High as the Waters Rise

by Anja Kampmann

  The mood was solemn as he prepared to speak, like in church.

  The land we’re here for is covered with whalebones, darkness, and silence.

  He turned his eyes to the floor, as if trying to keep from laughing. Then he raised them. Now he looked them all in the eye.

  You’re here because a few crazy-ass engineers invented the best drilling technology in the world.

  He paused and looked around. Philippe smiled at him, but Sharam didn’t seem to notice.

  But not for you, he continued.

  They were hanging on his every word. As if all the warmth of the deck were concentrated here, a bright spot, the only one for nautical miles. They knew the stories that were told about him. Iranian speedboats had shot up his platform in the days when Saddam Hussein’s poison gas crept over the northern plains, scaring back an army of five hundred thousand poorly trained Iranians. He’d lived through the Gulf War from beginning to end, had seen the Kuwaiti oil fields go up in flames one by one, Minagish, Burgan. He knew the names of the blasters who used extinguishing explosions to deprive the flames of oxygen. Sharam was one of the last of the true blues, a driller they looked up to, someone who could say things like: you’re worth nothing—and they endured the long pause before he continued—if you don’t stick together.

  He talked of the oil fields and of the wars. Why is it our company drilling out here and not another? They listened. Only Philippe interrupted him. I’m not going back, he said. Even if it gets harder.

  He saw something like rage flash in Philippe’s eyes.

  Where should I go—on a fishing trawler, to harvest the sea? The Itremo mines? Really?

  Philippe pulled his hood over his baseball cap and drank another sip.

  Sharam shook his head slowly.

  I’m just saying that we are all we’ve still got out here. And this platform has a history, just like us, and if we don’t know it we’re fucked.

  Francis laughed. We’re fucked either way—that’s the deal.

  And how they fuck us. Philippe burst into laughter, fluttered his eyelashes and started to dance, wiggling his hips wildly. Sharam’s no seriously, seriously could be heard a few more times, but even he seemed content with his chewing tobacco and his legs stretched out in front of him, flip-flops, and all of them leaning against the walls, as if they were on a journey, as if they were on a boat or a trip, just setting out together. Eventually the night grew long, and they stayed there until they had to sleep for the next shift.

  The next morning, they stood in front of the rotary table a quarter of an hour before the beginning of the shift, helmets under their arms, facing east, where at a quarter to seven all the light was already blazing.

  They never spoke much of that day, but from then on, they met in the corner of the gym, behind the fitness bikes—Philippe called it a gated community—and the meetings were a homecoming. They saw new images of soot and burning oil, flares in the dead of night, and perhaps it was only because of the narrowness of their cabins and the continual weariness that they saw only the gigantic flames in the center, dark orange and sooty. They squashed the wads of tobacco under their upper lips and lay there, bits of dirt stuck in their ears.

  Waclaw had thought so often of these gatherings with Sharam that the memory felt hollow and spent, and even Mátyás had rolled his eyes in annoyance when Waclaw brought it up. We’re not a fucking club, Mátyás had said in a voice that sounded brittle and exhausted. Three times they managed to all work together. Philippe was the first to break away, then the Bosnian from Tuzla, finally the well was finished and they had to move on, and the next time they came on deck, twenty miles to the north, only Sharam was left. It was winter before they saw Francis again, pale and haggard. He kept close to them as much as he could. They tried a few times to revive the meetings, but it seemed that they were all too tired and worn down. The Sharam of today had none of that. His voice had sounded like nothing.

  The boat left around ten thirty. From the stone steps beyond passport control Waclaw had looked at the new town, at the huge white high-rises, stuck in the scorching hot earth by some European architects in the seventies. Gigantic masses of hot concrete, fluttering laundry and the absence of color. A friend of his, Akhil, lived there with his family on a floor with narrow rooms, endless kitchens where sweet fruit juice dripped onto the floor.

  He watched the waiters, busy selling potato chips and drinks to the passengers. They’d checked his passport twice, and then a third time on deck. The ferry would reach the Spanish mainland in less than two hours. And while the coast out the window became a distant bright strip, he thought of the traces of glaciers on the ocean floor, of the continents moving toward each other at the pace of a fingernail’s growth. He thought of birds of prey that drop their victims down deep canyons, there to finish them off, of inflatable boats made of porous rubber. Somewhere out there he heard the dull smack of Darya beating the laundry dry. Only inside him was it quiet.

  5

  Budapest

  The hotel exhaled the severity of the previous century. Express trains from Vienna, champagne drunk from crystal glasses, silk-lined suitcases with heavy clasps. Brass-colored balustrades. One gives one’s luggage to the porter rather than dropping it in a corner as Waclaw did. The porter looked at him questioningly and he forced a smile. Then he glanced at the door as if someone else were still coming, but no one came.

