their very nature, the suitcases, holdalls, bags and boxes brought the feuding couple together and toned down the Dutch hullabaloo, but only to a certain degree: as they carried it all into the vestibule, the Dutchmen continued to shout at each other in guttural syllables, jostling each other and dropping their parcels; finally they moved the cars, which wasn’t easy, as several more vehicles had arrived at the car park by now.

As he entered the dining hall, he was no longer in any doubt that the entire boarding house had been hired for a private party. The waiters were not taking any orders, just supervising a buffet table and drinks. He did find it amusing; above a stage hung a sign saying ‘Gay European Union for Poland’, and there were colourful objects hanging from lines stretched from wall to wall, as for a New Year’s Eve ball. Most of them were beach inflatables, representing male members of gargantuan size blooming out of a scrotum, but he also noticed some imitation baroque angels among them, with coiled willies like small horns and also some blow-up plastic effigies of rock stars, among which he recognised the immortal face of Freddie Mercury. Only a while later, as he was eating a sandwich, did he spot one of the Dutchmen: now he was wearing a vicar’s uniform. Holding a glass of wine, he was having a lively conversation with someone in German.

‘Is there going to be a service?’ he asked the man standing next to him.

‘Don’t you know?’ wondered the nice, rather tubby man. ‘Pastor van der Ecke is conducting a wedding ceremony today. It’s the first one in Poland. Not legally binding,’ he giggled, ‘because for us it’s not legal, but a wedding’s a wedding. The couple have just gone to get changed. And what about you?’ His interlocutor looked at him keenly. ‘Are you alone?’

‘Alone,’ he repeated unsurely, then immediately added, ‘Come here on my own? No, I’m with Sabine.’

‘Sabine? I don’t know him.’

‘It’s a sort of nickname.’

The other man lost interest and wandered off to the buffet table. Mentally he was already composing a letter to Sabina, which should start with the words: ‘The main thing is to be in the right place at the right time’. But once he had waited a quarter of an hour, roaming the crowded room with glass in hand and being picked out every now and then by someone’s inquiring look, he felt the sort of weariness that evolves into irritation. There was clearly a long time to go until the ceremony, and ultimately, did he have to watch it? He went over to the bar and bought a small bottle of whisky, some nuts and some mineral water. As she handed him the change the lovely barmaid, dressed in a double-breasted man’s suit, put a packet of condoms on the counter.

‘On special offer from the association,’ she explained, ‘scented ones!’

Without a word he shoved the Gay Union gift into his pocket, and thus equipped, headed upstairs to his room.

II

He was never so happy. They rode along country roads, with no fixed plan, just following their noses. He was on a Soviet Ukraina and Sabina was on an East German ladies’ bike. His was new, while hers carried the evidence of numerous modifications, and every few kilometres the chain fell off. At state-farm shops they bought bread, margarine, tinned fish and tomatoes. Sometimes, when they spotted a bottle of Bulgarian wine on a dusty shelf, they took a box of biscuits to go with it. In his pannier there was a tent, and Sabina was carrying two sleeping bags in hers. But they didn’t always feel like putting up the poles, spreading out the canvas and sticking in the pegs. They spent their first night under the open sky by the campfire, on a bend in the river. On the other side of the Vistula, where the ferry took them, they slept in an enormous haystack. Their exams were behind them. He had won a place at university, and Sabina had got into the medical academy. Through four years of high school they had taken no notice of each other. Only at the graduation ball, when he asked her to dance for the third time, had they shyly kissed, their lips hardly touching. Now, when they were together, Sabina had an extremely gentle way of cooling his desire; ‘Not yet,’ she would say, when he tried to part her thighs; ‘Not yet,’ she would whisper, as she returned his kisses.

Past the second or third house with a portico, right next to a stinking concrete cowshed from the 1950s, beside a pond covered in duckweed, they came upon a Mennonite cemetery. He caught a glimpse of a different Sabina. As if in a trance, she walked from gravestone to gravestone, touching the crumbling, moss-coated slabs. ‘Were they Jews?’ she asked him timidly, ‘or maybe Germans?’

