Flights

ASH WEDNESDAY FEAST

‘You can call me Eryk,’ he would announce in lieu of a greeting as he walked into the little bar, which at that time of year was heated only by the wood in the fireplace, and everyone would smile in a friendly way to him, some even beckoning him over with a wave that simply meant ‘pull up a seat’. All things considered he was a good companion and – in spite of his eccentricities – was well-liked. To begin with, before he’d had enough to drink, he would sit in the corner looking gruff, at a remove from the warmth of the fireplace. He could afford to do so – he had a powerful build, was resistant to cold, could keep himself warm.

‘An island,’ he’d start, seeming to be sighing to himself but loud enough so that the others would hear, provoking them as he ordered his first giant beer. ‘What a miserable state of mind. Asshole of the world.’

The others at the bar didn’t really understand him, it seeemed, but they would chuckle knowingly.

‘Hey, Eryk, when are you going on your whale hunt?’ they would holler, their faces flushed from the fire and alcohol.

In response Eryk would curse baroquely, pure poetry, like no one else – this was a part of the nightly ritual. For every day went ahead like a ferry on its cables, from one shore to the other, passing on its route those same red buoys tasked with breaking up the water’s monopoly on vastness, making it measurable, and in so doing, giving a false impression of control.

After another beer Eryk would be ready to sit with the others, and he usually did so, although lately as he drank his mood tended to turn sour. He’d sit there grimacing, sarcastic. He no longer spun his yarns of distant seas – if you had known him long enough you knew he never repeated any tales, or at least they differed from one another significantly in the details. But now, more and more often he simply attacked the others rather than telling any stories. Angry Eryk.

There were also evenings when he’d fall into a kind of trance, and at these times he’d become unbearable. More than once Hendrik, the owner of the small bar, had had to intervene.

‘Consider yourselves enlisted,’ Eryk would shout, pointing his finger at each person in the room in turn. ‘To the last man. And I am to set sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea! Oh, life! ‘tis in an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge – as wild, untutored things are forced to feed.’

Hendrik would amiably pull him aside and give him a friendly pat on the back, while the younger clientele would guffaw at his strange speech.

‘Give it a rest, Eryk. You don’t want to make trouble, do you?’ the older ones, who knew him well, would say to try to calm him down, but Eryk would not allow himself to be calmed down.

‘Talk not to me of blasphemy. I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.’

When this happened the only thing to be done was pray he didn’t offend some visiting guest, since the locals didn’t take offence at Eryk. What could you expect of him, now that he looked out at the bar as though through a milky plastic curtain; his absent gaze revealed that he was travelling the seas within himself now, his staysail up. Now the only thing that could be done was to mercifully send him home.

‘Listen, then, hard-hearted man,’ Eryk kept babbling, planting his finger on somebody’s chest, ‘I’m talking to you, too.’

‘Come on, Eryk. Let’s go.’

‘Ye’ve shipped, have you? Names down on the papers? Well, well, what’s signed, is signed; and what’s to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won’t be, after all…’ he mumbled and went back from the door to the counter, demanding a last round, ‘a draught of a draught,’ as he said, even though no one knew what that meant.

He’d continue making a fuss until someone seized the perfect moment to tug him out by the tail of his uniform and sit him back down until his taxi came.

But he wasn’t always so belligerent. More often than not he left before he reached this state, since he still had to walk four kilometres – and he found this march home, he noted, most loathsome. The route was monotonous, along a road that ran between old pastures overgrown with weeds and looming dwarf pines. Sometimes, when the night was clear, he could make out in the distance the outline of a windmill, long since inactive, serving only as a backdrop for tourists as they photographed themselves and one another.

The heating would kick in about an hour before he got back – he had it set that way to save on electricity – so clouds of cold – damp, soaked through with sea salt – still hovered in the darkness of both rooms.

He sustained himself on the same single basic dish, the only thing he hadn’t tired of yet: thin-sliced potatoes, interlaid with strips of bacon and onion, cooked in a cast-iron pot. Sprinkled with marjoram and pepper, liberally salted. The perfect meal, nutritional proportions perfectly preserved: fats, carbohydrates, starch, protein and Vitamin C. With dinner he’d turn on the television, but then, since he hated TV most of all, he’d always open a bottle of vodka in the end and drink it dry, before finally going to sleep.

What a godforsaken place, this island. Shoved up into the north as into a dark drawer; windy and wet. For some reason people still lived here and had no intention whatsoever of moving to bright warm cities. They just hunkered down in their tiny wooden homes arranged along a road that rose with each new asphalt coating, condemning them to eternal diminishment.

