Cold Sea Stories

Mimesis

SHE LOVED THIS road. The moss that covered the dunes was as soft as a carpet. Pine trees shot skywards on either side, and tall grass whispered in between them. Whenever the sun was hot for more than a few days, there was a strong scent of juniper in this spot, as heavy as pitch. Large and small bushes of it, some with fantastically twisted manes, grew everywhere here, like elves suspended in motion. Entirely different from over there, by the river, where the path kept sinking into a peat bog or muddy clay, and swarms of mosquitoes rose from the alder and osier leaves. And although it was much further to the sea across the dunes, year after year she took this route. Sometimes she came upon a roe deer. Then she would stop for a while, until the animal turned its moist eyes on her, and quickly vanished into the forest. Whereas the wild rabbits and squirrels entirely ignored her, as if they had never known any harm from man. She never ran into Willman here either. Not like by the river, where he used to graze his cattle. There he would bar her way on the narrow path and always recite the same silly little poem:

Then he would produce a pine cone, a pebble or a wilted flower from the pocket of his patched-up trousers, and shove his gift under her nose on an outstretched palm. She had to smile at him, take the present and nod, which meant: ‘Oh, what a lovely day it is, Mr Willman’, and then he would let her pass, so close to him that she could smell the odour of his sweat and his nasty, sour breath. One time he handed her a little mole. The creature was dead. Horrified, she had run off through a hazel copse, all the way to the marshes.

But she wasn’t thinking about Willman now. The forest ended at the edge of the shifting dunes, and from behind the rise she could hear the monotonous roar. This sound always made her feel happy: she quickened her pace, and from the top of the dune, where she could see the sea, she let herself race downwards. Once on the beach, where the waves were licking her feet, she took off her sandals and then, with a quick, decisive movement, her grey dress. Although the water was still cool, she swam for a long time – to the sandbank and back again, as ever.

By the time she emerged onto the shore, the sun was quite high in the sky. In a few minutes her long, loose hair was dry. With her gaze fixed on the horizon, she sat still on the sand. Far away, above the mouth of the river, cormorants were circling. The summer was beginning. But just as last year, not a single boat had sailed out to sea. Nor had a single plough appeared that spring on the polder between the canals. And yet she felt safe here. She had never found any trace of a human presence on the beach. And it was a long time since any horse and cart had come down the road to the village.

Maybe that was why the noise she heard behind her frightened her so much? There was a distinct sound of sand grains crunching, coming ever nearer. She stood up, and turning round abruptly, she caught sight of his tall figure. Only a little later, when he stopped a few paces in front of her, did she remember to shield her breasts. When she screamed, he smiled, pointed at her dress and covered his face with both hands, while muttering a strange, incomprehensible sentence. She ran along the shore, splashing her feet in the water. She was out of breath. She fell onto the cold, wet sand. The stranger was approaching, holding her sandals. She wanted to run away again, and leaped to her feet, but just then he blocked her way and said something that she partly understood: if she didn’t help him, death would finally find him here or somewhere else; it would catch up with him and take him to a dreadful place.

His speech was not like the language of the people from the city. He had a foreign accent, he twisted words, and some of the phrases he used were totally impossible for her to understand. But he no longer inspired fear in her. She made signs to show him that she had been deprived of the gift of speech. She told him to follow her at a safe distance. Not once did she look round behind her. Only next to the van Dorns’ house, which was at the edge of the village, right at the foot of the dunes and the cemetery, did she stop for a moment to check he hadn’t lost her. He was standing hidden behind a pine trunk, afraid to come out onto the road. She turned and showed him that all the houses were empty, even the one next to the chapel, where Willman had spent the winter. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t understand this. He cried that she should give him away at once, for he had no more strength to go on running, and preferred to die here, under the tree, than in the middle of the village, reviled and set upon by dogs. She wasn’t able to explain to him that there weren’t any dogs here any more. And that as long as no lorries appeared, they were safe.

He sat down, leaning against the pine trunk. He had a beautiful, dusky face. She saw tears rolling down his cheeks from under his closed eyelids. His lips kept on whispering the same sentence, in the language that was nothing like the speech of the people from the city. It was strangely soft and sibilant, and inspired trust. She guessed it was a prayer. When he opened his eyes, she made signs to tell him to wait for her patiently. He followed her small, rapid footsteps, but didn’t even get up from the grass. He watched her disappear around the bend, sending up small white clouds of dust on the sandy road.

A chevron of cranes cut across the pure blue sky. Far above the meadows, a hawk was calling. No one appeared on the bend or in the yard of the nearest house. But once the sun had started to vanish behind the dunes he saw her, coming back towards him. In the first instant he didn’t recognise her: she was wearing a long, plain dress, her hair was tied back and covered with a linen cap, and on her feet instead of sandals she had some funny, high-laced boots.

First she laid a small white tablecloth on the grass. Then she took some fritters from her basket, a smoked fish and a bottle of juice. As he ate, ravenously and clumsily, without paying her the least bit of attention, she furtively watched him. He collected every crumb, even off the ground, and sucked them all up. Then he drank. Finally he said something about a hen: it was flying with blood-stained feathers, high, higher and higher. She showed on her fingers that she only had three hens, and that she wouldn’t kill any of them, because in winter there wouldn’t be any fish, or even fritters.

But no, that wasn’t what he meant. Somewhere in the neighbourhood he had crept up to a fisherman’s cottage and hunted down a hen. But he’d been afraid to light a fire, and the raw meat he had eaten had poisoned his stomach. He had lain in a hollow, covered by fern leaves. At dawn, probably on the third day, he had heard the distinct roar of the sea. He didn’t want to die in a pit stinking of excrement, bitten by flies and spiders. He had set off across the moss, soft as a carpet, all the way to the last dune, and there, from the top, he had seen her, just as she was emerging from the water.

The talking exhausted him. He leaned back against the pine trunk again and stared ahead of him, at an indeterminate point. She put the tablecloth and the bottle into the basket again. ‘Follow me,’ she indicated.

But he was afraid the people whose hen he had stolen were sure to recognise him as the thief. She tried to explain to him that the fisherman’s cottage was far away, not in this village. And it looked completely unlike their houses here, built using the axes of the Lord’s carpenter, according to the rules in the Book. But how was she to convince him? He didn’t even glance at the drawing she sketched with a stick in the sand.

Sated and distracted, heaven knows what he was thinking about. She threw a pine cone at him. Then he looked at her with eyes dark as coals, which soon, following the way she was pointing, turned towards the orange sphere of the sun. He understood that gesture. Tomorrow, when the sun rose on the far side of the forest, she would come here again, alone.

After the warm day, the air was settling in invisible layers. Low down, just above the ground, it drew in the cold and the damp. Higher up, a warmer breath of wind was distilling the essences of herbs and grass. Above all hovered the resinous scent of pines, carried from the sea on the evening breeze. By the van Dorns’ house, over which the storks were circling their nest, she felt a touch of anxiety. She thought she had seen the stranger’s face before, in the city. Could she be mistaken? And hadn’t Harmensoon been right, when, in his fiery sermons preceding the breaking of bread, he had spoken of corruption, sin and death, which always came from the cities? Just like the lorries, and the people who carried guns.

There hadn’t been any candles left for ages. And the stocks of oil she had collected from the houses had to be kept for winter. Meanwhile, although darkness had fallen, the appropriate number of verses had to be read aloud. Otherwise the day would not have its blessing, and as such would come to nothing. In fact it would only be a minor sin, but it was characteristic of sins that once committed, they liked to repeat themselves. If only her father were standing beside her, they wouldn’t have had to light the lamp. He knew the Book almost by heart and could recite the prophets from any point at random. But where was he now? Carefully she lit the wick and read a passage from Isaiah, the one about hidden treasures and secret hiding places. Then, to avoid wasting oil, she snuffed out the lamp and went to bed. But sleep refused to come, even though the day had been ended as it should. An owl was hooting at the Helkes’ house. A mouse was scratching in the wardrobe. A light gust of wind came flying in from the sea and set the branches in the orchard swaying.

