Just After the Wave

by Sandrine Collette

  The first alarm comes after four or five hours: the motor begins to cough. Already, thinks Louie. He shouts:

  “More fuel!”

  Perrine hands him the fuel can. They don’t switch off the burning motor, they’re too afraid it won’t start again. And it’s absolutely vital not to spill any fuel.

  “Can it catch fire?” says Noah worriedly, awake now.

  “Yes,” says Louie.

  “Oh no.”

  They immediately continue on their way, relieved the boat is again moving forward as steadily as an old workhorse. In the can there is a little bit of gas left. Until tomorrow, thinks Louie. After that, we’ll have to row.

  Shortly before nightfall he lowers the anchor. Perrine opens a bag and takes out eggs and pancakes, and potatoes to the brim, their eyes are shining. She also brought the shriveled little early apples from the apple tree at the top of the island, the one that hasn’t yielded anything decent in years; but she took them all the same, Noah went with her, carrying the ladder, she already knew what she wanted. She chops the apples in little pieces to give them to the hens with some grass she cut, hastily, she’s not sure that fowl eat grass, actually, but if they’re hungry, they’ll give it a go.

  Once they’ve peeled their eggs, she takes the shells and crushes them and mixes them with the apples. She has seen Madie do this in winter when the hens didn’t have much to eat. Perrine puts half the mix aside, for the next day. She wonders if the hens will go on laying, on the boat. And whether they’ll have to leave them their fresh eggs for food.

  After they’ve eaten they curl up in their blankets, their eyes closing already with exhaustion. Around them, millions of stars cast their light in reflections upon the sea, like lanterns on a holiday; there are so many that they can’t see the black water below them, stars embroidering a tapestry of tiny suns, and with their heads back they gaze at the echo above them, they play at searching on the water for the constellations they’ve found above them in the sky, which tremble and blink while they point to them, exclaiming, sorry they don’t know them better, fascinated by the glow, the sparkle. When Noah leans over to splash the water with both hands, the world clouds and furrows, the stars blur. It takes a long time for the sea to recover its smooth surface, for the ripples to vanish—no matter, they look at the sky again, motionless despite the trails of satellites. Perrine recognized the Little Dipper and, slightly higher up, the North Star. They fall asleep too soon, fatigue gets the better of them. And if they wake during the night, when the clucking of a dreaming hen disturbs them, they are instantly reassured, lulled by the lights of a world watching over them.

  * * *

  The next day the difficulties start. Since dawn, when the raw light on the ocean woke them and they started the motor, Louie has been watching the fuel level. For a start he lowered the throttle so it would last longer; at around noon he poured the final drops of fuel into the tank. Now, after spluttering and hiccupping for a few minutes, the motor stalls, stops, no more sound, nothing.

  “That’s it,” says Louie.

  “No more gas?” asks Noah.

  “Nah.”

  “Are we almost there?”

  Louie looks around him. No way of knowing. He would give anything to see, far far off on the horizon, something that looks like land, but no, and his throat constricts like the night before, the same irrational temptation to turn around and go back to their island, the one that will be submerged in a few days’ time, it’s stupid, really stupid, he murmurs to himself. How much time have they saved with the motorboat, he has no way of knowing; how long they will have to keep rowing across this monstrous ocean, he doesn’t know either. So to forestall any false sense of joy, he says:

  “I don’t think so.”

  Noah grumbles.

  “There’s nothing but water. It’s stupid.”

  “We have to get going, now,” says Louie, handing him one of the two oars.

  “I don’t know how,” whines Noah.

  “Try.”

  They paddle unevenly; Noah cannot get into the rhythm, hasn’t the strength, he lets the boat turn when Louie sculls on his side, at the age of eight you don’t have much in the way of muscles, especially when you’re just a little shrimp.

  “You have to make an effort,” complains Louie, “I can’t row by myself for days on end. But hand it over, I’ll make a start. When I get tired, you’ll help me.”

  He takes both oars and puts them in the oarlocks, settles onto the seat, and, like Pata, cries out with his first pull, Heave! He doesn’t like sitting like this, which means his back is to the horizon, which prevents him from seeing where he’s going, unless he twists around every two minutes, craning his neck to make sure they’re not wandering off course—but what is their course, when the horizon is slack, undetectable, so monotonous you could weep.

  Heave, says Louie in his mind, to give himself courage.

  Because where courage is concerned, he hasn’t got a lot left.

  For a long time, the water dripping from the oars between two strokes is the only sound drifting over the sea, slow and regular. Louie’s arms are aching, and so is his back; the sweat is stinging his eyelids as it trickles down his brow. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t know whether Perrine and Noah have noticed that he is slowing down. He doesn’t want Noah to help him yet, the boy is dozing under a cloth for protection from the sun, he can do another hour, anyway, and then the heat will start to decline, and his thoughts decompose, extenuated, there is nothing but water, oars, and the sound of his breathing.

  They stop to have a snack, drink something, catch their breath.

  “You okay?” asks Noah anxiously.