You can all go down along the shoulder of that road, towards the small port, which is made up of several seedy buildings, a plastic hut that sells the ferry tickets and a lousy marina – largely abandoned at this time of year. Perhaps in the summer a few yachts will come in bearing some eccentric tourists who have tired of all the racket around southern waters, rivieras, azures and sweltering beaches. And then people like us – restless people, ever ravenous for new adventures, backpacks brimming with cheap ramen – might wind up in this sad place by accident. What will you see here? The very edge of the world, where time, reflected off the empty waterfront, turns around disappointed and heads towards land and pitilessly leaves this place to its perpetual enduring. For how is 1946 different from 1976 here, or 1976 from 2000?

Eryk got marooned here after an array of adventures and misadventures. In the beginning, long ago, he fled his country, one of those bland, flat communist lands, and as a young immigrant got hired to work on a whaling ship. At that time, he had only a few English words under his belt, intermittent pinpoints between ‘yes’ and ‘no’, just exactly enough to answer the simple grunts the guys on the ship would exchange among themselves. ‘Take’, ‘pull’, ‘cut’. ‘Fast’ and ‘hard’. ‘Catch’ and ‘tie’. ‘Fuck’. It sufficed at first. And it sufficed, too, to change his name to a simple, widely known one: Eryk. To get rid of that dragging corpse that no one knew how to pronounce correctly. And to toss into the ocean the folders of papers, school certificates, diplomas, transcripts from additional studies and records of vaccines – those would never come in handy here, if anything they’d just humiliate the other sailors, whose entire résumés consisted in a few long voyages and some escapades in portside pubs.

Life aboard a ship is immersion not in salt water, not in the rains over the northern seas, nor even in sunshine, but rather in adrenaline. There is no time to think, no meditation over spilt milk. The country Eryk came from was far away and not particularly seafaring, having only sparing access to the ocean. Its ports were an embarrassment. It favoured towns situated on safe rivers bound by bridges. Eryk didn’t miss it at all, greatly preferring it here in the north. He’d thought he would sail for a few years, save up some money, then build himself a wooden home, marry a flaxen-haired Emma or Ingrid with whom he would have children, for whom he’d make floats for float fishing, with whom he’d clean sea trout. Someday he would write his memoirs, when his adventures had arranged themselves into a suitably attractive package. He couldn’t say how it had happened that the years had raced by as they had, taking some shortcut through his life – lightweight, fleeting, leaving no traces. At most they left a record on his body, his liver in particular. But that was later. In the beginning, after his first voyage, it so happened that he ended up in jail – for more than three years – when the evil captain framed his whole crew for smuggling cigarettes and a large packet of cocaine. But even in prison in a distant land Eryk stayed in the dominion of the ocean and whales. In the prison library there was only one book in English, left no doubt by some other prisoner years earlier. It was an old edition, from the turn of the century, with brittle pages, yellowed, bearing the traces of daily life.

And so for over three years (which in any case was not so severe a sentence, given that the laws in effect at a remove of just a hundred nautical miles for the same offence was death by hanging) Eryk secured himself free language lessons in advanced English, a course in literature and whaling and psychology and travel all in a single textbook. A good method, not inviting of distractions. In just five months he was able to recite the adventures of Ishmael in passages he knew by heart, and to speak in the voice of Ahab, which brought him special pleasure, for this was the manner of expression most organic to Eryk, fitting him like comfortable clothing; who cared if it was strange and old-fashioned. And what a stroke of luck that such a book had fallen into the hands of such a person in such a place. A phenomenon known to travel psychologists by the name of synchronicity, evidence of the world making sense. Evidence that throughout this beautiful chaos threads of meaning spread in every direction, networks of strange logic, all bearing, if one were to believe in God, the contorted imprints of His fingers. Which is how Eryk saw it.

Soon, then, in that distant, exotic prison, where in the evenings it was hard to breathe because of the tropical humidity, where anxiety and longing rankled the mind, Eryk would immerse himself in reading, becoming a bookmark, being happy. In fact, he would not have made it through his time in prison without that novel. His cellmates – smugglers, too – often heard him reading aloud and quickly succumbed to the charm of the whalers’ adventures. It would not have been at all surprising if they had tried, after being released, to educate themselves further in the history of whaling, writing dissertations on harpoons and nautical equipment. The most gifted among them might have attained a higher degree of initiation: a specialization in clinical psychology in the field of perseverance in the face of any obstacle. And so the Sailor from the Azores, the Portuguese Sailor and Eryk began to speak to one another in a prison slang all their own. They even managed to discuss in this manner the little Asian guards:

‘By Jove! For isn’t he a jolly fellow!’ would cry the Sailor from the Azores when, for example, one of the guards would smuggle a pack of damp cigarettes into their cell.

