Sailors on the Inward Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

caught a cold and was running a temperature. Even if they had been well enough to travel, the long journey across Europe was too hazardous to risk and so, standing at the reception desk in the lobby, surrounded by all that noise and confusion, he placed a call to his aunt who lived in the resort town of Zakopané, a four-hour trip by rail, asking her to take them in until the situation stabilized enough so he could make plans to go home.
    When the train pulled away from the platform in Central Stationthe next morning Conrad told Jessie and Borys that his family had stayed in the country often when he was a child and that everything would be fine. They could relax in the pine-scented air and be treated to wonderful stories his aged aunt was very likely still capable of telling. And while he truly believed they might enjoy themselves, Conrad said that for him the journey to Zakopané was the saddest of his life, every mile reminding him of the pleasure he had taken as a boy, the places he remembered best, a valley with a river, a series of hills sheered off eons ago by a glacier that left a pale palisade, a millhouse on a stream, all mocking him with their old purity as if he were traveling through ghosts. He kept his thoughts to himself, entertaining Jessie and Borys like a tour guide, pointing out the attractions one by one, talking about his feelings toward them when he was a child, relieved when they reached a bend and all those old vistas were left behind.
    But his spirits improved when the Villa Konstantynowka came into view an hour later. He had hired a coach at the train station to take them the rest of the way and as they entered the valley he saw the house and felt again the excitement he had experienced as a boy at its wondrous shape. An elaborate mansard roof graced the villa’s three stories like a collection of tents you would imagine appropriate to a Mongol lord. It swept upward from the eaves in elegant curves, terminating in a sharp peak of copper shingles that had long ago developed a turquoise patina. On each floor tall windows rounded at the top reflected the trees on the property so that the house appeared to be inhabited by poplars, firs, and pines and also tiny white clouds in patches of mountain blue sky. “I used to sit by the window in the attic,” Conrad said, “reading stories of Polish heroes and imagining myself doing battle on horseback with invaders down in the valley, returning triumphant to the safety of the villa, which I, of course, thought of as a castle.”
    His aunt had been alone since his uncle Charles had died some years back and was delighted with the company, making a fuss over the three of them as if they were all children. The villa seemed like a safe haven, immune from the dangers he had worried over all the way from Cracow. Of course, it was an illusion. The war was expanding alarmingly fast, according to reports on the radio they listened to in the living room filled with dark old furniture. He felt himself slipping into depression fueled by anger over what was happening to Poland and his inability to do anything about it.
    For relief, he took long walks soon after he awoke. The exercise was salutary, but what brought him the greatest solace was the familiar view of houses scattered among stands of alders, deep green pastures above the treeline dotted with grazing sheep, a view that swept aside the uncertainty of the present and returned him to the happier days of childhood. The magic of images, he told me, was never more powerful than those seen in the fresh cold air of morning, the equal of Proust’s madeleine or Balzac’s fermenting apples. The view was a transforming lens, a time machine that revealed a world steeped in tradition, impervious to change, the world children know.
    As he was resting on a rock one morning, gazing down into the valley where farmers were working in the fields, a scene that put him in mind of Millet’s