From the recent collection The Burden of Skin.
The sea was groaning like a wounded beast. Is the sea hungry? Or thirsty? Is it afraid?
Dawn was slipping through holes in the thin curtains. Lying in bed, Enriko began to make out the contours of objects. He listened to the sea. It was calling him as usual, but this time it was full of pain; its sobs were breaking through the roar of the waves and then falling silent on the shoreline. The sea was lamenting – it had called something to mind and was yearning for it. It had seen something and wanted to tell him about it. What a great burden to bear: the capacity to see and remember everything, to be there forever.
Enriko got up and approached the window quietly, careful not to wake his grandmother, and put an eye to a hole in the curtain. Light interlaced with gold. Violet streaks of cloud. And over there in the distance, the steadily breathing body of the sea in infinite motion, arranging itself in stripes of indigo and gold. Enriko touched the cut on the back of his hand and began to suck it, in case something was still seeping from the wound. A chasm of a wound. A scab was slowly forming. Grandma had examined it last night and said it was nothing serious, but the tissue had come apart and there’d be a scar. Maybe on his arm too.
“Men have scars,” she said. “You’ll have more scars in the future. And you’ll be proud of them.”
He gazed at her calm face, sunken cheeks and small, sharp nose. His grandma, composed of nothing but creases and silence, clothed in a layer of widow’s black that would be her skin to the day she died. She smiled to herself as she washed his wound, and swung her head. She smiled the same way when Enriko’s father screamed at her, she was unmoved, as if mentally far away, recalling something not too pleasant, but essentially insignificant. Grandma had scars too, two parallel lines on her forehead, one higher, one lower, and a dimple on her chin, as if cut by a knife. Once when he asked her where they came from, she said life carves marks on people. The crown of her drooping head shone silver, shot through with streaks of dark hair. Both were reflected in the mirror above the table: she was huddled, gone grey, like a mushroom and as patient as a mushroom spawn, Enriko was slender, prematurely stretched like a sunflower, with narrow shoulders and extremely long hands, curly hair that grew so fast his father cut it for him every three months, always brutally, as if he couldn’t restrain his anger at the hair for being so thick and growing as furiously as weeds after rain.
“Curls,” his father kept saying, stumbling on that word and muttering it like a curse. “Curls,” he’d hiss, waving the heavy, rusting tailor’s shears he’d taken from Grandma’s basket. “I’ll cut off your curls, you inhuman creature.”
Grandma sometimes complained that such beautiful hair was wasted on a boy, a girl would have had more use for it.
“You don’t look like anyone, but you do have your mother’s hair,” she once told him. “Though even hers wasn’t quite the same – your hair is bursting with life. Your mother’s dragged her to the bottom.”
He peeped through the hole in the curtain again, his long eyelashes splaying against the fabric. The sea was glittering in the distance like a golden bracelet. It was a soft, subtle morning. Yesterday his father’s belt buckle had slashed Enriko’s body like a knife. His father had beaten him and then left. When he came back he wouldn’t even remember why he did it. He’d look vigilantly in every corner, seeking a new excuse, strong as a bear, with one heavy leg that he dragged behind him, as if it didn’t belong to him. Hobbling. Clatter. At these moments Enriko’s senses were so highly sharpened that he could have read his father’s thoughts, but there weren’t any thoughts in his father’s head, just a swarm of wasps stinging from the inside. The sea glistens. His father is a wine-skin full of foul, murky water. Any moment now this water will come pouring out of him. He’ll try to drown Enriko in it. But Enriko can’t be drowned. If needs be, he’ll change into air. He’ll change into sea foam. With his eyes closed he’ll follow the movement of his father’s eyeballs. His father will strike the first blow, unaware that he’s hitting the crust of a shell, an empty void. Because Enriko will be there already, on the other side. His hair will spread out on the surface of the water. Like black seaweed swaying. The child who emerged from amniotic fluid will return to the water.
He carefully pushed the window frame, raising it a touch without making a sound. Grandma was sleeping on a narrow sofa bed against the wall, on the other side of the room, immobile, with her hands crossed on her chest, as if trying not to take up too much space. If she woke, she’d start her grumbling, as gentle as the ticking of a clock, but endless. Why are you always trailing about by the water? The sea brings nothing but trouble.
Sometimes Enriko fantasized that one day a great storm would arise and the water would pour in all the way to the threshold, seize Enriko and carry him far away, to his mother.
He could feel the faint chill of the flooring under his feet. He slid back the window and ran ahead, and kept running, while his feet exchanged greetings with the stones and sand, feeling their dampness and roughness.