‘Upon my word, I am of more or less the same sentiment. Let us give him our blessing.’

This was good for them, since each newly imprisoned cellmate understood little at the start, becoming their foreigner, necessary for them to be able to conduct any semblance of a social life.

Each of them had his favourite lines, which he’d read aloud each evening, the others finishing his sentences in a chorus.

But the main topics of their conversations in their increasingly refined language were the sea, their travels, and getting offshore, entrusting themselves to the water, which – as they determined after several days’ worth of discussion worthy of the Pre-Socratics – was the most important element on earth. They were already planning the routes they’d take to sail home, readying themselves for the views they’d see en route, composing in their minds the telegrams they’d send their families. How would they earn a living? They argued about the best ideas, but they always ended up circling back around to the same theme, having caught (though they didn’t know it yet) the fever, been infected with it; deeply unsettled by the mere possibility of the existence of something like a white whale. They knew there were still countries that fished for whales, and although that work was less romantic than how Ishmael described it, it was hard to come up with anything better given their current circumstances. They’d heard Japan needed men for whaling, and switching from cod and herring to whales was like moving from crafts to fine art…

Thirty-eight months was long enough to work out the details of their future lives; to minutely, point by point, discuss them with their colleagues. There were no serious disputes.

‘Merchant service be damned. I’ll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the merchant service to me again. Flukes! Man, what makes thee want to go a-whaling, eh?’ roared Eryk.

‘What have you seen of the world?’ the Portuguese sailor would cry.

‘The Baltic is no stranger to me, and I have travelled the length and breadth of the North Sea. I know the currents of the Atlantic like my own veins…’

‘You are very certain of yourself, my dear fellow.’

They had to say something to each other.

Ten years – that’s how long it took Eryk to get home again – and no doubt he had it better in this sense than his comrades. He took a circuitous route back, through peripheral seas, the narrowest straights and widest bays. Just when estuaries started to blend into the open waters of the seas, just when he’d enlist for a ship heading home, suddenly some new opportunity would arise, more often than not in the exact opposite direction, and if he did hesitate for a moment, he would usually come to the conclusion that the truest argument was an old one – the Earth is round, let us not be too attached, then, to directions. And this was understandable – to someone from nowhere, every movement turns into a return, since nothing exerts such a draw as emptiness.

During those years he worked under the flags of Panama, Australia and Indonesia. On a Chilean freighter he transported Japanese cars to the United States. On a South African tanker he survived a wreck off the coast of Liberia. He transported workers from Java to Singapore. He got hepatitis and was hospitalized in Cairo. After having his arm broken in a drunken brawl in Marseille, he quit drinking for a few months, only to then drink himself into a stupor in Malaga and break the other arm.

We won’t dwell on the details. The twists and turns of Eryk’s fates on the high seas are not what interest us here. Let us skip to the moment he finally came ashore on that island he later came to hate, getting hired to work the small, primitive ferry that ran between the islands. Working that job – humiliating, he called it – Eryk lost weight and became a little paler. The dark tan he’d had before disappeared forever from his face, leaving behind dark splotches. His hair greyed at his temples, and wrinkles made his gaze more penetrating, sharper. After this initiation, which was a powerful blow to his pride, he got transferred to a route with more responsibility – now his ferry connected island to mainland, and no cable imprisoned him. His wide deck could accommodate sixteen people’s cars. The job provided him a steady wage, health insurance and a peaceful life on that northern island.

He’d get up every morning, wash his face with cold water and arrange his grey beard with his fingers. Then he’d put on the dark green uniform of the United Northern Ferry Company and go on foot to the port where he had docked the previous evening. Shortly thereafter someone from the ground service, Robert or Adam, would open the gate, and straight away the first cars would get in line to drive up the iron ramp and onto Eryk’s ferry. There was always enough room for everyone, and it also happened sometimes that the ferry was empty, clear, light as a daydream. Then Eryk would sit in his cabin, suspended on high in his glassed-in stork’s nest, and that other shore would seem so close. Wouldn’t it be better to build a bridge than make people go back and forth and pester him this way?

It was a question of states of mind. Each day he could choose between two. One was sensitive, quick to take offense – he would be sure he wasn’t as good as anybody, that he was lacking what everyone else had, that he was a deviant of some sort who didn’t even know, for God’s sake, what was wrong with him. He’d feel isolated, lonely, like a child sent to his room looking out the window at his peers as they played happily. That fate had intended him for a small supporting role in these chaotic human peregrinations across land and sea, and now, since settling on this island, this episode had turned out to be a minor one, as well.

