‘Where do you think it’s going?’ I said.
‘It’s difficult to know,’ said Piotr.
We were sitting on a low wall looking out to sea at a boat moving away from us, thick black smoke rising from its chimney. It was late afternoon, the last afternoon, the last boat, the last talk with Piotr, for on the following day we would have to leave this place. The boat sounded like a dog groaning in its sleep.
‘Could it be Stockholm?’
‘No. Stockholm would be more to the east.’
‘Do you know much about the boats?’
‘Not much. But I talk to the sailors sometimes.’
‘It seems to be swinging off to the left now.’
‘Yes.’
‘It could be going anywhere, I suppose.’
‘Maybe it’s for Travemünde, or Copenhagen.’
I took in the names. What kind of life goes on there, I wondered? I looked at Piotr. I saw marks on the side of his face I had never noticed before, small dry pits, maybe from some fever he had as a child. What was that? I tried to form a picture of him from that time, his home, his parents. Even then, even when I had graver things to occupy me, my curiosity was there like rheumatism. But I let it pass.
‘I didn’t see you yesterday,’ I said.
‘No. I had a day off.’
‘How was it?’
‘Good.’
‘Did you rest?’
‘I went for a walk.’
‘To another town?’
‘I went out along the beach under the dunes, then up a trail.’
‘Where does it go?’
‘To a forest. Haven’t you been?’
‘No.’
‘That’s a pity. You should try to see it.’
‘The time is short.’
‘Well, yes. Holidays come to an end. But if you have a chance, go in the morning. I always go when the leaves are still wet. You can see the sun burning off the mist. The forest is full of animals – badgers, foxes, sea eagles, boar. And there are glacial lakes. I lived in a hole for two years, 1943 to 1945. In Wielkopolska. We moved by night, sometimes to another hole. You had to have another sense then if you were to stay alive. Then with the peace I didn’t need this sense any more. It went flat. I found that I missed it. That was something I hadn’t expected. But I can get it back again if I go into a wilderness. It wakes up.
‘Yesterday was good – soft, clear light. I walked for maybe three hours and then sat down by a lake. I had a sandwich in my pocket and I ate it. Just to be there is enough for me, to see that it is there, that everything in it is all right. The squirrels and birds call out warnings when you first get there, but then they stop. They get used to you. I suppose they forget you’re there. After a while you’re just one of the creatures. You could hear something, a fish on the surface of the water, a bee. There might be a sound like breathing from the swaying trees. But it’s very quiet, very peaceful.’
He struck a match and pushed a cigarette into the bowl of his hands.
‘Then I came back by bus.’
I imagined him there in the back seat, silent, back straight, hands folded on his lap, among schoolgirls singing camping songs.
‘There was a band playing when I got there,’ he said. ‘Some people were dancing. I looked around but I didn’t see you.’
‘No. I wasn’t there. I could hear the music through the window, though.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘There was a time when I couldn’t stand that music. But I find I can like it now.’
‘And your girl?’
‘She was with me. We had a little dance on our own.’
He smiled. He seemed to like this picture. His eyes moved across my face, then back out to the sea.
‘She’s very beautiful,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘You shouldn’t lose her.’
‘No,’ I said.
We watched the boat move out towards the horizon, very small now. We had the same view of the sea Angelina and I had from our room. I thought of the drawing I watched her make and placed the boat in it, just beyond the ear of the horse.
‘Do you have a girl?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Did you have?’
‘I had a few, like most people. I also had a wife.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘I couldn’t find her after the war. Later I heard she got to England, but I’m not sure that’s right.’
He smiled, shrugged. He sent his cigarette somersaulting in an arc towards the sea. I looked at him – the long fingers, the slow, watery eyes, the hair rolling over the collar of the white shirt he wore when he sat behind the desk in the hotel.
‘Have you always done this?’ I asked him.
‘What?’
‘Working in a hotel.’
‘No.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘I made trumpets.’
‘Only trumpets?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you like doing that?’
‘Yes. It was good. I liked the people there.’
‘Why did you stop?’
‘I got tired. I couldn’t concentrate.’
I looked at him again. I tried to see past the weariness and delicacy, but nothing was clear. Could he help us? Would he? Those were the days, the long decades, when you were not to ask the wrong question of the wrong man. We had all learned, even those with power, to measure every gesture, to have the cunning of the smuggler. But I was in a place now where those skills could not help me.
‘Tomorrow we must leave,’ I told him.
‘I know that,’ he said.
‘Angelina wanted to cook something for me. Fish with grapes. But we never got around to it.’
‘I could let you into the kitchen,’ he said.
‘It’s all right. We haven’t the grapes.’
‘No. I suppose you wouldn’t have.’
I took a long breath.
‘When we leave here, we don’t know where we will go,’ I said.
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘There are many fine places,’ he said. He was alert now, his speech slow and tight.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But we haven’t permits. Our papers say that tomorrow we must return to Berlin.’
