Cold Sea Stories

The Flight into Egypt

AS THE WOMAN with the child in her arms alighted from the bus and walked towards the border guards’ cabin, a sudden gust of wind raised her headscarf. At that moment on the television screen he saw the beautiful, delicate face of a young mother, maybe about twenty years old. She walked the last few metres to the border at a rapid, determined pace, slightly bowed, avoiding the television cameras. But the cameramen had sensed a good story. In the procession of some fifty people, she was the only one carrying a child, which was bundled in a blanket. She briefly handed it to the officer so she could fetch her documents from under her coat – a passport and a loose sheet of paper, printed and stamped. Just then, for a few seconds, all the lenses caught her glance. There was something ineluctable in it: a deathly exhaustion and – only just managing to shine out from under it, nurtured for weeks on end for this very moment – a small ray of hope.

A day later, when all the newspapers printed a portrait of the woman in the headscarf on their front pages, he noticed another thing too: even though it showed uncertainty, her expression had enormous strength of pride in it. The article described the refugee camp in Ingushetia, a journey lasting several months and several paragraphs across various borders, at the end of which they got out of a Ukrainian bus and quite literally walked – because they had no transport – into Poland. Anyone who had been through all that should not have to regard the immigration officer as if he were God, ready to frustrate the entire ghastly ordeal at a stroke by sending them back. And indeed, she didn’t – instead her eyes were saying, ‘I wouldn’t go back now even if you drew a gun on me.’ But of course there was no question of drawing a gun; the officer merely checked her documents – maybe taking a bit long over it, but not long enough to stop the refugees from reaching their destination that same day, towards evening, a former Soviet army training centre thirty kilometres from the capital.

Over the next couple of hours, as he took his usual daily walk, now and then he was conscious of the fact that his thoughts were centred on the Chechen woman. She intrigued him. Once in the tram, he tried to imagine her voice. Perhaps in contrast to her facial features, which were slightly sharp, her voice was soft, almost velvety, and surely only when she sang one of those ancient mountain songs with the other women did it sound like a blade cutting the air in two. On the dunes, as he gazed at the forlorn greyness of the November sea, he also wondered what their first meeting would be like. He was sure they would speak in Russian.

‘Zdrastvuytye,’ he practised greeting her, bowing gallantly as he swept aside some sand and dried leaves with the tip of his shoe, ‘menya zavoot Andrei Stanislavovich, a vam? – My name is Andrei Stanislavovich – what’s yours?’ But perhaps, he thought, as he stood on the very edge of the shore, it’s correct to ask ‘a vas?’, not ‘a vam?’ He spent much longer speculating about her name, but finally for lack of even the slightest knowledge of any Caucasian language, his efforts ended in failure. Only once he was in the local shop for his daily groceries did he sober up a bit. ‘My God, ancient mountain songs – what on earth am I thinking? What if she lived in a tower block in Grozny, loves disco music, and her voice has gone hoarse from smoking and drinking?’

But once he had cut her picture out of the newspaper, that sort of doubt seemed absurd. He knew about people’s faces, and could tell how far the look in someone’s eyes conceals the goodness or badness in their soul. With some difficulty he searched a storage space in the ceiling for some brushes, tubes of paint and primer he hadn’t used for years. He spent a good quarter of an hour in the cellar fetching out an easel and a dusty canvas stretcher from under a pile of junk. As the lift was out of order again, he carried them up the stairs to his seventh-floor flat. To have a good spot by the window, he moved the sofa bed and the television. Finally he fixed up the stretcher and primed the canvas, carefully, taking his time, and concentrating extremely hard, as if this simple activity were more than just a technical preparation. Then he did his first sketches on some sheets of wrapping paper. The oily smell of the primer soon pervaded the little flat, bringing him an unexpected throng of memories. The academy he no longer attended, the studio he no longer possessed, the wife he had left, friends he no longer saw, exhibitions he had long since forgotten – it all came back in a chaotic stream of sounds and images. He had no regrets, not even those dreadful mornings at the Actors’ Club when, with savage hangovers and not a penny between them, he and a few friends would emerge onto the grey street, only to bump into an army patrol just around the corner. His present life, solitary and well-ordered, was no escape. If the desert had stretched away just beyond the city boundaries, he would have settled right there, to have a daily view of nothing but endless plains that seemed to converge on the horizon. What still bothered him, when he finally set aside the sketches a few hours later, were not the memories, but the fact that after fifteen years he was going to start painting again.