The other state of mind strengthened his conviction that actually he was better, unique, exceptional. That he was the only one who sensed and understood the truth, that only he was capable of being exceptional. And he sometimes managed to spend a number of hours in this elevated self-esteem, and even days, when he felt, let’s say, somehow happy. But then it faded, like intoxication. And by way of a hangover there appeared the terrifying thought that in order to seem like a person worthy of respect, he had to continually fake it in these two ways and that – worst of all – someday the truth would come out; it would be revealed that he was no one.

He was sitting in his glassed-in cabin observing the loading of the first morning ferry. He saw people he’d known a long time from the little town. Here was the R. family in their grey Opel – the father worked at the port, the mother in the library, while the children, a boy and a girl, were still in school. Here were four teenagers, school kids, who would take their bus on the other side. And here was Eliza, the nursery school teacher, with her little daughter, whom she was of course taking with her to work. The little girl’s father had disappeared all of a sudden two years earlier and had never been heard from since. Eryk suspected he must be fishing for whales somewhere. Here was old S., who had something wrong with his kidneys; twice a week he had to take the ferry to go to the hospital for dialysis. He and his wife were trying to sell their little dwarf-like wooden house and move closer to the hospital, but for some reason or other they hadn’t managed to do so. The truck from Organic Foods was going to stock up on products on the mainland. Some black foreign car, probably guests of the Director. The yellow van that belonged to the brothers Alfred and Albrecht, two stubborn old bachelors who continued to raise sheep on the island. A couple of cyclists, numb with cold. The delivery vehicle from the car shop – must have been going for parts. Edwin waved to Eryk. You could recognize him on any island of the world – he always wore checkered shirts lined with artificial fur. Eryk knew them all, even the ones he was seeing for the first time – he knew why they had come here, and knowing the aim of a journey, you know enough about a person.

There were three reasons for coming to the island. Reason One, because you simply lived here; Reason Two, because you were a guest of the Director; and Reason Three, because of the windmill, to have a picture of yourself taken with it in the background.

The ferry took twenty minutes. In that time some of the passengers got out of their cars and lit a cigarette, even though they weren’t allowed to. Others stood at the railing and just looked out at the water, until their rocking vision finally hooked onto the other shore. Soon, excited by the smells of the mainland, with all their incredibly important tasks and obligations, they would disappear onto the little streets by the waterfront, ebbing away like the ninth wave that reaches furthest and soaks into the ground and never returns to sea. Others would come to take their places. The veterinarian in his elegant pick-up; he earned his living by spaying and neutering cats. A field trip to investigate the flora and fauna of the island for a class on the natural world. A delivery of bananas and kiwis. A television crew coming to interview the Director. The G. family, returning from a visit to the grandmother. Another suntanned couple of cyclists would replace the first.

During loading and unloading, which took almost an hour, Eryk would smoke a few cigarettes and try hard not to give in to despair. Then the ferry would return to the island. And so it would go eight times, with a two-hour break for lunch, which Eryk always ate in the same little place. One of three places around there. After work he’d buy potatoes, onions and bacon. Cigarettes and alcohol. He’d try not to drink until noon, but by the sixth trip he would already be smashed.

Straight lines – how humiliating they were. How they destroyed the mind. What perfidious geometry, how it makes us into idiots – there and back, a parody of travel. Going forth merely in order to return again. Speeding up just to put on the brakes.

So it was, too, with Eryk’s marriage, which had been brief and turbulent. Maria, a divorcée, worked in a shop and had a young son who went to a boarding school in the city. Eryk moved in with her, into her nice, cozy little house with its enormous television. She had a slim figure, with somewhat generous contours, light-coloured skin and tight-fitting leggings. She soon learned to serve his potatoes with bacon and started adding marjoram and nutmeg to them, while he threw himself into chopping wood for their fireplace on his days off. It lasted a year and a half; after a while the never-ending noise of the television started to wear him down, its gaudy illumination, the rag by the mat where you had to leave your muddy boots, and that nutmeg. After he got drunk a few times and swore at her like a sailor, finger raised, she threw him out of the house, and shortly thereafter she moved to the mainland, to be near her son.

Today was 1 March, Ash Wednesday. When he opened his eyes, Eryk saw the grey light and the sleet falling, which would leave blurred tracks on the windows. He thought of his old name. He’d almost forgotten it. He said it out loud, and it sounded as though he were being called by some stranger. He felt the familiar pressure in his head after yesterday’s drinking.