The sea lit up at the sight of him. The pain eased, the first rays of the sun twinkled on the waves. As nobody had ever asked him about it, he’d never told anyone why he plunged into the water every day. He just did. There, the sea came pouring inside, under the cover of his skin too. He loved the sea and he thought like the sea. His interior was the sea, the skin layer just a border separating the sea from the rest of the world. As he lay in bed, he was lulled to sleep by the rocking of waves that flowed through his body, crashing against the shore of his skin.
As every morning, he sang his song to the sea. And it replied with its roar and rocking. As he entered the foam, the waves embraced him. The water began to hiss, washing over the stripes on his hands and forearms, stinging his skin, but Enriko felt gratitude, knowing that salt cleanses wounds. From afar he could see his house, an inconspicuous yellow block with a flat roof, white sliding windows and plastic shutters. He had nothing in common with this house. Here, in the water, was his home. With his eyes closed he could feel rings of it shimmering around him. The sun’s rays danced on the surface of his eyelids.
Stretched out on his back, he continued to drift until the sea said that’s enough and carried him onto the shore.
Now he was on the alert. With back bent, head bowed and nose close to the sand he trotted along, looking to either side. He had changed into a dog. He was tracking. The air was sharp, leaving specks of salt inside his nostrils. The sand smelled of moisture, snail skin and the dried-out bodies of jellyfish. There was no day when he didn’t find something. Long ribbons of seaweed which he braided into plaits, very like the ones the sirens wore. Shells saturated with gold, mother-of-pearl and aquamarine – the valuables offered him by the sea because it loved him. Lots of little gifts. Enriko didn’t need as many, but the sea was loving and generous, and adored pampering him. What he liked best was when it presented him with toys. Sweet wrappers covered in words he didn’t know. Small objects, sometimes of no use, like a flip-flop or part of a plastic deckchair. Enriko couldn’t accept all the gifts, and simply left most of them on the beach. But sometimes there were real treasures: a Smurf figurine, a fluorescent toy spade or a rubber seal pup. Enriko gazed lovingly at the seal pup, and then threw himself into the waves to thank the sea, and floated on his back, with his head submerged and just his nose protruding above the surface. The sea whispered in Enriko’s ear that he deserved everything that was most beautiful, it whispered to him that he was good.
That day Enriko found as many as two gifts on the beach: a piece of glass polished by the water, as lovely as an emerald, and a seashell almost as big as his hand, with thick walls covered in convex stripes. He turned it over in his palm on all sides, drew the tip of his finger over the bulging bands, unable to believe how heavy it was. The sapphire streaks passed into azure, which faded to change into bleached orange, bordering the edges of the shell. It sang the song of the sea into his ear. He felt sure at once that his uncle would like it. His uncle would so delighted when he saw it that he’d start to draw immediately.
Enriko jumped up and raced ahead, almost unaware of the resistance the sand was offering him. He had changed into the wind. He ran diagonally across the beach, raising clouds of sand around him, until he felt the stab of pine needles on the soles of his feet. Briefly he wondered whether to go home for his shoes, but that meant the risk of encountering his father. It was never entirely clear what business took his father to the city, when he’d be back and what mood he’d be in. Enriko cut across a small wood that separated the beach from the village, and ran on over compacted earth, still damp from the night, full of potholes and ruts, down which on rare occasion the tired, battered cars of residents wobbled their way. On one side stretched an olive orchard that fell away steeply towards a meadow bordering the beach. On the other side rose some ugly bungalows, built here out of longing for peace and safety, but without further thought, painted in garish, self-satisfied colours designed to distract attention from their hideousness. The houses carried large water collectors on their flat roofs, because no authority had ever had the know-how, desire and courage to extend a water system to the village.
“They can’t imagine what their life would be like if they kicked up a fuss, so why on earth should they?” his uncle would say angrily.
They were so alike, Taso and Ana, his uncle and his mother. Twins. So the photos told Enriko. Only a tiny difference in the size of their noses, the width of their faces and the length of their chins betrayed that they were of different sexes, but the set of the eyes, the shape of the lips, and the hair were just the same. Taso had left their mother’s womb first, so in time he had adopted the title of older brother. He had always done his best to protect his sister, and he’d done it well, until he left for Greece, and Ana got married. Looking through his parents’ wedding photos, Enriko sought a trace of his uncle in vain. Taso hadn’t even come when his nephew was born. Only when he learned that Ana had disappeared did he come back. He went round asking questions, paid bribes, and had a fight with someone to a point of bloodshed. Yet the village said nothing. Finally he had founded “Ana’s Bar” to remind everyone that Ana was missing. To disturb their peace. One day someone will come into the bar who who’ll tell me the truth, he kept repeating. In vino veritas, you sons of bitches. That was what he said when he was sober, and also when he was drunk.
