Cold Sea Stories

Afterword: An Interview with Paweł Huelle by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

ALJ: Although each one is independent, the Cold Sea Stories have some common themes and a shared atmosphere. What inspired you to write them, and how intentional are the echoes that resound through the collection?

PH: I wrote them around the age of fifty, in the realisation that I am a man of the Baltic – all the stories are set in my own native region, Gdańsk and the surrounding coast, except for ‘Öland’ which is set on a Swedish island, but still in the Baltic Sea. And that means I belong to the culture of the north, which is sad, melancholy, nostalgic, bleak; there is not much light – hence several of my characters search for the light, and ultimately disappear into it. This is the culture of herrings, potatoes and vodka, not wine, and this is the place that has shaped me, like it or not.

This collection of stories is a sort of synthesis of my life here, and they feature some of my obsessions, such as the cyclical nature of time, and where life starts and ends. And the significance of great books as an authority in human life, from religious books including the Bible – which has such meaning for the Mennonites in ‘Mimesis’; mystical, ideal books that may never actually have existed – such as the Book of Light brought by the mysterious stranger in ‘Öland’; or the toy shop catalogue that was so immensely significant for the hero of ‘Franz Carl Weber’ in his childhood.

ALJ: ‘Mimesis’ is an example of how stories fill a gap in the history of your region. Who exactly were the Mennonites?

PH: They were a religious minority who were forced to escape the Netherlands when the Spanish Catholics persecuted them in the sixteenth century. They came to Poland because it was a very tolerant country in the days of King Sigismund August Jagiełło, who gave them land on the Vistula delta. Many of them also settled in Russia, but left after 1917 when their farms were expropriated by the communists, and then moved to Poland - in the story, the elder Harmensoon mentions the Russian villages they have been forced to leave. They were very good entrepreneurs, and also experts at reclaiming the land from the sea, creating polders and so on. Not all the Dutch who came to this area were Mennonites, but many of them were. When fanatical Catholics asked the king why he tolerated advocates of other religions, he said: ‘I cannot and will not be the king of your consciences.’

Mennonite culture was destroyed by the Germans in the Second World War and finished off by the communists. According to their faith, the Mennonites were not allowed to make oaths to anyone, so the orthodox ones who were pacifists and refused to join any army were sent to labour camps and murdered. Some of them did join the army as medical auxiliaries. In the communist era the only survivors went west with the Germans who left what is now western Poland. Since first reading about the Mennonites, and since seeing the film Witness, which is about the Amish people in America, whose origins are the same – I have wondered how these people’s way of life was possible. Could you really live outside the mainstream of society, and create a utopian, noble existence? It can’t really work, but its history is interesting, and it is inspiring to me that they lived near here. They are People of the Book, like Orthodox Jews or Muslims.

There are several villages that they left behind, some entirely abandoned. It is a dramatic sight to walk along a village street where there are as many as twenty houses that have been empty for more than fifty years. You hear ghosts there, voices from the past, and that was my inspiration for the story.

ALJ: How much of your own biography is concealed in the stories? I know that as a student you were involved with Solidarity, but to what extent is ‘The Bicycle Express’ autobiographical?

PH: ‘The Bicycle Express’ is almost entirely autobiographical. It describes my part in the revolution of 1980, when there was a general strike. I really did have a heavy, ‘armoured’ Ukraina bicycle, made in the Soviet Union. There was no public transport, so bikes were selling like hot cakes, and I got the last one in the shop. Then for two weeks I rode around with my friend Andrzej, who had a racing bike, delivering anti-communist Solidarity leaflets. We would collect them from the shipyard gates each evening - more than ten thousand leaflets - and then tour all the factories in the entire Tri-City of Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot, distributing them.

August 1980 was the first Polish rebellion against the communist regime, when Solidarity came into being. The atmosphere was euphoric, because it was the beginning of the end of communism. That summer was my first experience of revolutionary activity; I was only about twenty, and it was a fabulous feeling that I remember well. The clamp down came in December 1981, when martial law was imposed, and was followed by the dismal 1980s. But nothing could ever be the same again.