On that day, four years ago, her father had woken her early, before sunrise. They had boarded the van Dorns’ boat, where they sat between barrels of butter and boxes of woven cloth. The journey had taken a long time: first along a canal, then down a river, until at last they had sailed out onto the sea. She remembered the large, grey sail, which tautened in the wind; she remembered the salty taste on her lips and the strange, dark-red colour of the bricks that everything in the city seemed to be made of: houses, warehouses, granaries and churches. The boat was moored at the quay, and Mr van Dorn was to spend the night on it, while she, her father and Rachela went to the house of a woman related to Harmensoon, who received them hospitably. She and Rachela had slept in one room. Next morning her father had taken them to a market, where she had found everything amazing: an electric tram came speeding along the street, there were automobiles hooting like mad, and the people didn’t walk, but ran in all directions, as if they hadn’t any time. At the quay, where dozens of other boats had appeared by now, van Dorn and her father had been busy selling their goods. She and Rachela could wander off a short way, but they weren’t allowed to talk to anyone – man or woman. She remembered that moment well: by a stall, where an old Kashubian woman was touting flounders, someone had touched her arm, and suddenly she heard a warm, familiar voice: ‘Is it you?’

‘My God, is that how my sister looks now?’ She was shocked. What would she tell her father? And what if Rachela had seen them?

But Rachela had vanished into the crowd, her father was helping van Dorn, and her sister, her older sister Hanna, was leading her by the arm, showering her with questions, every few moments kissing her on the cheek and hugging her. She didn’t even look back as they entered a narrow, cobbled alleyway, with horse-drawn carts rumbling along it. Then at some point the sisters had turned into a courtyard and, behind a chestnut tree, next to a cast-iron pump, they had gone through a gate, and up a staircase creaking with age, to the first floor.

Once in the flat, she had told Hanna about their father’s anger and distress: summoned by Harmensoon, he had stood in the middle of the chapel, and for everyone to hear him, had repeated after the elder the words of expulsion. The women in the gallery had covered their faces, the men had tugged at their hat rims, and then such total silence had fallen that you could hear the wax dripping onto the floor and the moths circling close to the ceiling. It was dreadful. After the service her father hadn’t slept all night, and in the morning, at breakfast, he had said: ‘I only have one daughter now.’

No one was even allowed to mention Hanna; thoroughly dishonoured, her name had to be forgotten in all the churches, for ever and ever. But she often thought about her. Why had she run away to the city? Was she so very unhappy with them? Was it true that the man with whom she was living in sin was the devil incarnate, like all Lutherans and Catholics? Wasn’t she afraid of the day when the Lord would come? For what she had done He might not resurrect her body, and her soul – damned for centuries – would wander in darkness and never know peace.

But Hanna wasn’t afraid of anything, least of all Harmensoon’s curses. She said how very happy she was here, where there were so many interesting things going on. Ludwig took her to the cinema, to dances and on outings, and the sin they spoke of was pure lies: she had adopted his faith, let herself be christened and they had been married in church. According to common sense, God was not a Mennonite, a Catholic, a Lutheran, a Methodist or an Orthodox tsar. According to common sense, the rubbish the elders taught in the chapel was nothing but fear of the world, which was changing, which was miraculously racing like mad into an unknown future.

She should have blocked her ears or run out into the street, she should have warned her sister what dangerous things she was saying, but she hadn’t done that. Hanna looked beautiful, and even the colour on her lips couldn’t change that. And at the same time she could be so loving and so funny. She seated her at the mirror, sat down beside her, took off her cap and let her try on some hats. Then they went out to the city, visited shops, travelled by tram, and in the small garden of a café right by the sea, where the men and women were dressed in white, they drank lemonade.

‘Is it a sinful life,’ said Hanna, smiling at her sister, ‘to do what gives you pleasure? You should try it too! You people are still living in the Middle Ages there!’

Luckily, it hadn’t gone further than words. She hadn’t let herself be talked into going to the cinema. She hadn’t glanced at a single man. And when they went home and Ludwig appeared, she had greeted him as custom demanded: with her head bowed low and her gaze dropped. If her father had seen her at that moment, maybe things would have turned out differently? Maybe his anger wouldn’t have been quite so great? But her father had arrived much later on, when the gramophone was playing tangos and foxtrots, when Ludwig and Hanna were whirling around the room, and there was an odour of cigars and Rhenish wine in the air.

‘These people have taken away my daughter,’ he said to the policeman. ‘Please start official proceedings!’

The policeman was distressed. He stood in the doorway, turning his peaked cap in his hands, and clearly didn’t want to step into the blind alley of domestic affairs.

‘Is anyone detaining her?’ said Ludwig, drawing up a chair for her father. ‘It’s just a visit to her sister, isn’t it?’

But her brother-in-law’s question hung in the air like an unnecessary flourish, and so it had remained in her memory for ever after, as had the image of the chair, sitting in the middle of the room and filling that long moment of silence with a sense of patent and utter redundancy.

The van Dorns’ boat had sailed long ago, and so they had walked to the Vistula Station, down a street that crossed a drawbridge. If only her father had tried to say – without avoiding words of anger – how very upset he was. But he had remained silent throughout the entire journey, and even when they had sat down in an empty carriage on the last train, which trailed across fields flat as a tabletop in the darkness, occasionally jumping a weir or a canal via a narrow little bridge, even when they were sitting so close to each other, staring into the gloom that stretched beyond the window of the puffing, narrow-gauge railway train, not a single word was said. She remembered the lamp swaying on the last carriage as it moved away from the empty little station. And the long sandy road they had walked for several kilometres to reach home.

The next day, she had had to stand in the middle of the chapel and confess her guilt to everyone aloud. Then she had listened to Harmensoon’s reprimands: was she not ashamed to show disobedience to her father? Should she not disdain people who commit the gravest sin and have themselves christened for a second time? Did she not know that music, alcohol and elaborate attire are the atrium of hell? Had she never heard that it was forbidden to exchange a single word with those who had been excluded from the community? To say nothing of taking part in their lascivious, pernicious entertainments? Was she showing due remorse? Did she realise that next time no one would admonish her again?

When he had finished, with her head lowered, she had had to go back to the gallery and take her place among the women. The congregation had started singing Psalm 130: ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord.’ She had wanted to join in with the chorus, she had wanted to be one of the pure, strong voices that every day for centuries had gone soaring up from here, straight into the presence of the Lord. But as soon as she opened her mouth, a hollow, husky moan had emerged from her throat. She had tried again, but the words had remained inside her, as if under lock and key. This sense of impotence was a hundred times worse than the fear she had felt as she stood before Harmensoon.

‘It will pass,’ she had thought, ‘it’s temporary.’

But that moment had lasted for four years, and now, as she lay in the empty house, unable to fall asleep under the throng of memories, and also – she knew – because of the stranger’s coal-black eyes, she felt a rising wave of rebellion and despair. Did God really want to punish her quite so severely? If He was just, why had nothing like this happened to Hanna, but to her instead? And where was the Lord the day when the lorries and the people carrying guns had appeared outside the chapel? Maybe only things, houses, animals and plants were real – water, air, earth, the rising and setting of the sun, the clouds, and nothing else?

At the Helkes’ house the owl hooted again. The mouse scratched in the wardrobe. The wind had died down entirely, and suddenly, in the immense silence that now lay over the roofs and trees like an invisible mantle, a terrible shout rang out, ripping the darkness apart. She went up to the window. The man she had fed was walking, staggering in the road. He was waving his arms about, clenching his fists, falling onto the sand, struggling to get up and shouting again, straight at the stars, as if there were someone up there who had to hear him out. From afar he looked like an intoxicated peasant who had taken the wrong road after the fair, and ended up not so much in a strange village, as in a completely different world.

