Cold Sea Stories

First Summer

IT HAD ALL fallen through. Two days before she was due to arrive, Sabina wrote to say that her daughter’s state of health had badly deteriorated. Instead of Poland she was flying to Boston to take care of her grandsons. She was very sorry. All the more since it was she who had had the idea for them to meet up. ‘I don’t know how to apologise,’ she added at the end. ‘You must be disappointed and angry, but think of me too – you can go there whenever you like, but I may have lost my only chance.’

He wasn’t angry or disappointed. He wrote a short, sympathetic reply, and as he was switching off the computer he merely wondered where the business card with the number of the Stokrotka boarding house had got to. He would have to call and cancel his reservation for two rooms. At last he found the small yellow card right by his desk, on the reference shelf, stuck to the spine of Herder’s Lexicon. When he heard the receptionist’s ringing voice in the receiver, without a second thought he changed the order to just one room. As he drove out of the city the next day, he felt as if Sabina had made the decision for him. In fact he had no desire for a weekend alone, at the close of summer, in a boarding house found via the internet. He decided to take lots of pictures and send the best ones to Sabina. The thought that he would photograph the road between the dunes – which she loved so much – first at dawn, then at sunset, suddenly seemed a perfectly adequate reason for this trip.

But he couldn’t remember this path. Perhaps at this particular spot the dune ran an entirely different way; in any case, he had to go a lot further before he finally found a way down onto the beach. The sun was already very low, there was a cool breeze blowing, and he only spotted one couple lying in a hollow out of the wind. He had seen them earlier, emerging from a brand new Mitsubishi at the boarding house car park: a well-known film director and his youthful boyfriend, who looked like a hitchhiker picked up on the highway. Now they were waving at him. He had no desire to chat, and gave their lair a wide berth, barely raising a hand in greeting. They shouted something, but their words were drowned by the roar of the waves. As he walked up to the water’s edge, he did not turn round in their direction again. He plunged his feet into the water, feeling the pleasant relief of not thinking about anything, but it was short-lived. His mobile phone rang, and on the screen he recognised his wife’s name. Joanna was already home – she had come back from her mother’s earlier than planned. As ever he had forgotten to take out the rubbish, and he hadn’t locked the balcony door. Were they already drunk? There’s no point trying to deny it, she joked – that’s what those old school reunions are for…

As he returned to the boarding house in total darkness, he felt ashamed of the lie, but the thought of what he would have had to say to his wife if she had found him at home was even worse. Somehow he couldn’t come up with a single credible reason why you might cancel a school reunion, even now, when he had had the time to think. A few dozen metres ahead of him he could hear voices: the director’s baritone mixed with the boy’s falsetto. Now and then they stopped and burst into laughter. He stopped too, not wanting to catch up with them. In the cool, still air between the dunes he could smell distinct trails of cigar smoke and a pungent cologne. Sabina had written the first letter a year ago, when by chance she had found his email address. He had replied at once. Then they had exchanged photos too, as if wanting to make sure that after twenty-four years they would be able to recognise each other. On a city street they would probably have passed each other by: she had grown thinner, he had put on weight. Her once chestnut hair with a copper sheen was now hidden by black dye. Not much of his hair was left, but now he had a double chin covered by a closely trimmed beard. She had lost her husband in a car crash. He was married for the second time. When they cycled along the dirt road twenty-five years ago, breathing in the damp scent of the stubble fields, they were completely different people from now. He had thought about it with no regret, but rather curiosity, as he had imagined tonight’s dinner, after which each would go to their own separate room. On the other hand, after all these years he couldn’t imagine their goodnight kiss, even if it were only on the cheek, in the corridor, like something from another time, another world, another story.

The couple in front of him vanished through the lighted doorway of the boarding house. In the car park where, since dusk, more than a dozen cars had managed to accumulate, there was still lively activity going on. Two Land Rovers had just driven up with yellow, Dutch registration plates, one from Breda and the other apparently from Utrecht. He did not know their language well, but it was obvious that both drivers, who were the first to jump out of the cars, were arguing about the route they had taken: it was meant to have been one way, but they had gone another and got lost. A third and fourth man who suddenly appeared in the headlights, were trying to make peace, and then two others, who got out last, started urging them to unload the luggage. There was an incredibly large amount of it. By their very nature, the suitcases, holdalls, bags and boxes brought the feuding couple together and toned down the Dutch hullabaloo, but only to a certain degree: as they carried it all into the vestibule, the Dutchmen continued to shout at each other in guttural syllables, jostling each other and dropping their parcels; finally they moved the cars, which wasn’t easy, as several more vehicles had arrived at the car park by now.