‘And you’re not going to do it?’
‘No.’
‘That’s very risky.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He turned to face me. The sun poised just above the sea struck his face, his eyes turning gold.
‘I was wondering …’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘I was wondering if you might know a place. A place where we might go for a while.’
‘A place where you can hide?’
‘Yes. I suppose you would have to call it that.’
‘And you came out here to ask me this?’
‘No, I didn’t. Angelina was in the room, drawing. I saw you from the window. I just came to talk. I didn’t think of it until a moment ago.’
He turned away. I could see that this weighed heavily on him, and I regretted it. He had no means of knowing what to do. It was like playing chess in the dark.
‘There’s a house in the dunes,’ he said finally. ‘I have a key. I can take you there.’
The house was set into the side of a hollow behind the range of dunes that faced the sea. A path of sand wound down from the door through trees and out between two dunes to the beach. The dunes were huge, like the bows of two liners face to face. The sand was cool and soft. We sank in it to our ankles when we walked to the beach. Everything was slow there. I had never known time to move like that. From the house we heard waves rolling into the shore, birdsong, leaves clattering like applause in the wind. There were white linen curtains at the windows, holy water fonts and pictures of the Sacred Heart on the walls. Just inside the door a sack of cabbage and carrots and potatoes Piotr had brought us. We had been up to the lake and carried b
ack buckets of water which we had heated in a kettle over a gas ring and poured into a bath. We went into the bath in the afternoon, when the sun was still high over the dune. I could see the table in front of the house, coffee cups, a pot of jam, a bird picking bread from a plate. I saw the paraffin lamp hanging from a hook in the ceiling, the curtains billowing in the light wind, the lamp swaying. I saw Angelina’s drawings and her pencils, the high bed with the iron railings at the top, pillows pushed through the gaps, sheets felling to the floor. Her blue dress hung by a strap from a chair. We lay in the bath, her back along my chest, the sun dropping from the sky, through the trees and down behind the dune, the light moving from blue to grey. We spoke in whispers, the water slowly cooling.
We had a rhythm of a kind. We woke around nine when the sun rose over the dune and hit our window. Got up after ten. We walked up through the trees to the lake to get water. Breakfast. Then I read or washed clothes or cut wood and Angelina painted. She was painting a vine with tiny white flowers on the beam that ran across the centre of the house. There was a clock ticking somewhere, there were people asking questions, messages were being passed to the police, there was a reckoning, I knew, on its way to us, but I drove all of this away. We walked down to the beach and swam. I watched her move through the water, her black hair flowing behind her. There was a time in bed usually in the afternoon when everything was still outside, and then we made dinner. Dinner was long, hours out at the table in the sand with candles in the cooling air while I told her the stories I have been relating here, about Pan Kazimierz and Jerzy, the train to Germany during the war and Renata with dreams so heavy in her head I thought they would drag her to the ground.
One day when evening arrived I left the bed and walked to the front of the house and sat in the sand. Angelina was still sleeping. The sun fell to the top of the dune to my left and filled the house and the valley it was in with an orange light so powerful that it made of the air a lens. I saw the edges and veins of the leaves, the patterns in the boards that made up the house, the metallic rainbow colours on the wings of insects, vivid and elemental. She was in the air between me and these things like an electrical charge. I felt something I didn’t know very well, something that seemed to draw me to fall into it, something like gratitude. Then the light weakened and faded away.
Angelina came out and lay in the sand with her head in my lap. I looked down at her face. I saw no effort there, there was nothing hidden, there was just peace as she listened to the rolling of the waves and felt the cool sand shaped around her body. There were parts of her that I could not enter. The place of family. The place of the past. The place of the horse. It was not that she denied me. It was that I hadn’t yet found the means. But there were times when I was with her when I believed that all I saw of her was mine. And there were times when I brought her peace – a little fragile maybe, but peace nevertheless.
I saw a man with a sack round a corner of the dune from the beach. He walked towards us, kicking up waves of sand with his feet. He was the first person to pass through that gap in five days. He had on a red shirt. His sack was in one hand and his shoes were in the other.
The sun moved into a break in the line of dunes and threw orange light like an unrolling carpet across the sand in front of us. When the man reached the light I saw that it was Piotr. He was smiling, unshaven, a little breathless, his hair falling down around his eyes as he trudged through the sand, a different being from the clerk with delicate gestures in the white shirt behind the desk in the hotel. He dropped the sack, sat down with us.
‘I have presents,’ he said.
He took from the sack four bottles of wine, three trout packed with ice into a towel and a bunch of green grapes.
Angelina laughed.
‘That’s my only dish,’ she said.
‘I thought it might be,’ said Piotr.
‘Why?’
‘It was a guess.’
She lifted the grapes and smelled them.
‘They’re wonderful. How did you get them?’
‘Through trade.’
‘That’s abolished,’ I said.
