Cold Sea Stories

Ukiel

FOR MORE THAN twenty years Joachim had always come back from work the same way. He had less than a five-minute walk from the notary’s office to the metro station on Admiralty Square. There he got on the green line, and five stops later he was almost home. He passed the hulking edifice of the Geological Museum, which he had never visited, and turned into a small, quiet street, where there were some four-storey apartment houses behind a row of old plane trees. His was number eight. Long ago, when he and Julia had moved here, each building had had its own porter. And each porter wore a sort of livery. As the years had gone by, the last remnant of their rather theatrical uniforms were the caps, quite like the ones still worn by provincial postmen to this day. And then, in the era of universal automation, the porters had been replaced by entry phones.

Sometimes the return journey took him about half an hour longer. Before going down into the metro Joachim would drop in at the Cosmopolitan bar to have an espresso with his glass of rum as he browsed through the newspapers – from the right-wing El Nacion to the left-wing El Mundo. His reading never absorbed him so fully that he couldn’t hear the conversations going on around him. The people holding them were brokers from the nearby stock exchange, and property dealers; naval officers were also to be found here. Sentences such as: ‘Look how badly Pepo has come unstuck, just when it was all going so fabulously well for him’, or, ‘But as I say, she’s a whore. I know what I’m saying, and that’s why I’m telling you,’ were like doors opening into other people’s apartments; not as though they were expecting any guests, but rather as though the listener happened to be walking up the stairs and chanced upon an accidental and briefly open chink into somebody else’s existence. Joachim did not find it unpleasant; on the contrary, sometimes he thought up a development to the stories he overheard.

That Pepo, for instance: having staged his own death, he had been leading a new life in Patagonia, while his wife and three children were regularly putting flowers on his empty grave. Pepo’s happiness in the arms of his young secretary had brought along an infinitely prosaic disaster: reduced to despair by the betrayal and departure of his beloved with a fly-by-night surveyor, he had gone back to his wife, only to find her in the arms of an advertising salesman. Two fatal shots, and then a third, suicidal one, had decisively won the fortunate Pepo first place on the evening news and in the tabloids.

Probably if he had written down the tales he invented, in a few years he would have had a complete set of short stories. With a brilliant title, let’s say The Secrets of the Cosmo Bar, it would have been a best-seller for at least a week. So Joachim was thinking to himself, as he descended into the subway one sunny November afternoon. He couldn’t forget what he had heard a few minutes earlier in the bar. An elderly fellow, a naval NCO, was relentlessly jawing away to his two mates about the insurgents from 120 years ago who still made appearances at his grandmother’s ranch. At night they stole cattle and horses, lit bonfires and fired their old popguns, but whenever the national guard were summoned, they never caught anyone. On the green line train Joachim considered several possible versions of this story, each one forking like the paths in a secret garden. But it wasn’t easy. Even the briefest description of the ghostly troop demanded knowledge that he didn’t possess. Who was their commander? Was it General Rojas, or someone else perhaps? Were they unionists or republicans? The history of the local dictatorships, coups, civil wars, crimes and sacrifices was like a sketchy diagram of a labyrinth he had never tried to enter. As he alighted at his station, he decided to get out the encyclopaedia and take a look on the internet, and even if making up this particular story proved too difficult, he would manage to stifle his evening depression. Lately it hadn’t given him a chance. He would wake up in an armchair when his half-drunk glass of whisky fell to the floor. He would switch off the television and drag himself to bed, upset by his own inertia. By life, which had long since lost its shine.

However, back at street level, as he was passing the Geological Museum, something happened that made him forget about all that in an instant.

At a crossroads, right on the corner, he noticed an old woman. Her ragged cotton dress, the man’s raincoat thrown over her shoulders and the knitted woollen hat were enough of a signal to avoid her. And yet he slowed down and stopped next to her small plastic bucket, as if to inspect her decaying sandals.

