The End of the Ocean

Chapter 6 DAVID

Once again my hands were immersed in soapy water. It foamed between my fingers and soaked through our clothing.

My shirt swelled like a taut balloon on the surface until the water prevailed.

As the filth released its grip on our clothes, the color of the soap and water changed from transparent to a nondescript grayish brown.

The air in the sanitary barracks was stagnant, with a strong odor of cleaning products. Familiar. Anna’s head bent over the washing machine at home. August’s teeny-tiny garments, clean and damp. The smell that spread through the room, covering up the aroma of food and the faint stench emanating from the trash can in the heat.

Anna and the laundry. The teeny-tiny garments.

I swallowed and tried to concentrate on what I was doing.

A few spots refused to come out, and remained in the fabric like shadows. Dried blood from a scrape on the knee that had long since turned a rusty brown color. Purple spots from unripe cherries picked one night in someone’s garden. They appeased our hunger pangs for a little while, but the craving in our stomachs was replaced by a sour sensation.

It was our fourth day in the camp. Already every day was the same. Jeanette’s office in the morning. Nothing new. Every day I asked if there was anything more I could do, anything else. But she shook her head. Then eat. Sweat. Listen to Lou talk, unable to pay attention. Pull myself together. Ask somebody about the time. Nothing new, no. Try to listen to Lou. Try to play. Try not to think. About Anna, about August, about the fire. Eat again. Wait for the evening, for the heat to abate. Sleep. Wait for the next morning and another visit to the Red Cross.

But today we were allowed to wash our clothes. Laundry tubs were set up on a simple work bench. Seven liters of water we had been given for this. A little treasure trove of water.

Lou was also washing her clothes. She was wearing only her underpants and scrubbing her shorts in a tub in front of her.

The door behind us opened. I turned around. It was a woman holding dirty laundry in one hand and a small water jug in the other.

I nodded and said hi.

She mumbled a reply, took one of the tubs down from the shelf, poured some laundry detergent out of a can, sprinkled it across the bottom, and filled the tub with water, doing everything quickly and expertly.

She sat down on the other side of Lou. I tried to smile, but she didn’t seem to notice, was busy with her laundry.

She put a dress in the water, a floral print, it looked expensive. After that a blouse made of a thin, silk-like fabric.

“Nice,” I said.

“What?”

“The blouse.”

“Thank you.”

She studied me for a couple of seconds before returning to her laundry.

She was in her late thirties, maybe even forty. Her skeleton seemed to be pressing through her skin. Her collarbone stuck out, but not because she didn’t eat enough, more because she was like that, naturally thin.

Or maybe she was one of those who always watched her weight, exercised. There had been a lot of people like that before. I remember that dieting was something women talked about. She was pretty, I saw that now—not beautiful, but pretty. Classic. The way you look if you come from a family where rich men marry elegant women. The families just become more and more attractive with each generation, until finally everyone forgets how ordinary people look.

One seldom saw her kind in Argelès. The tourists who came to the town were a different sort. They liked the amusement park on the beach and the pedestrian street where you could buy knock-offs of famous labels. I had only seen her kind on the few occasions I had traveled further north up the coast, in Cannes and Provence.

But now she was here, among all the rest of us. The former kinds of distinctions no longer existed.

Her movements were quick. Unfriendly? Maybe she didn’t like my watching her.

“Been here long?” I asked, sort of to explain my staring.

“A while.”

“Do you like it?”

“Excuse me?”

I laughed. “Sorry. Wrong question. I get it.”

She didn’t smile. Just kept rubbing her dress.

“Fine, fine.” I held up my hands to show that I gave up, that I wouldn’t bother her anymore.

She continued washing with quick movements, putting more clothing into the tub. Only women’s clothing, I could see.

“Are you here alone?” I asked.

“I thought you were done talking,” she said.

“We’re alone, too,” I said and pointed at Lou.

She stirred the contents of the tub a little. The suds foamed between her fingers. She stared at the clothes. Then she drew a breath. “You’re not alone,” she said. “There are two of you.”

She hid her face from me, but couldn’t hide her voice. It wasn’t accusing. It wasn’t angry and dismissive like before. She just said it, plain and simple.