By the time he finished the painting four months later, it was spring. He left the keys to his flat with the neighbour, Mrs Z, and drove his clapped-out old Beetle to the lakeside cottage he had inherited from his parents. Never fully finished and rather neglected, it stood amid the pampered homes of the new generation like a relic from the mid-1970’s when First Secretary Gierek seemed to have achieved an economic miracle. He was surprised to find that this winter the thieves hadn’t stolen anything. As he was lighting the stove, he came upon an old newspaper from several years ago. He noticed a picture of Limonov, the Russian writer, firing off a round from a machine gun somewhere down into the streets of Sarajevo under siege. Beside him three grinning Serb riflemen were taking a break. He looked at the flames consuming all four men and the range of hills behind them. Then he unloaded his stretchers, paper and easel from the roof rack. He had no particular plans except to study the light – reflected off the surface of the lake, diffused in cobwebs of juniper, or spilling across the broad stripe of a clearing. He spent days on end sitting on the jetty, lying in a drifting boat or wandering about the sandy tracks in the ancient forest. Then he feverishly painted his canvases, as if in a short time the whole scene would sink into darkness, for ever and ever. It was a long time since he had felt as happy. Sometimes, at moments when he least expected it, he could feel the gaze of the woman in the headscarf on him. And that was when he managed to capture the light in his pictures. He was grateful to her – without her, he was sure he would never have recovered on his own.

In mid September when he rang Mrs Z’s doorbell, she was beside herself with joy.

‘At last!’ she said, ‘I was beginning to think something had happened to you!’

‘But I wrote postcards,’ he said, smiling as he picked up his keys, ‘about two a month.’

‘Who sends cards from such a short distance these days? Couldn’t you have called from the, er, mobile? Or dropped by once a week?’

But she didn’t wait for an answer. Over a cup of tea she had lots to tell him. Did he remember the gardener’s house? Their housing blocks were built on an old nursery garden, and that house, or rather brick hut, had been left there for the workmen. Later on it had been a greengrocer’s, and finally a hang-out for tramps. ‘Now we’ve got immigrants in there!’ she said as she passed him the jam.

He didn’t show enormous interest as Mrs Z added a few more details: the housing cooperative had given the old ruin to the city, the city had paid for the roof to be repaired, and now there were two people living there, a man and a woman.

‘Do you know, the people from our blocks had a collection for them. Father Sieniewicz made an appeal, and at once a used washing machine was found for them, a TV, some furniture and a pushchair for their child. I didn’t have much to give,’ she sighed, ‘so I sorted out a few dishes from the kitchen and that was it!’

Back in his own flat he went straight out onto the balcony, leaned his elbows against the railing and gazed at the port canal. Stripped of their paint and eaten away by rust, tugboats, pushboats, scows, barges, motorboats and cutters, tightly clustered in the same spot as usual, were waiting for their final voyage. The shipyard dock, where they were cut into sheet metal, was visible beyond a forest of cranes on the other side of the water. In the middle of the canal two tugboats were leading a Norwegian freighter out to sea. Closer by, between the blocks, a gang of boys was playing football. Above a grove of pines, which by some odd stroke of fortune had not been cut down, the orange sphere of the sun was pumping an incredible amount of light onto this whole composition. The former gardener’s cottage would have looked abandoned, if not for a clothes line hung between two withered apple trees: shirts, sheets, blouses, trousers, tablecloths and underwear announced that normal life was proceeding along its usual course.

Next day, as he passed that way, he was quite surprised to see a man hanging a wooden sign on the concrete wall, reading: ‘Furnitures. Carpentary renew and produceon.’ He tore a page from his notebook and wrote on it in block letters: ‘CARPENTRY. FURNITURE MANUFACTURE AND REPAIR’, then handed it to the somewhat surprised author, who was still up on the ladder. He might have been about forty-five, with a quiet, rather sad smile that did not leave his face.

‘Spasiba,’ he thanked him in Russian once back on the ground. ‘Zakuritye – you smoke?’

The cigarette made his head spin. He very rarely smoked nowadays, only occasionally with a drink, but the carpenter’s offer was so natural that he couldn’t refuse. Somehow the conversation did not take off, so they stood side by side and smoked, like during a break at work. Only when the door of the gardener’s cottage opened and the woman came out with the child in her arms, did the man say: ‘Maya zhena – my wife!’

