‘What do I mean?’ Willman repeated like an echo. ‘The fact that she won’t be sailing with us.’
‘No,’ said Jakub, looking him straight in the face, ‘she’s not as stupid as you think. I’ll soon persuade her…’
Willman burst into loud laughter.
‘Her mother,’ he said, catching his breath, ‘went traipsing about on the seashore too. And even Harmensoon was afraid to forbid those oddities, that bathing. Do you know why? Because he was afraid of her. And do you know why? Because she was a witch. Luckily she drowned.’
‘I thought witches were a Catholic speciality,’ said Jakub, ‘but clearly I was mistaken.’
Willman did not answer. He got on with the rigging, muttering a little poem to himself:
For several days they worked in ponderous silence. But when, as every afternoon, she turned up at the canal with a basket of food for them, Willman simply took his share and ate it, chewing steadily and systematically. Jakub ate faster, always rescuing the tiniest crumbs from the ground, gathering them in his hand and sucking them up with his lips. She liked to watch his long, fine fingers. She liked the moment when he raised his eyes and cast a furtive glance at the basket, where there were still apples from the orchard, or blueberries she had picked in the forest.
And although life went on as before, without any changes to the daily ritual, she could sense an invisible wall of antipathy growing between the two men. Once it was absolutely solid, she wrote on a piece of paper: ‘What happened?’
And when Jakub appeared at her house after dark, she put her question on the table.
He pretended he couldn’t make it out, so she turned up the wick. He pretended he couldn’t understand, so she wrote: ‘You and Willman.’
‘It’s nothing serious,’ he said.
So she added: ‘I can see.’
But he refused to say, and his face, usually lit by a smile in the evenings, was tense and focused. He ate next to nothing, didn’t even thank her, and quickly left the room. She heard the stairs creak as he climbed them at a slow, heavy pace to the attic. But this time the bustle upstairs only lasted a short time. He gathered his odds and ends, and before she had finished tidying the kitchen, he came downstairs again.
‘I’d better be going now,’ he said. ‘Willman and I will be trying out the sails in the morning.’
She nodded. But once he had gone, she took the lamp and slowly went upstairs. The bed he had put here was neatly made. In the chest that served him as a wardrobe she found a change of underwear, a handkerchief and some socks. There was a violin case lying beside the pillow, not fully closed. Carefully she took out the instrument, and just as blind people do, she touched it with her fingers. Willman had provided Jakub with hair for the bow, the strings and a lump of rosin. But the violin itself, which had lain for a hundred years or more amid a firearm, some maps, some shining chronometers and a handful of silver coins in the chest that had once belonged to a Belgian captain, was a present from her. Jakub would play at night, up here, and then every last sound of the music ran right through her – nothing mattered any more, not even the rules she was breaking with some degree of fear. Sometimes her father came to her in her dreams, sat on the edge of her bed and silently pointed a finger at the ceiling, as if asking her: ‘What is the meaning of all this?’
But she was not sure what she really wanted, and her thoughts, full of vague presentiments and images, were burdening her with a weird, chaotic aura of alien things she had never known before. The violin floated back into the mossy shell of its case. Holding the lamp in one hand and the instrument in the other, with a heavy heart she slowly went downstairs. Only in the main room did she realise that Jakub had come back, and that she must have missed him by a whisker going through the hall. Now he was silently standing by the door, gazing at her. She showed him the case and gave him an inquiring look to ask if that was what he had come for.
‘No,’ he said. And before she had time to reach for her pencil and notebook, he quickly added: ‘There’s someone walking about in the chapel – I saw a light in there.’
She went up to the window and pointed at the moon.
‘No,’ he whispered, ‘the light is from inside, I saw it myself just now.’
She grabbed his hand, nodded for him to sit down and opened the notebook.
‘You imagined it,’ he read, ‘stay here.’
‘Willman,’ he asked, ‘what’s he doing there at night?’ She refused to write him an answer. ‘Why are you hiding something?’ he cried. ‘If it’s not Willman, who is it?’
But her pencil said nothing, nor did the look in her eyes.
Jakub went outside. After a short walk he was standing outside the chapel. The moonshine really was reflecting in the windows, and no other light, at least not now, was illuminating the interior of the dark block. Yet he couldn’t have been mistaken: as he was heading from her house towards the van Dorns’, someone had been walking about in the house of prayer holding a lamp or a candle; there had been a flame moving between the walls, casting a flickering shadow into the windows.
Jakub timidly pushed the heavy, double door. In the very faint light he could make out some benches and a table about eight yards long, which towered above him on a platform. Old books with wooden spines, coated in cloth worn smooth by generations, gave off an odour of prayer and time. He was not alone in here, he sensed in terror, when from a corner of the room steeped in total darkness he heard scraps of muttered phrases, some tapping and rustling.
‘I am Jakub,’ he said loud and clear. ‘Who are you?’
No one answered. The sounds stopped, but only momentarily, for barely had he taken two steps forward than a noise erupted in the corner, as if lots of objects had been thrown violently to the floor all at once. He approached the point where the two walls ran together, but found no one there. But he did discover some large books, which lay scattered beside a huge cupboard with glazed, open doors. Cautiously, carefully, he picked them up one after another and set them on an oak shelf. Thick dust rose from the parchment pages, the leather spines, the sacred letters and the metal fittings. It pierced his nose and stung his eyes, but Jakub could smell another ingredient in it too: candles that had only just been extinguished. He went up to the table. The congealed wax on the candlestick was still warm. Next to it stood a vessel that looked like a cup. Carefully he touched the skin of the liquid at the bottom with his thumb, and then put it to his tongue. The bare hint of moisture, less than a drop, had a taste of cheap red wine.
‘I am Jakub,’ he shouted into the darkness. ‘If there’s someone here, let him speak!’
There was no reply. He could hear his heart continuing to pump blood within the vaulted silence of his body, could hear the woodworm endlessly boring a labyrinth of gloomy corridors in hard veins of wood. He moved towards the exit at a slow, quiet pace. When he was halfway across the chapel, a noise like the previous one rang out behind him. But now the books were not just falling out of the cupboard – now they were being furiously hurled to the floor, one after another, with a resonant thud as each one landed. Amid these sounds he could hear a verse from the Bible – about fire and burning – spoken over and over again like an incantation. Jakub didn’t want to hear what sort of fire it was, nor whom, or what it was meant to burn. He ran outside terrified, and the vision of the falling books chased him up the road. He felt as if they were flying after him on the outspread wings of their pages, brushing his arms and face in flight, and falling under his feet like stones, while he had to jump across them like streams in the mountains.