He even found the situation amusing.
Could I really have encountered the devil? Things like that only happen in stories, especially nineteenth-century, and best of all, Russian ones, he thought as he wiped his face, pleasantly cooled by the snow.
He had seen that figure somewhere before: in a black frock coat, with the white splash of a cravat, in a fanciful hat, and with those funny skates, which were strapped on to some flat-soled boots. But where and when?
The whole way home he kept looking behind him, but the stranger had vanished. As he was climbing the rise to the estate, he turned to look at the lake again, and then he caught sight of the fellow, standing on the ice a few dozen metres from the shore, bowing and politely tipping his hat.
‘I haven’t gone mad, have I?’ Joachim said to himself several times over, as he walked down Jesionowa Street. ‘Someone’s having a joke at my expense. Must be some local oddball. There always were plenty of oddballs around here.’
That evening Marta gave in to some painful memories. One single word was like a concentrate containing the ultimate cause of all their family disasters and failures: Wadąg. That was the name of their father’s favourite lake, where he had his own boat, where once – probably in 1966 – he caught a fifteen-kilo catfish, and where, in a small, wooden cottage on a headland, lived the pastor’s wife, widow of the Reverend Eberhard Jellinek.
‘What did he see in her?’ said Marta, pouting with contempt. ‘That Evangelical old witch! That hussy! That Protestant whore!’
Joachim tried to calm her down. Why get upset, why curse, when none of them were alive any more? What could it matter nowadays?
‘Maybe you don’t remember how much Mother suffered!’ – Marta was not inclined to forgive the pastor’s widow – ‘And how embarrassing it was when he died there, at her place, in that house, in their marital bed, apparently!’
Joachim had forgotten that detail. Whereas the sight of his father, always cheerful – as he drove up to the house on his powerful Zundapp motorbike after a night or two at Wadąg, as he walked across the yard with a net full of handsome pike and zander, still flapping – that sight brought back pleasant memories.
‘Well of course,’ said Marta, refusing to give up, ‘you men always prefer to remember nothing but the pleasant things. Hush it all up and sweep it under the carpet!’
Despite their difference of opinion, somehow their conversation was affectionate. Marta admitted that they had cut down the big ash tree illegally; it was well over a hundred years old. Marian, her husband, had started building the workshop adjoining the house.
‘There was no alternative,’ she said, suddenly downcast, ‘but you know, once it was gone, once they had taken away the chopped-up trunk and the branches, I felt it was a bad omen. And that came true. Marian never finished the building. Only our son-in-law, years later. And it’s not so great now either, there’s too much competition.’ Marta drank a sip of tea from a chipped cup with a gold stripe. ‘They’re all lowering their prices, as if they were deliberately conspiring against us.’
Joachim spent half the night sitting over his laptop, online. He searched for all sorts of different things, from images of the devil, through to the history of skating. But in vain. Only when he remembered a visit to the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, where he and Julia had once been, did it finally dawn on him. And how simple it proved to be! Sir Henry Raeburn’s painting of ‘The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch’, that ironical image of the skating minister, was exactly what he was looking for. The same black stockings, the same jaunty hat, cravat, flat-soled boots and strapped-on skates. But after a brief moment of satisfaction, he suddenly felt troubled: was it really possible, in this remote corner of the world, on Lake Ukiel, for someone to have come up with such an insane and yet sophisticated idea? To make himself look like the Reverend Robert Walker he must have obtained the right costume, the boots and the old-fashioned skates. And why was he following Joachim, of all people? Perhaps, he rationalised, this oddball had simply headed onto the lake and picked out the first skater he met to play all those mirror-image tricks on him. And if so, Joachim decided, he really must catch up with the joker and have a chat with him: how had he come up with this idea? Did he only know the image of the skating Reverend Walker from a reproduction? In spite of these probable, if eccentric theories, or rather attempts at an explanation, Joachim felt rising anxiety. No, it wasn’t normal. To meet someone on the ice at his home lake who made himself look like a figure from a little known Scottish painting was something bordering on mental aberration.
Next day, on the dot of noon, he set out onto the ice. He passed bays and inlets, and ran across some wrinkled patches of snow. Nowhere did he meet the bizarre eccentric. At one of the jetties he ate a sandwich and sipped from a thermos of hot tea. He was tired by now. Fine snow began to fall from clouds, which were drawing in from Gutkowo. Before he knew it, only minutes later, he found himself in the middle of a blizzard. He had lost his sense of direction: he might just as well be skating towards home now as in the opposite direction, towards the Old Manor.
‘That’s all I needed,’ he thought, ‘I’ll keep going round in circles until dusk, and then they’ll find me on the shore, or somewhere in the middle, frozen to death like a soldier retreating from Moscow…’
He wasn’t afraid of death, but the thought that it could come right now, when he had lost his way out in the open, was very annoying. It was snowing more and more heavily, and he was probably turning circles. He slowed down, and heard someone else putting on the brakes beside him.
‘Reverend Walker,’ he shouted. ‘Please stop fooling around! Where are we?’
He was answered by laughter. Ringing, female laughter.
Straight towards him, out of the white mist came Julia.
She was wearing a down jacket and a woollen hat, the ones they had bought for their trip to Patagonia.
‘That’s impossible,’ said Joachim, ‘That’s contrary, that’s entirely contrary, not just to my notions – it’s contrary to the laws of physics!’
‘Are you sure?’ laughed Julia, looking him straight in the eyes. ‘I’ve waited so long for you.’
‘So I’ve died,’ he sighed. ‘At last. So this is what it’s like?’
Julia took off a glove and touched Joachim’s cheek. Her hand was warm and smelled of almond lotion. He remembered that smell. He kissed her fingers.
‘Can you explain it to me?’ he asked.
‘There’s a special point,’ she said, putting on the glove, ‘where all the laws of physics are broken. The crooked lines of time run together. It’s like a sort of loop.’
‘You mean to say there’s a point like that just here?’
‘Uh-huh,’ she said, putting a sweet, which she had taken from her bag, into her mouth. ‘Just here. There are very few of these places. Very few indeed. But you silly boy, you refused to come over here. I had to work pretty hard at it. First the sweet flag outside the Geological Museum.’
‘So that was you? In those sandals that didn’t match?’
‘Let’s say it was.’
‘And that oddball in the hat and the frock coat?’
‘Do you remember us looking at him in the museum? You liked him so much. I thought when you saw him you’d get the whole idea.’