Cold Sea Stories Read online

  A few bicycling nights later I visited him again. He asked me to tell him our exact routes. Rather than details of the strike, he was more interested in the look of the port from Siennicki Bridge where my chain came off; the driver of a police radio car who went past us had slowed down noticeably at the sight of two young men fixing a bike halfway across the bridge in the middle of the night. Were the tugboats at anchor illuminated? What about the wharves? Can you see the rust on the tramlines at night, or only in daylight? Those were Lucjan’s questions, but when I read to him, one after another, the strike committee’s resolutions, and then selected information from the bulletins saying that the whole country was on strike, or ready and waiting, that human solidarity had never been so genuine or so profound in our country, and that we would win, because after all one day we had to win, since we had always kept losing, at least for the last two hundred years, he just nodded politely and said: ‘All right, that’s all politics. But what are you going to do afterwards?’

  ‘But you know that,’ I said, a little irritated, ‘I’m going to write my dissertation on Iwaszkiewicz and how his Ukrainian stories echoed Romanticism.’

  ‘And then what?’

  I didn’t really know what he meant. What could happen then, except life? Marriage? Work? Travel? I had never lived in terms of the future, I didn’t like projects, plans or specific ventures, because anyway, as Lucjan knew perfectly well, in our everyday reality nothing ever came entirely true, and at the drop of a hat it could all change, suddenly collapse, be destroyed, wiped out or smashed to bits. So how could he ask questions like ‘then what’? If Lucjan weren’t blind I’d have answered by asking: ‘Do you think I’m clairvoyant?’ But it wasn’t appropriate for me to say that, so after a short silence I simply replied: ‘I don’t know.’

  He looked worried by my answer. For a moment his furrowed face wrinkled into a mask of concern.

  ‘I mean your dreams. Oculos habent et non videbunt, you understand? “Eyes have they, but they see not.” Psalm 115. Towards the end it clearly says: “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence.”’

  I shrugged my shoulders. Did he mean my religious beliefs? We had never touched on that sort of topic, not even when he had occasionally explained an extract from the Bible to me because I needed it for an Old Polish literature class. In any case, I was already late. At the shipyard conference hall the talks with the government delegation were just starting, and I wanted to be there on the spot and not miss anything; the negotiations broadcast by cable radio could only be heard at the shipyard gates. As usual I left him the cake my mother had baked, and we said goodbye until next week.

  The next few bicycling nights were warm and starry. After delivering the bulletins Fredek and I would ride to the beach at Brzeżno or Jelitkowo, and there, waiting for the sunrise, we would chatter away like souls possessed about what was going to happen – next day, month or year. Things that had been quite unthinkable for years on end now seemed within reach. Sometimes we reminisced about our school days, including the student chaplaincy on Czarna Street, where what attracted us was not so much religious need as the charms of the girls. Whenever Alicja sang ‘Ma-ra-na-tha’ from the altar in her beautiful contralto voice, to the sound of a guitar, a flute and a violin, there can’t have been a single boy who didn’t want to take communion in her company. Joanna had a lovely black plait, and as she read Saint Paul’s words about love, our desires, though not originating from the soul or the Scriptures at all, filled the chapel with sexual tension.

  We had other memories too, of the City Parks Service and Scout Brigade IIIb on work camp in 1974, tidying up the old German graveyard. When the excavator scoop rose yet again, a white stream of skulls and bones had come pouring out of an enormous heap of sand – they were the SS-men shot by the Soviets, probably in 1945, lying in an unmarked mass grave. Iron crosses, helmets, and especially death’s head insignia from the officers’ caps enriched more than one collection of militaria in our city that summer. We managed to stuff our pockets and plastic bags with them before the prosecutor arrived. That same year, before the holidays began, Fredek and I had scrawled a message on the wall at our school: ‘We’ll get revenge for Katyń!’ How surprised we were next day when instead of a maths test we had a special assembly for the first lesson. Accompanied by two secret policemen, the headmaster threatened to expose and punish the guilty parties. Afterwards, as a historian, he gave us a half-hour lecture that proved without question that the tens of thousands of Polish officers and civil servants who died there were killed on the orders of Hitler, not Stalin.

  At dawn, as the sphere of the sun rose over the bay, I was riding my Ukraina home. The quiet, empty suburbs were still dozing as I thought about that mythical journey of my father’s, which Lucjan was so fond of asking about. My father had paddled an ordinary canoe more than six hundred kilometres along the River Dunajec, then the Vistula, to Gdansk. In literally the heart of the city, on the Motława, he had put down his oar, picked up his rucksack and set off through the burned-out, silent streets, where brick dust and the smell of people burning were falling like a mist on the remains of the thousand-year Reich. He never liked to talk about it; all I knew, which was obvious, was that he had gone in search of a new life, because the old, pre-war one had ceased to exist in any way, shape or form, but why did he choose that particular route and direction? Only now, 35 years after his early morning march through the gutted streets, as I rode through almost the very same places on my bike, did I think he might have been like Abraham, who had received a summons from God: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy father’s house’. And if, I continued to fantasise, he might have been Abraham, I would have been Isaac, and then the remark Lucjan had made just after I was born – ‘Where I’ve come from he wouldn’t last as long as five hours’ took on a completely different meaning and significance; it would be like a prophecy, not a commentary on an ordinary situation defined by history. But what on earth did that change in my life?

