‘So where are we going?’ He took Julia by the hand. ‘Where to now?’
‘That depends on you. You can go back to your sister’s house. She’s waiting for you. Or we can go off and turn a new circle together. It will take a while,’ she said, laughing. ‘Here, time is nothing but the image of eternity set in motion.’
They headed off together, holding hands like a pair of high-school kids at the ice rink.
‘Can you see the past from here?’ he asked.
‘It’s not that simple,’ said Julia, frowning. ‘Here there is no past and no future. You’ll soon understand.’
They emerged from the blizzard. All around the lake he saw the rising, distant chains of soaring mountains. A little later they passed a man hunched over a hole in the ice. He was wearing a hat with earflaps, and a quilted jacket thrown over his shoulders. He was just pulling a small fish out of the frozen depths. Next to him, a frying pan was already heating on a lighted Primus stove. On the ice behind the fisherman stood a rusty old humpback Warszawa, completely disembowelled.
‘Look,’ he said to Julia, ‘that must be Nowacki. I forgot to ask Marta if he used to frequent our house by the pond. Perhaps I’ll ask him.’ Joachim slowed down.
‘No,’ said Julia, pulling him forwards, ‘it’s not worth it.’
Ukiel-dukiel, crooked crook-iel, hummed the happy Joachim.
And then they both hummed the little rhyme together.
First Summer
IT HAD ALL fallen through. Two days before she was due to arrive, Sabina wrote to say that her daughter’s state of health had badly deteriorated. Instead of Poland she was flying to Boston to take care of her grandsons. She was very sorry. All the more since it was she who had had the idea for them to meet up. ‘I don’t know how to apologise,’ she added at the end. ‘You must be disappointed and angry, but think of me too – you can go there whenever you like, but I may have lost my only chance.’
He wasn’t angry or disappointed. He wrote a short, sympathetic reply, and as he was switching off the computer he merely wondered where the business card with the number of the Stokrotka boarding house had got to. He would have to call and cancel his reservation for two rooms. At last he found the small yellow card right by his desk, on the reference shelf, stuck to the spine of Herder’s Lexicon. When he heard the receptionist’s ringing voice in the receiver, without a second thought he changed the order to just one room. As he drove out of the city the next day, he felt as if Sabina had made the decision for him. In fact he had no desire for a weekend alone, at the close of summer, in a boarding house found via the internet. He decided to take lots of pictures and send the best ones to Sabina. The thought that he would photograph the road between the dunes – which she loved so much – first at dawn, then at sunset, suddenly seemed a perfectly adequate reason for this trip.
But he couldn’t remember this path. Perhaps at this particular spot the dune ran an entirely different way; in any case, he had to go a lot further before he finally found a way down onto the beach. The sun was already very low, there was a cool breeze blowing, and he only spotted one couple lying in a hollow out of the wind. He had seen them earlier, emerging from a brand new Mitsubishi at the boarding house car park: a well-known film director and his youthful boyfriend, who looked like a hitchhiker picked up on the highway. Now they were waving at him. He had no desire to chat, and gave their lair a wide berth, barely raising a hand in greeting. They shouted something, but their words were drowned by the roar of the waves. As he walked up to the water’s edge, he did not turn round in their direction again. He plunged his feet into the water, feeling the pleasant relief of not thinking about anything, but it was short-lived. His mobile phone rang, and on the screen he recognised his wife’s name. Joanna was already home – she had come back from her mother’s earlier than planned. As ever he had forgotten to take out the rubbish, and he hadn’t locked the balcony door. Were they already drunk? There’s no point trying to deny it, she joked – that’s what those old school reunions are for…
As he returned to the boarding house in total darkness, he felt ashamed of the lie, but the thought of what he would have had to say to his wife if she had found him at home was even worse. Somehow he couldn’t come up with a single credible reason why you might cancel a school reunion, even now, when he had had the time to think. A few dozen metres ahead of him he could hear voices: the director’s baritone mixed with the boy’s falsetto. Now and then they stopped and burst into laughter. He stopped too, not wanting to catch up with them. In the cool, still air between the dunes he could smell distinct trails of cigar smoke and a pungent cologne. Sabina had written the first letter a year ago, when by chance she had found his email address. He had replied at once. Then they had exchanged photos too, as if wanting to make sure that after twenty-four years they would be able to recognise each other. On a city street they would probably have passed each other by: she had grown thinner, he had put on weight. Her once chestnut hair with a copper sheen was now hidden by black dye. Not much of his hair was left, but now he had a double chin covered by a closely trimmed beard. She had lost her husband in a car crash. He was married for the second time. When they cycled along the dirt road twenty-five years ago, breathing in the damp scent of the stubble fields, they were completely different people from now. He had thought about it with no regret, but rather curiosity, as he had imagined tonight’s dinner, after which each would go to their own separate room. On the other hand, after all these years he couldn’t imagine their goodnight kiss, even if it were only on the cheek, in the corridor, like something from another time, another world, another story.
The couple in front of him vanished through the lighted doorway of the boarding house. In the car park where, since dusk, more than a dozen cars had managed to accumulate, there was still lively activity going on. Two Land Rovers had just driven up with yellow, Dutch registration plates, one from Breda and the other apparently from Utrecht. He did not know their language well, but it was obvious that both drivers, who were the first to jump out of the cars, were arguing about the route they had taken: it was meant to have been one way, but they had gone another and got lost. A third and fourth man who suddenly appeared in the headlights, were trying to make peace, and then two others, who got out last, started urging them to unload the luggage. There was an incredibly large amount of it. By their very nature, the suitcases, holdalls, bags and boxes brought the feuding couple together and toned down the Dutch hullabaloo, but only to a certain degree: as they carried it all into the vestibule, the Dutchmen continued to shout at each other in guttural syllables, jostling each other and dropping their parcels; finally they moved the cars, which wasn’t easy, as several more vehicles had arrived at the car park by now.
As he entered the dining hall, he was no longer in any doubt that the entire boarding house had been hired for a private party. The waiters were not taking any orders, just supervising a buffet table and drinks. He did find it amusing; above a stage hung a sign saying ‘Gay European Union for Poland’, and there were colourful objects hanging from lines stretched from wall to wall, as for a New Year’s Eve ball. Most of them were beach inflatables, representing male members of gargantuan size blooming out of a scrotum, but he also noticed some imitation baroque angels among them, with coiled willies like small horns and also some blow-up plastic effigies of rock stars, among which he recognised the immortal face of Freddie Mercury. Only a while later, as he was eating a sandwich, did he spot one of the Dutchmen: now he was wearing a vicar’s uniform. Holding a glass of wine, he was having a lively conversation with someone in German.