  Louie raises his thumb. Right as rain. His brother laughs. In fact, he feels as if his bones are going to snap in two, he is aching so badly. When they set off again after fifteen minutes of rest, Louie’s arms feel like metal rods with joints that someone’s forgotten to oil, rusty muscles, raw nerves, and everything pounding dully in his forehead and his temples, as steady a beat as the oars in the water, and he often lets the boat glide ahead without rowing at all.

  “Let me try.”

  Perrine has sat down next to him. He looks at her, hands her an oar without saying a word; he hasn’t the strength to speak. Just his sunken eyes distorting his face, it feels as if they are pressing right into his head, the sockets sinking into his skull and pulling on his skin and sending a somewhat blurred vision back to him, but maybe it’s the sun on the water, anyway he cannot speak, he hands her one of the oars and that’s all, he’d like to smile but can only manage an ugly grimace.

  “How do I do it?” asks Perrine.

  He shows her. Noah is sitting cross-legged on the seat facing them and observes them, nods, Okay, tries to remember their movements. Perrine is a quick learner. It’s not that the boat is going any faster, but they’re sharing the effort, each of them holding their oar with two hands; Louie found them some rags to wrap around the handles, because of the painful blisters that appear on their fingers. And it’s not that the prospect of all the days ahead has stopped worrying them, but now they feel a bond, together, indestructible, all three of them paddling as best they can, even when Perrine lets the oar slip and the boat swerves to the side—so then Noah puts in an effort, makes up the difference, helps out, and they begin giggling because it’s too hard, because they’re dead tired and they can’t take it anymore, but they’re not alone, and they keep going, letting out wild cries to urge themselves on.

  * * *

  Early in the morning, Louie goes back to rowing on his own. Deep down, he’s not proud of himself. He warns them. It won’t go quickly. He’s aching all over. The other two nod their heads. They’ll help later, because just now Noah got out the two little fishing poles he found in the barn before they left, the first ones they ever used, when they were four or five years old, with hooks that have g
one a bit rusty. The lines are short, so that they wouldn’t catch them in the leaves of the bushes—a precaution that is useless, now, but what can they do, so he skewers pieces of raw potato in the place of worms, and Louie shrugs his shoulders.

  “That’s the way we used to do it,” protests Noah.

  “And we used to have freshwater fish behind the house. Now, we have the sea!”

  “So?”

  “So, you can’t catch ocean fish with potatoes.”

  “If they’re hungry, they’ll come and eat all the same.”

  “Yeah, sure,” scoffs the older brother.

  And yet he will have to concede it wasn’t a bad idea, because Perrine and Noah manage to catch three fish in the next hour; not a great catch, but better than nothing, and the fish are a decent size. Well? says Noah, showing off. All right.

  They put them in a bucket of water.

  “You’d do better to kill them,” says Louie. “It’s too hot, they’re going to die anyway.”

  “It’s so they’ll keep longer, otherwise they’ll stink.”

  “And how are we going to eat them?”

  “Eat them . . . ?”

  Noah looks out at the empty horizon. We need an island so we can make a fire and cook them. He taps Louie on the arm:

  “Don’t you see any?”

  “See for yourself. There’s nothing. Just the sea.”

  “But I wonder if there isn’t something,” murmurs Perrine.

  Of course, it’s just an almost invisible shape that could be nothing more than a veil of mist on the water. But you never know. They clamber over to her.

  “There,” says Perrine.

  “I can’t see anything,” says Noah.

  “Maybe,” says Louie.

  He looks at the sky. If they decide to go in the direction Perrine is pointing to, they will get off course. And they’ve probably drifted so much already, without knowing it, the boat turning on itself during the night, with its stern to the north when the sun rose, or to the south, or to the west, or who knows where. Is he sure he headed in the right direction every time? And yet he hesitates. If it is an illusion, a fog bank, yes. Should they try? Get closer. He’ll give it an hour, a lost hour or an hour on the way to respite, they only left the day before yesterday, and it kind of annoys him, We can’t go stopping already on the third day. So all of a sudden he makes his decision.

  “We’re not going.”

  Perrine gives a start. We’re not?

  “Why should we go?”

  Silence. The question surprises the three of them, even Louie who asked it, and they can’t find an answer.

  “To cook the fish?” says Perrine after a few seconds.

  “Just to have a look?” suggests Noah.

  “And see what?”

  “If there are people there who can help us.”

  Louie frowns; he is so sure they are the only survivors that he hasn’t thought about that. No, the world has become . . . a desert. Emptiness. Nobody. Just the eleven of them, or the three of them, with nothing around them, only water. But if they can find the higher ground, that will change everything. They will see that life has not vanished and there are still thousands and millions of them, on the mountains, and surely they’ve rebuilt society the way it used to be, before, something he has already almost forgotten about.

  “Oh.”

  Noah laughs.

  “You don’t think there’re any people over there?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “So shall we go and see?”

  “Okay. Let’s go and see.”

  May as well lug reality around with them: this is what Louie keeps telling himself as he paddles with Perrine, whose eyes are shining, and he cannot understand what it is that is driving her and Noah, their wide grins, this joyful air of theirs, the thought that they might find people they don’t know, he cannot help asking himself over and over: what for?

