I see them walking along a sand path, a late evening sun lighting their faces. A small cove is behind them, waves rolling in. They sit on a rock. They are so close it seems they’ve been stitched together. He reaches up and takes something from her eye. He looks as if he could be broken by a whisper.
‘You won’t leave again, will you?’ he says.
He felt it before he woke, a force rising in him as if out of the earth. He opened his eyes. The doors to the balcony of their room were open, the sky dark, just a thin line of pale light along the rooftops. He saw a cat walking there. He reached behind him and found that she was there. He turned to face her. And he found that she too had wakened, she too felt it, for she drew him to her, her body moving, her knee rising up his leg to his hip, her hands racing like small animals up his chest, her mouth searching for his. She guided him upwards and moved beneath him. Her legs fell open like the wings of a butterfly. They were there in the night, held in a dream yet alive as never before.
Later then her cry, high and pure before it descended. It rang in his head. She was beside him, her eyes closed. He looked at her ribs moving as she breathed. Then she laughed. He turned and kissed her from shoulder to neck, lifted the hair away so that he could look at her face. There were streaks of colour in the sky, the light flowing over her. How long can they go on, he wondered, living like this?
They got a corner room in an old stone hotel looking out over the ramparts of a medieval wall to trees and a river. They walked together through the streets. People looked at them. He was unshaven, his hair long and bleached, his skin dark from the weeks in the south. People looked at her everywhere they went.
They went into a bar. It was still light, a cool summer evening. There was a pool table there. M. wanted to play with her but there were men at the table and others waiting. ‘Play,’ said Hanna. ‘I’ll watch.’
In another room a guitar player and a violinist were placing their equipment on a small stage and tuning their instruments. It became M.’s turn at the pool table. He was awkward and tentative but the other man was worse and M. won. In the next game several balls struck by M. went in in succession and by the third he was in a rhythm, the balls finding a true geometry as they spun around the cushions through narrow corridors into pockets. His shots grew more outlandish and yet they went in. The music started. She got out of her chair and stood at the back of the crowd facing the stage. M. won games four, five, six and seven. He couldn’t miss. More people arrived to watch the band. They closed in around Hanna. M. could just see the glow of her hair in the overhead light, her head moving to the music. In the ninth game there was a long tactical battle over the last ball. M. could not see her at all now. He thought of missing deliberately and leaving the black ball over the pocket, but could not bring himself to do it. Yet he felt a great need to know what she was doing in the crowd. He tried a wide angle shot off a side cushion into a corner pocket but missed. The balls fell awkwardly for his opponent and he too missed. The black and white landed against the end rails opposite each other and at an angle. He hit the cue ball with hard right-hand spin, sending the black ball off the side rail, the end rail near him and back up the table into the corner pocket.
‘Excuse me for a moment,’ said M.
He went into the crowd. He couldn’t find her. He moved all around the bar, the music loud and hateful to him at this moment. He went out into the street. It was dark. He ran along the street in front of the bar in both directions. People watched him. He tried to think of a method for covering the area but couldn’t. There was an intersection with several roads radiating off it and he ran a little way along each of them, then back. Nothing. He was out of breath. Many possibilities of where she was and what she was doing moved through his mind. He had drifted a little way from the bar. Maybe half a kilometre. He thought of the man he was due to face at the pool table, thin, weak-chinned, a chaotic brown moustache and enormous eyebrows. He would have already racked the balls and be waiting. Somehow M. could not tolerate the thought of forsaking his place at the table. He headed back towards the bar and then immediately saw her. She was at a telephone, her back towards him. He watched her weight shift from foot to foot as she nodded and listened, her hand rise and sweep through her hair, then emphatic gestures as she seemed to try to be understood. She reached into her pocket and put more money into the slot. He moved to the cover of a building and watched a moment longer, then moved on.
He arrived at the bar. The men were waiting at the table. They were silent, their expressions sour. Blue smoke enshrouded them. The thin man with the moustache was standing with his arms folded around a cue. He gestured with his head towards the table.
‘Sorry,’ said M.
He stepped up and broke. The balls had been racked too loosely and did not scatter well when he struck them. The cue ball slid off the side of the pack, sprung off two rails and disappeared into a pocket. Two shots to his opponent. M. could see as the man crouched over the ball that he was a poor player, and very ponderous. His eyes moved along the table to the object ball as though he was following the progress of an ant, and then back. He did this six times and then struck the cue ball with terrible violence, sending it whirling around the table and unsettling a line of balls along the end rail. When everything stopped moving the congestion of balls around the spot remained intact but there were three of solid colour left hanging over pockets for him. They were unmissable.
Hanna arrived, calm, smiling, newly lipsticked. She kissed M.
‘You’re playing again?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t left the table,’ he said. He didn’t look at her.