‘What have you got there?’ he asked, pointing at a small sheaf of plants tied together with string. ‘Where did you find that?’

As she only replied by smiling, he added: ‘So where does it grow?’

The old woman started talking in a dialect he couldn’t understand. Her face was furrowed with scars and betrayed native Indian descent. Her toothless mouth resembled a sponge.

He leaned over the bucket, took hold of a bunch of green foliage growing out of white roots, and slowly sliding his hand down the long leaves, put the unusual bouquet to his nose. He was not mistaken. It was Acorus calamus, simply known in his native tongue as tatarak – sweet flag. Never, not by any river, pond or lake, had he ever come across it in this country. He felt a strange charge, a tingling that ran the length of his body from head to toe.

‘Where does this grow?’ he repeated, reaching for his wallet. ‘Where did you pick it? On a ranch? At the botanical garden? It’s impossible! I know the botanical garden better than anyone!’

But none of his words were getting through to her. She was staring hard at his hand as it fished out a banknote. She accepted the lavish payment in silence, with a nod. She poured the rest of the water from the now empty bucket, and without a second glance at him, shakily waddled off along the pavement, with a newly lit cigarette in her mouth. That was when he noticed that her ancient sandals didn’t match.

He put the sweet flag in a vase, which Julia had bought long ago. This fake version of Greek antiquity had really annoyed him at the time: did the donkey Hephaestus was riding really have to have quite such an erect tail? And as for the Silenus following the divine smith, did he have to have an equally prominent appendage? And what was that sack he was carrying on his back? None of the familiar myths gave grounds for this particular artistic vision. And there was the colour scheme too – garish and tacky, like the covers of the magazines cooks and chauffeurs loved reading. Julia had laughed at his objections.

‘Have you got something against folk art?’ she had asked.

Now, after all these years alone, the sudden memory of her voice and her touch made him feel painful confusion.

‘My Silenus,’ Julia had whispered, ‘my lovely little donkey!’

That night of love had been accompanied by distant volleys of rifle fire, the rumble of artillery and the whistling of aeroplanes over the city. The coup by the latest junta did not have the slightest significance in their lives. They had never meddled in the local politics. Although naturalised, they were foreigners here. In the darkened room Joachim lay in bed, gazing at the vase with the bunch of sweet flag and wondering where Julia was now, if her body had long since turned to dust? Or to be precise, did some immaterial particle of Julia, which all the religions call the soul – did her personality still exist somewhere beyond the confines of the coffin lying under the ground at All Saints cemetery, where the damp, maggots and bacteria had done their work long ago? Joachim had no illusions: all the religions told bare-faced lies. Bare-faced, because no one had ever given a sign from the realm beyond. Flying saucers, just like Jesuit tales about spirits, were a consolation for the naïve. Julia’s present existence could only have two forms: a decomposing corpse in the coffin, or his personal memories, in which she appeared – as now – beautiful and alluring. And as she had no family, the moment when he himself would die would be her ultimate end: with no one left to remember her, she would finally sink into a black hole, non-existence, the abyss, like whirling specks of cosmic dust. And what would happen to him? He was not in the least concerned about the memories somebody might have kept about his life. He got out of bed, went into the kitchen, took a bottle of whisky from the cupboard, fetched some ice cubes from the fridge, went back into the bedroom with a full glass and switched on the television. In Saint Peter’s Square a mass was being said for the soul of the late Pope. A strong gust of wind turned a few pages of a Bible lying open on an ordinary, plain coffin. An emotive journalist announced that surely the Holy Spirit was manifesting His presence. Joachim sighed at this portent of a miracle, took a large swig, switched off the television and went to bed. But he didn’t fall asleep. The smell of the sweet flag was so strong and pungent that even the alcohol he had drunk could not dull the impression: he heard the clatter of oars being set in the rowlocks, the splash of a wave against the underside of the boat, the murmur of the wind in the reeds and the cry of the water fowl, among which he could unmistakably distinguish the sounds of the tern and the loon, and the long groaning of the bittern. He and his father were walking down the hill to the jetty. Around them there was a scent of the first hay harvest, mint and clover. Both of them were wearing their white, Sunday-best shirts, starched and ironed by his mother. Once they were aboard the flat-bottomed boat, his father took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeves, straightened his bow tie, and as he took his first swing at the oars he said: ‘Now don’t forget, this is a serious business. Music is what our souls need the most. Do you understand?’