Although I have changed Lucjan’s real name, his story is true too. He was my father’s cousin, who came back from the Gulag in 1957, when everyone thought he had died at Katyń(where the Soviets massacred tens of thousands of Polish officers and intelligentsia) after being arrested by the Soviets in Wilno (then in Poland, but now Vilnius, in Lithuania) in 1939. It’s true that on his return he saw me as a baby, and was pleased to find that in spite of what had happened to him, life in Poland was carrying on. He was never willing to tell us any of the details of his fate in the Soviet Gulag, but he spent eighteen years in Magadan and other Siberian prison camps. Before the war he had worked as a translator for the Ministry of Affairs – he was a genius who knew eighteen languages perfectly. But the only way to survive the forced labour, felling trees in the Siberian forest on an inadequate diet, was to drink spirits, and it turned him into an alcoholic. After he came back he went blind, and read books in Braille. He was extremely erudite, a great and sensitive person.

ALJ: Is the story of the burning pirate ship in ‘Depka and Rzepka’ your invention, or is that a real legend?

PH: I first heard that story from my father when I was about five years old. My father was a ship mechanic, and he really did repair small fishing boats – he heard it from the locals, so it does come from traditional Kashubian folklore. I’m fascinated by the Kashubians – they are the people who have always lived in this part of the world, throughout history, regardless of which other nations took control of it or fought over it. The Poles, Germans, Russians, Dutch and French have all had an influence on Gdańsk and the region, and as the Free City of Danzig it was an international place, but through all these historical eras the ethnic locals have always been the Kashubians.

Bishop Sedenza is a real historical character, and the story of his captivity is recorded in the mediaeval chronicles. Of course there really were pirates on these waters too. The Hel peninsula is the long spit of land that sticks out into the Bay of Gdańsk, a place where ships were often wrecked on the sandbanks. And it’s also true that I was sent to the fishing village of Hel to buy fish for Christmas (the Polish traditional meal is carp, or at least fish of some kind). There was often nothing to buy in the shops, so you had to go and get it from the fishermen.

ALJ: ‘Öland’ is an unusual story for you, because although it is set on the Baltic, it happens on an island off the Swedish coast, not anywhere in northern Poland.

PH: I spent three weeks on the island of Öland, and I found the landscape mystical. At the very centre of the island you can hear the roar of the sea coming from every direction. It’s quite empty, with no people, and there are some mysterious stone circles, tall grass, and the wind. But no woods or trees. There I listened to the wind, the grass and the sea roaring – there were no other sounds. I wanted to write a story connected to an apocryphal legend about the Three Kings, which says that after their journey to Bethlehem two of them went home peacefully, but the third one wandered for centuries, unable to find his way back.

ALJ: ‘Doctor Cheng’ seems the most mystical story of all – why the Chinese theme, and why did you feature the 9/11 tragedy here?

PH: The 9/11 disaster stands as a caesura that divides our era in two. Meanwhile, the hero is searching for the ghost of his dead wife, whose death marks the division in his life.

The Chinese house in the Wrzeszcz district of Gdańsk is based on a real house, on Szymanowski Street, built in the Secession era and stylised to look Chinese. The I-Ching, the Chinese fortune-telling book, is seen by some to have a bad influence on Chinese culture, as the prophecies it contains are considered fatalistic. The book the man remembers receiving as a Christmas present in childhood is the Polish classic children’s novel, Mr Inkblot’s Academy by Jan Brzechwa, in which one of the characters is a magical Chinese doctor called Pai Chi Wo.

ALJ: ‘The Fifteen Glasses of Gendarme Polanke’ has a different atmosphere from the other stories, is set in the early twentieth-century and is the only story not to feature a large and important book, be it a Bible or a toyshop catalogue. Why is it so different?

PH: I originally wrote it twenty years ago as the start of a novel about Kashubia, which I never finished. As a child I was taken on holiday to a Kashubian village, where there was no electricity – it was like in the nineteenth century, people still used oil lamps and candles, and were self-sufficient, making their own bread, butter and sausages. They went to the city by horse for three things only – salt, oil for their lamps, and nails. They made everything else themselves. There was no radio, and no TV, and in the evenings people drank weak beer and told incredible stories for hours on end. It was wonderful for me as a child, I have a mythical memory of it, and I still dream about it. Kashubia has changed now, but the people there still speak their own language, Kashubian – I have a passive knowledge of it.

