The End of the Ocean

Chapter 26 DAVID

We could smell the smoke long before we saw the entrance to the camp.

It was so harsh. Familiar. The acrid smell of fire. It had been there all along.

The smell of smoke was something massive that had infiltrated and inhabited me. The stinging in the throat, eyes, the pressure in the chest.

Marguerite started to run. I took Lou by the hand and ran, too.

When we arrived, people were running in all directions, carrying away the few personal possessions they had or running towards the fire, hoping to help.

Caleb pointed.

“It’s the sanitary barracks,” he said. “Someone has set the sanitary barracks on fire. It’s those bastards from up north, I’m sure it’s one of them.”

“Is that the women’s shower?” Lou asked. “Daddy, is the women’s shower burning?”

We ran closer, Christian, Caleb and Martin in the lead. I followed right behind them, holding Lou by the hand. Marguerite took up the rear. And we stopped only when we could feel the heat of the blaze.

For the time being only the barracks were burning. It looked harmless. It looked like something that could be controlled.

“No, the trees,” Christian said.

The trees, the shady trees that had kept the camp cool, were a firetrap. The branches stretched towards the ground. If they should catch fire, that would be the end. Then we would have no other choice but to get out of there. Run away, as we had run away from Argelès.

People were running back and forth with half-empty buckets. Some stood with hoses in their hands. Feeble streams of water were sent into the flames, only to evaporate and disappear.

“The water,” Marguerite said softly. “They’re using up the water.”

She was right. The fire was consuming the last of the camp’s water.

The woodwork caught fire, the flames ate their way inwards, upwards and disappeared in a tail of thick black smoke.

Martin, Christian and Caleb had also thrown themselves into the fire-fighting effort. They carried a plastic water tank between them, a few liters sloshing at the bottom.

“More for the hoses,” Caleb shouted.

More people ran past us, so close to me that somebody rammed into me, a hard shoulder against my own. I almost lost my balance.

Lou tugged at my shirtsleeve. “Daddy? We have to help! We have to stop them! We have to stop the fire!”

But then she discovered something. “Francis.”

She walked a few steps closer. “He’s doing it!”

The light from the fire illuminated him.

He was standing, strong and tall, holding a hose in his hands. Suddenly he was a man, no longer an old-timer.

He walked steadily forward, fighting the flames, in the front lines. He gave orders and everyone did what he said. He, too, was on fire.

He shouted that everything around the barracks had to be removed so there would be no fuel for the fire.

Caleb and Christian started taking down a tent while Martin joined those who were spraying water onto the flames.

I walked further ahead, away from Marguerite and Lou. Marguerite stood with one hand on Lou’s shoulder. Taking care of her.

I have to help out, I thought. I must do something, too. But there were no tasks in need of doing. Everything was already being done. There was nothing I could do.

So dizzying. The smell of smoke. The heat from the flames. The ashes descending like snowflakes to the ground. The sound of the fire, a creaking, crackling roar.

All I managed to do was stand completely still.

But suddenly somebody was screaming, drowning out everything else. “The child! No!”

At first I didn’t understand what they meant. Then I spotted Lou’s purple singlet on its way into the burning barracks. And after it: a hose she was dragging with her, a green garden hose that was being pulled into the roaring building.

She was inside.

I heard nothing but my own breathing, heavy, rasping, as the smoke filled my lungs and my chest contracted.

Lou in the flames. Anna in the flames. August’s face in the light of the hot tongues of fire.

It wasn’t illness that would take Lou from me. Not a water shortage. It was fire. I would also lose her to the fire.

My entire world would burn up. And there was nothing I could do.

“David.”

Marguerite thumped hard on my arm. I still was unable to move.

“David!”

And she ran towards the flames herself. That woke me up.

I ran after her, towards the heat.

But Francis got there before us. He was quicker. He jumped lightly over a burning beam on the ground, followed the hose, and disappeared in the direction of the purple singlet inside.

Time stopped, time flew by.

I just stood there.

And then he finally came out.

I had no idea he was able to move so quickly.

She was on his back. I couldn’t see her face. She hid it. His back became a shield for her.

He ran towards the flames that separated them from us, ran straight into them, protecting her with his body. And in that way he saved my daughter.

In the meantime, the flames consumed the barracks behind them. Soon there was nothing left.

But I was no longer staring into the flames, only at Lou, whom I held in my arms.

I brought her to the first-aid barracks. Somebody had opened the door, broken the lock. There were a number of people who needed help, who had burns on their hands from fighting the fire. But no doctors or nurses were to be found.

Instead people helped each other. Took what they needed in the way of Band-Aids, bandages and pain relievers.

Lou was the only child there and everyone let her through. Children still came first. Some things were still as they ought to be.

Every single injury from the fire was dressed and bandaged by Martin, who worked with practiced hands. He had apparently done this before.

Lou didn’t ask about Francis. Maybe she had already figured out what had happened. That he was lying in the next room, that Marguerite and Caleb were with him, that they were doing what they could.

No, he wasn’t what she asked about.

“The women’s shower, Daddy, did it burn down? Did everything burn down?”

She could hardly sit still on the hospital cot where Martin had left her. The whole time she wanted to jump down and run away.

“Wait,” Martin said. “The barracks burned down but nothing else. We were able to put out the fire before it spread.”

But she wouldn’t listen.

“We have to go, Daddy. We have to go back. There’s something I have to check.”

Martin rubbed some ointment on her and put on a final bandage. Far too big for her minor injury.

“There’s no fire damage in the rest of the camp,” he said calmly. “You mustn’t be afraid. Hall Four is fine. Your bed is still there.”

But Lou clung to me. “I have to go and see. We have to go now.”

