The End of the Ocean

Chapter 22 DAVID

I was awakened by a bewildering sense of relief. She had left in the course of the night. She had not said anything about why, but it was probably because of Lou. And that was for the best.

Yet it was as if Marguerite were still there, beside me in the bed. The warmth of her, the hollow in the mattress where she’d been lying.

I turned towards Lou, who was waking up. I smiled at her, wanting to suggest something: a walk, a game, a picnic. A game of tag beneath the trees. A treasure hunt—perhaps I should create a treasure hunt for her.

“Today I can go with you,” Lou said.

“What?”

“I don’t need to stay with Francis. I can go with you and ask about Mommy. I can go with you to the people who find people.”

Anna.

August.

His four tiny baby teeth. The big movements he makes with his little arms when he pounds a toy against the floor. And the joyful sound he makes over the rhythm he creates.

Anna, her smile in the morning, her narrow eyes sparkling at me in bed. And rosy cheeks. She had always had rosy cheeks when she woke up. As if she’d been outside in the fresh air.

What was I doing?

“Fine,” I said, and sat up quickly. “Fine. If you want to come with me, that’s terrific.”

We went outside together. She was Lou, herself. Chattering away, but not about the can of corn. Maybe she had forgotten about it already or forgotten that she was supposed to be feeling guilty. Or perhaps she understood in one way or another that I was feeling even guiltier.

She was the way she’d been yesterday, stepping lightly across the dry grass, across the dirt. She was here.

While I… I was floating somewhere else, without solid ground beneath my feet. I floated, rising and drowning at the same time.

There was no line today. A woman—I’d seen her before, one of the many who came here often—was standing at the door looking inside when we arrived. Then she pulled the door shut and left without looking at Lou and me.

I took hold of the door handle and pushed it down. The floor—the nice, clean floor—was covered with dust.

There was only an empty space where the desk had been. A clean square on a gray surface, like when a picture is removed from a wall. In the middle lay an extension cord that had been connected to the computer, dead and useless.

“They’ve left,” Lou said. “The Finders have left.”

“No, they haven’t,” I said. “I’m sure the office has just been moved somewhere else in the camp.”

Lou didn’t say much more as we trawled through barracks, tents and halls. I talked all the more because of it.

“Look here, here they are, I’m sure, around this corner. No, but what about this? And him, we can ask him, I’ll bet he knows something. Let’s go to the entrance, maybe they know something there. The main office, then, they must know something there at least. No, you know what, nobody knows anything here, but we can manage on our own, we can figure it out, right? We can manage on our own. We will find Mommy and August.”

I talked, not solely to keep my own spirits up, not solely to reassure her, but to hide what I saw.

Things had gotten even worse. Garbage cans filled to the brim. Clean laundry torn down from a clothesline, soiled with dirt and dust. Dirty pots thrown into a ditch. Personal possessions, a bag, two cups, a bra, a book, scattered across the ground between two barracks.

Two guards were standing in front of the warehouse, both wearing uniforms, both wearing helmets and Kevlar vests and holding machine guns. I kept talking as if they weren’t there. But Lou squeezed my hand, tightly, while looking in the other direction, neither at me nor at them.

But I don’t think she saw the very worst. Because when I discovered it, when I discovered the water tanks, I took her away from there in a hurry.

They were located in the very back of the camp and had been refilled on a daily basis. I had never seen them less than three-quarters full.

But now they were only half full of water.

I hauled Lou away.

“Wait,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. But I kept tugging.

We should leave, move on, get away from here.

But I didn’t know where to go, because the war was advancing from the south, and north of us the borders were closed.

To the west, that was the only direction open, but there lay the ocean, only the ocean.

We could leave. Try to get onto a boat.

But the ocean was many miles away. And we didn’t have any water. We couldn’t just start walking without water.

And then, the most important thing of all, Anna and August… they had to get here. We had agreed on that. Sooner or later they would have to arrive.

We had no choice but to wait.

Wait. Keep waiting.

I dragged Lou out of the camp with me. To the boat again, the only place where we could get away from everything.

I didn’t notice that Marguerite had followed us. I was too busy talking, shooting my mouth off to avoid having to talk about what I had seen.

We had made it a good distance down the highway when she suddenly appeared. She was out of breath, as if she had been jogging to catch up with us.

“Hi.”

She smiled. A bit shyly?

My heart beat a couple of extra beats, an idiotic teenager’s smile forced its way across my face.

“Hi!”

But I couldn’t smile at her like that, what was I doing?

“Hi,” Lou said and looked back and forth between the two of us.

“I was calling you,” Marguerite said.

“Ah,” I said.