As the two bikes slowly rode alongside each other, down a canal, he had a great deal to tell her. She was amazed that the people who created polders here out of the marshes of the delta were governed by the Bible, even in the pettiest matters, such as waistcoat hooks and eyes. And why had they travelled all the way here from Holland? She wasn’t in the least bit interested in royal privileges, or in rents and taxes. But when he spoke about religious persecution in the Netherlands, she wanted to know if the Catholics cited the Bible as an authority too.

‘And what happened to them all in the end?’ she asked once they had ridden further, across a wooden drawbridge. He didn’t have a ready answer to every question. But Sabina was enchanted anyway as if, in the geometric lines of poplar trees, willows and fields bordered by canals, she had suddenly caught a glimpse of a completely different world. ‘The People of the Book,’ she said, raising her head from the handlebars to look at him, ‘could you call them that?’

Then they rode all the way to the dunes and the pine trees, pitched their tent in a clearing next to an abandoned house, swam in the sea or lay about on the sand, feeling the flow of time idly slow down. Far beyond the village there was a holiday park, and occasionally a couple of beachgoers walked past their den but, for the greater part of the day, they were completely alone.

‘This place was waiting for us from the start,’ said Sabina.

The first time, they made love on the beach in full sunlight, straight after bathing.

As he kissed her wet skin he knew this fragrance and this light belonged to the summer for ever more, as did the roar of the sea, and the clouds like ships with fantastically stacked-up sides. The path they took back to the clearing was coated in a soft carpet of moss. Sabina loved the feel of it, and watched as the imprint of her foot disappeared far more slowly here than on the wet sand along the seashore.

‘I could go on like this for all eternity,’ she laughed. ‘If only the summer would last for ever.’

But, like a tree stump etched by the heat of the sun, August was just starting to sink under its own weight, down into the dark well of time, whence in a short while no light would return. The nights were very cold. One time, wrapped in a blanket, they sat out on the beach until dawn without seeing any more falling stars. In the distance, banks of purple clouds were drawing in from the direction of the Soviet border. A thick fog shrouded them on the path between the dunes. He was walking only a few metres behind Sabina, guided by the sound of her soft footsteps. Around a corner, where the track climbed sharply uphill, he sensed he was alone. ‘Sabina?’ he called in a hushed tone, ‘Are you there?’

He began to fret when he didn’t receive an answer. He called again, but only a startled owl squawked from the nearby pines. About fifteen seconds went by, as he stood there amidst the silence entirely veiled in white. Finally he heard her footsteps behind him. ‘Did you get lost?’ he asked. ‘Did you go off the track?’ But as she gave no reply, they walked on, side by side now, to the clearing. The fog was dispersing. Someone had dragged their things about in the grass, knocked over the tent poles and overturned the interlocked bikes, although it looked as if nothing had been taken. They had just finished tightening the guy ropes when Sabina whispered: ‘There, in the window – look!’

He reassured her. As the setting sun cast light on the window frame, it caused a sloping shadow to fall inside the empty house, and this looked like a person.

‘It’s moving,’ she said, grabbing his hand. ‘We’d better go!’

Finally he persuaded her they should go in there together. In a large kitchen area, where the bare remains of a tile stove were still standing, they cautiously walked among swirling pillars of dust, picked out of the grey gloom by the slanting shaft of light falling through the window. They passed from one room to the next, hesitantly, like uninvited guests. There were no household items or even the remains of furniture anywhere. The sun, wind, rain and frost must have been causing devastation here through the holes in the roof and the empty eye sockets of the windows since long ago. Decaying floor boards, fungus on the roof beams and weeds growing in the middle of a side room – all this they saw, as well as evidence of casual visitors. There were rags and broken bottles lying about everywhere, and the place stank of urine and old excrement.

