The End of the Ocean

Chapter 8 DAVID

We passed the fence. I led Lou out onto the highway. A light wind was blowing there. I wanted to walk briskly, taking huge strides. But Lou held me back. How tightly she hung on there, to one of my hands, while her other hand was neglected. She should have had someone’s hand to hold there as well.

The only sound was that of her shuffling child’s feet.

“Can you walk a little faster?” I asked.

“Yes.”

But she walked just as slowly, dragging her feet, and did not say a word.

Before she would have protested. Howled. Screamed.

“It would be better if you said something,” I said.

“Like what?”

“You think walking here is boring, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. You hate walking.”

“No, I don’t.”

And then she really tried to walk faster. She trotted beside me.

“Take it easy,” I said.

Suddenly I felt pretty lousy.

“We’re just going for a little walk, right?” I said. “Just for something to do. A short walk.”

“How far?”

“One minute.”

She didn’t know how to tell time, had no idea that if she counted slowly to sixty, the minute would have passed, that one minute is nothing at all. Sometimes I was surprised at how easy it was to fool her, which made me feel even worse. Not because I fooled her, but because of how easy it was.

I just couldn’t bear to go back to that sweaty, claustrophobic camp. Here, out on the road, we were at least in motion. We could pretend we had a goal. But there was nothing to walk towards, nothing on which to focus your gaze. Just one little, forest-covered mound was sticking up in the landscape. A ridge was perhaps the word. Really it was no more than a bump amidst all the flatness.

A displaced bump.

“Has a minute passed?” Lou said after a while.

“Soon.”

“I taste like salt,” Lou said, and placed the tip of her tongue against her upper lip.

“Salt’s good,” I said.

I missed the salt. I missed the mountains and the ocean.

Here the air was dry. Earthy, almost sandy. It got into your nose. The air wasn’t fresh. While at home the smell of salt water was everywhere.

Salt purifies. Preserves things. You can put food in salt and it will be preserved forever. You can pour salt water on cuts and yes, it hurts, but salt is clean, one of the cleanest things in the world.

People have even started wars over salt.

For me, salt was my job. A job I enjoyed. I had had this job since Lou was born. I had to quit school then, bring home a paycheck. No two ways about it.

I had never thought I would stay there, in Argelès. Had always thought I would move away. Ever since I was young, I had envied the tourists who came and left every single summer. They invaded the summers for those of us who were natives, taking over, eating enormous quantities of moules-frites and sunning themselves to a crisp on the beach. Until they took their beach towels and hats and the smell of suntan lotion with them and went away.

But in recent years the tourists hadn’t come. The faucet was turned off. They disappeared. And I wanted to disappear too. From the empty restaurants, from the deserted shopping street, from the amusement park that slowly rusted away in the spray from the rising ocean, the punctured inflatable castle and the overgrown miniature golf course.

They disappeared. I stayed. With Anna, with Lou and, later, with August. In our crowded apartment by the harbor, where the salt water often forced its way into the cellar. But my job was a bright spot. The plant was located at the end of the esplanade. Before there had only been grassy dunes there, and a sun lounger rental business that had never managed to make a profit, because this was the windiest spot on the entire beach. But also the most beautiful, for those who took the time to notice and were able to ignore the wind.

I was lucky to get the job. Thomas was a friend of my father and a good boss. And my duties were fine. Noisy, but fine. We wore ear defenders to protect ourselves from the sound of the turbines. I worked with salt every day, and liked the smell. But the objective was precisely to eliminate the salt.

We monitored operations as the seawater was channeled through the turbines, separating the salt from the water, osmosis in reverse. Fresh water ran out the other end—good, clear water.

Desalination was the future, Thomas used to say. And he told us about the facilities in other places in the world, in Florida and southern Spain, where there were many. These were the facilities that irrigated the ever-expanding desert.

But with each passing day, Thomas grew more and more worried, because the machinery at the plant was constantly breaking down. Parts fell to pieces, we couldn’t replace them. And we were unable to produce enough water. We were too small-scale, and it wasn’t cheap enough, either. And when the desalination plants in Spain were leveled to the ground during the battles over the River Ebro, when our neighboring country became divided, he hardly slept at all any longer. He talked and talked about the EU. About the time when Europe was united. He talked about how everything was just disintegrating, every day he told me of a new conflict. Personally, I had given up paying attention a long time ago. I couldn’t bear to read the news. Because people were fighting everywhere, it seemed—north against south, the water nations against the drought nations. And there was also internal strife in some countries. Like in Spain.

Those who have something to protect forget about everything else, Thomas said. To each his own. Nobody takes care of anyone except their own people.