“The Finders were gone,” Lou said.

“She means the Red Cross,” I said.

“The people who find people,” Lou said.

“But they’ve probably just relocated,” I said to Lou. “Or are taking a break.”

“Probably,” Marguerite said, without conviction.

We’d stopped and stood facing one another. Lou stared at Marguerite. I would have liked to know what the child was thinking. Had she picked up on something?

“Are you going for a walk?” Marguerite asked.

Hush, I wanted to say to Lou. Don’t say anything. But I didn’t have a chance.

“We’re going to the boat,” she said. “You can come along.”

Lou climbed up the ladder expertly and swung over the railing.

I let Marguerite climb after her, wondering whether she would hesitate, say it was too high, ask questions about whether the ladder was stable.

But she did none of these things.

She was wearing only a tank top. I could see the muscles tightening in her neck and back as she moved.

While I was climbing I could hear them laughing softly at something up there.

“We were waiting for you,” Lou said when I peeked over the railing. “Marguerite and I were waiting for you.”

She pulled the board off the entrance hatchway and crept down into the saloon.

“Ladies first,” I said to Marguerite and regretted it immediately.

But she smiled. The second smile of the day. “Thank you.”

It was very cramped inside. I hadn’t noticed it before when it was only Lou and me. But two adult bodies took up too much space.

Everywhere I turned, there was Marguerite. I tried to avoid contact with her, but my bare arm still brushed against hers, I could still smell the scent of her hair as she moved past.

I didn’t want physical contact with her. Didn’t want it. Though it was all I could think about, that and only that. I even imagined Lou not being here.

Anna. Anna. Jesus. What kind of a man am I, what kind of a partner, what am I doing?

Finally I sat down at the map table. There was no room for anyone else beside me there.

Lou showed Marguerite the toilet.

“Daddy says that it works, for sure,” Lou said. “He checked the pump.”

“How nice,” Marguerite said.

“But we can’t use it here,” Lou continued. “Because it will fall into the garden.”

“Gross,” Marguerite said.

“Yes, gross!” Lou laughed.

They continued chatting.

Laughing more. Enjoying themselves.

Having far too nice a time.

I turned towards the map table. Something that was covered with old plastic bags was screwed onto the wall.

I took them off, one by one. They concealed instruments. It reminded me of the control room at work. I quickly read through the names: echo sounder, VHF, GPS.

Then I discovered that the tabletop could be opened. I raised it. Nautical charts. Large transparent plastic folders containing maps.

I picked them up, spread them out before me.

White ocean, light blue along the shoreline, gray where it was the shallowest. The land was light brown, almost golden. That made sense. Dry. The ocean was covered with numbers, there were numbers everywhere. It took me a while before I understood what they represented: shallows and depths.

Along the shore the numbers were close together, in many places just one to two meters, but at sea, on the white patches, the open sea, the numbers were further apart. And it was deeper: two hundred and fifty meters, three hundred, four hundred.

How much water made up an ocean? How many liters? An ocean three hundred meters in depth, an area of one thousand square kilometers. How much water was that?

The calculations made me dizzy. An infinite amount of water. And all of it completely undrinkable.

Dead water, Thomas, my boss, used to call it. Not good for anything. You can’t water your plants with it. You can’t water yourself. Salt is death.

He had been proud of the job he did. And his pride was infectious. “Salt water is the future, David. Water into wine is all well and good, but what we’re doing is even better. We are the magicians of tomorrow.”

We just didn’t wave our wands quickly enough. There weren’t enough of us. The plant was too old, too run-down, too small.

And then… I remembered the flames when the building caught fire. It burned so well, almost brightly. That something that contained so much water could burn so well…

“Where has it been?”

Marguerite was standing over me and pointing at the maps.

“I… um… what do you mean?”

“The maps show where the boat has been, don’t they?”

“Oh. Yes. Maybe they do.”

I glanced down at the map I had lying in front of me.

“This is France.”

“The Atlantic coastline,” she said, and pointed. “Bordeaux is there.”

I opened the folder and took out more maps. They covered every part of the same coastline, overlapping in some places, from Bordeaux via La Rochelle to Brest. Large portions of the maps were white. Ocean, the Bay of Biscay.

“Are there more?” Marguerite asked.

I took out the other plastic folders containing charts, opened the first one, took out four more sheets of paper, tried spreading them out, but they were too large for the tiny saloon table.

“Let’s take them outside,” Marguerite said.

Lou helped to spread them across the dry grass in the garden. Marguerite laid overlapping charts on top of each other, showing Lou how they could be fitted together like a puzzle.

There was a slight breeze, the maps fluttered. Lou and Marguerite found stones to hold them down.

