The End of the Ocean

Chapter 2 DAVID

Timbaut, Bordeaux, France, 2041

The heat trembled above the road in front of us. It shimmered on the hilltop, like water, but disappeared as we approached.

We still didn’t see any sign of the camp.

Above us the sky was blue. Not a single cloud. Blue, always blue. I’d started to hate that color.

Lou slept against my arm, rocking gently as the truck drove over bumps in the asphalt. It had been a long time since anyone had done any road maintenance. The houses we passed were abandoned, the fields dry and scorched brown by the sun.

I turned my face towards Lou, sniffed at her head. Her soft, little-girl hair smelled of acrid smoke. The sour smell of fire was in our clothes, too, even though it had been many days since we left Argelès. Since we became half a family.

Twenty-two days—no, twenty-four. Already twenty-four days had passed. I had lost count. Wanted perhaps to lose count. Twenty-four days since we ran out of Argelès. Me with Lou in my arms. She cried. I ran until we could no longer hear the fire. Ran until the smoke was just a haze in the distance. Only then did we stop, turn towards the city and…

Stop, David. Stop. We are going to find them now. They are here. Anna and August will be in the camp. Because this was where Anna wanted to go. She had spoken about the place for a long time. It was supposed to be decent. There was food here and electricity from solar panels. And, not least, there was water. Clean, cold water from a faucet.

And from this camp it was supposed to be possible to continue north.

The driver put on the brakes. He drove onto the side of the road and stopped. Lou woke up.

“There,” he pointed.

In front of us was a military-green tarpaulin fence.

Anna. August.

The driver let us out. He mumbled “good luck” and drove away in a cloud of dust.

The air hit us like a hot wall. Lou blinked towards the sun, clinging to my hand.

The fireball in the sky sucked every drop of moisture out of me. The asphalt was burning. It was so hot it had to be on the verge of melting.

My phone was broken. My wristwatch had been bartered away. I didn’t know what time it was. But the fence before me still cast a short shadow, so it couldn’t be more than three.

I walked quickly. Now we would find them again. They had no doubt arrived here before us.

We reached the entrance. Two guards wearing military uniforms sat by a table.

They looked at us without seeing us.

“Papers?” one of them said.

“I’m looking for someone,” I said.

“Papers first,” the guard said.

“But—”

“Don’t you want to go inside?”

I placed our passports in front of him, but left Anna’s and August’s passports in the bag. The guard didn’t need to see that we had them. He would certainly only start asking questions.

He leafed quickly through the pages in my passport, stopped at the photograph. I was startled every time I saw it. The guy in the picture, was that me? Such round cheeks, almost chubby. Had the camera distorted my face?

No, that was just how I was at the time. Stout, not fat, merely in good health.

Or maybe normal, actually. Maybe that was how we all looked before.

He picked up Lou’s, it was newer, but Lou grew so fast. The child in the passport could have been anyone. Four years old when the photograph was taken. Smiling. Not as serious as she is now.

I had braided her hair this morning. I was good at it. Brushed it and divided it into two identical halves, with a sharp parting in between. Then I quickly made two tight braids that hung down her back. Maybe it was because of the braids we had finally been picked up by a driver. Now I hoped they distracted people, so they wouldn’t notice how dirty she was, and thin. So they wouldn’t notice her seriousness—she seldom smiled, my child. Before, she was the kind of child who was always jumping, running, skipping. But now the braids just hung down her back, completely still.

The guard continued looking at me. Clearly he was comparing me with the photo in the passport.

“It’s five years old,” I said. “I was only twenty.”

“Do you have anything else? Other papers that can confirm your identity?”

I shook my head.

“This was all I managed to take with me.”

He looked at the picture one more time, as if it could provide him with answers. Then he took out a stapler and two light-green slips of paper. With practiced movements he stapled them on random pages in the passports.

“Fill this out.”

He held it out to me.

“Where?”

“Here. On the form.”

“I mean… where? Do you have a table?”

“No.”

I took the passports. He had left mine open at the page with the green form.

“Do you have a pen, then?”

I tried to smile. But the guard just shook his head in resignation. His eyes did not meet mine.

“I’ve lost mine,” I said.

That wasn’t completely true. It wasn’t lost, the ink was used up. Lou had been crying so much the other night on the road, sobbing softly with her face hidden in her hands. I let her draw. She drew thick blue lines of ink on the back of an old envelope we found on the side of the road. Drew pictures of girls in dresses and colored in the skirts. She pressed the pen down so hard that it made holes in the paper.

The guard rummaged through a box on the ground. He pulled out a battered blue ballpoint pen with a broken plastic casing. “I want it back.”

I had to fill out the form standing up. I had nothing to lean the passport against. My handwriting came out wobbly and strange.

I tried to hurry. My hand shook. Occupation. Last place of work. Last place of residence. Where we had come from. Where we were headed. Where were we headed?

“The water countries, David,” Anna used to say to me. “That’s where we have to go.”

The drier our own country became, the more she talked about the countries in the north, where the rain didn’t just come once in a great while during the cold months, but also in the spring and summer. Where long-term drought didn’t exist. But where instead the opposite was true: the rain was an affliction, arriving in storms. Where rivers flooded over and dams burst, abruptly and brutally.