‘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 atmosphere 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.

ALJ: Where did the idea for ‘Abulafia’ come from, apart from reflecting your interest in the history of the region surrounding Gdańsk?

PH: It’s odd, but I don’t really know why I wrote it – it just came into my mind one day, as a combination of various themes. The Junkers were the Pomeranian, German gentry, and von Kotwitz would have been a typical surname for a Junker. I used the same name for a character in my novel Castorp, set in the same era. ‘Abulafia’ is about how a person goes to the very edge of existence, in search of something that is ill-defined: the utopian dream of the language of the Garden of Eden, spoken by all mankind before the Tower of Babel.

ALJ: What gave you the idea for ‘The Flight into Egypt’? Why did you choose to write about refugees from Chechnya?

PH: A few years after the first war in Chechnya (which happened in the mid-1990s) I saw a photograph of a beautiful Chechen woman, taken on the border between Poland and Russia, and I found it very moving. She looked like the Virgin Mary in an icon; she had a look of great suffering but also of pride. It was in all the main daily papers. She must have been very young, nineteen or twenty, and she was waiting to be let into Poland as a refugee. It made an impression on me, and triggered the idea for this story. I talked to some Poles who were working with Chechens and knew about the refugee camps, so that aspect of the story is true – it is based on the real fate of the Chechens, who have suffered a genocide, all the worse for the fact that the world has turned a blind eye to it.

ALJ: ‘Franz Carl Weber’ seems to combine realism with fantasy – which elements are taken from life and which are pure invention?

PH: It is to some extent autobiographical, in that my father really did bring a Swiss railway set home for me and my brother from abroad. For children growing up in austere, communist Poland, it was like having our own helicopter, or a flying carpet – a beautiful gift like a memory of a world that no longer existed. In the mid-1990s I went to Zurich for a literary event, and I found the toy shop, Franz Carl Weber, which is still there. I went inside and saw all the toys in the world, except for electric railways, because things have changed now.

ALJ: I know Lake Ukiel is a real place, about 130 kilometres south east from Gdańsk, in the Mazurian lakelands. But it seems a strange name for a Polish lake.

PH: Yes, it is near Olsztyń, and still appears on the maps with its Polish name, Lake Krzywe (‘krzywe’ means ‘crooked’), as well as the name Lake Ukiel – meaning ‘elbow’ in the language of the original natives of this region, the Old Prussians, or Baltic Prussians, who were wiped out by the Crusaders and disappeared as a race. They were northern Europe’s equivalent of the North American Indians, and all that is left of them are a few place names. They feature quite strongly in early Polish history. In 997 Poland’s patron saint, St Wojciech, was sent by King Bolesław I to convert the Old Prussians, who killed and (according to one version) ate him.

ALJ: You return to some of the themes of ‘Mimesis’ in ‘First Summer’, where the Bible found by the main character is clearly meant to be the one hidden by Harmensoon, the Mennonite preacher in ‘Mimesis’. What was your thinking here?

PH: I wrote ‘Mimesis’ much earlier than the other stories, and ‘First Summer’ last of all, so together the two stories have a circular structure. When the hero of ‘First Summer’ finds the Bible, he closes a circle that began in ‘Mimesis’. That book can never be as important to today’s modern civilisation as it was in the past. Once it was what mattered most to earlier generations, but things have changed, and it no longer has the same significance.