  So they won’t be alone?

  Do they think it will heal the wound of abandonment.

  Do they think that through some inexplicable miracle their parents might be there—then that would mean that they, too, failed to find the way to higher ground.

  And are they not enough, just the three of them?

  Apparently not.

  Nothing but bad thoughts in his head, Louie, so he keeps quiet, and rows, and pulls on his arms, heave. A little later, he raises his head to stare gloomily out at the island in the distance.

  But there’s no more island.

  He rises halfway to his feet.

  “Hey?”

  Looks at the others.

  “Where is the island?” asks Noah in a little voice, reaching for Perrine, she’s the one who saw it first, so he grabs hold of her as if to a last hope.

  And Perrine murmurs:

  “I don’t see it anymore. There’s nothing there now.”

  Louie got back on what he thought must be the right course, and now he is rowing again, without haste. Sitting across from him, the two younger ones look dejected. The water is playing tricks on them, creating mirages. Since the vanished island, there was one time they thought they saw a boat, another time the leaves of a tree. And each time, they held out their arms and stamped their feet and cried with excitement, launching into a song of celebration; and each time the boat got closer it banished the images and shapes, and they lowered their heads, pointing to a spot on the sea: It was there, right there. Louie, too, has visions. But he knows they’re false, and he forces himself to look elsewhere, to ignore the glimmer and the hope; if there was something real, he’d go right by it, for sure, with that way he has of frowning because the sea is playing tricks on them. He’d rather miss an island than head for one all full of joy only to realize, as he sails through it as if it were a fogbank, that it doesn’t exist. He’d rather die, yes: he doesn’t want to be disappointed. So he carries on, his eyes glued to his hands gripping the oars, and time seems to stretch to infinity, everything the same, hot and slow and painful, today, tomorrow, he can’t recall, all he knows is that nights have gone by.

  At dawn on the fifth day, the hens cluck and rouse them from sleep. They eat a little, pull up the anchor; the day has begun. Louie, Perrine, and Noah take turns rowing, and the worst is when the two younger ones are at it together. Leave it, murmurs Louie, massaging his palms, I’ll row again, we can just stop for fifteen minutes. The day is spent between the meager meals they have to share with the hens and the boat that has to be propelled relentlessly across the water. After lunch, Perrine and Noah fall asleep, from heat and fatigue, and Louie on his own curses the sun, but not too much, just to let it know, because it’s better to burn to a frazzle than to get caught in a storm, which is bound to happen sooner or later. But he complains all the same, because of the sweat stinging his eyes and dripping down his brow, and the feeling he has of being burned all over, suffocating, his throat dry.

  Because they’re making no headway, and the days that last forever.

  Because of his back and his arms, his belly and his legs, all aching.

  Because the younger ones are taking naps.

  He shouts. Shit!

  Perrine wakes with a start.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. It’s just shit.”

  Shortly before nightfall they stop and drop anchor. They eat, drink, feed the hens, gather the eggs they continue to lay, share them out among the birds and themselves, swallowing them whole and trying not to let anything dribble down their chins. Then they lie down; at last, thinks Louie.

  Too hot under the blankets—but with these damned mosquitoes.

  Fall asleep like the dead.

  And every day it’s like this.

  How long has it been? They can’t agree, is it five days, or six. Seven, said Noah, but Noah will say anything
just so you listen to him. Every morning is the same, with the creaking of the anchor being raised, and the soreness in their muscles that make their movements stiff.

  Not seven, no, can’t be.

  “If it’s six,” says Noah, “then we’re over halfway there, especially as in the beginning we had the motor and we went fast. We should be there soon, don’t you think?”

  Louie shrugs.

  “We’re not rowing all that fast. We’re losing some of the time that we made up.”

  Noah graciously adjusts his reasoning: Only halfway?

  But the thing is, all the days are alike—and basically they ought not to complain, thinks Louie, if something were to change, it would mean bad weather, wind and rain.

  “Or land,” adds Perrine.

  “No, it can’t be land. Not yet.”

  Still . . .

  Suddenly, all three of them give a start. They look at each other without daring to look up again. Perrine has even closed her eyes tight, murmuring, It’s just another mirage, right? So Louie turns to the side where the apparition is coming from. He says to Noah:

  “Do you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about you, Perrine?”

  “I think so.”

  “Right.”

  He scratches his head. This is the first time they have all thought they’d seen the same thing. He asks them again, to be sure:

  “An island?”

  “That’s right,” says Perrine.

  “There it is,” says Noah.

  “So maybe we should go take a look, then.”

  An hour later, the island has grown larger. They let the boat glide as they hold onto the gunwale, astonished: this time, it’s for real.

  “Let’s stop!” exclaims Noah.

  “And we can make a fire and cook the fish. We have to catch some,” says Perrine, already looking forward.

  They threw away the first fish they caught long ago, since there was no way to cook them; the hens pecked at them with their tip of their beaks, and they tossed the rest into the sea, because of the smell. This time, Perrine and Noah hastily take up their fishing poles, while Louie returns to his oars.