As he entered the dining hall, he was no longer in any doubt that the entire boarding house had been hired for a private party. The waiters were not taking any orders, just supervising a buffet table and drinks. He did find it amusing; above a stage hung a sign saying ‘Gay European Union for Poland’, and there were colourful objects hanging from lines stretched from wall to wall, as for a New Year’s Eve ball. Most of them were beach inflatables, representing male members of gargantuan size blooming out of a scrotum, but he also noticed some imitation baroque angels among them, with coiled willies like small horns and also some blow-up plastic effigies of rock stars, among which he recognised the immortal face of Freddie Mercury. Only a while later, as he was eating a sandwich, did he spot one of the Dutchmen: now he was wearing a vicar’s uniform. Holding a glass of wine, he was having a lively conversation with someone in German.

‘Is there going to be a service?’ he asked the man standing next to him.

‘Don’t you know?’ wondered the nice, rather tubby man. ‘Pastor van der Ecke is conducting a wedding ceremony today. It’s the first one in Poland. Not legally binding,’ he giggled, ‘because for us it’s not legal, but a wedding’s a wedding. The couple have just gone to get changed. And what about you?’ His interlocutor looked at him keenly. ‘Are you alone?’

‘Alone,’ he repeated unsurely, then immediately added, ‘Come here on my own? No, I’m with Sabine.’

‘Sabine? I don’t know him.’

‘It’s a sort of nickname.’

The other man lost interest and wandered off to the buffet table. Mentally he was already composing a letter to Sabina, which should start with the words: ‘The main thing is to be in the right place at the right time’. But once he had waited a quarter of an hour, roaming the crowded room with glass in hand and being picked out every now and then by someone’s inquiring look, he felt the sort of weariness that evolves into irritation. There was clearly a long time to go until the ceremony, and ultimately, did he have to watch it? He went over to the bar and bought a small bottle of whisky, some nuts and some mineral water. As she handed him the change the lovely barmaid, dressed in a double-breasted man’s suit, put a packet of condoms on the counter.

‘On special offer from the association,’ she explained, ‘scented ones!’

Without a word he shoved the Gay Union gift into his pocket, and thus equipped, headed upstairs to his room.

He was never so happy. They rode along country roads, with no fixed plan, just following their noses. He was on a Soviet Ukraina and Sabina was on an East German ladies’ bike. His was new, while hers carried the evidence of numerous modifications, and every few kilometres the chain fell off. At state-farm shops they bought bread, margarine, tinned fish and tomatoes. Sometimes, when they spotted a bottle of Bulgarian wine on a dusty shelf, they took a box of biscuits to go with it. In his pannier there was a tent, and Sabina was carrying two sleeping bags in hers. But they didn’t always feel like putting up the poles, spreading out the canvas and sticking in the pegs. They spent their first night under the open sky by the campfire, on a bend in the river. On the other side of the Vistula, where the ferry took them, they slept in an enormous haystack. Their exams were behind them. He had won a place at university, and Sabina had got into the medical academy. Through four years of high school they had taken no notice of each other. Only at the graduation ball, when he asked her to dance for the third time, had they shyly kissed, their lips hardly touching. Now, when they were together, Sabina had an extremely gentle way of cooling his desire; ‘Not yet,’ she would say, when he tried to part her thighs; ‘Not yet,’ she would whisper, as she returned his kisses.

Past the second or third house with a portico, right next to a stinking concrete cowshed from the 1950s, beside a pond covered in duckweed, they came upon a Mennonite cemetery. He caught a glimpse of a different Sabina. As if in a trance, she walked from gravestone to gravestone, touching the crumbling, moss-coated slabs. ‘Were they Jews?’ she asked him timidly, ‘or maybe Germans?’

As the two bikes slowly rode alongside each other, down a canal, he had a great deal to tell her. She was amazed that the people who created polders here out of the marshes of the delta were governed by the Bible, even in the pettiest matters, such as waistcoat hooks and eyes. And why had they travelled all the way here from Holland? She wasn’t in the least bit interested in royal privileges, or in rents and taxes. But when he spoke about religious persecution in the Netherlands, she wanted to know if the Catholics cited the Bible as an authority too.

‘And what happened to them all in the end?’ she asked once they had ridden further, across a wooden drawbridge. He didn’t have a ready answer to every question. But Sabina was enchanted anyway as if, in the geometric lines of poplar trees, willows and fields bordered by canals, she had suddenly caught a glimpse of a completely different world. ‘The People of the Book,’ she said, raising her head from the handlebars to look at him, ‘could you call them that?’