About the Author

Paweł Huelle spent his early writing career as an employee of the Solidarity Movement’s press office in the late 1980s. He subsequently achieved great critical success (both domestically and in translation) as a writer of novels, short stories and essays, and has been honoured with numerous awards. His first novel, Who Was David Weiser? (1987, published in English by Bloomsbury, 1990) was described by critics in Poland as ‘the book of the decade’, ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘a literary triumph’ and elicited comparisons to Günter Grass and Bruno Schulz; subsequently it has been widely translated, and was shortlisted for the inaugural Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Huelle followed this with Moving House and Other Stories (1991, Bloomsbury 1994), First Love and Other Stories (1996), and then three novels, Mercedes Benz (2001), Castorp (2004) and The Last Supper (2007). The novels were published in English translation by Serpent’s Tale (2005, 2007 and 2008 respectively), with Mercedes Benz and Castorp both shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Recommended Read

Fog Island

Mehmet Zaman Saçlioglu

from Elsewhere: Stories from Small Town Europe

THE TRAIN WAS moving fast. Only two of us remained in the compartment as the others got off at the previous station. My travelling companion, a slim, light brown haired man in his thirties, a little younger than I, took off his shoes and stretched out to sleep on the seat opposite. I was considering doing the same but hesitated, as there were only fifteen or twenty minutes left before my stop.

I moved next to the window and pressed my nose against the glass as if hoping to see something through the pitch dark. No moon, no stars, no lights to be seen out there. My eyelids became heavy, lulled by the constant rattling and swaying of the train. Just as I closed my eyes I noticed that the train sounds had changed and the shaking stopped. The train was slowing down. Soon it came to a halt. Outside, there was nothing to be seen. I entered the aisle and peered out but still nothing. This was no ordinary darkness.

I pulled down the window and detected there was movement outside. This strange darkness – like a curious child who sticks his finger into every hole he can reach – flowed through the window, twisting, winding, becoming white. Then I realised we were in the midst of a dense fog. For a moment a light shone through the moving mist. I was never aware that this last train of the day made such a stop. I closed the window to those foggy fingers. As I was about to return to my compartment, the door to the car at the other end of the aisle opened and the conductor entered ringing a small bell:

‘Breakdown! We’ll be here for an hour. Please do not get off the train, the fog is very thick….’

As he passed by me I asked the conductor the name of this place.

‘Second Island station,’ he said.

I said I’d never heard of it before.

‘This is a very small station,’ he said. ‘Not every train stops here.’

My travelling companion also awoke and was putting on his shoes. He approached me with sleepy eyes, touched my arm and cocked his head as if to ask what was happening. A questioning sound came from his mouth. I realized that he was mute, and it occurred to me that he might also be deaf.

‘Breakdown,’ I said slowly so he could read my lips.

I was not mistaken. My travelling companion was both mute and deaf – but we found a way of communicating. His face lightened up as he noticed the fog. He opened the window, stretched out his arm and waved it in the fog while uttering joyous sounds. Then he turned to me and made a sign with his hand for me to follow him outside. His finger pointing to the outside, he opened the door, then grasping the iron handle, stepped down. He was emitting little screams and laughing. As he reached the ground he let go, turned around and extended his hands toward me.

To read the rest of this story, purchase Elsewhere: Stories from Small Town Europe here.

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Comma Press

www.commapress.co.uk

Copyright © remains with the author and translator 2012

This collection copyright © Comma Press 2012

All rights reserved.

First published in Kraków as Opowiečci chłodnego morza by Wydawnictwo Znak, 2008.

The moral rights of Paweł Huelle to be identified as the Author of this Work, and of Antonia Lloyd-Jones to be identified as the Translator of this Work, have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This collection is entirely a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed in it are entirely the work of the author’s imagination. The opinions of the author are not those of the publisher.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from the Arts Council England.

This translation has been funded by the Polish Book Institute ©POLAND Translation Program.

Footnotes

1

Who built you so high aloft, O lovely forest?

2

‘Impossible’ [German].

Content

Paweł Huelle
COLD SEA STORIES

Mimesis

The Bicycle Express

Depka and Rzepka

Öland

Doctor Cheng

The Fifteen Glasses of Gendarme Polanke

Abulafia

The Flight into Egypt

Franz Carl Weber

Ukiel

First Summer

Afterword: An Interview with Paweł Huelle by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

About the Author

Recommended Read

Copyright

Footnotes