Finally Martin let her go. He smiled at me apologetically.

“I did the best I could.”

I didn’t have time to answer. I had to run after Lou.

It was starting to get dark. Smoke still hung over the camp like a dry, scorching fog.

Embers lay glowing on the ground where the sanitary barracks had been. Christian and a number of other people my age were sitting in a circle. All of them were covered with black soot, and they were grimy and exhausted. Several were holding half-empty water buckets in their hands.

They were guarding the fire. If they saw any stray embers, they put them out immediately.

Water, water, even more water wasted.

Lou ran all the way to the smoldering ruins before she stopped.

She stood in front of it, scanning the blackened ground.

Then she put her hands over her face. A tiny sob escaped. “Everything’s gone!”

Gone? What was gone?

“Lou?” I placed a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s all burned up,” she said without looking at me.

She grasped a scorched wooden stick with one hand. And then she started walking in, across the red-hot rubble, while poking with the end of the stick.

“Where was the women’s shower?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Where was it?”

She kept going. Her shoes gave off the stench of burned rubber. She used the stick to push aside charred woodwork.

“Lou, what are you doing?”

She picked her way through the rubble, placing her feet between glowing embers. Her face was red from the heat.

“Lou? Stop!”

And at exactly that moment she stopped, but not because I had told her to.

With her stick she pushed aside a huge floorboard made of some kind of plastic material.

Smoke poured out and I couldn’t bear to think about how toxic it was.

In two steps I was at her side.

“Now you have to stop!”

But then I discovered what she was standing there staring at.

“They’re destroyed. All of them burned up!” she said.

At her feet, hidden by the board, by what had previously been the floor of the women’s shower, were tin cans that had exploded. The contents oozed out. Yellow corn turned gray from ashes.

It smelled of fried ham, baked beans. Tomato sauce.

She squatted down.

“There must be something left!”

Using the stick, she started digging through the destroyed cans.

“There? No. What about that one?”

But they were all destroyed.

I pushed at the cans with my foot and the food got stuck on my shoes.

Finally, at the very bottom, we found four undamaged cans. The labels were destroyed but the cans were in one piece. I took the stick from Lou and dragged them towards me. Then I peeled off my T-shirt and used it as a pot holder.

We brought them with us, went away from there and sat alone a little way away from the burned-out ruins. I opened a can that turned out to contain beans.

They were steaming.

We shared the beans. Once again we shared her booty. And I didn’t manage to say anything today either. I was too hungry. I gobbled up the food like a dog.

We were dogs, all of us.

Lou was sniffling as she ate, drying her tears with quick movements.

“They were supposed to be for us, Daddy. For us and the boat. We were supposed to take them with us and live there. Francis helped me. We collected the cans and hid them under the floor of the women’s shower.”

I was unable to answer. I was afraid I would start crying myself. And besides… what would I say? She knew that stealing was wrong. All children know it. Anna and I had taught her that. But all the same, she had stolen again, because her hunger was controlling her thoughts. Overpowering everything else.

And me. Regardless, I had nothing to say. Damn dog that I was.

She stood up. Brushed the ashes off her clothing. “I want to go to bed now.”

Hall 4 looked the same. Our beds were waiting just like before. The bag in the closet. Our home was intact, I caught myself thinking.

But this wasn’t a home. Just an old warehouse full of military cots.

And we were refugees. A refugee has no home. Home was what we had lost.

Lou fell asleep right away. When Marguerite came in I was still sitting at Lou’s bedside, just as passive as before, just as listless.

I’m a lump of meat, I thought. There are no bones in me. No skeleton. Just flesh, fat, a soft mass.

Marguerite stood beside me. She said nothing. It took me a while to turn around and look at her. She was crying.

“Francis… he’s…”

And then she said it, using many words to express something very simple. I didn’t look at her, heard only how she fretted on and on. I knew from the start what she was going to say. Knew it the minute I saw him emerge from the flames, that this wouldn’t end well.

“Sorry,” she said softly. “I said we should leave, wanted to take her away, but she just ran. Straight in.”

“I never asked you to watch her,” I said.

There was a coldness in my voice, coming from I didn’t know where.

“We should have realized it,” she said. “She said it, after all, we have to help. We should have realized that she was talking about herself as well.”

“We shouldn’t have realized anything at all.”

The cutting words flew out of my mouth, but it was the only reply I could muster. For there wasn’t any we. There was only Lou. Me. Lou and I. Marguerite wasn’t a part of it.

But Marguerite didn’t leave, she sat down with me. She continued.

“We have to leave, David.”

I didn’t reply.

“We have to get out of here.”

We. Still we.

“David?”

I got to my feet. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I left the room, left her sitting there, left Lou who was lying in bed. The embers were still smoldering at the scene of the fire. The smell of wet, charred wood filled the camp.

Christian, Caleb and Martin were sitting in the soot on the ground. A jar of pills changed hands.

“We stole it from first aid,” Caleb said when I sat down. “Everything is up for grabs now.”

“One will do away with the pain, three with the anxiety,” Martin said, his voice already listless.

I took four.

Everything was all right, for a while everything was all right.

My mind became sharp, my body simultaneously slow and quick.

The words pouring out of my mouth were sharp, witty, clear.

I was only interested in being. Here. Now.

I danced, on two legs, on all fours.

Rolled around with Caleb and Martin, the dirt sticking to us. I could smell the odor of soot and human beings.

Girls arrived, several of them. I took one of them, rolled around with her, too. Pounded hard inside her. I heard moans, but whether they came from her or from me, I couldn’t say.

I never saw her face, it was too dark. Or maybe I was blinded by woodsmoke.

Everything was all right. Everything was forgotten.