Abruptly I felt ashamed. She was right, I shouldn’t say that I was alone, because I had Lou. I still had Lou. Who at this moment was playing with the laundry water while talking softly to herself. Something about the ocean. The ocean at home?

The woman rinsed the soap out of her clothes with the last of the water from the jug she had brought along, wringing them out with rhythmic movements. Her hands were slender, delicate. The water gushed out of them.

Suddenly I wanted her to wring out our clothes, too, in the same way. For my own part I hadn’t even made it to the rinse cycle yet.

“Would you like to eat with us?” I asked when she stood up to leave.

“You don’t give up, do you?” the woman said.

How should I reply? That I felt bad for her? That was why I asked. Or that I liked her hands? You don’t say such things. Besides, I already regretted it. That I had asked. I shouldn’t invite other women to dinner. I had Anna.

“We have to dry our clothes first,” she said, without waiting for my answer.

Was that a yes?

“Can’t we eat while they’re drying?” I said.

Because there wasn’t really anything wrong with our having a meal together, was there? It wasn’t exactly as if I had asked her out on a date, either.

“You’re new here,” she said. “We have to guard them while they’re drying.”

“Huh?”

“They disappear.”

“Oh.”

I blushed; I should have realized that.

We sat there, the three of us, by the clotheslines in the shadow of the sanitary barracks, looking at our wet clothing hanging in the sun.

There was no wind, so the garments hung limply from the line, but the heat did the job. And we just sat there.

She didn’t suggest taking turns, so we could watch each other’s clothing in shifts. Maybe she didn’t trust me. I hadn’t really given her any reason to.

Or maybe she liked sitting like this. It was a way of killing time, was maybe how people lived here.

I didn’t suggest it either, actually. Because it was quite nice. We had found a place in the shrinking shadow of the barracks.

Lou played again, more wildly than usual. She ran back and forth between the drying garments.

The woman was silent. I was silent as well.

It occurred to me that I’d forgotten to ask her name, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt private, like everything else about her.

Afterwards I learned it anyway. We were in the mess hall and had finished our meal. A casserole in dented aluminum bowls. Lukewarm.

Lou wolfed down everything she was given, as if she were afraid the food would disappear if she wasn’t quick enough. It was late in the day and she had only eaten a few dry crackers for breakfast. I had forgotten while we were waiting for the clothes to dry that the child needed food. Scatterbrain. But now her tummy was full and she was calm and she said, as simply as only she could say it: “My name is Lou. What’s your name?”

“Lou is a nice name,” the woman said and abruptly got to her feet.

“But what is your name?” Lou asked.

The woman took a step away from the table. “Marguerite.”

Marguerite. Like a daisy.

“Daddy’s name is David.”

The woman took one more step.

“That’s nice. Thanks for the company.”

“Where are you going?” I asked. “We could eat together later, too?”

“Yes,” Lou said. “We could.”

“Maybe,” Marguerite said.

But it didn’t look like she meant it.

“Fine,” I said.

Makes no difference to me, I wanted to say. But I didn’t say anything. And she had already turned to leave. Was headed away.

I thought she needed us. But she didn’t, I could see that now. A woman like her didn’t need people like us.

I was just a child, dragging another child with me. We came straight from the sandbox, both Lou and I. We were dirty, even though we were clean. Completely unlike her. Nonetheless, I didn’t want her to walk away, with that bony back of hers, so slender and erect.

“I was just trying to be nice,” I said to her back.

“Me too,” she said, without turning around.

And then she disappeared.

For some reason or other my eyes were stinging. But crying didn’t help, I knew that.

Besides, it was so hot, so hellishly hot. The mess hall tent was hot. The sun beat down on the roof. The walls were folded up to let the air in, but it didn’t help, because not even the faintest breeze could be felt. Only dry, sweltering heat.

Around us people sat on the benches, sweating. Red in the face, their skin shiny. Everyone looked the same. I didn’t know any of them.

I emptied the water out of my cup. It was as warm as piss and tasted like rubber.

Waiting and waiting.

I stood up suddenly.

“Come on,” I said to Lou.

“I haven’t finished eating.”

“Finish up, then.”

She pushed in the last spoonful.

“Come on,” I said. “Hurry.”

“Where are we going?” Lou said.

“Out,” I said.

“Why?”

“They said we could go wherever we wanted. During the daytime we can go wherever we want.”

