Alex Aspden

Baltic love

We were stuck together in our studio flat (200 sq. ft, everything balanced on top of something else) for nearly a year during the pandemic. We got on each other’s nerves so much that when the restrictions were lifted I expected her to tell me to get fucked and pack her bags. But instead she said, we need a holiday.

It wasn’t mentioned again until a few weeks later when I said, as if it were an original thought, we need a holiday. She looked pissed off. This is exactly what I’m talking about, she said.

She needed a holiday. She hadn’t done any writing at all during lockdown. Instead, she spent most of her time taking long walks around the suburban streets where we lived. I hadn’t gone outside much and preferred to stay in the flat for days on end staring at my laptop, keeping my work emails down to zero. Anything over zero gave me a rash.

Now the restrictions on international travel have been lifted, she tells me she’s booked us a holiday cottage in Poland on the Baltic coast. The word cottage concerns me. So does the word Baltic. It’s the middle of winter.

We fly out to Gdansk. I’ve never been colder in my life. I need sun, I tell her as we walk down the steps from the plane. If I don’t have sun I’ll die.

It’s cold on the runway and in the bus and in the terminal building, and the stare from the border guard inside his booth is cold and truly piercing, and when he hands back my passport it’s cold from being in that cold booth with him in his cold hands. From the look in his eyes I can tell that he has cursed our entire romantic retreat. That’s what she called it on the plane after her third whisky and mineral water.

We catch a bus from the terminal to the city centre. She’s booked us into a hotel for the night on Świętego Ducha. She says we’ll go on to the cottage in the morning. The restaurant is still open. We haven’t been out for a meal for a long time, so we go up to our room to dump our bags, then she does her nails, puts on vivid green eyeshadow, huge hoop earrings and a flowing dress of a thousand colours. I wear my shirt undone down to here.

We eat a good meal with three bottles of wine and the atmosphere is so perfect that I ask her whether we shouldn’t just stay at the hotel instead of going on to the cottage where we will only coop ourselves up (she has alluded to the remoteness several times) reliving the horrors of the last year. But she replies that she needs to get some work done, that there are too distractions at the hotel and too many people around. They are legion, she says.

I look around and there’s only one other couple in the restaurant as well as a children’s football team of eight or nine year olds, all wearing muddy kits and eating silently. There aren’t any adults with them but they make polite conversation with each other and when each one finishes their meal they set their cutlery down on their plates and wait silently for the others. When they’re all finished they settle the bill with the tallest one’s credit card and leave in single file.

We head back to the room but I don’t want to go to bed, so I stare out the window at the street below, watching scores of potential friends pass by. I stay squatting on the floor because she’s sleeping in the middle of the bed, and eventually I lie down and fall asleep. I dream that we’re back at the flat. I’m sitting on the sofa reading a book and she’s leaning out the window and shouting at the moon. When she comes back in the book has disappeared from my hands and is now in hers, and she throws it at me and brains me with it. This wasn’t a dream. It was a memory of 24 December 2020, just before midnight.

In the morning, we take a taxi from the hotel out to Gdansk Bay. We pull up at a cottage where there’s not much around except the sea, a beach, a few other cottages some distance away and endless woods. I tell the driver the day we’re leaving and when to pick us up to take us to the airport. I stuff some euros into his shirt pocket to guarantee his return, but he says nothing. A look of total self-assurance comes over him when I stuff the money into his pocket, as if he’s used to having money in his pocket. Local big boy. Unnerved by his silence, I ask for assurances that he will return at that time on that day to take us to the airport. Please, I say, debasing myself before the big boy. But he says nothing. He won’t be coming back. I can see it in his eyes and hear it in his laugh.

We get out of the taxi and he drives off before I’ve even closed my door. There’s no sun. It looks like evening although it’s still early. It’s so cold that I can’t feel my face.

It’s even colder in the cottage. I sit on the floor by the fireplace and huddle up in my coat. She steps over me and unpacks her laptop and notebooks on the kitchen table. She refuses to turn on the lights when it gets even darker, citing a year of oppression under the rule of electric lights. She closes the curtains and lights a few candles but always stays at or just beyond the edge of their glow. There’s newspaper and kindling by the fireplace so I light a small fire. I practically climb into the fireplace to warm myself up.

She works at the kitchen table without taking off her coat, and I go upstairs to unpack my stuff, but when I come back down she’s not at the kitchen table. I search for her but I get the feeling she’s dodging me in the darkness.

Later, I ask into the darkness whether she wants to go for a walk on the beach. She says no.

I go for a walk anyway and see a seal, streaked grey and darker grey. It waves to me. When I get back, I tell her about the seal, but she tells me it was only a rock, and I look out the window and see that it was a rock, streaked grey and darker grey. She prepares an early dinner of sauerkraut, straight out of the jar. While we eat, she litters her conversation with the most sinister threats.

I go out again after dinner and the seal is still there, lit up in the moonlight, still waving.

I try to get her to go out for a walk the next morning but she says she’s not going anywhere. I walk for hours through the woods, stopping every half mile or so to headbutt a tree.

We eat sauerkraut again that night. She doesn’t want to make anything else but that’s fine because I can’t get enough of it and I see now that she was right when she said all through lockdown that we should just eat the same thing every night and that thing would take on delicious and hidden characteristics previously unknown to us. We haven’t had sex at all during the last year.

The next morning, I try again to get her to go out for a walk, but she still refuses to leave the cottage. She says she has too much work to do, that she’s on a roll, and that the reason we came here is for her to be productive again and not to waste time adding to the pointless walks we spent the last year taking in the suburban streets around our flat. She adds that those walks have made her not want to take any walks ever again.