Seven years had passed. In this time people had brought him rumours and gossip. They laid accusations on the counter. They drank on credit, promising to bring in eye-witnesses. They lowered their voices whenever they spoke of the culprit. They cursed the policeman and all the police in the country. Those who did business with the police cursed the most.
At eight a.m. the bar was still closed, but Konstantin was already sitting at the counter, Taso’s best friend, who came to the bar early in the morning and was the last to leave. On a good day, he played the accordion, he played acutely and with feeling; Taso would rest his hands on Konstantin’s shoulders and sing, just as if sirens longing for the sea were circulating in his blood stream.
Konstantin patted the chair next to him and moved his plate of white cheese, bread and honey towards Enriko.
“Hey, kid, have you been swimming since daybreak?” he asked.
Enriko nodded and beamed.
“What did you catch?” asked Taso.
Enriko pulled the blue-and-orange shell from his pocket with a beseeching look on his face, and Taso smiled.
“Beautiful. We’ll do a drawing,” he said.
“It’s three months since it last rained,” said Konstantin with a sigh. “People are saying that where the river falls into the sea, on a level with Tanis, you can see the roof of an old ship that used to transport timber. Something for you, Enriko.”
Enriko nodded. Just then Adego and Klodi arrived for morning coffee and news, and when Celestino came in, the bar, which had seemed empty, suddenly became too small. Celestino, nicknamed Concertina, was small and stout, with narrow shoulders, a belly like a ball and a slight squint, and regarded himself as a gigolo. His wife had died young, of heart disease, before she’d had the chance to have a child. He said it was so long ago that sometimes he had to look at her photo to remember her face, and that if he wanted, he could sleep with any woman in town, but he was bothered by diabetes and sweated terribly – and no girl was worth moving from the village across those potholes for. When you’re on your own you can save lots of money and energy, and spend them on all sorts of interesting occupations, such as eating and drinking with your friends.
“That Karaj girl is part snake, part wild cat,” said Celestino to open the conversation. “She came to join her parents from Italy and keeps walking past my house to show how her nipples jump out of her low-cut dress. Konstantin, play something on your accordion at the front door, maybe you can lure her in here.”
Enriko sat against the wall, and on a table covered with a cloth full of holes he lined up the shells he’d brought to his uncle’s bar and kept in a basket near the fireplace. First he organized them from smallest to largest, then according to shape, from the roundest to the most conical, then by colour, from the darkest to the lightest. And over again. He’d listen to the voices and wait for Konstantin to play his accordion, though Konstantin only played in the evenings, and only once his pals had stood him enough drinks.
At twelve Agron checked in, because he always took his heart medicine at noon, and he was sure it should be washed down with walnut rakija, or it wouldn’t work. After drinking it he’d be pensive and stand leaning against the counter, picking his nose with the long, horny nail of his little finger.
“Unlike you lot,” he said, “I respect my health and I hope I’ll be drinking rakija at all your funerals.”
Enriko thought the old man was coming up to eighty, but Taso said he was only a few years short of a hundred. Agron walked exaggeratedly upright, like a soldier, and always wore the same shabby grey trousers pulled high above his belly and held there by a belt. Sometimes Enriko saw the old man from afar, plunging himself into the sea at dawn, but Agron never called him over to join him. Just once Enriko had asked him why he had that long, claw-like fingernail, and without blinking the old man had replied that he pierced lizard hearts with it. From then on Enriko had never approached him again.
In any case, the men at the bar usually ignored him too, only Celestino would say with a laugh, as he drank up: “One day you’ll grow up to be a beautiful girl, Enriko!”
After twelve the bar emptied, so Taso and Konstantin settled on the veranda, smoking cigarettes. Enriko squatted on the steps. He was waiting for the mouse that lived under them to emerge, or for some other little creature to appear for a drink of water from the bowls set out on the floor.
In the distance a man walked past who had stopped dropping in at the bar ever since it became known that he helped his wife to wash the dishes. Celestino had caught him red-handed one day when he knocked at his door with the news that a car with foreign plates had run over his hen.
“What I saw was beyond human comprehension,” Celestino had said in a loud voice as he told the story at the bar. “Mr Dishcloth was standing by a bowl of water, rinsing plates in it! The only thing he was missing was an apron or a skirt.”