But it didn’t help that he talked, it didn’t help that I tried to listen. It didn’t help that we worked as hard as we could. It didn’t help that France had approved the construction of three new plants.

That’s how quickly things can change. One day you wake up to the sound of the alarm clock, eat breakfast, go to work, argue, laugh, make love, do the dishes, worry about your bank account being drained before the end of the month… you don’t think about how everything you have around you can disappear. Even if you hear that the world is changing. Even if you notice it on the thermometer. You don’t think about it until the day when it’s no longer the alarm clock that wakes you up in the morning, but the sound of screams. The flames have reached your city, your house, your bed, your loved ones. Your house is in flames, your bedclothes catch fire, your pillow starts smoking and you can’t do anything but run.

“Salt is death,” Thomas said. “Salt kills.”

Towards the end, before we had to leave everything behind, I was often allowed to borrow his battered plastic boat. I would take it out on the ocean by myself, tell Anna I was going fishing, even though it was seldom possible to catch anything any longer. After docking the boat, I used to stand on the beach with my feet in the water, the water that rose slowly and relentlessly, and that was exactly what I thought. Salt is death. This ocean is death. It is rising and spreading its salt everywhere. And then I closed my eyes and prayed to a God I didn’t believe in, prayed that when I opened my eyes again and stuck my hand in the water, the ocean would have become something else. That when I tasted my fingers, it would taste of nothing, the way fresh water does. Clean, clear nothing.

Sometimes I would stand there like that. For a long while. But I never tried to taste my fingers. I just clung to the thought, to the idea that the water of the rising ocean would one day be fresh.

I squeezed Lou’s hand a little harder, out of a need to confirm that she was still there. We had walked quite a distance now. I turned around, could just make out the contours of the camp fence far behind us.

“Look there,” I said to Lou. “It’s nice here.”

A shadowy lane appeared on our left, with tall trees on both sides. We continued walking down it. Beneath the trees. The temperature dropped several degrees.

Lou must have felt it, that it was pleasant walking here, because now she was walking faster.

We walked around a bend. I turned my head and could no longer see the highway behind us. Ahead of us there was another bend in the road. I liked that we were alone here. That there was no longer any trace of the refugee camp. That I could pretend that we were just an ordinary father and daughter, out for a walk on an ordinary road, in an ordinary world. Like before.

We walked for five minutes, maybe ten, passed some stone houses, a small farm. In two places I saw people. An elderly woman carried a sewing chest out to a car. An elderly man took a swing down from a tree. They were headed out, packing up, trying to make their way to the north, like everyone else. Otherwise it was deserted everywhere. Abandoned, here as well.

Only traces of the people who had lived here remained. Curtains that someone had chosen, garden furniture where someone had relaxed, chimneys from which smoke had risen, a garden rake that had drawn careful grooves in the gravel in the yard, the pétanque court where the balls had landed in the sand with a crunch.

I could have lived here, I thought, even though it was far from the ocean. Here, along this lane, in this shade, I could actually have lived, this could have been my home.

Yet another house appeared, the last on this stretch of road before the forest. The house was neither large nor fancy, but nonetheless it was a palace compared to our apartment at home.

It must have been abandoned a long time ago, or inhabited by someone who couldn’t be bothered to maintain it properly. The yard was overgrown with dry weeds and the paint was peeling off the front door. There were shutters covering all the windows.

By the side of the house I spotted the lid of an old-fashioned rainwater tank. It was locked with a rusty padlock. It could be as old as the house. Was there still water in it?

Lou walked into the withering garden. It had once been overgrown, but now the apple trees were dried up and the leaves on the branches were yellow.

There was a shed with the door slightly ajar—maybe the wind had blown it open. Lou walked over and closed it. Then she turned around and pointed at something.

“What’s that?”

Behind me, far inside the garden, there was something large and tall under the dark trees, covered by several green tarps. It was long and oval, with something sticking out on both sides. A kind of stand could be discerned on the ground.

Lou tugged at me. “Come on.”

The tarps were dirty and worn, but securely attached, held in place by ropes in different pale, sun-bleached colors. Green, blue and grayish white, crisscrossing. Some of them were rotting. They had to be of cotton or hemp. But most of the plastic cords were still in one piece.

In some places leaves had gotten stuck between the ropes. The leaves had become tiny pockets of soil, where seeds had landed. From which small plants were growing. Small plants which in turn dried up and died from the drought.

We walked over to it. I reached out my hand and took hold of one of the tarps, trying to make out what it was covering.

It was soft, like there was nothing behind it, but then my fingers came up against something hard—a beam? I slid my hand upwards. The first beam met another under the tarps and something was resting on them, something enormous, heavy. And then suddenly I knew.