All M.’s balls were either trapped behind his opponent’s or in the group around the spot. He couldn’t find a shot. The other man went 5–0 up. Finally M. saw an obscure possibility of a four-ball combination coming out of the pack. He struck it severely and the object ball went in, but so did two of the other man’s balls. The black ball slid to rest over a side pocket. The man tapped it in.
M. sat down. She leaned against him.
‘Bad luck,’ she said.
M. entered the room carrying breakfast for him and Hanna on a tray. All through dinner after the pool game he had tried to drive out of his mind the picture of her speaking on the telephone. It took him more than four hours, but he did it. Now he felt well. He listened to the water moving through the heavy stone walls of the room. The bathroom door was half open and he could see through the mirror her form behind the white curtain as she leaned over to turn off the taps. He saw her step from the bath, a towel held in front of her. He looked at the morning sunlight coming in through the windows and filling the room. He felt light, easy, complete. Hanna saw him in the mirror, stopped, smiled.
‘I met some people,’ said M.
‘Where?’
‘Downstairs, where they have breakfast. They’re from Finland, a couple, very nice. I thought you’d like to meet them.’
She turned away, opened her bag of make-up.
‘Aren’t we leaving here?’ she said.
‘I thought maybe tomorrow,’ said M. ‘We could have dinner. I said to them that we’d see them in the bar downstairs.’
‘Yes,’ she said, her back to him. ‘That’s fine.’
Later that morning Hanna came into the room. M. had been to collect their laundry and she to buy shoes. How would she look in this moment? Preoccupied? Poised? Perfectly groomed, at any rate, I would say.
She stood still and looked at M.
‘Did you find anything?’ he asked her.
‘No,’ she said.
Still she did not move.
‘Are you all right?’ said M.
‘Have you seen the car?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘You didn’t pass it?’
‘No.’
‘The window is broken.’
‘Which one?’
‘The front. There’s a hole and hundreds of little pieces of glass. I could see a stone in the front seat.�
�
‘Is there anything missing?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘I’d better get it fixed,’ said M.
‘Yes,’ she said.
16
A Dream
I WOKE. I could see that it was early, the leaves still wet, wisps of mist still turning in the pale light high above the house, everything still.
Angelina was not in the bed. Did I wake as she left it? I looked at the twists in the sheet where she lay through the night. I lay on my back listening for her.
I got up. I moved through the rooms and did not find her. I went out to the table, around the house and all the way up the trail to the lake to see if she had gone for water. I didn’t see her there.
In the house I found her clothes hanging on the rail, her bag, the box of paints she was using on the beam. I sat. I made tea. I waited.
I walked down into the valley and out between the dunes to the sea. The water was still and gleaming like mercury under the morning sun. I looked right and left along the beach but I didn’t see her. I sat for a while watching a fishing boat cast nets, then I walked back to the house.
After a while I went back out and sat on the slope of a dune between the house and the sea. The sun made its way across the sky. Around eleven o’clock, I thought to myself, Now she would be painting the beam. A little later, with the sun directly above me, it would be the swim. Then bed. You have everything now, she said. I went into the house and tried to eat soup and bread but I couldn’t. I looked on every shelf, in every drawer and all around everything that was there but found nothing either missing or added. I lay down on the bed. I got her smell. I said prayers to saints to bring her back to me. Then I went back out and sat on the dune. She could be coming just now, I thought.
Long after darkness fell I got up. I put all our things in cases and made the house ready. What would I do with her dresses, her shoes, her drawings? I put the picture of the horse running across water in one of my bags and the rest of her things in hers. I found I couldn’t carry everything for there were three of us taking it all when we came here and so I put her bags in some low bushes out behind the house near the trail that went up to the lake. Then I went back along the beach to Miedzyzdroje.
When I got there I sat on a bench near the bandstand and waited until there was a trace of light in the east. I watched it fall across the sand and the empty promenade and over the façade of the hotel. The green and black curtains were drawn across the window of the room where I stayed with Angelina. I went into the streets then and to the house where Piotr had his room. I had to knock three times before he woke. He looked behind me for Angelina and then let me in.
‘They’ve been asking about you again,’ he said. ‘They came to the hotel.’
I waited through the day in Piotr’s room while he worked in the hotel. When he finished he went by train to Szczecin. I slept some but I could not say how much. He had left me food on the little table by his window but I didn’t eat it. I thought all day of Angelina. I felt her moving through me.
It was dark by the time Piotr came back from Szczecin. He took a bottle of vodka down from a cupboard and we sat at the table. I ate a little of the food and drank while he told me what happened in Szczecin. I listened very carefully to everything he said but all those things about cars and boats and cities and officials seemed to be happening to other people, far away.
‘I talked with people around the town,’ he said. ‘Some of them I can trust and some of them I don’t know. It’s confusing. Maybe some of what they said is real. One said he saw someone like her walking on the deck of a boat in a blue dress. She has a blue dress, no?’
‘She does.’