When she went out into the road, he was lying face down on the sand, muttering to himself. He no longer had the strength to stand up, even less to take another step. As she leaned over him and gently touched his head, she felt the angel of death – who had been hovering here for a long time – recede noiselessly into the darkness, letting her pass underneath its invisible wing. As she dragged the heavy, inert body straight into the house, another flash of anxiety ran through her. She had never met this man before, and yet she couldn’t shake off the feeling that his face, now bathed in the weak, amber light of the lamp twinkling by the bed, that this face was not unfamiliar to her, and that those two burning, dark eyes had closely followed her once before now. But she hadn’t time to stop and think about it: once she had removed his shirt and trousers, along with some scabs and a layer of dirt, once she had washed his open wounds, shivers began to make his body shake; his eyes stayed shut as he raved in a fever and refused to drink. It occurred to her that if the stranger died, she wouldn’t be able to manage without Willman. After all, she couldn’t make a coffin on her own, or lay the body in a grave.

He was amazed by everything, though he didn’t show it, and said nothing, rather than ask questions. The wardrobe, for instance: it looked as if all the men here wore the same waistcoats, done up not with buttons but sixteen inconvenient hooks and eyes. The dark trousers made of woven cloth and the jacket that looked like an old-fashioned frock coat were also not the most comfortable. He put them on, when she fetched her father’s clothes out of the cupboard, including shirts and underwear. But he refused the black hat, and did so with such a decisive gesture that the startled look in her eyes, which he caught for a moment, must have disconcerted him. Then, as she led him through the village, he couldn’t understand why she was taking him around the houses, opening doors, drawers and wardrobes, as if seeking his approval every single time, even though all the interiors, barns, kitchens and bedrooms, just like the clothes in the wardrobes, the household utensils and trinkets, were all so similar to each other. And why did she lose patience when in the final house, in reply to her clearly inquiring look and gesture, which he couldn’t understand, he had dismissively shrugged his shoulders?

She ran outside, leaving him amid the hazy presence of the people who once lived here. Timidly he touched the table top, walked to and fro about the large room, and drew his fingers across the cool oven tiles. Finally he stood at the window and waited, God knows what for. Flooded with sunlight, the road was empty. Not one, not even the smallest rural sound disturbed the total silence. Pervading the grass-choked vegetable beds, last year’s bean poles and the wild, dried-out sunflowers, pervading the moss on the sill, the dust on the casing, the furniture, the objects and the air, there was a clear, ever more threatening shadow of abandonment. If only a single shattered windowpane, a toppled fence or an open and partly pillaged chest of drawers could verify the facts that he was slowly starting to guess, his anxiety would not have been so sudden and so violent.

In a headlong rush he raced back from house to house, now opening door after door himself, looking into larders, sheds and summer houses. But all the objects lay quietly, indifferently, in their places, and the cruel peacefulness seemed to hide an enhanced threat, lurking in every cranny. In the dairy at the edge of the village, which he timidly entered through a creaking gate, there were small pails, sieves and ladles standing on the shelves, as if at any moment streams of milk were just about to gush into the wooden vats. A similar sensation came over him in the weaving shop; as he walked slowly through striped beams of light that fell into the dark interior through narrow little skylights, as he touched the immobile shuttles or gently moved the looms, it felt as if all this archaic machinery were just about to start clattering, rattling and whirring, as if women in long, impractical dresses, or men in black hats were going to emerge from behind the pillars and bring this place to life, ready at any moment for its daily labour. There were scraps of cloth lying in a wicker basket, and a bolt of homespun material sitting on a shelf. The dust that rose from under his fingers swirled in crucibles of sunlight, faster and faster, higher and higher, until finally millions of rapidly moving particles vanished up in the roof, under the rafters, where despite the daytime, total darkness reigned.

Squinting, he came out onto the road, flooded with brilliant light, and instead of heading back in the direction of the buildings, he walked towards the dunes. Only when he noticed the large, motionless sail of a windmill did he stop, wondering whether to turn round. But his curiosity won, and he climbed the last few metres of the slope, wading up to his ankles in cloying, hot sand. To his amazement he found himself looking at transmission belts, cog wheels, a dynamo and a transformer, through which no current had ever flowed. Someone had never finished their work here, as proved by some rolls of wire waiting to be unwound, and some insulators and transfer boxes resting against the walls.

Yes, this was what he wanted to ask about, when, tired by the heat and by trudging round the village, he quietly entered her house. He patiently accepted the chair she offered and sat down at the kitchen table, but she wouldn’t listen to his short, measured sentences, each followed by a long pause; she wasn’t going to explain away his doubts, and he was surprised when, instead of setting a plate or a bowl of steaming buckwheat on the table, she put down a thick exercise book, from which she tore a half-blank page; yes, he was surprised by her childish handwriting, so different in style from the sums set out on the top half of the page, among which from the corner of his eye he noticed the items: ‘glazing – 4 gulden 75 pfennigs’ and ‘fence paint – 2 gulden 43 pfennigs’ (which together made 7 gulden and 18 pfennigs, if he hadn’t made a mistake in his addition); yes, he was surprised by the expression in her eyes, which she raised from the sentence she had just written to look straight at him – it was imperative and insistent.

‘A man and a woman cannot live in the same house together unless they are married or related,’ he read, ‘so you must choose another house for yourself, there are tools everywhere, you need to dig the garden, I have some seedlings, please come for dinner each day at noon .’

All he said was: ‘Yes, but of course.’ And before she had finished writing the next sentence, he had left, muttering under his breath: ‘A thousand thanks, young lady.’

She watched him through the window. He stopped by the Helkes’ yard, but after a brief hesitation, just as if he didn’t wish to live close to her, he moved on, only disappearing from view at the van Dorns’ house. She was surprised when he didn’t emerge from it for a good quarter of an hour for, as he was living there now, he could and should come to dinner. But he did not come. Nor did he deign to appear the next day, as she waited with nettle soup. Of course she kept seeing him, marching towards the river with some fishing pots, or bustling about in the garden, around the shed, but never with a spade in his hands. She grew more and more curious about why he would disappear into the forest for whole afternoons on end, and what he did at home in the evenings, with no candles or oil, all on his own, just as she was.

Imperceptibly, day after day went by, and suddenly she realised that she wanted to hear the sound of his voice, whatever it might mean, and that she was longing to tell him everything, with the help of pencil and paper. But she lacked the courage. Her father would surely have been glad that she had given him help, but paying a visit to a strange man – without higher necessity – could only mean one thing: a breach of the law and yet another sin.

‘Would that still be the case if I took him some fritters and watermelon salad?’ she asked herself, and then an inner voice instantly reminded her: ‘An unmarried girl does not meet a man without witnesses, if he is not a member of her family.’

Meanwhile the newcomer was behaving eccentrically. He never worked in the garden, usually slept until noon, then disappeared somewhere on the river or in the forest, and in the evenings, if he wasn’t hammering in the shed, he would sit under the van Dorn’s great lime tree and motionlessly stare at the sky, waiting for dusk. One day, as she was spreading out the sheets in the orchard, he came up unexpectedly quietly and left a fair-sized bundle on the porch. It was a wild rabbit: dressed, roasted and wrapped in a burdock leaf. Another time she found a bag full of fish on the threshold: zander, roach and pike, gutted and interlaid with herbs; although it was summer, they smelled to her of autumn and the past. But how was she to tell him about it? About the full nets, the smoke over the waters and the barrels the men would roll into the larders when the first chilly weather came? And anyway, what concern of his could such matters be?

Suddenly she sensed that that old world, which had literally vanished before her eyes, would never return to its former shape. She could, as until now, comfort herself with hope; she could mentally repeat Harmensoon’s prophecy that the righteous would return to their dwellings, but right now, as she cut the fillets of zander into even white strips, the awareness that what had happened already could never be undone cast chaos and doubt into her soul.