I stood there watching. The two bowed heads. Marguerite explaining calmly, Lou talking loudly and eagerly, while the entire western coast of Europe slowly appeared before our eyes on the ground.

“From the north,” Marguerite said finally. “She came from the north. Far north.”

“She?”

“That’s what you call a boat. She’s a woman.”

“But it’s a boat,” Lou said.

Marguerite laughed. I felt a stabbing inside of me. How rusty it sounded, that laughter. As if she wasn’t used to laughing.

“From the north?” I asked.

From the water countries.

I gazed at the maps, following them upwards, the English Channel, Le Havre, Calais, Ostend, Vlissingen, Den Helder, Cuxhaven, Sylt, Esbjerg, Hirtshals, Egersund, Stavanger, Haugesund…

I walked over to the maps of Norway, stopping by the one furthest north.

What a coastline, so different from France. The landscape at home was a straight line facing the ocean compared to this. The Norwegian coast was jagged, fragmented, made up of thousands of islands. And long, dramatic fjords that continued inland for miles.

“We’re here,” Marguerite said, and pointed at a place in the grass, off the charts.

“Where is the ocean?” Lou asked, and looked around her.

“Far, far away,” Marguerite said.

“But how did the boat end up here?” I asked. “In the middle of the countryside?”

“Come.”

Marguerite walked away between the trees. She stopped for a moment. Sunshine and shadows flickered across her face. Then she seemed to notice something between the trees behind the house.

“Here.”

She nodded at us, encouraging us to come along. And we followed her into the tangled underbrush, where she pointed out an almost overgrown cart road.

It followed a dried-up brook, with smoothly polished stones where the bed of the river had once been.

Soon the riverbed sloped downwards. We walked down a gentle incline.

We reached a dilapidated construction beside the riverbed.

Marguerite stopped at the sight of weathered planks and rotting wooden boards.

“What was it?” she said.

I was puzzled. “Didn’t you ever build a dam as a child?”

“No,” she said. “I never built anything.”

No… women like her didn’t build… they didn’t need to—you don’t need to build when you are given everything.

We continued on along the path, and soon the landscape opened up. And there, between the trees, we saw it.

A belt of mud, almost dried out.

“A river?”

“A canal,” Marguerite said. “Canal de Garonne. It continues on to the Canal du Midi. At one time they divided France in two.”

“In two?” Lou said.

“The canals divided France, but connected the oceans, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.”

“Where is the water now?”

“The canal has dried up. But it will be filled up again if it starts raining.”

“When it starts raining,” I said.

“What?”

“The canal will fill up again when it starts raining.”

Marguerite looked at me, was going to say something.

I stared back at her, hard. She would have to understand this, thank you very much. We couldn’t talk like that around Lou.

She corrected herself.

“When it starts to rain,” she said to Lou, “the canal will fill up again… all we need is a little rain.”

We walked home together, Lou in the middle between us. I suddenly expected her to reach out her hands, one hand for each of us. That she would get us to hoist her into the air. Jump. The way she used to, with Anna and me.

But she walked without taking either of our hands. And that was good. Because she shouldn’t hold hands like that, not with Marguerite.

We passed a tractor. It was parked on the side of the road. Abandoned.

Somebody had vandalized it. Cut up the leather seat with a knife—the foam rubber was spilling out.

Marguerite looked at me, above Lou’s head—was it safe, she was thinking maybe, to walk along these roads alone?

We walked faster, hurrying back to the camp.

“Thank you,” Marguerite said when we arrived. “For letting me see the boat.”

“Yes…” I said.

“You’re welcome,” Lou said.

“Good night,” Marguerite said. “See you.”

“You can come with us tomorrow, too,” Lou said.

“I’m sure she doesn’t want to do that,” I said.

“Don’t you want to?” Lou asked.

“I would like that very much,” Marguerite replied.

But she didn’t wait until the next morning.

She came back that very same night.

She was there with her body. The rippling tautness beneath my fingers. The bony softness.

You’re here, I thought.

You’re here, under me, over me.

And I can’t stop myself. See no reason to hold back. I am incapable of thinking about why I should hold back.

Anna was a hole in my head. August and Anna a black hole into which everything disappeared.

But Marguerite filled me up again. A little, a little bit.

We didn’t talk. I wanted to, wanted to know everything about her. Wanted to hear everything.

But we couldn’t talk. Because Lou was sleeping quietly.

We could only lie here. Beneath each other, on top of each other. And I wanted to gasp. Howl. Scream. But I was as quiet as I could be.

While I hoped the hole would shrink.

While I hated that the hole shrank.