“It’s a boat,” I said.

A boat on a stand, in a garden, miles away from the ocean.

It must be big.

I started from behind and paced it out.

At least ten meters long.

And tall. At least three meters from the keel to the top of the cabin.

“Can we take off the tarps?” Lou asked.

The knots were hard between my fingers. I struggled to undo one after the next. It was as if the wind and the weather had helped tighten them.

Lou helped out, too, but most of the knots were too difficult for her. We had nothing we could use to cut the ropes and, besides, I didn’t want to destroy them. We were going to cover the boat again later, after we had seen it. We just needed to take a look. Nobody would notice.

I wound up the ropes carefully as I undid them, into huge coils that I laid side by side on the ground in the dry grass.

Lou moved them around, started sorting them by color. The blue ropes in one pile, the green in another. She could report that there were seven ropes in all.

My fingertips were sore and the palms of my hands raw by the time I had finally untied all the knots. The tarps hung in place by themselves. Four of them. I pulled them off and they slid across the hull with a sweeping sound as they dropped to the ground.

It was a sailboat. The mast lay on the roof of the cabin. The hull was dark blue, like the ocean in the evening, and there were four windows on each side.

It rested on a stand made of unpainted wooden beams, handmade from the looks of it, but solid.

There was a ladder lying over two crossbeams, a half-meter above the ground, as if it belonged there.

I pulled it out. Aluminum, with paint splotches, but all in one piece and lovely. I lifted it up onto one end, placed it on the grass and leaned it against the side of the boat.

“Are you going to climb up?” Lou asked.

“We have to, don’t we?” I said.

“Is it allowed?”

I smiled.

“Do you see anyone we can ask?”

She looked around. “No.”

“Do you think I should do it?”

“I don’t know. You decide.”

“You decide, too,” I said.

“Oh.”

“Should I do it?”

“Yes. If you want.”

I adjusted the ladder, pulling it a little further out so the approach angle was less steep. Then I stepped on the first rung.

The second.

The third.

The stand under the boat protested, creaking loudly. A tiny jerk shuddered through the entire structure. I stopped.

“Daddy?”

Maybe it wasn’t as solid as it looked. Or maybe it had something to do with the structure? I tried one more step.

“Daddy, maybe you shouldn’t do it after all?”

“It will be fine,” I said.

But it wasn’t, I could feel the impact of my steps reverberating through the stand, like I was in the process of tearing it down.

“Daddy?”

“OK, OK.”

I climbed down, took hold of the ladder and leaned it against the end of the boat instead. A swim ladder was attached up there and the ladder became an extension of this, like I was climbing up from the bottom of the ocean.

I tried again; it was easier to keep my balance now, the stand didn’t grumble. I climbed up a couple of rungs to make sure it would hold.

No creaking now, it felt solid and stable.

I jumped down to the ground again, reached my arms out towards Lou.

“You can climb right in front of me. I’ll take care of you the whole time.”

She didn’t reply, looking uncertainly at the ladder.

“Come on.” I nodded towards the boat. “It’s like the ladder to the slide on the playground… at home, just a little longer. And I’m right behind you.”

She drew a breath, looked up at the boat, walked over to the ladder and stepped onto the first rung.

“Good, Lou.”

She climbed right in front of me, between my arms. I looked directly into her neck, which was slender and tanned and still a little dirty. I hadn’t noticed that she hadn’t washed everything off when she showered. She should have had somebody to help her. Sometimes I wished she had been a boy. It would perhaps have been easier.

She started climbing more quickly. I had to concentrate on keeping up with her. She took determined steps upwards, climbing like the child she was, boy or girl. First she lifted her right foot, and then her left, up to the same rung, so both feet were solidly planted on one rung before she attempted the next.

Then she reached the top. She struggled to get over the railing, but I pushed her up from her bum.

When she was finally standing on deck, she smiled.

“I was first.”

“That you were.”

I climbed up after her, crawling up over the railing. I stood on deck for a moment, looking around.

A bench on either side, a tiller in the middle.

An opening covered by boards, a keyhole in the board on top.

Another keyhole—for the engine, no doubt—and some instruments down along the floor, a couple of measuring devices and a lever for the gas and gears.

And a cool breeze was blowing through the air. We were just far enough above the ground to feel the effect.

The floor and bench in the cockpit were made of wood that looked dry, a gray color, blistered, as if in need of oil or stain.

Only the helm had been preserved, the lacquered finish was still shiny. The woodwork was golden.

