Павел Хюлле - Cold Sea Stories

‘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.