Cold Sea Stories

by Pawel Huelle

  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 Swis
s 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.