Then they rode all the way to the dunes and the pine trees, pitched their tent in a clearing next to an abandoned house, swam in the sea or lay about on the sand, feeling the flow of time idly slow down. Far beyond the village there was a holiday park, and occasionally a couple of beachgoers walked past their den but, for the greater part of the day, they were completely alone.

‘This place was waiting for us from the start,’ said Sabina.

The first time, they made love on the beach in full sunlight, straight after bathing.

As he kissed her wet skin he knew this fragrance and this light belonged to the summer for ever more, as did the roar of the sea, and the clouds like ships with fantastically stacked-up sides. The path they took back to the clearing was coated in a soft carpet of moss. Sabina loved the feel of it, and watched as the imprint of her foot disappeared far more slowly here than on the wet sand along the seashore.

‘I could go on like this for all eternity,’ she laughed. ‘If only the summer would last for ever.’

But, like a tree stump etched by the heat of the sun, August was just starting to sink under its own weight, down into the dark well of time, whence in a short while no light would return. The nights were very cold. One time, wrapped in a blanket, they sat out on the beach until dawn without seeing any more falling stars. In the distance, banks of purple clouds were drawing in from the direction of the Soviet border. A thick fog shrouded them on the path between the dunes. He was walking only a few metres behind Sabina, guided by the sound of her soft footsteps. Around a corner, where the track climbed sharply uphill, he sensed he was alone. ‘Sabina?’ he called in a hushed tone, ‘Are you there?’

He began to fret when he didn’t receive an answer. He called again, but only a startled owl squawked from the nearby pines. About fifteen seconds went by, as he stood there amidst the silence entirely veiled in white. Finally he heard her footsteps behind him. ‘Did you get lost?’ he asked. ‘Did you go off the track?’ But as she gave no reply, they walked on, side by side now, to the clearing. The fog was dispersing. Someone had dragged their things about in the grass, knocked over the tent poles and overturned the interlocked bikes, although it looked as if nothing had been taken. They had just finished tightening the guy ropes when Sabina whispered: ‘There, in the window – look!’

He reassured her. As the setting sun cast light on the window frame, it caused a sloping shadow to fall inside the empty house, and this looked like a person.

‘It’s moving,’ she said, grabbing his hand. ‘We’d better go!’

Finally he persuaded her they should go in there together. In a large kitchen area, where the bare remains of a tile stove were still standing, they cautiously walked among swirling pillars of dust, picked out of the grey gloom by the slanting shaft of light falling through the window. They passed from one room to the next, hesitantly, like uninvited guests. There were no household items or even the remains of furniture anywhere. The sun, wind, rain and frost must have been causing devastation here through the holes in the roof and the empty eye sockets of the windows since long ago. Decaying floor boards, fungus on the roof beams and weeds growing in the middle of a side room – all this they saw, as well as evidence of casual visitors. There were rags and broken bottles lying about everywhere, and the place stank of urine and old excrement.

‘All these days we’ve been a stone’s throw from here,’ said Sabina. ‘What if someone was spying on us? How awful.’

‘No one has been in here for ages,’ he said, pointing at their own footprints in the thick layer of dust and sand from the beach. ‘Look.’

But Sabina did not want to see any more. Through an empty door frame she went out onto the porch, ran down to the meadow and back to the tent. It was only the crash of rotten floorboards that stopped her in her tracks. As he was coming down from the porch, he had fallen almost up to his neck into something that must once have been a small cellar. He had ripped his trousers, banged his knee and grazed his elbows. But as he scrambled out of the hole, he felt a sort of package under his feet, in a niche in the brick foundation wall. Soon he had extracted a metal box, wrapped in a long-decayed piece of cloth.

‘Leave it,’ she asked. ‘It looks like a doll’s coffin. Are you that curious? Do you know how many microbes there are on those rags?’

‘More like a booby trap,’ he joked, separating the fabric from the tin lid with a knife. ‘Adek’s farewell kiss.’

‘Adek?’ she asked uncertainly.

He used two fingers to give himself a toothbrush moustache, and they both laughed.

A day later, on the return journey, as they were riding along the canals, weirs and state-farm stubble fields again, it was the only thing they could talk about.

Why had someone taken so much trouble to hide a badly scorched Bible? From the Russians? To whom did it belong? Was Harmensoon the owner of this copy, for that was the name – unless it was a surname – written in fine calligraphic script which they had read on a yellowed slip of paper placed among the pages of the Book of Daniel? Printed in Königsberg in the year of Our Lord 1794 - it must have had previous owners. Why had it been hidden under the steps? As they were waiting for the ferry across the Vistula, he explained to Sabina that this Harmensoon could not be a pastor if he belonged to one of the local chapels.