And as she passed them by on her way to the tiny garden, where two sunflowers and a bed of dwarf beans were growing, in perfect Polish but with a slightly lilting Russian accent, she said: ‘Good day, sir! Isn’t it a lovely bright day?’

‘Yes,’ he said in total amazement, ‘it’s lovely.’

He watched as she gently spread a blanket on the grass, sat the child on it and then started picking beans, gathering them into a shopping bag.

As if she had only got out of the Ukrainian bus yesterday, he detected a shadow of anxiety in her furtive gaze. But wasn’t he just ascribing his own state of mind to her? That was what he thought, and didn’t feel too pleased with himself. He barely nodded to say goodbye, and went on his way. The fact that he hadn’t seen the man, either then, in the television shot, or next day among all those press photos, gave him an excuse to concoct various versions of their story. She might have arrived in Poland with the child at a point when he was already here, or vice versa – perhaps she had come first, and he only got here later. There was another possibility too, which for some unknown reason, intrigued him the most: twice her age, the man was not the child’s father and hadn’t known her earlier at all before. They’d met at the camp. She’d made a choice, knowing by instinct that it would be easier as a threesome, at least to begin with. But could he ask any direct questions? And was it really appropriate to do so? A few weeks later he saw all three of them from his balcony, getting out of a square-nosed Wartburg. Holding the child in a sling, the woman was taking the shopping out of the boot. The man was untying some neatly cut planks from the roof rack. Thanks to the old East German limousine, life in the gardener’s cottage seemed to have picked up speed. More and more often he heard the sound of an electric saw, the squeal of a drill and the knocking of a hammer coming from over there.

When he and Mrs Z invited them to supper at her flat, they did not appear to be particularly excited. They brought a bottle of Hungarian wine and a basket of peaches. During the second course the baby started crying and griping. Once his mother had fed him, he finally fell asleep, laid on the sofa in front of the television. Mrs Z showed them photographs of her children, grandchildren and late husband, who had sailed on tramp steamers for over thirty years. Aslan turned out to have been a driver and supplies officer for a firm producing mineral water. When after the second war, in Putin’s time, neither the firm, nor his home, nor his relatives still existed, he went into the mountains. That was all he said. Almira told how they had escaped the bombardment of their village, by fleeing into a valley and up a stream. It was impossible to carry the wounded, because the riflemen, who could see them from their jeep a hundred metres above the narrow road, were just waiting for the chance. They were surrounded at the pass. Boys over the age of fifteen were separated off to be searched. Two who had been found with firearms were led away into a cleft and shot. Then the colonel made a speech: those who went back to the village were guaranteed safety. Those who crossed the border into Ingushetia might get killed, because there were lots of bandits everywhere. They had reached the overcrowded camp beyond the pass next day, but no one had given them a friendly welcome. They had no tents, water, food, sleeping bags or cigarettes. A French doctor with a Japanese assistant handed out the last of the aspirins. She had been lucky, because when a helicopter carrying food landed on the campground, the Frenchman had insisted that she and the child be taken to a hospital. The pilot didn’t want to know, but after a terrible fuss he finally gave way. That was the last time she had ever seen the people from her village. He noticed Mrs Z discreetly wiping away a tear. Aslan, who must have known the story, blew a stream of tobacco smoke towards the ceiling. Then there was a silence. As they were to drink coffee in his flat next door, where he had promised the guests something special too, it was a convenient excuse to change the atmosphere along with the place. However, that did not prove possible.

When he unveiled the portrait of the woman in the headscarf, Aslan flared up in anger. Taking no notice of his host, he went up to the painting several times, turned to Almira and rapidly uttered a string of curt remarks, getting louder and louder, full of evident outrage. She tried to calm him down and reason with him, but this infuriated him even more. The violent exchange of remarks in their own language went on for about a minute, then Aslan took her by the hand and led her back to Mrs Z’s flat, where quite unaware of all this, Mrs Z was standing in the doorway with a baking tin full of cake. They collected the child and, without bothering to call the lift, began to make their way down the stairs.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Almira as they left, averting her gaze. ‘Izvinitye.’

He stayed on at Mrs Z’s, where they sat up for ages over a bottle of brandy and some tea. If he was cross, it was only with himself. There was something he had failed to foresee, with disastrous results. He did not bear them a grudge, but he would have felt better about it if he had been told, even in unpleasant terms, exactly what his mistake had been.