I positioned myself in front of it, took hold with my right hand. Planting my feet on deck, I straddled my legs and shaded my eyes from the sun with my hand like I was scanning the sea.

“Ship ahoy!”

Lou laughed her one-of-a-kind laughter.

“Land in sight! Can you see land?” I asked in a skipper’s voice.

“No,” she said. “It’s not land.”

“You’re right, it’s not land, just the ocean, as far as I can see. And waves. Huge waves.”

“A storm!” Lou said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “The captain will pilot you safely through this.”

“Are you the captain?”

“That I am… and look! Do you see the pirate ship?”

We sailed. We fought off pirates. We met dolphins and a mermaid. Lou shouted, gesticulating with her arms, and took the helm. She laughed loudly.

Soon she wanted to be the captain. And I became an obedient sailor, albeit a pretty stupid one. She had to explain everything to me, while she laughed even more. Because the sailor got everything mixed up, couldn’t tell the difference between right and left, port and stern, and was afraid of everything, especially the pirates.

But we made it, nonetheless. Thanks to an amazing ride on the backs of two dolphins. And especially, thanks to her.

“Thank God for your heroism and your shrewdness, Captain,” I said.

“Shrewdness?”

“That means to be sly,” I said. “You are a sly captain.”

We played for an hour, maybe two. I breathed easily up there on deck, beneath the shadow of the trees, where there was a breeze.

But Lou kept looking at the boards that blocked off the opening.

“Can we open the door?”

“No,” I said.

And she wouldn’t let it go.

“We have to open it,” she said a little while later and pounded on the boards. “You can break them, can’t you?”

“We can’t go around breaking other people’s things,” I said.

“Oh. OK, then,” she said, her face ashamed.

Then she thought about it. “But they’re not here?”

Lou didn’t ask for things very often. And she didn’t give up very often either.

“Fine,” I said. “We can see if there is a key inside.” “Where?”

I pointed. “In the house.”

“But isn’t the house locked too?”

“We may have to break something, then,” I said. “After all.”

“We won’t tell anyone,” she said quietly.

I had to laugh.

We broke a window in the back and entered what turned out to be the living room.

I tiptoed through the house, but stopped when I realized what I was doing and began walking normally. I could stomp as loudly as I liked. There was nobody around who could hear us anyway.

The rooms were simple, unpretentious. Not many ornaments, just an overloaded bookshelf against the wall in the living room, and on one of the long walls a photograph of a snow-covered mountain by a fjord.

The people who had lived here must have left without taking much with them. Maybe just clothing and the most essential items.

I suddenly felt like I was trespassing on somebody else’s life and hurried through the rooms to the front of the house. I stepped out into the hallway.

There on the wall was a key cabinet. So simple. Tidy. It looked like a little bathhouse, with yellow and white stripes, the old-fashioned kind that could still be found in some places by the beach.

Anna and I always misplaced our keys. We agreed they should be put somewhere specific, but it was like we could never decide where. I had bought a couple of hooks, but never hung them up. We could never agree on where they should hang and whether we could just screw them directly into the wall or if we needed wall plugs.

We weren’t very good at such things. I was quite handy—it wasn’t that. It was just that there were so many decisions to be made and we had to make them together, which made it difficult. Even the simple task of putting up a few key hooks.

But here the keys hung in rows. It was easy to spot the one I was looking for. A small key at the end of a blue string, attached to a huge, round clump of cork. Of course. It was a key with a life jacket.

Lou stood beside me, a bit too close, panting eagerly into my ear as I tried to unlock the hatch, twisting and wiggling the key. I tried applying some muscle.

“Sit down on the bench,” I said.

“But then I can’t see.”

“You can see afterwards.”

I tried again, yanking away, roughly. The key turned in the lock.

I had to fiddle with it a bit before I discovered that what was above the entryway was actually a hatch that could be slid backwards and that I had to push this back before I could loosen the two boards that were the door.

The lower board was wedged stuck, as if there were a vacuum in the woodwork. But Lou was on her feet again and standing close to me, peeking into the boat.

“There are benches inside, too,” she said.

“Mm.”

“And a table.”

I gave the board a solid kick. It gave way, loosened. And then it could be pulled up.

Lou peeked inside, clapped her hands.

“How cozy!” She spun around. “It’s so cozy!”

Girls.

But she was right. It was cozy. Everything was compact and neat, everything fit together, could be taken apart, stacked, closed up and secured.

We explored the boat for a long time. Lou kept crowing with joy, like she was playing in a playhouse.

She took out cups and plates from a cupboard, white with blue letters.

“What’s written on them?”

“Navigare vivere est,” I read.

“What does it mean?”