He didn’t entirely. But he was happy. Marta and Andrzej had stayed at home, with their mother, doing normal things. Meanwhile he and his father were cutting across a wide arm of the lake, as if united by an extraordinary secret. A large, dazzlingly white cloud hung motionless over the water, but it wasn’t obscuring the sun. It was reflected in the green water like the face of an ancient divinity.

‘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.

‘From this year,’ he said, looking up at the sky, ‘you’re going to study music – Jonatan will come to us three times a week. You have plenty of time until the autumn to make your choice.’

‘But,’ I asked rather uncertainly, ‘what am I to choose between?’

‘What do you mean? The violin or the piano.’

He definitely preferred the piano, but he didn’t say a word. Only when his father was tapping out the ash from the bowl of his pipe against the wet edge of the pond did he inquire: ‘So what about the Prussians? Did they live in our house?’

His father laughed long and loud.

‘But I told you, there’s nothing left of them. Well, almost nothing. Just a few words, that’s all. For instance, our lake has two names, even in the official atlas. Krzywe and Ukiel. And the Prussian name, Ukiel, means just the same as Krzywe: “crooked”.’

Back in his tiny bedroom in the loft, as he listened to the endless croaking of the frogs punctuated by the hooting of an owl, he kept mindlessly repeating: ‘Ukiel-dukiel, crooked crook-iel’, as if it were a sort of incantation.

Now there were some belated party-goers driving down the street. A dirty Land Rover was dragging a chain of strung-together cans behind it. One of the drunken passengers kept firing a shotgun again and again into the sky and shouting: ‘Socialismo o muerte! Venceremos! Viva Fidel!’ Somewhere nearby a car alarm started to wail and some stray cats began to yowl, which the new, centre-right district administration had been battling with for a few months to no avail. He fetched his address book and chose Marta’s number, which he hadn’t called for about seven years. After a long wait he finally heard a ringing tone, and straight after that a soft, female voice.

‘Hello?’

‘Marta?’

‘No, it’s not Marta. Who’s that?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. This is Joachim. Is Marta there?’

‘I’ll just fetch my mum.’

Finally he heard his sister’s voice.

‘Is that really you?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing. I just wanted to come. For a few weeks. Is there a chance you can put me up?’

Marta did not reply immediately. Only after a few seconds, as if she had to have a good think about it, did she answer in a hushed tone: ‘But yes, of course, come over!’

The snow came like salvation. On the third day after the wet, grey holidays, large flakes of it began to fall on Jesionowa Street, coating the overflowing dustbins, cluttered little gardens and dog messes at the edge of the bald lawns. Joachim was delighted: the whiteness engulfed not just the world of things, but also spread itself like a soft mantle over his skittish, anxious thoughts. Even the places he had missed, and which immediately after his arrival had seemed to him hideous and unrecognisable, now took on a neutral softness thanks to the fluffy white snow. In fact, from the slightly bow-shaped street, built up on either side with angular terraced houses, he’d been unable to reconstruct the old road that passed the pond and led to the woodshed; but once a thick layer of snow was covering them, the ugly, identical houses no longer looked as awful. Even the mechanic’s workshop, which had been erected on the site of the old pond – a heavy concrete lump with a row of dirty glass bricks running under its flat roof – did not offend Joachim’s gaze as painfully now that it was covered by a white hat.

It went on snowing for four days. Then, along with a cold, icy wind from the east came a powerful frost. At last it all calmed down and, at a temperature of minus fifteen, the sunlight brought an austere brightness out of the wintry landscape.