Afterwards the wretched man explained that his wife’s fingers were twisted by rheumatism and whenever she washed the plates she broke them; their children had gone far away and there was no one to help at home.
“But he could spout whatever nonsense he liked – the shit has stuck to him anyway,” Celestino concluded. They’d all started calling the old man Mr Dishcloth, and only Celestino called him Carpet Slipper, because he reckoned Mr Dishcloth was too high a compliment for him.
“Who knows,” wondered Celestino, “perhaps there are more like him in the village, but they’re better at hiding it.”
But his pals assured him there was only one Mr Dishcloth.
Enriko raised a hand to greet Mr Dishcloth, who nodded to him from afar, and in Taso’s direction too. Nearby a cat ran past, which showed up at the bar now and then and ate everything they gave it, even bread and potatoes. Enriko had sometimes seen the cat flash by with a lizard or a robin in its mouth. Once Enriko had blocked its path to save the creature, but he soon found out it was impossible to force the cat to give up its prey, even if he tried to distract it with a piece a meat. Another time he and Taso had stopped the cat with a live, struggling sparrow in its mouth, and had poured a bowl of water on its head, but the cat hadn’t even twitched; they’d heard the crunch of fragile bird bones snapping under the pressure of its jaws. The cat stared at them, its eyes shining, because it could feel that sound throughout its body and knew it had got its way. What could they do? They let it go, and Enriko went on offering it yogurt, bits of chicken and bread, hoping to save at least one creature by doing so.
In the distance the village policeman rode by on a ramshackle bicycle without looking in their direction. He had only shown up at the bar once, but Taso had approached him and said something into his ear, after which the man had never come back again.
Enriko took a pencil, a sheet of paper and a shell and placed them before Taso. His uncle glanced at the boy’s hand, at the closing wound, and then looked him in the eye.
“Men have scars,” muttered Enriko.
“Everyone has scars,” said Taso. “But it’s better not to have them.”
Enriko thought his uncle’s hand was shaking as, suspended just above the paper, he drew an outline in the air that would appear seconds later on the paper in the shape of a shell. His long, curly hair cast dancing shadows on the page. Right now, Enriko was thinking, his uncle looked like his mama. The good mama from the photos, whom no one was willing to tell him about. Mama Ana, whom he couldn’t remember. Mama, who had vanished two years after he was born, because she’d changed into a siren.
“Does he often hit you?” asked Taso, looking up from the drawing.
Enriko nodded to say neither yes or no. How many times was often? Every day? No. Sometimes it was enough for Enriko to wobble after the first blow and tumble to the floor, and then his father would stop and walk away, as if he’d remembered other, more urgent matters. Grandma said that essentially his father had a good heart, but Enriko thought his father was lazy. He easily lost interest in beating the child. He didn’t want to lean down to hit him; by and large he rarely kicked him – he preferred to use his hand, his belt or a stick. Looking him in the face. As equal to equal, although they weren’t equal. Grandma would tell his father to stop, or he’d kill the child, and his father would reply that the child could take it. The child had to be as strong as he was. One day he’d be doing the beating. He had to know how. He had to feel it on his own skin. He had to toughen up. A man should be resilient. He’d run into worse things than that in life. And he mustn’t whine. It was all basically to teach him not to cry.
“It’s raining, drip, drip, drop,” hummed Taso and drew Enriko towards him. He rocked in his uncle’s arms just as he did in the water. How many tears had the sea shed to be so salty?
He wiped his face, kissed his uncle on the temple, though he never did that, put a heavy, round shell into his shorts pocket, did up the zip carefully and ran towards the river. From quite far off he could already see the dull, rusty top of the boat sticking out of the water. Nearby the river fell into the sea and the current was strong, but Enriko wasn’t afraid. The water could carry him but never drown him. He took off his shirt and jumped in. The sea is mighty. It can kill anyone if it wants to. His father too could kill anyone if he wanted. But the sea is good to Enriko, the sea embraces him, the sea loves him. And his father wouldn’t want to kill him either. He always knows when to stop hitting. Sometimes Enriko thinks one more blow and he’ll die. The life will fly out of him along with his breath. At these moments he changes into the sea, his consciousness rocks like the waves. But his father knows when to stop. How not to take his life. How to leave some of him for later. Enriko belongs to his father and his family – so it always has been, and so it always will be.
