by Pawel Huelle
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.