“What are they crying about?” Anna said. “They have all the water in the world!”

Where we lived we had only the salty sea, which was rising. That and the drought. That was our flood. Relentless.

First it was called the two-year drought, then the four-year. This was the fifth year. The summer seemed to be without end.

People had started leaving Argelès back in the autumn of last year, but we stayed put. I had a job to attend to; I couldn’t leave it, the run-down old desalination plant that converted the sea into fresh water.

But the power came and went, the stores were emptied of food staples and the city became emptier, quieter. And hotter. Because the drier the earth became, the hotter the air was. Previously the sun had applied its forces to evaporation. When there was no longer any moisture on the earth, we became the sun’s target.

Every day Anna talked about how we should leave. First straight up north, while it was still possible, before everyone closed their borders. Then she talked about different camps. Pamiers, Gimont, Castres. This one near Timbaut was the last.

As she talked, the temperature rose. Refugees from even further south passed through our city, stayed a few days, traveled on. But we stayed.

I stood there with the pen in my hand. Where were we headed?

I couldn’t answer this by myself. I had to find Anna and August first.

The man behind us in the line bumped into us, but didn’t seem to notice. He was tiny and shriveled, like he didn’t fill out his own flesh. There was a dirty bandage around one of his hands.

The guard quickly stapled the green form into his passport. The man accepted it without another word. He already had a pen in his hand and stepped aside to write.

It was my turn again. I gave the guard the passports and the forms with the ten pieces of information that were supposed to be everything he needed to know about Lou and me.

The guard pointed at the item at the bottom.

“And here?”

“We haven’t decided yet. I have to speak with my wife first.”

“Where is she?”

“We were supposed to meet here.”

“Supposed to?”

“Will. We have agreed to meet here.”

“We’ve been asked to ensure that something is written in all the fields.”

“I have to speak with my wife first. I’m looking for her. I said so.”

“Then I’ll put England.”

England, smack in the middle between south and north, still habitable.

“But there’s no guarantee it will be England where we…”

Anna didn’t like England. Didn’t like the food. Or the language.

“You have to put something,” the guard said.

“So we won’t be committed to it?”

He laughed a curt laugh.

“If you should be lucky enough to be granted residency, you must take whatever country you get.”

He leaned over the form and wrote quickly: “Great Britain.”

Then he gave me back my passport.

“That’s everything. At night you must stay here, but during the day you can come and go as you please, both inside and outside the camp.”

“Understood,” I said.

I tried to smile again. I wished he would smile back. I could have used a smile.

“You’ll be assigned a spot in Hall Four,” he said.

“But where can I ask about my wife? And my son? He’s just a baby. His name is August.”

The guard raised his head. Finally he looked at me.

“The Red Cross,” he said. “You’ll see them as soon as you enter.”

I wanted to give him a hug, but instead just mumbled, “Thanks.”

“Next please,” he said.

We walked quickly through the gate. I pulled Lou behind me. As soon as we were inside, I became aware of a sound. Crickets. They were sitting in a tree above us, rubbing their wings together feverishly. There was no water, but nonetheless they kept at it, as energetically as hell, staying the course. That was perhaps how one should approach this. I tried breathing more calmly.

The camp consisted of some huge old warehouses spread out across a flat field. Big trees cast shadows. They still had leaves; the roots must go deep. A sign on the wall informed us that the place had once been an awning factory. “Sunshades for all your needs,” it read. No doubt they’d done good business.

We continued walking through the camp. Between the buildings were a dozen or so military tents and just as many barracks. They were set up in straight lines and all of them had solar panels on the roof. There was no trash anywhere. People sat here and there, resting in the heat. Everyone was clean and wore clean clothes.

Anna had been right. This was a good place.

“There,” I said, and pointed at a flag that was flapping on the roof of a barracks a short distance away.

“What country is that from?” Lou asked.

“It’s not a country. It’s the Red Cross,” I said. “They know where Mommy and August are.”

“Do they?” Lou said.

“Yes,” I said.

Lou held my hand, with her dirty, sticky child’s hand. Anna used to nag her about washing her hands. The same ritual took place before every single meal. Remember to wash your hands, remember the germs. If she could see Lou now.

We turned a corner, and Lou came to an abrupt halt.

“A line,” she said softly.

Damn.

“We’re good at that,” I said, and tried to make my voice sound cheerful.

During the past year everything was rationed. We stood in lines for a gallon of milk. For a cut of meat. For a bag of apples, every other kind of fruit. The lines for fruits and vegetables were the longest. There were so few bees, so few insects. They had disappeared gradually, but when the drought came, the extinction rate accelerated. No insects, no fruit. I missed tomatoes. Melons. Pears, plums. Digging my teeth into a juicy plum. Cold from the refrigerator…

Lou couldn’t remember a life without lines. And she was the one who had come up with the idea that we could sit in line, instead of standing in line.

The first time she sat down, it was from sheer exhaustion. She was whining. On the verge of tears. But when I sat down beside her and said we were on a picnic, she laughed.