‘Not in Szczecin. A Danish boat came in. I’d met the purser before. He’s a Pole. His liking for vodka, you could say, is stronger than average. He has a particular nostalgia for Polonez, and I brought him some. They were carrying a shipment from Portugal. Ham, herbs, lemons and so on. Such wonderful smells! He gave me a choice and I picked grapes, for you.’
We dug a hole in the sand and built a fire. Angelina peeled the grapes and cooked them with the trout. Night fell and we ate the trout and drank the wine by the light of the candles and the moon. Piotr drank faster than us, though Angelina had nearly a bottle to herself for it was the red wine from Hungary which she favoured. He started off the meal very grand and ceremonial, pouring the wine out like a waiter and making toasts to youth and beauty. He even put French words in them. But then I saw the drink pushing him this way and that. He told a long story in which his cousin came out of a bath and saw a page of his schoolwork blown by the wind and stuck to a tree outside his window. He reached for it, fell to the ground, completely naked, and after running here and there found himself in a courtyard. ‘It was a convent,’ said Piotr. ‘There was a nun’s face in every window!’ He laughed loud and long then, a mad, shrill laugh, like a cockatoo. When he was quiet again he looked at us, his eyes like blue flames until they clouded over. Then he passed into a long silence. I didn’t like what was happening. Angelina was beginning to drift. I couldn’t see where any of this was going. And the world we’d made there in the dunes was like none I’d ever known, but it was poised as if on a needle. I feared a fall. ‘I should be dead,’ said Piotr after a long while. ‘The rest of them are.’ He looked up.
‘When something like that happens, all the chords break,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see? All the chords inside.’ He fanned the fingers of both hands out over his chest. ‘The instrument will no longer play.’
He dropped his head.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘You’re all right,’ I said.
‘I can’t drink any more,’ he said. ‘All of a sudden. I don’t know why.’
Angelina smiled, reached her hand across to his.
‘I like you this way,’ she said.
He sat up, ran his hand through his hair.
‘I’m afraid I bring you bad news along with the fish.’
We looked at him, waiting.
‘That’s what I came with. Bad news. That’s me today.’
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘It’s why I wanted to bring the grapes.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And the news?’
‘You can’t stay here any more.’
He waited, but nothing was said. I saw Angelina look up into the trees, as if she’d heard something there, as if the conversation no longer concerned her.
‘An official is coming from Pila. Head of education for his district.’
‘To Miedzyzdroje?’ I said.
‘To this house.’
‘When?’
‘Two weeks. And then after him another and another. Officials of middle rank who have earned a reward. Until the autumn.’
‘And we have to leave before this one from Pila arrives?’
‘No. You must leave the day after tomorrow. Workmen are coming to make the house ready.’
I looked at the house. The moonlight was shining pale and white along the side wall. It looked like frost.
‘I’ve let you down,’ said Piotr. ‘I know it.’
Angelina was smiling. She reached across with the bottle and poured him more wine. I felt it all running away from me then. It was as though I was trying to carry sand and it was falling down around my arms and through my fingers.
‘Do you know anywhere else we could go?’ I said. ‘Somewhere like this?’
He shook his head.
I turned to Angelina.
‘Maybe we could go to Naklo,’ I said. ‘There would stil
l be people there I know. Or back to Berlin. They break through there all the time and we could—’
‘What would you do?’ said Angelina to Piotr.
‘Me?’ he said. ‘You ask me? That’s curious.’ He laughed a little, then looked at me. ‘You remember how it was, don’t you? People here laughed, loved. We had a life inside us. Before all those things happened. Remember? Now we’re in the last place. Windows closed, door bolted, air stale. None of us are worth anything to anyone. But the strange thing is, everything is watched! Every footstep. You’d think we were made from jewels. So we hide the inner life. I hid mine so well that now I can’t find it.’ He took a long drink of wine. ‘Well, what loss to anyone?’ He turned to Angelina, took her hand. ‘What would I do? I don’t know. But then I don’t know anything. I don’t think very well. But there are people who are strong. I’m sure of it. If you could find someone like that they could help you.’ He drank what remained in the glass. ‘I like to come up here to the forest. That’s what I like.’
He dropped the glass then, looked down into the sand. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. His eyes fluttered, he let out a long sigh. ‘Fish with grapes,’ he said. ‘Very beautiful.’ I saw Angelina turn away from him, and from me. She looked out towards the sea, the moonlight bright on her face. She looked as she did when she was trying to find the lines of the horse as it ran westwards across the water, intent, unreachable, everything moving inside her like a flock of birds rising from a field.
I lifted the bottles and the plates from the table and brought them into the house. Angelina walked barefoot across the sand towards the sea. I could see the moonlight shining on the water through the gap in the dunes. I touched Piotr on the shoulder and he looked up at me, his eyes red and wet. ‘I wanted us to have a happy night,’ he said. I tried to raise him from the chair but it was only his arms and shoulders that moved.
‘I’ll make a bed for you on the floor,’ I told him.
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