  The bicycle express soon came to an end, on the day when Lech Wałęsa the electrician was carried on the workers’ shoulders and declared the end of the strike. Not long after I got my first job as a journalist at the Solidarity union information office. Fredek was in charge of the printing. The revolution was having ever wider-reaching effects, and for lack of other goods, had become the number one export item, as a while later the Czechs, Germans, Hungarians and Slovaks came to believe, and finally the Russians themselves. Whatever my thoughts about it later on, often critical, nothing could change the miraculous fact that it brought freedom, without so much as a single hair falling from the heads of our opponents – even those who had more than once fired, or given orders to fire at people merely because they were demanding bread and liberty. In fact they only quailed with fear once, when the television showed the execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu.

  The clunky Ukraina went on providing excellent service. I rode it to work and to the university, where instead of writing my dissertation I was helping my colleagues to set up the Independent Students’ Union. One October day as I was organising a rally, Lucjan died. The funeral did not draw a crowd. A few old men – former Gulag prisoners, the priest, my parents and I said the prayers. The day before the burial, when Lucjan’s body was lying in the mortuary, my father and I went to his attic to start sorting out his flat. In the letterbox I found a delivery note, and that afternoon I collected the parcel. It was the Hebrew Bible, published by the Landau Foundation if I remember rightly.

  ‘What shall we do with it now?’ my mother fretted. ‘They don’t keep Braille in normal libraries, and I’m sure no one knows Hebrew at the ones for the blind!’

  ‘We’d best send it back,’ my father reckoned.

  But I had another idea. In the chapel at Srebrzysko, before the coffin was closed, I placed the Book in Lucjan’s hands, with his right index finger just under the cover, touching the first letter of Bereshit, or the Book of Genesis. As the grav
ediggers were flattening the small mound of earth with their spades, I remembered a line from The Aeneid that I had heard my cousin Lucjan quote in the first days of the August strike: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbras. Distracted by the funeral, for lack of a dictionary I couldn’t translate it properly, and afterwards I plain forgot about it. Years later, as I was leafing through a beautiful translation of Virgil in a bookshop, I found that extract, which goes: ‘On they went, those dim travellers under the lonely night, through gloom…’

  Depka and Rzepka

  IN THOSE DAYS buying anything – even fish – rose to the status of a problem. There was even a joke about it that used to do the rounds in our city. Why before the war was it possible to buy fish as far inland as Drohobycz? Because in those days Poland had only just over a hundred miles of coastline. And why since the war is it impossible to buy fish even in a port? Because these days Poland has more than three hundred miles of coastline.

  A second, quite accidental piece of comedy on the same subject was provided by an advertising cartoon shown on our cinema screens at some point in the mid-1970s, after the obligatory newsreel and the so-called extra. A fish appeared on the screen, marked with the symbol of the Central Fish Processing Plant, and addressed the audience, saying: ‘No fish will tell you this himself, but eating them’s good for your health. Come and shop at the CFPP!!!’ The whole audience gathered in the cinema used to roar with laughter at this ad, because the shelves in the shops – including the fishmonger’s – were glaringly empty. Why do I mention this?

  Because I’m thinking about Christmas Eve. And as I’m thinking about Christmas Eve, there’s no way of avoiding the subject of fish.

  In my family, unanimity had reigned in this respect ever since – by decree of Stalin and the rest of the Big Three – we had been resettled in Gdansk. As a result of this enforced emigration, a certain basic change in culinary predilections had taken place. It wasn’t carp (which stank of silt), or pike (which was awfully bony), but cod, huge and fresh, that had become the main feature of our Christmas Eve menu. My father, who had arrived in the city on the bay in 1946, would speak with a tear in his eye of his expeditions to Bonsack (in other words, Sobieszewo Island), where in the forties and fifties you could buy fresh and smoked fish from the fishermen – outside the framework of the Central Fish Processing Plant, of course. I remember the large fillets of cod my mother used to fry, and not just for Christmas Eve, and the chunks of smoked eel, whenever Uncle Henryk – hero of the Warsaw Uprising – came to see us on my father’s name-day. Zander too, delicate and delicious, brought home by bus from Bonsack for all sorts of family occasions.

  However, this was in the 1970’s, when buying fish – even at Bonsack – was harder and harder. In short, days of want. And Christmas Eve was approaching.