Towards evening, with a pot full of stew (there would have been enough for two families), she set off for the van Dorns’ house. But the voice she heard coming from inside was not the stranger’s. Willman was talking loud and uninterruptedly, with the other man just asking him the occasional question, so quietly that even if she leaned her head towards the open window, she couldn’t catch the details, which flew away like insects into the warm, all-embracing dusk. She didn’t want to eavesdrop. Nevertheless, as she entered the cool hallway, something stopped her on the threshold of the room. Wasn’t the hero of their tale Bestvater, who had been driven out and excommunicated just like Hanna? The men had taken a vote, but before that Harmensoon had made a long, angry speech.

‘Isn’t there enough depravity for you in other communities?’ he had thundered. ‘Do you imagine, you naïve people, that it will stop at machines for churning butter and lamps in your homes? Your sons will bring wireless sets here, and your daughters, wives and daughters-in-law will bring in hats with ribbons! Is that the proper way to emulate the Lord? Our axes, ploughs and nets, our chisels and our planes, and finally our hands and our prayers – aren’t they enough for us?’

Willman fell silent; the stranger shifted restlessly on his chair and asked: ‘And then what happened?’

‘Then,’ sighed Willman, ‘those who had agreed to electricity raised their hands, but there were only three of them: Helke, van Dorn, and the widower.’

‘What widower?’ There was a note of despondency in the stranger’s voice. ‘Have you already told me about him?’

‘Yes, Wolzke, the father of that idiot,’ said Willman, sniggering. ‘And Bestvater too, but he had no right to vote, because the windmill and all that electricity were his doing, so he dropped it all and left the next day.’

‘He left…’ the stranger interrupted. ‘That is, you mean to say you expelled him, just like that?’

But in Willman’s words there was no doubt, not even a shadow of regret: Bestvater himself had loaded his belongings onto a horse-drawn cart, slammed the door of his cottage, and as he drove past the chapel, he had screamed for everyone to hear him: ‘Harmensoon, you fool, you’re not interpreting the Book, you’re poisoning it with your venom, and everyone here is going to die of it!’

She listened to this with greater anxiety than on that day in the past, outside the chapel, whence her father had dragged her home, away from the din and hubbub of outraged voices. Now, learning for the first time about the hand Bestvater had raised, his gesture opposing Harmensoon, suddenly she was stunned, driven into a bizarre state of confusion she had never felt before. And although Willman went on to say how Bestvater had moved to the Tiegenhagen community, where there weren’t actually any dunes or sea, but the men’s waistcoats did have buttons instead of hooks, where electricity had just been installed and where the elders were the brothers de Veer, Jan and Piotr, not many of these things got through to her. Finally, when Willman had finished and silence reigned in the room, she pushed the half-open door, left her pot of stew on the table, and made such a rapid exit that the two amazed talkers hadn’t even the time to stop her in the hallway.

She wanted to cry, but not a single tear came flowing down her cheek. She wanted to scream out all her pain, but not a single word, not even the simplest, could break free of her lips.

By the light of the moon, she seemed to see the lorries driving noiselessly up to the chapel again, and just as on that day, when she was coming back from the sea, she stopped at the edge of the forest. Once again, she seemed to see the people in uniforms, only waiting for Harmensoon. Finally he appeared, and just as before, he was carrying some charters, folios and parchments, of which the oldest, set in wooden frames, bore royal seals. He went up to the officer, waving the wad of documents under his nose, and said at the top of his voice that this was a violation of the law. A gentle murmur ran through the crowd, and just as before, the officer crushed his cigarette-end under his heel, then gave a signal. Obeying the armed men, they boarded the lorries. Harmensoon raised his voice, and just as before, tried to persuade the officer that the Russian villages of Molochno and Chortytsa had long since ceased to exist, that their ancestors had travelled there voluntarily, and that the land on which they were now standing had never known violence, for the followers of the Lord never carried or used weapons, just as they never swore oaths. Just as before, she saw the lorries driving away, one after the other, Harmensoon went on talking, the officer kept nodding his head and clapping Harmensoon on the back, and just as before, once the transport had disappeared around the corner, the officer gave a signal, the soldiers fired once, and again, Harmensoon fell, the officer raked up the pile of documents and parchments with his boot, set it on fire with a petrol lighter, took a good look all around, gave a signal, and just as before, drove away in a small open car, escorted by two motorcycles, overtaking a line of cattle being herded down the dusty road by guards on foot.

Just as before, she pressed her face to the smooth, moss-coated beech bark. But this time she couldn’t hear the dogs barking like mad at the cattle herders until rifle shots silenced them for ever. Now she was afraid of ghosts, not people. Maybe that was why, when she saw a light in the window of her house, she went inside at a confident, rapid pace . She knew he would be waiting for her. She knew he would talk. She turned down the wick in the lamp, which was sending up too much smoke, and sat down facing him. He said his name was Jakub and he had seen hell. He said she shouldn’t be afraid, because he, Jakub, son of Aron, was going to build a boat with Willman’s help, and they would sail far away, to the other side of the sea, where people did not throw other people into ovens or onto lorries. She wrote on a piece of paper that there were boats on the canal. He said those boats were too small and too old for such a journey, and that Willman thought the same. She quickly added that she wouldn’t sail anywhere, because she was waiting here for her father, for Rachela, for the Helkes and all the others. He said they would never return. She wrote that they would return. He asked how she knew they would return. She wrote that she knew it from Harmensoon. As he raised his eyes from the sentence he had just read to look into her face, bathed in the twinkling light of the oil lamp, she saw alarm and anxiety in them.

‘But that Harmensoon fellow is dead,’ he said. ‘Willman told me you buried him.’

For a while she hesitated over the paper, until finally she wrote: ‘I am afraid, because one day, when Ludwig comes here again…’

He asked who Ludwig was. But she pushed away the notebook full of sums and hid her face in her hands. He started saying gentle, tender words to her, but he wasn’t sure if she could hear him. She was emitting quiet, muffled sobs, like the whimpering of a little dog. She didn’t turn away when he laid his hand on her head. It was only when his fingers removed her linen cap and instinctively sank into her hair the colour of bright, burning copper that, without looking up, she raised a hand, found his touch between her tortoiseshell hairpin and her bared nape, then made him let go and sit up straight again.

‘There’s little time,’ he said. ‘We have to make great haste. Do you know,’ he added in parting, ‘why they didn’t burn your houses down?’

Willman was hungry for his stories. In Andress’ boatyard, where they now worked from dawn to dusk, Jakub spread images before his eyes that were enough to make his head spin. Often, without putting down his plane or axe, Willman would interrupt him to demand an explanation. What is an overture? Can the baton be made of yew, or is it better to have it carved from a pine twig? Is the orchestra pit, where Jakub used to sit each evening, something very deep? What does anyone need the conductor for, if the musicians already know what they are meant to play? Do they sing psalms on stage? What is the second violin?

Golden coils of wood shavings flowed to Jakub’s feet one after another, while his voice rose to the rafters of the shed, ringing with Almaviva’s laughter, Don Jose’s lament or Faust’s curses. Willman particularly loved the stories where someone dropped dead, and love – just like death – was draped in a robe of destiny.

‘And did all that really happen?’ he asked every single time.

Clearly and patiently, Jakub explained what a libretto was, a part and a score. Willman kept nodding his head, but he suspected that Jakub did not want to reveal the entire truth. How could you present something that had never actually happened anywhere? And to people who sat on elegant chairs and armchairs each evening? Why should the musicians and singers want to deceive them?

Jakub, on the other hand, was not expecting to hear any stories. The questions he asked rarely, and as if by chance, were aimed at determining essential facts. Willman did not know if patrol boats ever appeared at the mouth of the river. He had no idea in which communities deportation had taken place. But he did know that in Tiegenhagen, where the elders were the brothers de Veer, Jan and Piotr, where Bestvater had put up electricity posts and where they wore waistcoats with buttons, they had decided that the men could swear oaths, put on uniforms and carry weapons, but only when people from the city demanded it of them.

‘That was long ago,’ pronounced Willman after some thought, ‘a year before war was declared.’

