Cold Sea Stories by Pawel Huelle

Author:Pawel Huelle [Huelle, Pawel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Comma Press
Published: 2014-01-18T23:00:00+00:00

Abulafia

THE SAND WAS everywhere. Not just under the miserable bed or in his bowl. It was in his eyes too, the pores of his skin, under his fingernails and in his hair. Sometimes he felt as if his entire body were nothing but grains of sand, joined together by some strange means, and that one day they would fall apart and then he would die. He longed for it. A year had passed since he was locked up in here, maybe even more. He had long ago lost track of time; when the guard who brought food and water had noticed he was marking the days on the wall, just above the dirt floor, the chain shackling him to the bed had been shortened. Since then, he’d been unable to go to the window, stand on tiptoes and watch the world go by. Below was a square, where once a week there was a slave and camel market. Beyond it, on the other side, stretched the walls of the city, which looked like a small fort with an entrance gate. The walls were very high, made of stone. With their clay coating, and especially in the sunlight, they looked like a sand castle from the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Only two towers rose beyond this line – the minaret of a mosque, and, as he guessed, the turret of the ruler’s residence.

Long ago he had tried to communicate. Using signs, he had asked the guard for an interpreter, or a textbook for learning the local language. Or anyone he could tell about himself. The toothless man nodded, and sometimes tossed him a handful of dried dates or an extra ration of manioc, but that was all.

He did not know who was keeping him prisoner, why here, or how long it would go on. As the months went by he had to come to terms with the thought that one day he would die in this hole; they would take his body out to the edge of the desert and throw it in a rift like the corpse of a rabid dog.

His only real life was his memories. But he could not summon them up the way one takes photographs from an album. They came according to a logic of their own, and disappeared in just the same way. Sometimes this caused him even greater pain, as the image of his mother, or just of the track leading across the dunes and pine groves by the sea suddenly faded and vanished.

He realised he would go mad if he did not employ his mind on some fixed occupation every day. He began to compose elegies, first in his own language, then translated line by line into ancient Greek, and finally into Latin. It was a demanding exercise, as being unable to write he had to entrust it all to memory. On the third elegy something dreadful happened. He woke up and could not remember the phrases he had worked on for the whole of the previous day.

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