Chill

Chill

For Anne and Holger

I flew to North America for a month long, laboriously-won scholarship.

My duties turned out to be minimal – merely a couple of hours a day – and, all in all, enjoyable. There was a time when I imagined that I could work for a while in a library, among the books, to distance myself from the world, to indulge, undisturbed, in my own company. And there I was.

There were some other people like me, coming from all over the world, nice folk some of them, but to be true, I remember just one – a man from Out-there, a native of the enigmatic Other-wise.

I met him in a pub. I never go out to pubs in my hometown, but there I found myself transformed, liberated, eager to learn – at last – what’s it like? In my new world, I felt lonely and lost, desperate to find some place where I would fit.

Once inside, it felt immediately OK. My feeling of embarrassment and awkwardness vanished. Soon I found myself engaged in conversation with a young man, seemingly a Native American, whom I found intriguing. He introduced himself as Boris – sparking my curiosity even more. Only later I would learn that his true name was a far cry from Boris.

Chatting, we went outside to get some fresh air, and only when I had gotten really exhausted, he offered to take me home. I accepted his offer willingly. I wondered at times what made me trust him right away. He called me next day, and a series of encounters followed leading me to exploring a very foreign world.

Boris was tall, hunched, lean, not too handsome, and often gloomy. His eyes were almost invisible behind his black hair, his forehead and his cheeks furrowed with with bands of thin scars.

He never mentioned them, just as he never talked about his life, which I found cool, much like the fact he had never tried to seduce me, or remind me that we were worlds apart, not the least because I am a woman. In spite of being urbane, I’d even say considerate to me, he behaved in a cold manner. At times I found his smile scornful, but I forgave him easily.

We were getting close very quickly. Our togetherness could hardly be described as friendship, but we talked more and more, bound by honesty – intimate but free of any mutual obligations.

He turned out to be a great raconteur. Tense and timid, at first, with every new story he gained ease and fluency. His tales were fascinating and absolutely amazing, but somehow I’ve never challenged their credibility, just listened, spellbound.

I guess many of them were drawing their motives from ancient myths, slightly embellished. Others, also fictitious, were relating to alleged events of his nation’s history. They told of animals and people, who would switch roles at will, or beings that were human and animal as well; of talking stones and walking trees; of offerings due to the spirits of nature and songs that heal body and soul and add to the beauty of life; as well as of the ever present communication between the living and the dead and the connection of both worlds by means of which not only the deceased can visit the living ones, but mortals also can get a peek into the land of the dead.

Everything in his stories was alive, vibrant, in full swing, all the way extraordinary. ”Sly as a fox and quiet as night.” “The path of the dead is easy to trace.” His sayings keep returning in my mind.

In his tales lingered echoes of ancient native myths from before the conquest of America; motives criss-crossed and tangled weaving a story that seemed true, coherent and reliable. But now and then Boris would lose the plot, looking absent-minded; I would touch his hand lightly and we would sit in silence for a while.

But I still hardly knew anything about him. He told me curtly that he had a mother and a step-sister living somewhere in the country and, if I understood him correctly, his father either had died or walked out on them; he mentioned it just once, vaguely and with apparent reluctance. Boris had never talked about his intimate life; I couldn’t tell if he had a girlfriend, or, may be, preferred men – matters I can usually sense. Anyway, he did wear a thin silver band on the ring finger of his left hand.

He would wait for me often in front of the library, where I had to spend my mandatory hours, we would grab a snack and go for a walk afterwards. Later, he started taking me for long rides in his shockingly old car.

Usually we would just drive ahead in silence, when all of a sudden he would turn into woods only to stop at the edge of some ravine. Concealed glades, rubble cairns, bizarre trees, overgrown caves would reveal their mysteries to us. We liked picnicking...

Everything seemed natural, ordinary, safe; now I wonder sometimes, what made him take a liking to me and what was at the root of our connection, though I know some things are better left unsaid.

During one of the excursions he mentioned nonchalantly, as if picking up some earlier conversation, that Boris was his moniker, while his true name was Lame Elk. I lurched, sensing something ominous and deliberate in his words. I wouldn’t press him into saying more.

I don’t remember much of what followed, except, I must admit with shame, I felt compelled to look at his feet. He noticed it, or maybe guessed it, and smiled ironically. We never returned to the subject, so I never learned why had he been given the name, and how it worked. After his strange confession he went on with his stories; I didn’t give a damn whether they were true, made up, or derived from the lore

As he was timid, he avoided looking into my eyes, stammered slightly and scowled frequently, I could never decide whether his tales were true, embellished, or sheer fiction.

One day Boris told me curtly that he was leaving for a couple of days and would call me upon coming back; this was the last I’ve heard of him. Things like this happen, I kept telling myself, trying not to succumb to embitterment, we were just acquaintances, no commitments and all that stuff. Besides, I was to return home soon, and the past would fade out anyway; nostalgia is inherent in farewells to places, where one had stayed for the time being, encountered new people, savoured different life.

Some time later I was traveling by coach on a highway through woodlands and we made a stop at a gas station. The moment I made just few steps into a murky forest, I was deluged by memories of the tales Boris had spun, of hours spent together in silence, in our rare communion; I turned on my heel and walked back to the bus, to the light and the humans.

On the side of the forest path stood a large trash bin. I stopped by it to empty my pockets of some papers. All of a sudden, I was struck by an overwhelming, irrational fear. I was hit hard by the sickening stench of rot and decay. There was something inside the bin. I caught a glimpse of a partly skinned leg of some big animal. It exuded deadly odour of blood and gore, of animal fear, and of some nameless horror, that felt even worse. The leg, emitting paralyzing cold, chilling to the marrow, shone with ghoulish glow, livid, phosphorescent, otherworldly.

I had never experienced such panic before. Goose bumps, pressure mixed with buzzing in my ears, rattling teeth, dizziness, nausea– just to begin with. I guess I started to scream, possibly fainted. In the haze I heard voices of others running towards me, saw glimpses of their deadly white faces and frightened eyes. I don’t remember, how I found myself on the bus, or for how long I sat motionless with my head squeezed between my knees. Frankly, I have no recollection of what happened next.

The epilogue?

The leg in the bin belonged to an elk, huge elk, of supernatural size.

The woods were in an area where Native Americans still hunt elk as they did inthe old days. A hunter most likely hadn’t noticed that what he had been tracing was no ordinary game, but a forest spirit which had assumed animal’s shape. Blinded by ignorance or arrogance, the hunter shot the animal down looking past its warning signals. The spirit, in revenge, turned him into the elk, shot subsequently by another hunter.

The chilling cold and the eery, livid halo were marks of transition to the lowest circles of the Land of Dead: to Death itself, point of no rescue nor return, where all hope for resurrection and mercy is abandoned forever.

That’s what I was told years later by another Native American, an old man rumored to be a shaman.

translation by Teresa Tyszowiecka

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