Sitting in line had now become routine for us. The lines were a place for games. Outings in the country. School. Dinner parties. There were especially a lot of the latter. Lou loved games about eating.

I gave Lou a cookie, the last one I had in my bag. She crunched on it and smiled.

“There’s like a yellow cream inside,” she said, and showed me the dry, grainy cookie.

We kept playing through the first course, the main course, dessert and cheese. For a few moments I managed to think only about the game.

But mostly I looked for Anna. Waited. She could appear at any moment. Walk towards me with August in her arms. He would smile with his mouth open, showing his four teeth. And she would hold him out to me so I could take him, hold him while she hugged me, and Lou would also join in. All four of us would stand like that, together.

Then the door to the barracks opened and it was our turn.

The floor was clean; it was the first thing I noticed. A hard, wooden floor, without a speck of dust. There were several cables coiling across it. And it was cooler in here. A fan on the wall droned loudly.

A woman who was half hidden behind the monitor of a desktop computer smiled.

“Have a seat, both of you.”

She pointed at two chairs in front of the desk.

I quickly explained our case: that the family had been split up when we left the south, but that we had agreed to meet here.

“It was my wife’s suggestion,” I said. “She wanted us to come here.”

The woman started typing on the computer. She asked for the names and birth dates of both Anna and August, asked what they looked like.

“Look like?”

“Do they have any special characteristics?”

“… No… Anna has brown hair. She’s quite short.” It suddenly sounded like I thought there was something wrong with her. “I mean… relatively short. Five foot two, I think. And pretty,” I hastened to add.

The woman smiled.

“She has brown hair that gets blonder in the summertime. Brown eyes,” I said.

“And the child?”

“He’s… an ordinary baby. He has four teeth and still doesn’t have much hair. Perhaps he has a few more teeth now, actually. He was cranky the last few days. I believe his gums were itchy.”

What more should I say? That he had a tummy I liked to bury my face in? That he laughed loudly and shrilly? That he howled like a foghorn when he was hungry?

“When did you last see them?” the lady asked.

“When we left,” I said. “The day we left Argelès, July 15th.”

“The time of day?”

“Midday. Lunchtime.”

Lou had stopped looking at me now. Instead she pulled her legs up beneath her, leaning her head towards her knees.

“What happened?” the woman said.

“What happened?” I repeated.

“Yes?”

Suddenly I didn’t like her prying.

“What has happened to many people,” I said. “We had to flee, were some of the last people to leave the city. And we got separated.”

“Was that it?”

“Yes.”

“And you haven’t heard from her since?”

“How could I? The network is down. Telephones don’t work. But I’ve tried. Otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here now!”

I drew a breath. I had to calm down, couldn’t start screaming. Be positive. Show that I’m a good guy.

Besides, I liked the woman. In her fifties, a narrow face. She looked tired, working hard for others all day, that kind of tiredness.

“We agreed,” I said as clearly and calmly as I could. “We agreed to come here. That was our plan.”

She looked at the computer again and wrote something else.

“Unfortunately I can’t find them registered here,” she said slowly. “They’re not here. And neither have they been here.”

I looked at Lou—had she heard anything? Maybe not. She was sitting with her forehead against her knees, making it impossible to see her face.

“Can you check one more time?” I said to the woman.

“There’s no need,” she said flatly.

“Yes, there is,” I said.

“David, listen—”

“What’s your name?” I said.

“… Jeanette.”

“OK, Jeanette. You probably have a family of your own. Imagine if we were talking about your people?”

“My people?”

“Your family. Your loved ones.”

“I have lost somebody too,” she said.

She had lost somebody too.

Of course she had lost somebody as well. Somebody she searched for, somebody she would maybe never see again.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What I mean is that you are the one with access to the records.” I pointed at the computers. “Isn’t that what you do? Find people?”

Find people. It sounded childish. I was a child for her, no doubt, a child with a child. I straightened up. Ruffled Lou’s hair, tried to look paternal.

“We have to find Anna. She’s her mother,” I said. “And her brother,” I hastened to add. She mustn’t think that I’d forgotten about August.

“I’m sorry, but you’ve been separated for twenty-four days,” she said. “Anything could have happened.”

“Twenty-four days isn’t that long,” I said.

“Maybe they’ve ended up in another camp,” she said, and now there was something comforting in her voice.

“Yes,” I said quickly. “That must be what happened.”

“I can put in a missing persons notice,” Jeanette said.

She smiled again, really trying to be pleasant. And I responded, just as pleasantly: thank you, that was kind of you. I wanted to show her that I could do this too. I sat stiffly, holding my arms tightly against my body. I hid my elbows from her, hid the rings of sweat on my T-shirt. I looked at Lou again.

I still couldn’t see her face. She was sitting just as stiffly as I was, with her face pressed against her knees.

Afterwards she had marks from her knees on her forehead where the fabric of her trousers had created a faint grid pattern on her smooth skin.

I didn’t take her hand. I wanted to run. Scream. But I forced myself to walk calmly.

The crickets. They stay the course. They can take this.

I am a cricket.