Joachim went down to the cellar. Among the empty jars, cardboard boxes, broken furniture and piles of magazines he discovered a pair of old ice-hockey skates. They had probably belonged to Andrzej: his brother had the same shoe size as him. As he was perching on a small stool in the hall polishing the leather – dried stiff by time – Marta came out to him from the kitchen.

‘Are you angry?’ she asked, lighting a cigarette.

‘No, why should I be? But your son-in-law is an awful yob. Fancy sending away the piano tuner the day before Christmas! I’d have paid him, since I ordered him. Couldn’t you have called me down from upstairs?’

Marta took a small glass jar from her apron pocket and tapped ash into it.

‘And those comments,’ he calmly went on, without looking up from the boot, ‘those stupid allusions. So I’ve come here to get my money back, have I? Couldn’t you have told him I gave up my share in your favour long ago?’

‘I did tell him,’ said Marta shaking her head, ‘but you can see for yourself. He bosses everyone around. With four children.’

He wanted to add that in his view all four of them were dreadfully badly behaved and nasty, just like their father, or rather not brought up at all, but as soon as he looked at Marta, he went straight back to his interrupted job. There were tears in her eyes.

‘You have no idea how hard it is,’ she said, slowly stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Ever since Marian died, I’ve lost all my energy. Are you really going to skate on those?’ she asked, changing the subject. ‘Wait a moment, I’ll get you some woolly socks.’

As he walked down hill to the lake, Joachim felt depressed. He couldn’t shake off the stifling, unpleasant atmosphere in the house. He felt sorry for Marta, but he had no influence on her life. Everyone, including her daughter, seemed to ignore her. And exploit her. The retired librarian cooked, washed, ironed and did the shopping, but was shown absolutely no respect for it. She was like an old servant who is only spoken to in case of need. All these days she had avoided talking to him one-to-one. He’d noticed that as soon as her son-in-law appeared, she fell silent. And yet there was at least one thing they ought to clarify. For years on end, month in, month out, Joachim had sent her 150 US dollars. Nowadays it was an almost ridiculous sum, but under the communists, converted into the zlotys of the day, it was rather a lot. When he wrote to say he couldn’t support her any more, that he was having some temporary problems and that he hadn’t been able to pull himself together since Julia died, she hadn’t answered, nor had she written for several years. He realised she had her own troubles, but after all this time shouldn’t she at least – even just a word or two – say thank you?

Luckily the sun was shining, and the powdery snow was crunchy underfoot. Down by the lake Joachim spied out the abutment of the old landing-stage, where he sat down and quickly changed his boots. The wind, which had been raging the previous night, had formed deep drifts in some places, but there were also whole expanses of ice that were free of snow, as if specially cleared for him. He raced ahead at great speed, turned wide circles, spun large and small figures of eight, and felt a surge of happiness. As he was returning to the house, the violet shadows of early dusk were already being cast on the snow. The family dinner was over by now, but Marta was waiting for him specially, and they ate together, the two of them, in the kitchen.

‘Do you remember the old, abandoned barn on the hill?’ he asked.

She did. The three of them, including Andrzej, had crept up there on the dot of noon. The air was rippling in the heat as they ran round the wooden skeleton chanting: ‘Bare-bottomed man, come out of the barn! Bare-bottomed man, come out of the barn!’ As soon as something moved inside, they raced off all the way to the grave, shouting at the top of their voices.

Why exactly had they called that place the grave? Old Maudzis, who did his ploughing every spring with a horse harnessed to a ploughshare, was always finding disintegrating clay pots there. Then he would cross himself and shout against the wind: ‘By Potrimpe, by Patollu, by Verszajte divine, touch thou not this grave of mine!’ Andrzej did the funniest imitation of him. First he crossed himself just like the old man, then he stuck his bum out in his direction, puffed up his lips, and let out a monstrous, raucous fart. Maudzis would yell swear words and throw clumps of earth at them. Sometimes he threw a shard from a clay pot.