I might still write that novel one day, so I won’t say what it is about, but the woman who is rescued has a very big secret. Polaske is the universal policeman who represents all historical regimes in this part of the world. In this story he is a Kashubian policeman before Polish independence, before 1918. Then in the inter-war period, when Poland was a republic again, he becomes Polański, a Polish policeman. During the Second World War and the Nazi occupation he is Polaske, a German, Nazi policeman. Then after the war, in communist People’s Poland he is called Polski, and he’s a Polish communist policeman.

ALJ: Where did the idea for ‘Abulafia’ come from, apart from reflecting your interest in the history of the region surrounding Gdańsk?

PH: It’s odd, but I don’t really know why I wrote it – it just came into my mind one day, as a combination of various themes. The Junkers were the Pomeranian, German gentry, and von Kotwitz would have been a typical surname for a Junker. I used the same name for a character in my novel Castorp, set in the same era. ‘Abulafia’ is about how a person goes to the very edge of existence, in search of something that is ill-defined: the utopian dream of the language of the Garden of Eden, spoken by all mankind before the Tower of Babel.

ALJ: What gave you the idea for ‘The Flight into Egypt’? Why did you choose to write about refugees from Chechnya?

PH: A few years after the first war in Chechnya (which happened in the mid-1990s) I saw a photograph of a beautiful Chechen woman, taken on the border between Poland and Russia, and I found it very moving. She looked like the Virgin Mary in an icon; she had a look of great suffering but also of pride. It was in all the main daily papers. She must have been very young, nineteen or twenty, and she was waiting to be let into Poland as a refugee. It made an impression on me, and triggered the idea for this story. I talked to some Poles who were working with Chechens and knew about the refugee camps, so that aspect of the story is true – it is based on the real fate of the Chechens, who have suffered a genocide, all the worse for the fact that the world has turned a blind eye to it.

ALJ: ‘Franz Carl Weber’ seems to combine realism with fantasy – which elements are taken from life and which are pure invention?

PH: It is to some extent autobiographical, in that my father really did bring a Swiss railway set home for me and my brother from abroad. For children growing up in austere, communist Poland, it was like having our own helicopter, or a flying carpet – a beautiful gift like a memory of a world that no longer existed. In the mid-1990s I went to Zurich for a literary event, and I found the toy shop, Franz Carl Weber, which is still there. I went inside and saw all the toys in the world, except for electric railways, because things have changed now.

ALJ: I know Lake Ukiel is a real place, about 130 kilometres south east from Gdańsk, in the Mazurian lakelands. But it seems a strange name for a Polish lake.

PH: Yes, it is near Olsztyń, and still appears on the maps with its Polish name, Lake Krzywe (‘krzywe’ means ‘crooked’), as well as the name Lake Ukiel – meaning ‘elbow’ in the language of the original natives of this region, the Old Prussians, or Baltic Prussians, who were wiped out by the Crusaders and disappeared as a race. They were northern Europe’s equivalent of the North American Indians, and all that is left of them are a few place names. They feature quite strongly in early Polish history. In 997 Poland’s patron saint, St Wojciech, was sent by King Bolesław I to convert the Old Prussians, who killed and (according to one version) ate him.

ALJ: You return to some of the themes of ‘Mimesis’ in ‘First Summer’, where the Bible found by the main character is clearly meant to be the one hidden by Harmensoon, the Mennonite preacher in ‘Mimesis’. What was your thinking here?

PH: I wrote ‘Mimesis’ much earlier than the other stories, and ‘First Summer’ last of all, so together the two stories have a circular structure. When the hero of ‘First Summer’ finds the Bible, he closes a circle that began in ‘Mimesis’. That book can never be as important to today’s modern civilisation as it was in the past. Once it was what mattered most to earlier generations, but things have changed, and it no longer has the same significance.