“It’s Latin and… something about navigation, about being at sea, that that’s life. Sailing is life, maybe… yes, I think so. Sailing is life.”

Wow. I was impressive.

“Sailing is life,” she laughed.

Nothing compared to the sound of that laughter. I would do anything to hear that sound.

When she discovered that the dining-room table could be lowered to the level of the surrounding benches, she was overjoyed.

“They fit!”

And there was a mattress that could be put on the table, so the benches and table became a bed.

“I want to sleep here.”

“You can’t very well sleep on the table.”

“Can too. And you can sleep in there.”

She pointed inside the forepeak.

“Or in the bathroom,” she said.

There was a compartment with a toilet inside between the saloon and the forepeak.

“You want me to sleep in the bathroom?”

“Yes!”

She was sweating from the heat, red in the face. Locks of hair had come loose from her braids and hung over her eyes, but she didn’t care, just pushed them to one side.

“But there isn’t room.”

“You have to sit on the toilet all night.”

“The captain’s orders,” I said.

Afterwards, when the sun was low in the sky, we sat in the cockpit, facing each other on the benches. Her feet didn’t reach the floor, so they dangled freely. Lou stroked the woodwork of the bench with her hands, thinking.

“I’m patting the boat.”

“I’m sure it likes that.”

“Nice boat.”

She kept stroking it, lovingly. But then she stopped suddenly.

“Ow!”

She held up her right hand, so I could see her little white palm. A splinter was lodged in her flesh next to her thumb.

“It hurts!”

I took her hand; the splinter was in deep.

“Take it out!” she cried.

“I don’t have anything here. We need a pair of tweezers.”

“Take it out!”

“We’ll go back. To the first-aid barracks. They’ll have what we need.”

“I don’t want to! Take it out now!”

“Lou, you have to go down the ladder.”

“No!”

I tried to persuade her.

I coaxed, I cajoled.

Finally she started climbing down the ladder in a fashion, but she didn’t want to use her right hand and tried to hang on using just her fingers, whimpering incessantly.

“It’s just a little splinter,” I said.

“It’s huge. Huge!”

We left the boat without putting the tarps back on, walking down the road while she hollered. It was a dumb boat. She was never going back. She even hated it.

“Shitty boat.”

“It’s not the boat’s fault,” I said. “It’s just that nobody’s been taking care of it. We can see if we can find some oil. Then we can polish the benches and oil them. Or varnish. Maybe there’s some in the shed. Then the splinters will disappear. And then it will be completely smooth.”

I realized that I liked the plan. I wanted to return tomorrow, I wanted to work on the boat. But Lou didn’t want to.

She kept howling, dragging her feet down the road, stopping constantly, asking me to wait, but when I waited and called “come on” in my nicest voice, she didn’t come. She just stood there.

And I had to walk back to get her, leading her by her left hand, while she held her right hand up in the air demonstratively. The entire time she complained about how much it hurt, in a voice ever increasing in volume.

“You have to carry me. Carry me!”

And I was losing my patience as well. That was enough now, enough. I drew a breath, as if air in my lungs would calm me. It didn’t help.

My cheeks were hot, my heart was pounding hard and Lou wasn’t quiet for a single second.

“Lou, please. You’re a big girl. You have to walk by yourself.”

I spoke softly, but tried to inject a kind of authority into my words. That didn’t work either.

That’s how I ended up putting to use all the tricks I knew.

I didn’t have all that many of them.

First I begged.

“Lou, please, sweetie, please calm down and start walking.”

Then I commanded.

“Lou. That will do. I can’t carry you. Now you must come.”

Then I threatened her.

“If you don’t come now, you won’t get any dinner. I will eat your dinner. I will eat everything.”

She would have to go to bed hungry, I said. She would get very hungry. No dinner if she didn’t pull herself together, behave like a big girl. Stop acting like a crybaby.

And finally I tried bribing her again.

“If you start walking properly now, you will have your dinner. Mine too. Along with your own.”

But nothing worked. Finally, I pulled her up onto my back, just as she wanted. Her legs curled around my waist, she was far too tall.

“Here I go, carrying you,” I said, “just because you have a tiny splinter in your finger.”

“It’s not in my finger,” she fretted. “It’s in my hand.”

And I kept carrying her. She was a sack on my back. Heavy and shapeless. And horribly sweaty, hot and dirty. While she whimpered and whined.

The sound was killing me. No, it could drive me to commit murder.

Nasal wheezing, uhuuhuuhuu… uhuhu… uhuuhu…

She hadn’t been this way for weeks. Months. She hasn’t behaved like this on a single occasion since people started fleeing from Argelès, since our city and our home had been destroyed.

Like a child.