  I was delegated to make the journey like a secret agent: on one piece of paper I had the address of the fishermen from near Jastarnia. On another I had the train timetable, there and back, for the line between Gdynia and Hel. A third contained a shopping list, eventually crossed out by my mother, who had simply added: ‘get whatever there is.’

  Mr Depka lived in a shed. It was a cross between the typical Kashubian cottage and something like a workshop and a storehouse: as much a fishmonger’s as a boatyard. He wasn’t even surprised when I came inside and revealed my references: ‘from Mr H, the engineer, who fixed your fishing boat motors’. But we didn’t talk about engines. Alojz Depka was excited, and over a glass or two of vodka he and Mr Rzepka were discussing something that had happened a few weeks ago, when Józk Konkel, a skipper from the maszoperia – as the Kashubian fishermen call their association – had sailed out into the bay. So, first of all, it wasn’t the time for fishing. Secondly, something had happened on the water that made Depka as well as Rzepka talk in hushed tones.

  This phenomenon had haunted the fishermen in the bay for years. Sometimes – no one knew exactly why at this rather than any other moment – an orange ball appeared on the water, especially in the vicinity of the old German torpedo launch platform. Like ball lightning – wieldżi, as the Kashubians would say – enormous. No one knew what it really was. This ball had been known to collide with a fishing boat, burning it and its entire crew to ashes; it happened in 1963, in the days when Ponke was in the maszoperia. No one was saved.

  Sometimes, the orange ball would stick to the prow and drag the boat a good ten miles or more at dizzying speed, to smash it to bits somewhere far off, near the Russian border or close to Gdańsk. So this particular demon couldn’t possibly have come from a decent Kashubian family of devils – home-grown and controllable. This was a truly evil one, on which nothing worked – none of the age-old prayers, nor sprinkling with holy water or casting spells. Just as I entered Mr Depka’s shed, he and Mr Rzepka were discussing the latest unfortunate incident. Józk Konkel had not sailed out far – within eyeshot, as they say. Even Hanka could see him from the shore – he hadn’t cast his nets, but just a couple of lines and was trailing them at a slow speed, trolling. The harbinger of a biting frost was rising in the glassy air, but the water was not yet full of the icy porridge forewarning that the bay will freeze.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Depka, ‘it happened so quick!’

  ‘We only saw a flash,’ added Mr Rzepka, ‘and that’s all that was left of Józk.’

  Regaled with a glass of moonshine of at least 70 percent proof, I listened to their conversation. After every accident of this kind a special commission always came, as in the Führer’s day, and before that the Kaiser’s. But no commission, whether from the military, the police, or the secret service, had ever managed to explain this enigma by filing a description of the incident and interviews with eyewitnesses in their cavernous secret archives.

  ‘When the Russkies tried sniffing about in Khrushchev’s day,’ continued Depka, ‘they closed our entire waters to fishing for a month. They sailed one way in that Soviet U-boat of theirs, then back the other, and found nothing.’

  ‘But one night,’ Rzepka was quick to add, ‘we were awoken by a terrible boom. The entire Soviet U-boat had flown sky-high, and there was nothing left but an oily slick floating on the water for a few days after. As ever, a huge, fiery ball appeared from over by the torpedo launcher.’

  ‘Oh no…’ Depka disagreed, ‘not at all. That time it came from the north.’

  For a while they argued this point, but calmly, as if for pure pleasure.

  ‘But what is it really?’ I asked naïvely. ‘Is it some strange atmospheric phenomenon? Never recorded anywhere on earth before?’

  Alojz Depka and Ignac Rzepka gave me a look of pity. Could a townie ever understand anything?

  The glasses were filled again as we snacked on smoked Baltic cod. And suddenly, as if I had opened the pages of a great book, a story unrolled: amazingly vivid and very old.

  Why did Hel – as this peninsula is called – mean the same thing in all the sailors’ languages, quite simply hell? Because the people living in the local hamlets, eternally buried in sand, were hell-raisers, real servants of the devil. During the autumn storms in particular they used to light fires on the beach as misleading beacons. The wrecked ships provided the locals with plenty of goods. They were aware of the ducal shore rights, and they knew perfectly well that everything tossed up by the water belonged to the Duke. Therefore after every disaster they caused, all the shipwreck survivors were killed – so there wouldn’t be any witnesses. Even – as happened extremely rarely – if the survivor was a woman.

  Evil spirits favoured this practice. No punishment, no misfortunes ever befell these land pirates.

  Only when a man in bishop’s robes escaped to shore from a tempest was the iron rule broken for the very first time. No one dared to kill a high priest. He was chained up in one of the cottages, where for ten years he was made to turn a millstone, until an official of Duke Świętopełk came riding by. He heard the prisoner chanting Latin psalms, then returning to the village with an escort, freed Bishop S
edenza, who ten years earlier had sailed as a legate of Pope Innocent IV to the Danish King Eric, and during a storm had ended up in Hel – in other words, in hell.