Jakub also wanted to know whether any of the locals had any sort of map, best of all the kind used to navigate on the sea, but Willman couldn’t remember anything like that. If they ever did go sailing, it was only to the sandbar, and if someone, such as the van Dorns, made the journey to the city by water, it was always in daylight, without losing sight of the shore.

Meanwhile their work was going faster than expected, and somewhere near the end of August, when the tails of falling stars flared in the night sky, the hull of the ship was ready. They painted it with pitch and launched it onto the dark depths of the canal, full of weeds and algae.

‘I thought you were only good at talking,’ said Willman at the time, ‘but you have strong, skilful hands.’

Jakub could not hide his satisfaction, but the funny, humorous remark he wanted to say in reply hung on his lips like a fruit killed off by hoarfrost, when at once Willman added:

‘But do you have to keep going to see her?’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked, and at once, almost instantly regretted the question, because he realised that Willman’s gaze, the cold look in his light blue eyes, did not just follow him here, while building the boat, but wandered after him each evening when, work-weary, he said: ‘Until tomorrow,’ and set off down the canal path, amid an oppressive odour of stagnant water, sweet flag and water lilies; at three oak trees he turned and then, following the sandy road, at the very end of the dunes and the cemetery he came to the van Dorns’ house, which for a brief while had been his, Jakub’s house, though it wasn’t now, because he didn’t go up the creaking porch steps, but walked on, past the small, silent windows of the chapel, all the way to her doorstep, where Willman’s gaze did not stop at the peeling paint on the door frame, but continued to delve, through the walls, the whispers and silences, as if he had a right to do so, granted him by the widower or by some blood relationship unknown to Jakub.

‘What do I mean?’ Willman repeated like an echo. ‘The fact that she won’t be sailing with us.’

‘No,’ said Jakub, looking him straight in the face, ‘she’s not as stupid as you think. I’ll soon persuade her…’

Willman burst into loud laughter.

‘Her mother,’ he said, catching his breath, ‘went traipsing about on the seashore too. And even Harmensoon was afraid to forbid those oddities, that bathing. Do you know why? Because he was afraid of her. And do you know why? Because she was a witch. Luckily she drowned.’

‘I thought witches were a Catholic speciality,’ said Jakub, ‘but clearly I was mistaken.’

Willman did not answer. He got on with the rigging, muttering a little poem to himself:

For several days they worked in ponderous silence. But when, as every afternoon, she turned up at the canal with a basket of food for them, Willman simply took his share and ate it, chewing steadily and systematically. Jakub ate faster, always rescuing the tiniest crumbs from the ground, gathering them in his hand and sucking them up with his lips. She liked to watch his long, fine fingers. She liked the moment when he raised his eyes and cast a furtive glance at the basket, where there were still apples from the orchard, or blueberries she had picked in the forest.

And although life went on as before, without any changes to the daily ritual, she could sense an invisible wall of antipathy growing between the two men. Once it was absolutely solid, she wrote on a piece of paper: ‘What happened?’

And when Jakub appeared at her house after dark, she put her question on the table.

He pretended he couldn’t make it out, so she turned up the wick. He pretended he couldn’t understand, so she wrote: ‘You and Willman.’

‘It’s nothing serious,’ he said.

So she added: ‘I can see.’

But he refused to say, and his face, usually lit by a smile in the evenings, was tense and focused. He ate next to nothing, didn’t even thank her, and quickly left the room. She heard the stairs creak as he climbed them at a slow, heavy pace to the attic. But this time the bustle upstairs only lasted a short time. He gathered his odds and ends, and before she had finished tidying the kitchen, he came downstairs again.

‘I’d better be going now,’ he said. ‘Willman and I will be trying out the sails in the morning.’

She nodded. But once he had gone, she took the lamp and slowly went upstairs. The bed he had put here was neatly made. In the chest that served him as a wardrobe she found a change of underwear, a handkerchief and some socks. There was a violin case lying beside the pillow, not fully closed. Carefully she took out the instrument, and just as blind people do, she touched it with her fingers. Willman had provided Jakub with hair for the bow, the strings and a lump of rosin. But the violin itself, which had lain for a hundred years or more amid a firearm, some maps, some shining chronometers and a handful of silver coins in the chest that had once belonged to a Belgian captain, was a present from her. Jakub would play at night, up here, and then every last sound of the music ran right through her – nothing mattered any more, not even the rules she was breaking with some degree of fear. Sometimes her father came to her in her dreams, sat on the edge of her bed and silently pointed a finger at the ceiling, as if asking her: ‘What is the meaning of all this?’

But she was not sure what she really wanted, and her thoughts, full of vague presentiments and images, were burdening her with a weird, chaotic aura of alien things she had never known before. The violin floated back into the mossy shell of its case. Holding the lamp in one hand and the instrument in the other, with a heavy heart she slowly went downstairs. Only in the main room did she realise that Jakub had come back, and that she must have missed him by a whisker going through the hall. Now he was silently standing by the door, gazing at her. She showed him the case and gave him an inquiring look to ask if that was what he had come for.

‘No,’ he said. And before she had time to reach for her pencil and notebook, he quickly added: ‘There’s someone walking about in the chapel – I saw a light in there.’

She went up to the window and pointed at the moon.

‘No,’ he whispered, ‘the light is from inside, I saw it myself just now.’

She grabbed his hand, nodded for him to sit down and opened the notebook.

‘You imagined it,’ he read, ‘stay here.’

‘Willman,’ he asked, ‘what’s he doing there at night?’ She refused to write him an answer. ‘Why are you hiding something?’ he cried. ‘If it’s not Willman, who is it?’

But her pencil said nothing, nor did the look in her eyes.

Jakub went outside. After a short walk he was standing outside the chapel. The moonshine really was reflecting in the windows, and no other light, at least not now, was illuminating the interior of the dark block. Yet he couldn’t have been mistaken: as he was heading from her house towards the van Dorns’, someone had been walking about in the house of prayer holding a lamp or a candle; there had been a flame moving between the walls, casting a flickering shadow into the windows.

Jakub timidly pushed the heavy, double door. In the very faint light he could make out some benches and a table about eight yards long, which towered above him on a platform. Old books with wooden spines, coated in cloth worn smooth by generations, gave off an odour of prayer and time. He was not alone in here, he sensed in terror, when from a corner of the room steeped in total darkness he heard scraps of muttered phrases, some tapping and rustling.

‘I am Jakub,’ he said loud and clear. ‘Who are you?’

No one answered. The sounds stopped, but only momentarily, for barely had he taken two steps forward than a noise erupted in the corner, as if lots of objects had been thrown violently to the floor all at once. He approached the point where the two walls ran together, but found no one there. But he did discover some large books, which lay scattered beside a huge cupboard with glazed, open doors. Cautiously, carefully, he picked them up one after another and set them on an oak shelf. Thick dust rose from the parchment pages, the leather spines, the sacred letters and the metal fittings. It pierced his nose and stung his eyes, but Jakub could smell another ingredient in it too: candles that had only just been extinguished. He went up to the table. The congealed wax on the candlestick was still warm. Next to it stood a vessel that looked like a cup. Carefully he touched the skin of the liquid at the bottom with his thumb, and then put it to his tongue. The bare hint of moisture, less than a drop, had a taste of cheap red wine.

‘I am Jakub,’ he shouted into the darkness. ‘If there’s someone here, let him speak!’

There was no reply. He could hear his heart continuing to pump blood within the vaulted silence of his body, could hear the woodworm endlessly boring a labyrinth of gloomy corridors in hard veins of wood. He moved towards the exit at a slow, quiet pace. When he was halfway across the chapel, a noise like the previous one rang out behind him. But now the books were not just falling out of the cupboard – now they were being furiously hurled to the floor, one after another, with a resonant thud as each one landed. Amid these sounds he could hear a verse from the Bible – about fire and burning – spoken over and over again like an incantation. Jakub didn’t want to hear what sort of fire it was, nor whom, or what it was meant to burn. He ran outside terrified, and the vision of the falling books chased him up the road. He felt as if they were flying after him on the outspread wings of their pages, brushing his arms and face in flight, and falling under his feet like stones, while he had to jump across them like streams in the mountains.