I took her by the hand and pulled her out of the tent.

We hurried through the camp. The sweaty faces were everywhere. Strangers, only strangers.

I had been surrounded by so many people.

A wife. Two children. Parents, in-laws. A sister.

My big sister and I, God, how we had argued when we were little. About everything. Alice never let me win. For a time I thought that she should have. She had the option. As the oldest, she had the power. The oldest always has the power. And the responsibility.

But letting me win would perhaps have meant breaking the rules of the game between us. Because we were supposed to argue, in a strange way I think we almost wanted to, that siblings want to argue. It’s so easy, much easier than being good to one another.

She was always older than me. Much older. After I had children, the age difference was sort of obliterated for some reason or other. It was strange that she still lived the life of a young person, while I changed diapers and heated nursing bottles. But now, after the past few months, I started thinking of her as my big sister again. Not older, but big.

Alice, my big sister… I didn’t know where she was, either. That clever sister of mine, clever with words, clever with numbers, clever with her hands. She built things, all the time. No, not built, constructed, but she never had the chance to become an engineer as she had planned. The crisis over-whelmed her. She created so many things: a windmill in the garden, a solar-cell-powered dollhouse, won an inventor’s contest at school. Where was she now?

My family. Alice, Mom, my aunts. Grandmother and Grandfather. Eduard, the only one of my friends with whom I had cried. Where was he? Where were they?

And Dad… my elderly father. That feeble body of his, the unsteady gait, where was he? He was tougher than I’d thought; people like him usually didn’t survive the summers. Hundreds of thousands of elderly people had passed away in recent years because of the heat. The nights in particular took their toll, the extreme heat, the aging bodies never found rest. But Dad lived. The heat didn’t get to him, like it did with the rest of us, it didn’t have any effect on him.

I had been angry with him for so many years. Angry with him for having had children far too late in life. So late that he couldn’t bring himself to be a father. Couldn’t bring himself to do the things a daddy does, what the other daddies did. Toss me into the air over his head, wrestle with me, raise his voice when I did something I wasn’t supposed to do.

Alice had been enough for him, a careful girl, well behaved, seldom dirty. I was simply far too much. With Dad I felt like I was all elbows, clumsy. Hard and sinewy. Far too loud, my movements uncontrolled. He never said it, but I was still young when I started noticing how he would leave the room when I came in. His sighs. How he lifted his book—always some book or other—protectively up against his face, using the book as a shield.

He didn’t even manage to follow up on my schooling, didn’t understand my impatience, my confusion over the letters of the alphabet. He had never been like that himself. I used to think that he’d always been old. And I was madder than hell with him for precisely that.

But still. Now I couldn’t imagine the world without that failing old body of his, without his sighs and his thousand-yard stare. My diminished old father. I had given up on him too soon. I could have tried to approach him. I should have. While there was still time.

I should have understood that he survived for a reason, that I was fortunate.

But they just left, he and Mom. One day in October of last year they closed up the house, covered the furniture with sheets and locked the door. They wanted to take the train to Paris, she had a cousin there. Alice went with them, too. From there they hoped they would be able to continue further north. In May we received our last message from them. They hadn’t been granted residency anywhere, but were going to try to get to Denmark on their own. After that… nothing.

I walked quickly. We passed the halls. The sanitary barracks.

I pulled air into my lungs. Dad… stop thinking about him, you have to stop thinking about him. About Dad. About Mom. About Alice.

Because there were too many people. Too many of them. I didn’t have enough hope for so many people. Only for Anna and August. Their faces, the smell of August, his gurgling, the hollow of Anna’s neck, snuggling against it, in it. Just the two of them. That would have to do. If I could have them, it would do.

“Where are we going, Daddy?”

Lou trotted alongside me, struggling to keep up. “Daddy?”

“I don’t know. Out.”

I took a breath. Tried to smile at her. “We’ll just go for a little walk.”

She didn’t want to go, I could see it on her face. But she didn’t protest. She just took my hand and held it tightly. Wherever I went, she followed.

I stepped briskly, adult strides.

I had to get some air. Had to stop thinking. Stop yearning. Just wait.

Anna. August.

Wait.

“You’re walking so fast,” Lou said.

“Sorry,” I said.

And I pulled her towards the exit.