‘Perhaps it’s Islam,’ said Mrs Z, nodding hesitantly towards the portrait, ‘because you’ve painted her almost like the Madonna. But why is there that desert in the background? I’d have painted over the sand and left it at that!’

He shook his head. ‘He’s not a fundamentalist. I don’t think he’s religious at all, it’s not that.’

But as the days went by no other explanation came to light. As he passed the cottage on his way back from the shops, the two of them were just on their way out to the car.

‘Good day,’ he said.

‘Good day,’ they replied almost simultaneously, and she added: ‘How are you? Everything all right?’

He nodded to say it was. Then he kept thinking to himself: ‘Well I never, it’s as if nothing had happened at all! Not the slightest ripple!’

When at the beginning of November the first snow fell, some unknown miscreants threw stones and smashed all the windows in the gardener’s cottage. With the help of several of the neighbours, he collected some money and dropped by to deliver his donation.

‘You see, he has gone to the glazier’s in the car,’ she said, standing in the doorway. ‘Please come in.’

But he refused, so she held him by the arm and said that time, with the painting, there had been a misunderstanding, that many times before now she and her husband had wanted to apologise to him, but they didn’t really know how to do it, so now, if he would like to come by that afternoon once they had put in the glass, they would be happy to hang the painting above the chest of drawers.

He came back an hour later, when he saw the old Wartburg and the glazier’s van from the balcony. They split the work three ways: two windows at the front, two at the back facing the copse, and two small ones in the side extension. The glazier took the money and drove away. He leaned the painting in its plastic wrapping against the chest of drawers and tried to leave too, but it would have been wrong to refuse a cup of tea. Behind a partition made of boards there was an entire workshop. The area where they were sitting served as the kitchen and bedroom. In a cubby-hole by the toilet stood the washing machine.

‘Aslan was so angry,’ she said at last, ‘because he thought I had met you earlier. But where? I couldn’t explain. Only when I showed him the picture, the one from the newspaper, did he stop. That day, when I was here on the border, he was still in Chechnya.’

They shook hands as they said goodbye.

Almost a month later, when the first Molotov cocktail landed on the roof of the gardener’s cottage, probably everyone on the estate was still asleep. Only the glow of the fire and the fire engine sirens awoke the people living in the blocks. Lots of them looked out of their windows. Several, like him, ran to the scene, but it was already too late. The woman and her child were sitting in a police car. Aslan, who at the final moment had managed to drive the Wartburg to a safe distance, was now walking towards his wife, in the company of a fireman and a policeman. Soon after, once the firemen had finished putting out the burning ruins, the police car drove away.

He called the local police station from home and said he wanted to talk to the victims of the fire. He was asked for his name and whether he had any connection with the case. He explained that he could offer them accommodation for a while. Then he was asked if he had seen anything suspicious, and if so, would he like to make a statement. He left his phone number and asked for it to be passed on to the fire victims. But by dawn no one had called, nor after. He heard on the local radio that an intensive investigation was under way, aiming to identify a potential ring of suspected perpetrators. The county administration had assigned the victims a safe place to live, at one of the holiday centres in the north.

As he was coming home from the shops next day, he could see the old Wartburg from some distance. The car was standing in front of what was left of the gardener’s cottage, its two-stroke engine whirring away. Aslan was poking about in the charred remains with a long pole, and next to him, with her head wrapped in a thick scarf, stood Almira. It was snowing. As he approached, she nodded to him, and soon after she got into the back seat of the car, beside the child. Aslan hadn’t found anything. He threw aside the pole and went behind the cubby-hole, from where he brought out a small box of tools.

‘I’ve got this left,’ he said. ‘As I was running for the car I threw it into the snow. Well,’ he offered his hand, ‘as you say here now, Happy Christmas. Uyezhayem – we are going away, i budyet kharasho – and it will be all right.’ He slammed the door and drove off slowly, so the wheels wouldn’t spin in the snow.

As he walked along that same path in the spring, a bulldozer was clearing the remains of the rubble. In a heap of rubbish, between a broken brick and a coil of wire he noticed a bit of reddish-brown material. He took it in his fingers and crumbled off a crust of ash. He hadn’t any doubt: the fibres rubbed across his hand were from a scrap of the canvas he had primed more than a year ago.

‘You won’t find any gold here like the Yids left behind,’ said one of the workmen. Two others chimed in with laughter.

But he wasn’t listening to them. The picture of the man and the woman with the child, driving alone in an old East German Wartburg across the white desert would haunt him for many months to come.