‘They did not recognise the clergy,’ he added, as the steel platform cut across the slow current of the river, ‘and elected their own chiefs.’

She said he should write something about it. A love story. So that the half-charred Bible had some direct connection with it. And also that he should describe the road down to the sea they liked so much. He shrugged his shoulders at the idea. He had no intention of writing anything. But he decided to keep the Book for ever. Just like the August light and the scent of her hair, it belonged to that summer.

During the night his sleep was interrupted several times by the thudding of the disco. The oomph – oomph – oomph of the bass line literally made the walls of the boarding house shake as it boomed away among the pine trees like a series of explosions. Now and then a car alarm went off. Then the upper floor came alive too. He could hear doors slamming, people running about the corridors and calling each other, loud laughter, and the shatter of breaking glass. Eventually he took two strong pills and sank into a heavy, ridiculous mist of abruptly ending dialogues, alien faces and unfamiliar places. He woke up late, before eleven. He ate breakfast in the tidied-up, rather empty dining hall. Yesterday’s decorations were lying in a heap in the corner: with the air let out, the plastic toys looked even worse than the day before. The tired waiter had not had time to ventilate the restaurant properly; the stale air smelled of alcohol, sweat, incense and marijuana, clearly smoked quite intensively. If he had been here with Sabina, he’d have felt awful. At the reception desk he announced that he was leaving and paid his bill. He threw his bag in the boot of the car, took his camera and set off on foot to the sea. But what was he going to photograph? The boarding house stood on the site of the abandoned house, and was not interesting in itself. The meadow where they had pitched the tent that time had disappeared under the car park, a site for a barbecue and a concrete sports area. Along the access road from the village the old trees had been cut down and, on the tiny, shredded allotments, the building blocks of summer cottages had been erected. The path he had followed yesterday and twenty-five years ago looked no better in the harsh sunlight. The benches and lamps placed at the head of it had been vandalised. There were mountains of litter pouring out of the rubbish bin, and a swarm of wasps was buzzing around the remains of fruit and empty juice bottles. Completely trodden away in the middle, the moss only grew on the sides of the dunes now. In its place, to prevent the rainwater from washing away the sand, slabs of concrete had been set in here and there, just like the ones at the parade ground he remembered from military training.

The way down to the beach brought him an even bigger surprise. Yesterday’s company from the Stokrotka, perhaps in its entirety, was gathered around the pastor, gearing up to make a home movie. The sight of so many naked men – hugging their own bodies, flexing their muscles or just as willingly revealing their sagging bellies, private parts and buttocks – among whom the director was diving about with a camera, was rather a shock for the other beachgoers. Dressed in bathing costumes or swimming trunks, they were bypassing the large semicircle of nudists as quickly as they could, most of them with eyes averted. He did not take any photos. He walked almost a kilometre along the shore to the next way down to the beach and went back up it, through the woods to the road, then along the road to the boarding house car park.

Behind the wheel, as he passed one holiday home after another, he thought about Sabina again. After her first year of studies she had gone to spend the vacation with her family in Chicago and stayed there. It wasn’t even a break-up: they hadn’t had any serious conversations, or exchanged any letters. He hadn’t suffered because of her. But when he and his first wife had separated after several years of marriage, he had come upon that Bible while packing up his things, and had felt a stab of pain in his heart, perhaps for the first time in his life grasping the meaning of the word ‘irrevocable’. Now he felt deep sorrow, with weariness stacked on top: he was tired of himself, of life, and of this entirely unnecessary outing to a place that didn’t actually exist any more. At the ferry the queue of cars was so long that he turned around and drove about twelve kilometres up river to the bridge. Half way across it, despite the sign forbidding it, he stopped the car, got out and opened the boot. He took the Mennonite Bible out of his travelling bag, threw it into the water and watched it change into a smaller and smaller, almost invisible dot. The drivers who were forced to go around his car hooted their horns furiously.

At home he did not open the computer until after supper. Sabina had written to inform him of her daughter’s death. Now that she would have to take care of her grandsons, she could not even dream of coming. ‘I hope,’ she wrote, ‘at least you are able to be happy. Apparently only two or three moments in life determine that, the ones that give light. The rest is meaningless.’ He closed his mailbox. He didn’t like such categorical statements. Before sleep Joanna asked him why he had come back from the school reunion early. After a short silence he replied that a gay rally was being held at the boarding house and a row had erupted over the reservation, as a result of which they had decided to cut their stay short. As he was falling asleep, he thought he could see Pastor van der Ecke finding some soggy pages of the Bible on the seashore, putting on his glasses, reading a few verses in the language of his forefathers and bursting into loud, ever louder laughter, which neither the wind nor the roar of the sea could stifle.