‘I’m paying him back now,’ said Marta about Andrzej. ‘We haven’t seen each other since Mother died. Do you correspond?’

Joachim said no. Zdzisław, the son-in-law, entered the kitchen. In a conciliatory way he set a decanter full of fruit liqueur and two glasses on the table.

‘Don’t be angry,’ he said, pouring a glass for himself and Joachim. ‘If I’d known you ordered the piano tuner, I’d even have paid him myself. But the man was standing in the doorway, I’d just dropped in from the workshop for a moment, and I thought he was some sort of conman, a Jehovah’s witness or something. So what happened, happened. But I’ve ordered him for tomorrow. At my expense.’

‘Well I never, sir!’ Somehow Joachim couldn’t get onto first-name terms with Marta’s son-in-law. ‘Why not pour a drink for your mother-in-law? Marta, will you have a drop with us?’

Without a word, Zdzisław fetched a third glass from the sideboard.

The cherry brandy was weak and too sweet.

When Joachim made a move to go up to his room, Marta grabbed him by the wrist.

‘Just tell me one thing. Why did you stop playing? Actually, why did you never start? I mean the stage, your career – well, why?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You were the only one of us who could have achieved something. Teachers, lessons. Just you. You went away, and nothing came of it! Nothing!’

‘Well, quite,’ said Joachim, kissing Marta on the cheek. ‘Nothing worked out for me either. But is that such a big sin?’

As he lay in bed, he thought about the nightmare Christmas Eve from a few days ago. The television switched on, the teenagers bickering, Marta forever on the go, and finally the piano that hadn’t been tuned for years, at which he had pointedly sat down and furiously played a carol that sounded dreadful.

Now he regretted it, like a schoolboy prank. But soon he was dreaming. Large snowflakes fell silently on the ash tree, under which his mother was arranging some gift boxes. Above the large, old tree a star was twinkling. The Pole star, not the Star of Bethlehem.

The piano tuner rang to say he was ill and could only come in a week at the soonest. Zdzisław tried to find another one, but with no result. Joachim was not in the least upset. Every day, taking advantage of the frosty, sunny weather, he went out skating. He toured ever more distant corners of the lake. In some places the new estates and housing districts came right down to the shore, wound around the bays and occupied the hills. He often passed speeding ice yachts, or nearer the buildings, boys playing hockey. One day, a single skater separated himself from one of these groups and, to Joachim’s amazement, started to keep him company. It was a very strange impression: the man was skating in parallel to him at a distance of about thirty metres, copying his every movement like in a mirror. When Joachim stopped abruptly, so did that fellow, and he slowed down in just the same way. When Joachim turned a figure of eight, that man turned one too. When he skated on just his left foot for a while, holding his right leg up like a crane, that fellow did the same.

‘I haven’t gone mad, have I?’ wondered Joachim, glancing into the bright blue sky (the man glanced skywards too). ‘He’s not my lookalike!’ Indeed, he didn’t look like Joachim at all; he was smaller, with a slight build, and he was dressed differently too. From afar he seemed to be wearing rather theatrical, old-fashioned clothes. But it was impossible to get any nearer: whenever Joachim moved towards him, the fellow immediately moved exactly the same distance away. When he did a low, rather clownish bow, the fellow bowed back in an identical manner.

‘Once I press him to the shore,’ the simple idea dawned on him, ‘he’ll have to go past me. Unless he flies off straight onto dry land. But then I’ll catch up with him…’

First he sped off towards Likusy, then he made an abrupt about-turn in the direction of the Old Manor, and finally built up incredible speed as he headed straight for the Podlesie shore. And it happened; with no space to escape into, right by the shore the stranger did in fact turn round and glide straight towards him. But it was an unnaturally rapid manoeuvre, devilish quick somehow; at the last second Joachim dodged, but not soon enough to slow down, so he crashed headlong into the shore, luckily landing in a deep snowdrift.