He swam up to the boat and dived. The metal hulk was like a rusty whale. He swam the length of the hull underwater, brushing his fingers against its rough edges. Clinging to its corroded surface were plenty of mussels, sea snails and sea anemones – these interested him the most. Softness hidden inside speckled, calcareous armour. The bumpy texture of rust-eaten metal under his fingers. Trembling dark purple protuberances and long black spines. A vast light overhead, a vast depth underfoot. Boundless water. Boundless time.
When Enriko finally surfaces, in the light of the golden hour his body shines like copper. Just ahead of him rise the honey-coloured walls of sand dunes, shot through with darker streaks of earth, as if someone has laid out graphite ribbons on a quilt of gold. In the distance Enriko can see two small figures on a cliff top, holding a long bundle in their outstretched hands. He blinks. Without much thought, he swims towards the figures: one of them shouts something to the other, until finally it raises both hands, causing the object it’s holding to knock against the ground. Then the second figure drops the burden at its end too. Enriko can see a tall, burly man hobbling in the opposite direction, but after a while he turns around. Once again he shouts something to the person standing opposite him. Enriko swims fast, and the matchstick figures grow before him, gaining details, though both men have their heads hidden under hoods. Once again they grab the bundle they were holding, and with a swing they throw it into the water. For the moment the sun’s rays dazzle Enriko, but now he’s shot through by certainty – the thing the men are throwing into the water was once a human being; a cobweb of long, female hair spreads in the air, the shape falls like a stone, and then there’s a deafening splash of water in the silence, as if a bomb has exploded right in front of him.
He dives. To forget what he has seen. To see with his own eyes. But he can’t see anything beyond the dark, transparent depths. When he surfaces, there’s no one on the cliff top. He swims towards the spot where the body was thrown into the water, but the surface is instantly smoothing over, as if the sea has swallowed the body, as if the body belonged to it. He dives again and again, violently catching mouthfuls of air and going deep underwater. He looks around in all directions, but can’t see a thing. No trace of the body, no trace of the hair. Just flashing shoals of fish and ribbons of seaweed glittering in the water.
He comes up to the surface. The sun’s rays have taken on the colours of fire, the shadows have grown longer. Again he goes underwater, sinking ever lower, immobile, into the darkness and silence of the deep.
And all of a sudden he hears singing, at first distant, like the wailing of the wind, and then his body is pierced by a sound that stuns and terrifies him.
He swims to the shore. He walks along the beach, across the sand, which turns into old gold beneath his feet. The shell in his pocket is weighing him down like a boulder. He walks at a steady pace, as if in a trance, though he has no idea what he has just seen, where he’s going or what he’s about to do.
His legs carry him towards home, and as soon as he can see the modest yellow block in the distance, a shiver transfixes him, because the house in which he has spent his whole life seems alien, as if he didn’t belong to this place or to this world anymore.
Through the open door he enters the house and sees his father, an immobile figure sitting on the couch, absent to a point of lifelessness.
He takes the shell from his pocket and clenches his palm around it. He can feel its weight under his fingers and the hardness of its walls. He only has to go up and strike his father on the one spot on his temple where the skull is fragile. Strike, and then batter his head with a steady motion, again and again, endlessly, just as his father’s blows seemed never ending as Enriko watched him lose his breath from the perspective of the floor.
He only has to throw the shell at his father for the man to leap up like a rabid beast and start to kick Enriko blindly, until he has lost reason, until the life has trickled out of the boy along with his blood.
He looks at the steel blue of his father’s eye, in which there’s no trace of the sea, no touch of longing for the sea.
“Go away,” says his father. “What do you want? I’m too tired to beat you.”
Enriko puts the shell to his ear and hears a whisper. She’s calling him. He drops the shell and runs out into the yard, then races across the sand, which in the light of the setting sun is like coral dust.
He enters the water. The pain changes into the foam of the waves that are washing against the beach, leaving shining stripes on the sand.
But what if the sun never sets? What if it goes on hanging like a red ball over the horizon forever? He, the sea and the sun will freeze and change into a picture. Enriko will dissolve in the sea. He’ll become the sea.
He only has to swim ahead, endlessly.
His heart is beating to a completely new rhythm now, to the rhythm of ebb and flow. With the tip of his thumb he touches the membrane between his fingers. He can feel his body lengthening and growing slender, his legs joining together to form a tail, and instantly his skin is covered in thick, heavy scales. The time has come. Somewhere in the distance, beyond the horizon, he can hear singing.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association. Her recent publications include a translation of My Name is Stramer by Mikołaj Łoziński, and as compiler and co-translator, The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories. Photo credit: Mikołaj Starzyński.