He rushed into the room, pale and shaking, but refused to say a word, or to read a single one of the patiently elaborated sentences which she had just finished writing; perhaps he suspected she had a hidden aim, to avoid giving him proper warning; perhaps he thought that the someone whom he could not see in the chapel, terrifying and dreadful, was acting in league with her and, throughout the whole of his time here, in this small, strange, abandoned village, had been covertly spying on him, giving her orders; or perhaps he wasn’t thinking anything of the kind, because he could still hear the rumble of the falling books, terrible thumps, louder and louder, sending clouds of silvery dust into the air and ringing in his ears like the breath of Abbadon, carrying the wind of destruction; perhaps he didn’t want to tell her all this because he would have to raise his voice, he would have to shout at her, and so, once he had calmed down and swallowed a mouthful of water from the jug, all he said was: ‘Wake me up early tomorrow, Willman can’t bear it if I’m late at the canal.’ And then, on the stairs by now, he added not his usual ‘Good night’, but ‘Nevertheless, good night .’

And yet she was happy. In the end he had stayed here, not at the van Dorns’. Now as she lay in bed, she would be able to hear him moving his chair, walking about the room, playing the violin, taking off his shoes, sometimes laughing to himself, opening or closing the window, or yawning lengthily – perhaps at deliberately high volume – and then lying down to sleep. She could wake him before dawn, watch him eating the same old fritters for breakfast, putting on his shoes and going off down the narrow track towards the three oak trees. She was happy, though there were no bustling noises coming from upstairs now, and the violin was down here.

Meanwhile, upstairs, in Jakub’s dreams, his father had suddenly appeared. He sat down on the edge of the bed and whispered into his ear: ‘When you went to join the orchestra and abandoned your home and your tradition, I told you it was bad, but as for this – this is sheer catastrophe!’ He pointed down at the floor, and asked: ‘What is the meaning of all this?’

But of course he wouldn’t listen to a word of what his son had to say to him. From under his black coat he took out his Book and slowly leafed through it, hesitating, frowning and muttering. Then he removed some individual letters from the pages, raised them in his fingers like thin flakes of soot and carefully blew on them; without changing shape they slowly glided across the room and landed on Jakub’s face, on his lips, his brow and his eyelids.

This scene absorbed him so fully that he lost sight of the border between sleep and waking, and failed to notice the woman’s presence at all. Meanwhile she laid the violin case next to the bed, leaned over Jakub, and wherever a letter appeared, she placed a kiss. The symbols vanished like snowflakes at the touch of her lips. Jakub woke up. Besides the absence of his father, and besides her so unexpected presence in his room, he had an even bigger surprise – she was whispering tender words full of emotion to him. She could speak. When she noticed that he wasn’t asleep any more, and at once tried to leave, he stopped her with a firm, decisive gesture.

A couple of hours later when, sated by love, she woke up at Jakub’s side and gently, without interrupting his sleep, touched his face with her fingertips, she heard the distant, rising rumble of the sea. Along with the first storm, the summer was relentlessly approaching its end. The dozen or fewer warm days they still had before them could change nothing here, although everything had changed between them. Less than an hour later Jakub came back from the canal.

‘Willman,’ he said, his voice faltering, ‘loaded up the supplies and sailed away last night.’

‘Did he leave a stupid little poem?’ she asked.

The day they saw the plane was no different from the ones before it. The frost held just as firmly as it had all winter, for almost four months now. Jakub came out of the woodshed and looked up to follow the flight of the reconnaissance biplane: it flew in from the east, turned a circle above the dunes, flashed over the village and headed west, towards the mouth of the river. She spotted it too: there was no black cross on its wing (like the one on the officer’s car, which instantly came to mind), but a red star instead.

‘What does it mean for us?’ she asked at supper.

Jakub thought hard over his watered-down soup.

‘I think it means we can kill a hen and make chicken stock,’ he said, ‘but not today, maybe in a couple of days’ time.’

From then on the nights became a torment. Jakub could understand her anxiety: now, more than strangers, she feared the return of her own people, in which she believed so strongly and firmly that even his tales of what he had met with there, in the camp and on the transports, his casual hints, which he had avoided earlier, were incapable of undermining this dreadful hope. There were moments when he could feel the fear and antipathy rising in her. She would stifle it with outbursts of passion, ever more ardent and insistent, but Jakub knew that like this she was only driving away the thought of the moment when she would stand before the entire community, merely in order to be judged and expelled.

‘You can’t keep on thinking about it!’ he finally erupted. ‘Sin is a relative concept.’

In short, matter-of-fact sentences she told him about Hanna and Ludwig. She had seen her brother-in-law that day, by the officer’s car. She had seen him fire a shot straight into Harmensoon’s temple. A couple of months later, when she saw the old man in the chapel, with the same, open wound, with the same blood-caked lock of grey hair, she was sure she had lost her mind, but Willman, whom she had quickly fetched, had seen the same thing. Harmensoon was looking for something in the books, but failing to find it, he had flown into a rage and screamed, ‘A mistake has been made!’ then vanished, only to appear in the chapel again a fortnight later, light another candle and throw the books to the floor again. She was afraid that one day he would appear in her house, so she had begged Willman to do it – yes, he had finally gone to the cemetery to dig up the grave, but there was nothing wrong: there lay the coffin, undisturbed, and there was the puffy, already decomposing corpse, the same one they had laid there together the day after the lorries drove away, so they couldn’t understand why he kept returning, what he was searching for in the books, or what ‘mistake’ he was on about. But later, with cruel clarity she had realised: what Harmensoon – or rather the thing that appeared in the shape of Harmensoon – meant was sin: common human sin, which could never be eradicated, not even in places like this one, not even with laws such as they had had here for centuries, and if that were the case, then the whole world was steeped in it, there was no hope left, and what it said in the Book about the coming of the Lord, heralded by signs and oppression, might simply never happen, for how could it occur, how was it meant to come about, if the unjust could no longer be distinguished from the just?

He listened to all this with bated breath. The rage that flashed in her every word poured not just onto her or him, but onto the entire world as well.

‘In a couple of weeks,’ he said, ‘when the Russians drive away the Germans, we can get out of here, if you want to.’

‘Where will we go?’ she asked. ‘Is there a place for us?’

‘The world is enormous,’ he replied. ‘Bigger than we think.’

A few days later they were woken at night by a deep, incessant boom. The ice was cracking on the river. And further off, beyond the dunes and the crests of the forest, heavy artillery was grumbling on the plain. That morning, with the rain came the thaw. The snow was damp and stuck to Jakub’s boots in heavy wedges that immediately matted together into frozen clumps. Every few steps he stopped to prise it off his boot soles with a pointed stick. Each time he did, his bundle fell onto the wet snow, and he muttered a curse, picked it up, threw it on his back again and continued on his way. And every time it happened he looked behind him, as if he couldn’t really believe that his requests, pleas and arguments were just the sound of empty words to her. As if he still had a hope that she would change her mind, and that he would suddenly see her on the road, wading through the dreadfully slippery slush and heading after him.

But the road was deserted. Around the bend, when the familiar roofs of the houses and the rectangular block of the chapel disappeared from view, Jakub stopped to empty his bladder.

The golden stream carved deep grooves in the snow and melted the ice, until finally it broke through to the earth in a small corridor, at the bottom of which lay one of last year’s grey pine cones.

One final time he looked behind him, now regretting the forceful, impulsive words he had spoken in parting. Perhaps he was free to say: ‘And why do you talk such nonsense? No Messiah, neither yours nor mine, is ever going to appear!’ But did he have to add at once in a harsh, sneering tone: ‘We can only save ourselves – can’t you understand that?’ Now this remark was weighing him down like unnecessary baggage that he had to keep lugging around with him, like a stone put into his bundle. At last, when the dusk had laid long, purple shadows on the dingy grey snow, Jakub reached the spot where the road emerged from the forest.