He even found the situation amusing.

Could I really have encountered the devil? Things like that only happen in stories, especially nineteenth-century, and best of all, Russian ones, he thought as he wiped his face, pleasantly cooled by the snow.

He had seen that figure somewhere before: in a black frock coat, with the white splash of a cravat, in a fanciful hat, and with those funny skates, which were strapped on to some flat-soled boots. But where and when?

The whole way home he kept looking behind him, but the stranger had vanished. As he was climbing the rise to the estate, he turned to look at the lake again, and then he caught sight of the fellow, standing on the ice a few dozen metres from the shore, bowing and politely tipping his hat.

‘I haven’t gone mad, have I?’ Joachim said to himself several times over, as he walked down Jesionowa Street. ‘Someone’s having a joke at my expense. Must be some local oddball. There always were plenty of oddballs around here.’

That evening Marta gave in to some painful memories. One single word was like a concentrate containing the ultimate cause of all their family disasters and failures: Wadąg. That was the name of their father’s favourite lake, where he had his own boat, where once – probably in 1966 – he caught a fifteen-kilo catfish, and where, in a small, wooden cottage on a headland, lived the pastor’s wife, widow of the Reverend Eberhard Jellinek.

‘What did he see in her?’ said Marta, pouting with contempt. ‘That Evangelical old witch! That hussy! That Protestant whore!’

Joachim tried to calm her down. Why get upset, why curse, when none of them were alive any more? What could it matter nowadays?

‘Maybe you don’t remember how much Mother suffered!’ – Marta was not inclined to forgive the pastor’s widow – ‘And how embarrassing it was when he died there, at her place, in that house, in their marital bed, apparently!’

Joachim had forgotten that detail. Whereas the sight of his father, always cheerful – as he drove up to the house on his powerful Zundapp motorbike after a night or two at Wadąg, as he walked across the yard with a net full of handsome pike and zander, still flapping – that sight brought back pleasant memories.

‘Well of course,’ said Marta, refusing to give up, ‘you men always prefer to remember nothing but the pleasant things. Hush it all up and sweep it under the carpet!’

Despite their difference of opinion, somehow their conversation was affectionate. Marta admitted that they had cut down the big ash tree illegally; it was well over a hundred years old. Marian, her husband, had started building the workshop adjoining the house.

‘There was no alternative,’ she said, suddenly downcast, ‘but you know, once it was gone, once they had taken away the chopped-up trunk and the branches, I felt it was a bad omen. And that came true. Marian never finished the building. Only our son-in-law, years later. And it’s not so great now either, there’s too much competition.’ Marta drank a sip of tea from a chipped cup with a gold stripe. ‘They’re all lowering their prices, as if they were deliberately conspiring against us.’

Joachim spent half the night sitting over his laptop, online. He searched for all sorts of different things, from images of the devil, through to the history of skating. But in vain. Only when he remembered a visit to the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, where he and Julia had once been, did it finally dawn on him. And how simple it proved to be! Sir Henry Raeburn’s painting of ‘The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch’, that ironical image of the skating minister, was exactly what he was looking for. The same black stockings, the same jaunty hat, cravat, flat-soled boots and strapped-on skates. But after a brief moment of satisfaction, he suddenly felt troubled: was it really possible, in this remote corner of the world, on Lake Ukiel, for someone to have come up with such an insane and yet sophisticated idea? To make himself look like the Reverend Robert Walker he must have obtained the right costume, the boots and the old-fashioned skates. And why was he following Joachim, of all people? Perhaps, he rationalised, this oddball had simply headed onto the lake and picked out the first skater he met to play all those mirror-image tricks on him. And if so, Joachim decided, he really must catch up with the joker and have a chat with him: how had he come up with this idea? Did he only know the image of the skating Reverend Walker from a reproduction? In spite of these probable, if eccentric theories, or rather attempts at an explanation, Joachim felt rising anxiety. No, it wasn’t normal. To meet someone on the ice at his home lake who made himself look like a figure from a little known Scottish painting was something bordering on mental aberration.