Because it must be noted that Chinese people have two names: one given by their families, used to summon the child, scold and punish him, but also the basis for affectionate nicknames. But when the child goes out into the world, he or she takes another name, an outside name, a world name, a personage-name. Donned like a uniform, a surplice, a prison jumpsuit, an outfit for a formal cocktail. This outside name is useful and easy to remember. From here on out it will corroborate its person. Best if it’s worldly, universal, recognizable to everyone; down with the locality of our names. Down with Oldrzich, Sung Yin, Kazimierz and Jyrek; down with Blażen, Liu and Milica. Long live Michael, Judith, Anna, Jan, Samuel and Eryk!

But today Eryk answered the call of his old name: I’m here.

No one knew that name, so I won’t say it, either.

The man named Eryk donned his green uniform with the logo of the United Northern Ferry Company, ran his fingers through his beard, turned off the heating in his little dwarf-like house and set out along the asphalt. Then, as he waited in his aquarium for the ferry to be loaded and the sun to finally come out, he had a can of beer and lit his first cigarette. He waved from on high to Eliza and her little daughter, friendly, as though wanting to reward them for the fact that today they wouldn’t make it to nursery school.

After the ferry had left the shore and was already halfway between the two marinas, suddenly it stalled, then set out for open sea.

Not everyone realized what was happening at first. Some, so accustomed to the routine of the straight line, looked at the disappearing shore indifferently, numbed, which would no doubt have confirmed Eryk’s drunken theories about the fact that travelling by ferry flattens out the brain’s coils. Others realized only after a long while.

‘Eryk, what are you doing? Turn around right now,’ Alfred shouted at him, and Eliza joined in with her high-pitched, squeaky voice: ‘People will be late for work…’

Alfred tried to get up to where Eryk was, but Eryk had thought to close the gate and lock his cabin.

From above he saw everyone simultaneously take out their phones and place calls, talking indignantly into empty space, gesticulating anxiously. He could imagine what they were saying. That they’d be late to work, that they wanted to know who would cover the punitive damages in question, that drunks like Eryk shouldn’t be allowed, that they always knew things would end up like this, that they don’t have enough jobs for their own people and here they were, hiring immigrants; who knew how they learned the language so well, but in any case there was always…

Eryk couldn’t have cared less. He was pleased to see that after some time they settled down and looked out at the sky getting lighter and distributing beautiful beams of light down between the clouds. Only one thing worried him – the light blue coat of Eliza’s daughter, which (as every sea-wolf knows) was a bad omen aboard a ship. But Eryk closed his eyes and soon forgot about it. He headed for the ocean and went down to his passengers with a box of fizzy drinks and chocolate bars that he’d prepared for this occasion long ago. These refreshments did them a world of good, he saw: the kids quietened down as they gazed at the shore of the island fading into the distance, and the adults evinced increasing interest in their journey.

‘Where are we headed?’ asked the younger of the brothers T., matter-of-factly, then burping from the fizzy drink.

‘How long before we reach the open seas?’ Eliza, the nursery school teacher, wanted to know.

‘Did you make sure you have enough fuel?’ asked old S., the one with the kidney problems.

Or at least it seemed to him that they were saying these things, rather than others. He tried not to look at them and not to care. He’d already steadied his eyes on the line of the horizon, its reflection slicing straight across his pupils, the top half lighter from the sky, the bottom half darker, from the water. And his passengers were calm, now, too. They’d pressed their caps snug onto their heads, pulled their scarves around their necks a little tighter. It might be said they sailed in silence, until their peace was pierced by the helicopter’s rumble and the wail of police motorboats.

‘There are things that happen of their own accord, journeys that begin and end in dreams. And there are travellers who simply answer the chaotic call of their own unease. One of these stands before you now…’ So Eryk’s defence embarked upon his short-lived trial. Unfortunately, not even this moving defence could keep our hero from another prison sentence. I hope spending another spell inside worked out to his advantage. Life for someone like Eryk is made of inevitable highs and lows, similar to the rhythmic rocking of the waves and the sea’s inexplicable ebbs and flows.

But this is no longer our concern.

If, however, at the conclusion of this story someone wanted to ask me, wanting to dispel any last doubts regarding truth and nothing but the truth, if I were seized by the arm and shaken impatiently and shouted at: ‘Tell me, I beg you, if in keeping with your innermost conviction this story and its contents are completely true. Kindly forgive me if I press too much.’ I would forgive them, and I’d respond: ‘So help me God, I swear on my honour that the story I have told you, ladies and gentlemen, is in its contents and general terms true. I know this for a fact: it happened on our globe; I myself was on the deck of that ferry.’