‘Was it in the house after she left?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you can check. You packed the bags.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, he says he saw her very early in the morning – that’s this morning now, not yesterday. She was on the deck of a freighter. It was not long after dawn. There was no one with her. There was no one around at all. She smoked a cigarette and then went below. The boat sailed at midday.’
‘Where did it go?’
‘This is it! There were two big boats docked there, one for Russia and the other for Norway. He can’t remember which was the one where he saw the woman.’
I chewed Piotr’s bread and followed the story as far as I could, Angelina down among the ropes and boxes in the hold of the boat on a rolling sea, sailors bringing her food.
‘Anyone else?’ I said.
‘Different people saying they saw her drinking coffee or getting on a bus or entering a church. None of them were sure. Then there was another one. I’m uncertain of him. I never saw him before. He heard me ask a woman I know there in a bakery about Angelina and he said he saw someone just like that coming out of a public building yesterday afternoon wearing a grey raincoat and getting into the back of a black car. A car for officials. Now the only thing we can know for sure is that I have become such an idiot that I forgot to speak quietly about things like this in front of strangers. But I tell you anyway. You should know everything.’
‘Piotr,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Stop.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Forget this.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s dangerous.’
‘I don’t care. And the longer we delay the further she will have travelled and the less likely it will be that we will find her.’
‘And it’s stupid.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m not going to look for her,’ I said.
‘Don’t say that.’
‘I’m saying it.’
‘But you must find her,’ he said. He brought his hand down on the table. The glasses shook but did not fall, little rings forming on the surface of the vodka. His face was contorted and red, his eyes wide. I could see there his own loss and his pity for me and the way we in our weakness look for others to complete the stories we have been unable to complete ourselves.
‘She’s gone,’ I said. ‘I’m never going to see her again.’
He held his position, then let it fall. He dropped back into his chair. He let out a long sigh.
‘Why did she go?’ he said.
‘Because she could,’ I said. ‘It’s something she has a skill for.’
* * *
The boat rocked in long, slow strides through the Baltic towards Copenhagen. I thought of a fat man on skates. It was night. I was in a pine box meant for a bass drum down there in a world of iron and oil. Next to me were tubas, cellos, clarinets, violins. A little box for the triangle. I heard footsteps sometimes, the engine grinding on like someone mourning a death. I got bread, coffee, ham, smoked mackerel. One sailor brought me boiled eggs for breakfast and a picture from a magazine of Rita Hayworth in a bikini. Piotr was not so weak as he said he was. He informed his supervisor at the hotel that he was ill. He travelled to the factory in Wielkopolska where once he made trumpets. He worked his way delicately through everyone he knew there and those known to them. Finally he found the manager of an orchestra based in Poznan that was about to travel to France. This was a man he had once encountered during the war as he moved from hole to hole. Piotr gave him what money he had and the promise of more from me when I would be earning in the West. He came back then to Miedzyzdroje and we walked out at night to the house in the dunes to bury Angelina’s bag in the sand. The next day we went to Szczecin and I got into my box.
From Copenhagen the boat would go to Calais. I had the address of an office in Paris written by the orchestra manager on a piece of paper. Poles there would help to find me work cleaning plates in a hotel kitchen and then a place on a boat headed for Montreal via Cork. After Cork we would put in during a gale in Sligo. There I would collect the pictures I would use when thinking of M. in his home in Ireland. I would be separated from my bag with Angelina’s drawing of the horse in it while getting ou
t of the boat at night in Calais. I would never see it again. Her gold chain I would leave behind in the shower room of a boarding-house while travelling to Renata in Chicago.
There on the boat moving through the Baltic I dreamed of Angelina. I saw her as I did from the rooftop outside our room in Berlin rounding a corner way down in the street into the sunlight in her yellow dress, her black hair flowing, her face held up to catch the sun. She went through the door. I heard her footsteps running up the stairs. She came in then smiling and fresh and free from all past and all burdens and all sorrows, her step light and quick, her arms out to reach for me. I ran my hands through her hair and over her face. I felt her beating heart. I got the aroma of sun and skin. I held her in my arms shaking and laughing with a happiness that seemed sent down from the heavens and with a golden light flooding the room around us. This is her, I thought, this is truly her. Lost, and found again. I have her now. I have her.
17
Fire
‘I HAVE TO leave you now,’ wrote Hanna. ‘It is because of problems in my family which are too complicated for me to explain here. You are now with the car trying to get the window repaired. You will come back to this room expecting to find me and then for us to make plans to go on with our journey and with our lives together. Never have I had a time like this time with you and never will I again. Now you will find only this letter. It is something very poor, I know. I could not face you to tell you. I tried to make myself do it but I couldn’t. I have tried to avoid having to leave you now but it is not possible. The time that I have to be away could be very long. I am so sorry, for you and for me. It is the destruction of everything I want in my life, but that doesn’t matter. I do not expect that you can forgive me. If you hate me now I understand it. Goodbye, my love. I love you and I always will. Hanna.’
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