‘The sea is over there. Not so very far from here. The people who once lived here called it the Cold Sea. They used to go there to collect amber.’
‘The Germans?’ asked Joachim.
His father took up the oars again.
‘The Prussians.’
‘But who were they?’
‘How can I explain it? Maybe something like the Red Indians? They used to catch fish in these lakes, and hunted in the forests. They built settlements.’
‘Where are they to be found?’
‘Nowhere any more.’
‘Why is that?’
‘They died out. Wars. Rebellions. Famine and diseases.’
‘All of them?’
‘The ones who survived were forced to be christened. They became Germans. Apparently several dukes from the Warmian clan escaped to Lithuania. That’s the legend.’
‘And what about their ghosts?’ asked Joachim.
‘They must be somewhere here. Maybe they’re hovering around our boat right now – aren’t you afraid?’
Even though he could sense the irony in his father’s tone of voice, Joachim replied very solemnly: ‘I’m not afraid of ghosts!’
As he got out of bed again to fetch ice for another glass of whisky, he thought how strange the workings of memory are.
He couldn’t begin to fathom who that man, Nowacki, was, who owned the humpback car, yet his father must have known him somehow, and he must have frequented their house. On the other hand, every sentence they had spoken in the boat on the return journey from the Philharmonic still rang clear as he remembered that night, dozens of years on, thousands of kilometres from that spot, and with such precision, as if he had heard and uttered them only yesterday. Or maybe it was a sort of reconstruction; maybe it was just his way of imagining that conversation, which had actually gone quite differently? But that was even less likely: why should he have suddenly thought of the murdered Prussians, their ghosts hovering around the boat, or his father’s remark about the Cold Sea? Yes, they had definitely talked about exactly that, and more or less in that way, more than half a century ago, when steam engines and platform-ticket machines still reigned supreme at the railway stations. Gazing through the window, he swallowed another sip of alcohol, but this time the whisky seemed disgusting. He poured the contents of the glass into a rubber-plant pot. Along the street came an old convertible, gradually slowing down, until it finally stopped outside number four. A man and a woman got out of it. They embraced and said their farewells with long kisses, then finally she went inside the house, he got back into the car and drove off without switching on the headlights. Somewhere from another house a strident chord on an out-of-tune piano burst into a tango, but after a couple of bars it fell silent. Suddenly, as if over there, on the other side of the street, where there was no trace left of the nocturnal lovers, a gate opened into another dimension. He saw himself and his father walking over the hill past the three oaks. Behind them they had the lake, the old pine forest, and the mound with the grave on top. In a shallow dip a few dozen metres ahead of them the house was already waiting: small, brick, with two mansards above a small veranda. Separating it from the pond and the lopsided woodshed was a mighty old ash tree. In the lighted window of the living room, his mother’s shadow flashed by. At the pond they turned and sat down in the doorway of the woodshed. Tobacco smoke blended with the smell of sweet flag and wood shavings as his father lit a short pipe.
‘From this year,’ he said, looking up at the sky, ‘you’re going to study music – Jonatan will come to us three times a week. You have plenty of time until the autumn to make your choice.’
‘But,’ I asked rather uncertainly, ‘what am I to choose between?’
‘What do you mean? The violin or the piano.’
He definitely preferred the piano, but he didn’t say a word. Only when his father was tapping out the ash from the bowl of his pipe against the wet edge of the pond did he inquire: ‘So what about the Prussians? Did they live in our house?’
His father laughed long and loud.
‘But I told you, there’s nothing left of them. Well, almost nothing. Just a few words, that’s all. For instance, our lake has two names, even in the official atlas. Krzywe and Ukiel. And the Prussian name, Ukiel, means just the same as Krzywe: “crooked”.’
Back in his tiny bedroom in the loft, as he listened to the endless croaking of the frogs punctuated by the hooting of an owl, he kept mindlessly repeating: ‘Ukiel-dukiel, crooked crook-iel’, as if it were a sort of incantation.
Now there were some belated party-goers driving down the street. A dirty Land Rover was dragging a chain of strung-together cans behind it. One of the drunken passengers kept firing a shotgun again and again into the sky and shouting: ‘Socialismo o muerte! Venceremos! Viva Fidel!’ Somewhere nearby a car alarm started to wail and some stray cats began to yowl, which the new, centre-right district administration had been battling with for a few months to no avail. He fetched his address book and chose Marta’s number, which he hadn’t called for about seven years. After a long wait he finally heard a ringing tone, and straight after that a soft, female voice.
‘Hello?’
‘Marta?’
‘No, it’s not Marta. Who’s that?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. This is Joachim. Is Marta there?’
‘I’ll just fetch my mum.’
Finally he heard his sister’s voice.
‘Is that really you?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing. I just wanted to come. For a few weeks. Is there a chance you can put me up?’
Marta did not reply immediately. Only after a few seconds, as if she had to have a good think about it, did she answer in a hushed tone: ‘But yes, of course, come over!’
The snow came like salvation. On the third day after the wet, grey holidays, large flakes of it began to fall on Jesionowa Street, coating the overflowing dustbins, cluttered little gardens and dog messes at the edge of the bald lawns. Joachim was delighted: the whiteness engulfed not just the world of things, but also spread itself like a soft mantle over his skittish, anxious thoughts. Even the places he had missed, and which immediately after his arrival had seemed to him hideous and unrecognisable, now took on a neutral softness thanks to the fluffy white snow. In fact, from the slightly bow-shaped street, built up on either side with angular terraced houses, he’d been unable to reconstruct the old road that passed the pond and led to the woodshed; but once a thick layer of snow was covering them, the ugly, identical houses no longer looked as awful. Even the mechanic’s workshop, which had been erected on the site of the old pond – a heavy concrete lump with a row of dirty glass bricks running under its flat roof – did not offend Joachim’s gaze as painfully now that it was covered by a white hat.
It went on snowing for four days. Then, along with a cold, icy wind from the east came a powerful frost. At last it all calmed down and, at a temperature of minus fifteen, the sunlight brought an austere brightness out of the wintry landscape.
Joachim went down to the cellar. Among the empty jars, cardboard boxes, broken furniture and piles of magazines he discovered a pair of old ice-hockey skates. They had probably belonged to Andrzej: his brother had the same shoe size as him. As he was perching on a small stool in the hall polishing the leather – dried stiff by time – Marta came out to him from the kitchen.
‘Are you angry?’ she asked, lighting a cigarette.
‘No, why should I be? But your son-in-law is an awful yob. Fancy sending away the piano tuner the day before Christmas! I’d have paid him, since I ordered him. Couldn’t you have called me down from upstairs?’