The narrow-gauge railway line was buried in snow, and on the platform – where, apart from a signboard with an illegible name, there was a wooden hut – lay a dead horse. Someone had cut a few long strips of meat from the corpse, and the rest must have been torn at by the hungry dogs of passing refugees, for several days at least. Along the tracks, which he followed onwards, he came across various abandoned items: a coffee mill, an army knapsack, a child’s sledge, a chamber pot, a travel rug full of holes, and then, as he passed deserted or burned-down houses, he found some abandoned bodies. Some in uniforms, others in civilian clothes; they stared at Jakub in amazement, as if asking him if he were really the victor. The living did not have this boldness: too horrified by their own catastrophe, silent, meek and obsequious, they dropped their gaze and answered in monosyllables.

Only two days later, once in the suburbs, did Jakub run into a Russian patrol. When instead of documents he showed the number tattooed on his arm, the officer gave orders to let him through. The city reeked of burning, a corpse-like odour, early spring, the grease of armoured cars, wet dog fur, plunder, field-hospital carbolic, cheap tobacco, dust, blood, rape and hooch, and something indeterminate as well, something mysterious that Jakub only recognised and was able to name a while later, as he revolved like a beetle, wandering the chasms of burned-out streets. It was the very fine dust of Gothic bricks. Rising above the ruins of port warehouses, churches and tenements, it drilled into his nose and crept under his clothing; when he sat down on the melting snow it got into his hair too, tingeing it with the red glow of still smouldering embers.

For a couple of hours Jakub roamed the gloomy labyrinth. It looked as if the address he had memorised was out of date, something that belonged to a different city. Finally he found the alley: two surviving houses amid the rubble. In the courtyard, behind the chestnut tree next to the cast-iron pump, he turned through the gate and went up the staircase that creaked with age, to the first floor. A smell of overcooked turnips floated from the cellars to the roof, and in the blink of an eye, from somewhere in the deepest recesses of his memory, the dull but unique flavour of prison-camp soup came back to him. He knocked bashfully, but heard no response at all from inside the flat.

Sure he wouldn’t find anyone here, he took the letter from his pocket. The envelope was fat, but the slot with a flap and a sign saying Briefe was not that wide at all. As he was struggling with it, he was surprised to feel that someone’s hands – on the other side of the door – were helping him. Once the parcel had disappeared through the slot, Jakub knocked again. A chain grated, the door opened a fraction, and he saw Hanna. He had imagined the older sister quite differently. They were similar, of course, but if physical features had relevance here, it was secondary. Once she had reluctantly shown him into the living room, he closely watched her hand movements, the tilt of her head, and the look in her eyes as she read.

‘So you were there for all that time?’ she said, looking up from the page.

He started to regret not having read the letter. What did she mean by ‘there’? Without speaking, he shrugged his shoulders flippantly. But for now she didn’t ask any more questions. The sentences in her monologue, long and not very clear, in which the distant past was mixed with the events of recent days, were as tiresome as the March dusk, which was just falling outside. What did he care about the death of Ludwig, a couple of months ago, on the heroic front? Or her fears about what she would do when the Russians handed this city over to the Poles? Her concerns about her younger sister did not sound very sincere. Nor did the comments she threw in here and there about the atrocities of war, which she must have been making on his account. He wanted to leave now, but at that she took offence: wasn’t her sister’s request sacred to her? Besides, it was the curfew now and the Russians shot without warning.

‘There’s a room here that’s perfect for you,’ she said. ‘Can you speak Polish at all?’

He nodded, which could have meant: ‘Yes, very well,’ but instead of confirming the gesture verbally, he asked if her sister had said anything in her letter about Ludwig.

‘About Ludwig?’ she asked in surprise. ‘Why should she? She writes about you, almost the entire letter, didn’t she tell you?’

He was embarrassed. Especially when Hanna cast her eye over her sister’s screed again and asked him: ‘Do you love her? Did it come to intimacy between you?’

And when he said nothing, at once she added: ‘Don’t be offended, I’m modern, and it’s best to be straight about things like that, isn’t it? Do you think they’ll return from resettlement? She tells me she’s going to wait until autumn, and then she’ll come here, to the city, and she hopes to meet up with you. It’s lovely that you’ve made an arrangement – am I to understand she’s all alone there now? Yes, she always was brave. You probably don’t know this, but when my people excommunicated me, she was the only one who came to see me. My God, it all seemed so simple then. But now?’

Over supper Jakub told Hanna he wanted to go abroad. Maybe in a few months’ time there’d be liners setting sail from here? And if not, he was still determined to travel, even via Germany. He had an uncle in America; he would find him, and over there, on the other side of the Atlantic, he would start a new life. Because here, on the old continent, someone would always be wanting to excommunicate someone else, capture cities and burn down houses.

Hanna was watching Jakub with discreet curiosity. Whenever he grew excited and spoke a little faster, sparks flashed in his eyes. It took her a while to notice the astonishing similarity: Jakub’s face, and the face in the holy picture given her by the parish priest, were literally identical. Just as if her guest had posed for the unknown artist. Of course it was impossible, but it made her feel the oddness of the situation all the more. Jakub caught the glance with which was she unknowingly steering his gaze towards the wall. Between a wedding photograph and a picture of Ludwig, A Holy Baptism Souvenir was hanging in a golden frame. Jesus had his hand raised, and his transfigured body was shining with the glow of an unearthly light.

‘Now I understand why you keep looking at me like that,’ said Jakub, laughing.

She didn’t answer, so at once he added: ‘I never saw any icons there in the chapel, or in the houses.’

‘They regard them as a sin,’ she said, sighing. ‘Anyway, to them everything is sinful and immoral. They say they are emulating God. But can man even attempt such a thing? They’re aiming too high! Their life is a torment, because when they don’t succeed, they are cruel – please believe me, I’ve been on the receiving end of it.’

He nodded, with understanding rather than sympathy. Later, as he lay in bed, he couldn’t fall asleep for ages. Now and then he heard a stray shot outside, soldiers calling, and the clatter of boots. On the wall above the bed a clock was ticking, and from the next room came Hanna’s gentle snoring. He longed for the roar of the sea, the dazzling whiteness of the dunes, and the scent of pine trees and juniper. He remembered that summer evening, when she had led him to the shed where the shipwrecks’ belongings lay untouched: an hour-glass with Greek lettering, a Swedish sextant, a Russian jeweller’s scale, an unknown sailor’s shoe, a bale of silk, a decimated whisky box, some French port, a silk shirt of unknown origin, and finally some candlesticks, cutlery and plates, two canvases by Dutch masters and the Belgian captain’s chest, in which he saw pistols, a handful of silver coins, some decaying maps and a violin, of Italian make, as it would soon turn out. Later she had explained to him that a hundred or more years ago, when the reign of the Polish kings had ended, they had stopped handing in the things they found to the officials. They were to wait here for their owners, until the Day of Judgement – so it had been decreed in the chapel.

He remembered that autumn day, on the verge of October perhaps, when he had walked the length of the beach alone after a storm. Among the mussels, seaweed and amber he had found a shackle. It was not rusty, and he recognised it instantly: he and Willman must have forged it before completing the rigging. There was a piece of ragged rope protruding from the shackle like a fluffed-up tail. He shook the sand off his find, took a swing and hurled it far into the sea.

Now the constant roar of the waves had lulled him to sleep. He dreamed he was on his way home. The moss coating the dunes was as soft as a carpet. On either side pine trees soared into the sky, with tall grass whispering in between them. She was waiting for him at the edge of the road, wearing her Sunday-best black dress with the little white collar.

‘It’s time now,’ she said. ‘Everyone is waiting for you.’