She encourages me to go out every day now, urging me on without looking up from her notebook. I stray beyond the beach to the next beach along. This beach is more expansive and there are more seals, all waving in unison. I return their waves, then spend a long time standing in the sea with the water up to my knees, trying to catch a fish with my bare hands. I get out of the water when my legs go numb. As I’m walking back, I find a fish washed up on the shore that one of the seals must have caught and then rejected. I pick it up and put it in my pocket. One of the seals eyes the fish and sticks out its tongue as I walk past.

When I get back, it takes me a long time to find her in the darkness. I call her name but she doesn’t respond. I only find her when I trip over her legs on the way to the toilet. I present her with the fish but she tells me to throw it away, not for reasons of food hygiene but because the sauerkraut is unimpeachable and also because she won’t make any changes to her routine. A small change would be all it takes to ruin her flow, she says.

When the day comes for us to leave she makes no move to pack her things. The taxi driver doesn’t appear. She tells me she has extended the lease.

I’m heading out earlier and staying out all day now, roaming all over. I explore the woods and every bit of undergrowth. I’m soon familiar with all the local flora and fauna as well as the outdoor jacuzzis of the nearby cottages. I slip into them when it gets dark and set the bubbles to max, and from the darkness I watch the guests through the patio doors as they enjoy their glasses of wine.

Feeling inspired and romantic one night after viewing a scene like this, I lean across the sauerkraut and take her hand and say, tell me what you’re working on. She doesn’t tell me.

I return to the woods the next day and while I’m digging around in a rocky area I find a metal door covered with moss. I push it open and find that it’s the entrance to a bunker. I walk down the steps inside and spend the night on the concrete floor. It must have housed German troops during the occupation because my phone light illuminates tiny swastikas and eagles scratched into the walls. While I’m dozing on the floor I think to myself that 39,000 Nazis died during the liberation of Gdansk in 1945.

I stay in the bunker until the next evening but I begin to feel weird after spending so long in almost complete darkness, so I leave and when I get outside it takes me a long time to find my way out of the woods. I wrestle my way through much undergrowth and when I’m out I stop off at a jacuzzi on the way back to relax for a while. I watch as the couple inside share a bottle of wine and then have hot sex on the kitchen counter.

The cottage next door looks empty so I gather my clothes and break in. Dripping jacuzzi water everywhere, I check there’s no one around and then cook up a load of pasta that I find in a cupboard. I turn up the dimmer lights to full blast and leave them on all night as I sleep in the master bedroom. Life is momentarily good again, but the sound of crunching gravel and the appearance of a Lexus on the drive the next morning interrupts my new life and sends me climbing out of the bedroom window.

As I walk back along the beach towards the cottage, I find that the seals are all gone and only the rocks remain. I wave to them anyway.

It’s even darker in the cottage now and in the light from her laptop she looks like a levitating head. I tell her she looks like a levitating head but she only replies to say that she’s getting a lot of work done.

I go to bed and when I get up in the morning I find her still sitting with the laptop at the kitchen table. She’s surrounded by piles of notebooks and there are bits of scrap paper everywhere. I start to say something but she puts a finger to her mouth to shush me and goes back to typing.

I head back to the woods and in a clearing I find the body of a hunter embracing a dead deer. They look as if they had engaged in hand to hand combat before finally succumbing to their wounds together.

I lift the hunter’s peaked cap. I recognise his face – it resembles the taxi driver’s. He and the deer look recently deceased. Death can’t have been the reason he didn’t come to pick us up then. I am grateful to the deer for avenging me.

I wander around for a long time holding my phone in the air, looking for reception. When I get a bar, I call the operator and luckily he speaks English and puts me through to the local police who don’t speak English except for one phrase, which is, send up a flare.

I have no flares.

I give them the address of the cottage and then repeat it ten times in succession and hang up. It check my work emails. I have 39,000, all marked high importance. We’ve been away for a long time.

When I get back to the house there’s already a police car outside. I find her sitting on a chair away from her notebooks and laptop, chewing her bottom lip and staring at two police officers who are examining a painting of a carp on the wall. They’re stroking their chins and making what sound like thoughtful comments. They look like they’ve been at it for a while.

During the interview that follows (one of them speaks English) they ask me what happened. I repeat that I found the hunter and the deer together and that they looked like they had engaged in a death struggle before finally finding rest together. I add that in their simultaneous deaths their souls must have transmuted and become united and indivisible in death. Afterwards, I take them to the woods and show them the place. They thank me and one of them goes to shake my hand before being blasted by his colleague for breaking social distancing.

When I get back to the cottage she tells me that any further disturbances, especially from the authorities, will be the last straw. I hope that the hunter and the deer will be buried together in the same embrace I found them in.

That night she makes it clear that we’re staying indefinitely, because she can’t let up now, not when it’s burning so bright, she says. I ask her what I should do and she says I should go back or stay, it’s up to me.

In the light from the laptop I see her rubbing her eyes over and over. They’re failing her because of the darkness. My legs are failing me from walking all day. I tell her that soon she will have no eyes and I will have no legs. She doesn’t reply.

I check my work emails again. There are 39,001. We’ve been gone a long time. I wonder if they’ll take me back.

Alex Aspden is a writer who lives and works in London. He was previously shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize and his work has appeared in multiple publications. His first chapbook, four walls, four towers, is forthcoming from Bottlecap Press in 2022.