INSTRUCTIONS
I dreamed I was leafing through an American magazine with photographs of ponds and pools. I saw everything, detail by detail. The letters A, B and C described precisely every component part of the plans and outlines. I eagerly began reading an article entitled: ‘How to Build an Ocean: Instructions’.
ASH WEDNESDAY FEAST
‘You can call me Eryk,’ he would announce in lieu of a greeting as he walked into the little bar, which at that time of year was heated only by the wood in the fireplace, and everyone would smile in a friendly way to him, some even beckoning him over with a wave that simply meant ‘pull up a seat’. All things considered he was a good companion and – in spite of his eccentricities – was well-liked. To begin with, before he’d had enough to drink, he would sit in the corner looking gruff, at a remove from the warmth of the fireplace. He could afford to do so – he had a powerful build, was resistant to cold, could keep himself warm.
‘An island,’ he’d start, seeming to be sighing to himself but loud enough so that the others would hear, provoking them as he ordered his first giant beer. ‘What a miserable state of mind. Asshole of the world.’
The others at the bar didn’t really understand him, it seeemed, but they would chuckle knowingly.
‘Hey, Eryk, when are you going on your whale hunt?’ they would holler, their faces flushed from the fire and alcohol.
In response Eryk would curse baroquely, pure poetry, like no one else – this was a part of the nightly ritual. For every day went ahead like a ferry on its cables, from one shore to the other, passing on its route those same red buoys tasked with breaking up the water’s monopoly on vastness, making it measurable, and in so doing, giving a false impression of control.
After another beer Eryk would be ready to sit with the others, and he usually did so, although lately as he drank his mood tended to turn sour. He’d sit there grimacing, sarcastic. He no longer spun his yarns of distant seas – if you had known him long enough you knew he never repeated any tales, or at least they differed from one another significantly in the details. But now, more and more often he simply attacked the others rather than telling any stories. Angry Eryk.
There were also evenings when he’d fall into a kind of trance, and at these times he’d become unbearable. More than once Hendrik, the owner of the small bar, had had to intervene.
‘Consider yourselves enlisted,’ Eryk would shout, pointing his finger at each person in the room in turn. ‘To the last man. And I am to set sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea! Oh, life! ‘tis in an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge – as wild, untutored things are forced to feed.’
Hendrik would amiably pull him aside and give him a friendly pat on the back, while the younger clientele would guffaw at his strange speech.
‘Give it a rest, Eryk. You don’t want to make trouble, do you?’ the older ones, who knew him well, would say to try to calm him down, but Eryk would not allow himself to be calmed down.
‘Talk not to me of blasphemy. I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.’
When this happened the only thing to be done was pray he didn’t offend some visiting guest, since the locals didn’t take offence at Eryk. What could you expect of him, now that he looked out at the bar as though through a milky plastic curtain; his absent gaze revealed that he was travelling the seas within himself now, his staysail up. Now the only thing that could be done was to mercifully send him home.
‘Listen, then, hard-hearted man,’ Eryk kept babbling, planting his finger on somebody’s chest, ‘I’m talking to you, too.’
‘Come on, Eryk. Let’s go.’
‘Ye’ve shipped, have you? Names down on the papers? Well, well, what’s signed, is signed; and what’s to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won’t be, after all…’ he mumbled and went back from the door to the counter, demanding a last round, ‘a draught of a draught,’ as he said, even though no one knew what that meant.
He’d continue making a fuss until someone seized the perfect moment to tug him out by the tail of his uniform and sit him back down until his taxi came.
But he wasn’t always so belligerent. More often than not he left before he reached this state, since he still had to walk four kilometres – and he found this march home, he noted, most loathsome. The route was monotonous, along a road that ran between old pastures overgrown with weeds and looming dwarf pines. Sometimes, when the night was clear, he could make out in the distance the outline of a windmill, long since inactive, serving only as a backdrop for tourists as they photographed themselves and one another.
The heating would kick in about an hour before he got back – he had it set that way to save on electricity – so clouds of cold – damp, soaked through with sea salt – still hovered in the darkness of both rooms.
He sustained himself on the same single basic dish, the only thing he hadn’t tired of yet: thin-sliced potatoes, interlaid with strips of bacon and onion, cooked in a cast-iron pot. Sprinkled with marjoram and pepper, liberally salted. The perfect meal, nutritional proportions perfectly preserved: fats, carbohydrates, starch, protein and Vitamin C. With dinner he’d turn on the television, but then, since he hated TV most of all, he’d always open a bottle of vodka in the end and drink it dry, before finally going to sleep.
What a godforsaken place, this island. Shoved up into the north as into a dark drawer; windy and wet. For some reason people still lived here and had no intention whatsoever of moving to bright warm cities. They just hunkered down in their tiny wooden homes arranged along a road that rose with each new asphalt coating, condemning them to eternal diminishment.
You can all go down along the shoulder of that road, towards the small port, which is made up of several seedy buildings, a plastic hut that sells the ferry tickets and a lousy marina – largely abandoned at this time of year. Perhaps in the summer a few yachts will come in bearing some eccentric tourists who have tired of all the racket around southern waters, rivieras, azures and sweltering beaches. And then people like us – restless people, ever ravenous for new adventures, backpacks brimming with cheap ramen – might wind up in this sad place by accident. What will you see here? The very edge of the world, where time, reflected off the empty waterfront, turns around disappointed and heads towards land and pitilessly leaves this place to its perpetual enduring. For how is 1946 different from 1976 here, or 1976 from 2000?
Eryk got marooned here after an array of adventures and misadventures. In the beginning, long ago, he fled his country, one of those bland, flat communist lands, and as a young immigrant got hired to work on a whaling ship. At that time, he had only a few English words under his belt, intermittent pinpoints between ‘yes’ and ‘no’, just exactly enough to answer the simple grunts the guys on the ship would exchange among themselves. ‘Take’, ‘pull’, ‘cut’. ‘Fast’ and ‘hard’. ‘Catch’ and ‘tie’. ‘Fuck’. It sufficed at first. And it sufficed, too, to change his name to a simple, widely known one: Eryk. To get rid of that dragging corpse that no one knew how to pronounce correctly. And to toss into the ocean the folders of papers, school certificates, diplomas, transcripts from additional studies and records of vaccines – those would never come in handy here, if anything they’d just humiliate the other sailors, whose entire résumés consisted in a few long voyages and some escapades in portside pubs.