Next day, on the dot of noon, he set out onto the ice. He passed bays and inlets, and ran across some wrinkled patches of snow. Nowhere did he meet the bizarre eccentric. At one of the jetties he ate a sandwich and sipped from a thermos of hot tea. He was tired by now. Fine snow began to fall from clouds, which were drawing in from Gutkowo. Before he knew it, only minutes later, he found himself in the middle of a blizzard. He had lost his sense of direction: he might just as well be skating towards home now as in the opposite direction, towards the Old Manor.

‘That’s all I needed,’ he thought, ‘I’ll keep going round in circles until dusk, and then they’ll find me on the shore, or somewhere in the middle, frozen to death like a soldier retreating from Moscow…’

He wasn’t afraid of death, but the thought that it could come right now, when he had lost his way out in the open, was very annoying. It was snowing more and more heavily, and he was probably turning circles. He slowed down, and heard someone else putting on the brakes beside him.

‘Reverend Walker,’ he shouted. ‘Please stop fooling around! Where are we?’

He was answered by laughter. Ringing, female laughter.

Straight towards him, out of the white mist came Julia.

She was wearing a down jacket and a woollen hat, the ones they had bought for their trip to Patagonia.

‘That’s impossible,’ said Joachim, ‘That’s contrary, that’s entirely contrary, not just to my notions – it’s contrary to the laws of physics!’

‘Are you sure?’ laughed Julia, looking him straight in the eyes. ‘I’ve waited so long for you.’

‘So I’ve died,’ he sighed. ‘At last. So this is what it’s like?’

Julia took off a glove and touched Joachim’s cheek. Her hand was warm and smelled of almond lotion. He remembered that smell. He kissed her fingers.

‘Can you explain it to me?’ he asked.

‘There’s a special point,’ she said, putting on the glove, ‘where all the laws of physics are broken. The crooked lines of time run together. It’s like a sort of loop.’

‘You mean to say there’s a point like that just here?’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said, putting a sweet, which she had taken from her bag, into her mouth. ‘Just here. There are very few of these places. Very few indeed. But you silly boy, you refused to come over here. I had to work pretty hard at it. First the sweet flag outside the Geological Museum.’

‘So that was you? In those sandals that didn’t match?’

‘Let’s say it was.’

‘And that oddball in the hat and the frock coat?’

‘Do you remember us looking at him in the museum? You liked him so much. I thought when you saw him you’d get the whole idea.’

‘So where are we going?’ He took Julia by the hand. ‘Where to now?’

‘That depends on you. You can go back to your sister’s house. She’s waiting for you. Or we can go off and turn a new circle together. It will take a while,’ she said, laughing. ‘Here, time is nothing but the image of eternity set in motion.’

They headed off together, holding hands like a pair of high-school kids at the ice rink.

‘Can you see the past from here?’ he asked.

‘It’s not that simple,’ said Julia, frowning. ‘Here there is no past and no future. You’ll soon understand.’

They emerged from the blizzard. All around the lake he saw the rising, distant chains of soaring mountains. A little later they passed a man hunched over a hole in the ice. He was wearing a hat with earflaps, and a quilted jacket thrown over his shoulders. He was just pulling a small fish out of the frozen depths. Next to him, a frying pan was already heating on a lighted Primus stove. On the ice behind the fisherman stood a rusty old humpback Warszawa, completely disembowelled.

‘Look,’ he said to Julia, ‘that must be Nowacki. I forgot to ask Marta if he used to frequent our house by the pond. Perhaps I’ll ask him.’ Joachim slowed down.

‘No,’ said Julia, pulling him forwards, ‘it’s not worth it.’

Ukiel-dukiel, crooked crook-iel, hummed the happy Joachim.

And then they both hummed the little rhyme together.