There was a crowd of people in the chapel. He could feel the warmth of human breath and burning candles. Harmensoon handed him the violin and bow, and once he had taken hold of the instrument, the old man opened the Book. Instead of biblical verses it was full of staves, and instead of letters he saw the black swallows of notes. Never before had he read or played this music. It was as lucid as a fugue by Bach, as solemn as a phrase by Handel, as lively as a few bars by Vivaldi, and as melancholy as a song by Schubert. Before the coda had finished resonating, he caught sight of the two sisters’ faces: leaning over the gallery rail, they were following his playing in deepest concentration. When he stopped, there was no one in the chapel the King. The waves were beating against the walls. The Earth was shrinking. The wind was raging in the broken windows, turning the empty pages of the Book, and bringing in snow, withered leaves and grains of burning sand.

Next morning when Hanna saw the empty bed and the half-open door, she wasn’t even surprised. But the bright mark on the wallpaper where the clock used to be and the missing silver candlestick made her feel confused. How would she tell her sister about it? The word ‘thief’ didn’t seem appropriate, nor was ‘swindler’ exactly right. Maybe she should keep quiet about it? She couldn’t imagine the two of them together, at any time or in any place. Nor could she forgive herself for so recklessly letting him in, and once it had happened, for keeping him here like a friend. But Hanna’s confusion proved far greater when around noon Jakub came back from the city. He put two cans of army food on the table, a chunk of bacon, some smoked fish, a bottle of vodka, some salt, a little bag of buckwheat and some matches. From his pocket he produced a handful of tea in a twist of paper.

‘I see you are resourceful in any situation,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid I am,’ he confirmed.

They smiled at each other. Then Jakub showed her an official receipt; bearing the stamp of the city’s Soviet police headquarters, it looked quite ominous.

‘What does it say here?’ she asked.

‘That I live here legally, and as a result you are safe, at least for some time.’

Only a man called Molke from the ground floor stopped bowing to her. But she didn’t have to take the slightest bit of notice, just like Jakub, who simply failed to perceive any of the neighbours.

‘Please take the D line and go as far as Bedford Park Boulevard. The lady will be waiting in the botanical garden. Have you got a map? What’s that? A guidebook, which one? Yes, perhaps. It’s called the Rhododendron Walk – do you know what those plants look like? The lady’s in a wheelchair, she’ll be holding the book, you are sure to recognise her.’

I was amazed. Where did she get my phone number from? And what an idea, to make an appointment through your secretary or someone of the kind who pronounced the simple word ‘you’ with such reverence?

I walked down 34th Street to Herald Square, and once at the station I wondered: maybe I shouldn’t go? But his words, after introducing himself as ‘Mr Hook’ and asking if he was talking to ‘Mr Helke, the writer from Europe’, that short sentence of his in which he said: ‘The lady read your story “The Table” and wants to tell you what it was really like’, that declaration of his in which there wasn’t the slightest doubt I would take up the invitation, had made my heart flutter. In the worst case I had disappointment ahead of me: a long monologue about an unsuccessful life, or questions such as: ‘Why did you write about the Mennonites?’

In Greek rhodos means a rose, and dendron means a tree, and indeed – the rhododendrons were blooming just like rose trees, in shades of crimson, white and red. Just as Mr Hook had said, she was sitting in a wheelchair with the book in her hands. She must have recognised me from afar, for as I approached, she raised the white cover and waved it to greet me in a very friendly way.

‘Thank you for coming’ – those were her first words. ‘I’m going to die soon, and what I read in here,’ she said, raising the book, ‘leads me to imagine you will want to hear this story, and that one day you will write about it, back in your own country.’

And at once, without any introduction, she started telling her tale. The English she spoke was coarse, but plain. Only occasionally did she put in a word in German, and then broke off at once, said ‘Excuse me,’ and went on with her story.

After about an hour, when Jakub and Willman were building the boat, along came Mr Hook. He looked odd: in a huge fedora and a summer suit, he was more like a character out of a Chekhov play than someone who lives in the Bronx. He brought some sandwiches and hot chocolate, straightened the rug on her knees and walked away, discreetly glancing at his watch.

My surprise was growing by the minute: how come no settlers were moved into the village once the Germans had deported everyone? Did Willman make a deal with Jakub that only the two of them would sail away together, or had there been a decision to escape as a threesome? Why couldn’t Jakub see Harmensoon in the chapel, when she claimed to have seen him many times after his death and burial? Was Ludwig, the one in the uniform, really her sister’s husband?

There were more and more questions on my notepad, but not once did I dare to interrupt the flow of her narrative. Every sentence was uttered with an effort she did her best to conceal, and had something final about it, as if after each full stop, marked with a short pause, the end of the world had come.

She had come to the city sooner than autumn. Hanna had greeted her warmly, Jakub coldly. Her idea of obtaining a Polish certificate for permanent residence had proved disastrous. Immediately she had those two and a horde of officials against her. How was she to prove she wasn’t a German? She had no documents, nor did she know Polish, and her statements that once, long ago, her ancestors - who were persecuted in the Netherlands - had come to this very place, prompted at best an embittered smile, more often irritation. Finally, one autumn day, amid a crowd of Germans, all three of them had turned up at the freight station. She recalled that there weren’t many men in the carriage. As soon as the train moved off, one of them started to hum a song, ‘Wer hat dich, du schöner Wald, Aufgebaut so hoch da droben?’[1]

Mr Hook invited us to lunch at the park restaurant.

‘Then, once they were all singing,’ she finished telling me at table, ‘though not as loud as their tradition bids the Germans, I noticed that Hanna and Jakub were singing too. Believe me, I alone was biting my lip to stop myself from screaming in horror, hatred and disgust.’

‘My dear, that’s enough now,’ said Mr Hook, laying his hand on hers. ‘I’m sure Mr Helke will describe it… It’s colourful material,’ he said, addressing me, ‘rich, but tragic, altogether fascinating for a writer, isn’t it, young man?’

I swallowed a chunk of steak.

‘No, Mr Hook,’ I said, ‘my name is not Helke.’

‘Really…?’ His hand, adorned with a silver signet ring, reached for the book. ‘Oh, yes, I’m sorry, but you are German, aren’t you?’

She shot him a black look. Withdrawing into the realm of rumination, he fell silent for a while.

‘What happened after that?’ I asked. For a moment she hesitated.

‘He betrayed me as soon as we arrived in the States. I couldn’t understand why, or what he saw in the obese piano tuner, who was quite a bit older than him. Later, when he left her too, I knew. He took Hanna away with him, and they lived together in Chicago. They had two sons, but he took to drink, and eventually Hanna ran off to the south with the children. He thought he was an artist. But here there were thousands like him. If they let him play in a bar it was all right. Hanna died five years ago. I wasn’t at her funeral. That day, in the train to Germany, I saw them holding hands. Can you believe it? From the moment I stood in the door of the flat holding the violin I knew he loved her, not me. I never told my sister about Ludwig. But he knew it from me, and I don’t know if he ever shouted it out in some drunken scene. If he did, she can’t possibly have believed him. After some time, when he wasn’t with Hanna the King, he called me and said: “Hello, this is Harmensoon, is Miss Wolzke at home today?” But I had stopped being afraid of ghosts long ago. And of damnation too. I no longer believe in anything, when it comes to that sort of thing. What about you? Do you believe in God?’

‘Don’t you think it’s time to go home now?’ interrupted Hook.

‘Do you believe in God?’ she repeated.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘in spite of all.’

Beyond the Rhododendron Walk there was a rose garden. As Mr Hook pushed the wheelchair it rolled along smoothly, almost noiselessly. She absolutely had to know what the city looked like now, whether bungalows had been built on the dunes, and whether the canals on the polders were regularly cleaned. The botanical garden ended at White Plains Road.

‘We both live near here,’ Mr Hook informed me. ‘My place is next to the gas station, and hers is above the bookstore.’

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, ‘and please mention Rachela van Dorn – she was the only one to survive the camp and the transports, and she wrote to me afterwards from France. She loved me, really.’

The light changed to green. I watched as they disappeared in the crowd, Mr Hook and she, on the other side of the river of cars.

Two years later, via my publisher, Mr Hook sent me her obituary. Only then did I imagine her, several decades younger, on the road she loved so much.