  A single room? Do you have a reservation? What must he look like—grimy and worn down, one didn’t travel to such places with a duffel bag, and the light of the chandeliers was too sharp. Two nights, he said, not knowing how he planned to get there, to this countryside, bald like old fur, the hairs ripped out. That’s how Mátyás had described it, this land, Bócsa, the village: a hole from which he had only ever wanted to escape. Waclaw traveled with these words, like an extra language, different from the ugly Texas English from the platforms that sounded like barking, a language to keep others away. He climbed the winding stairs and knew that Mátyás would have called the balustrades golden; the Danube beyond the high window, wide and summery and sluggish. He unpacked the animal and set it on the window. It had been with him for years, zsírkő, Mátyás called it—lard stone—but it’s the only fatty thing about you. This animal, with the head of a lion and frog’s feet, with which it would no longer hunt in any country on earth. He heard it snarl.

  The previous evening he’d seen the glow of the great Gibraltar refinery, the lights of the harbor on car windows; he’d sat in the parking lot and stabbed his fork into the last bit of tuna in the can. In the darkness, the cranes moved in the container port, and he stayed and waited, until at five in the morning the Boeing’s engines started drawing in air and jet fuel was injected into combustion chambers.

  From above, he’d seen the Danube between the hills, eating through the land with its innumerable twists, an early light falling on it. He’d schlepped the bags through the streets, crossed the Chain Bridge, and saw the lion on the left side leering at him. He wasn’t sure if he belonged here, in this Budapest that Mátyás had told him of, as of a beautiful woman with a cough.

  A bottle of mineral water stood on the dresser next to his bed. He poured the whole thing into a beer glass. It was the first time in ages that he’d heard the bubbles bursting, the first time it had been so quiet. The sound reminded him of the clinking of tiny ice particles that Mátyás had told him about, at night on the Ekofisk, where the snow drove almost horizontally against the floodlights: silent, huge flakes. He lay on the bed until it was pitch-dark.

  He went into the bathroom. For a while he stood on the warm tiles, hesitant. Then he turned on the tap, unwrapped a small piece of soap from its paper, held it under the water, and drew it along the underside of his left arm until the few armpit hairs were lathered. In the big mirror he saw the clear lines of his collarbone, above which stretched a strip of bronze skin, burned again and again over the course of countless summers. He saw his long neck and the beginnings of his should
er muscles, the length of his arms, on which few hairs gleamed, his flat chest and the corset of his ribs. He propped himself hesitantly on the bathtub before plunging his head in the water. The slight scent of chlorine pressed into his nose.

  It was night when he left the hotel. The Erzsébet Bridge was illuminated, seagulls circled through the lights and disappeared screeching into the darkness. Far away on the hills down the bank were several buildings; the lights should have made them look bigger, but the night swallowed them, like dust motes on a school stage.

  The Danube flowed darkly past. Below, the water was an old, sluggish murmur against the concrete foundations of the bridge. The eddies swallowed themselves and glided by, fists that couldn’t close, but were silently torn away.

  In the morning, he stood at the open window. Below the Gellért, the lit yellow trams drove along the riverbank, bringing the first round of people to their jobs in bakeries and ticket kiosks, a bit of the warmth from their beds still living in the narrow space between neck and collar. It was almost a relief to see the little women in their padded jackets, their short steps, the mundane trips over these bridges. The day arranged itself along the river, the bells tolled, the stoplights changed. He left the window open to hear as much of it as he could.

  But as he walked through Budapest, the thrashing and chasing within him hadn’t subsided. He took the small streets parallel to the river; shop window dummies looked past him and it seemed unreal, everything, the whole last few years. As if he were already far from it all. Or as if somewhere deep within him the time with Mátyás was intertwining with another disappearance, for which he’d long lacked words. It was a throbbing, dull and distant, as if he were leaning on a dam and hearing the stormy movement of a few stones against the ground on the other side. Like a hollow space that, between all the new places, he’d failed to notice. He thought about this as he sat on a stool in a Budapest tailor’s tiny workshop, watching him sew a blind hem in fine woolen cloth.

  He didn’t know exactly why he’d stopped in front of the workshop. He’d sought shade by the walls of the building, where little rivulets flowed from terra-cotta pots over the paving stones, and since morning he’d been walking around aimlessly. He’d sat in a café where a large painting hung on the wall: two three-masters in full sail, a raging sea with a tremendous tentacle coiling out of it, while beyond, scaly heads emerged from the water and opened their maws in various directions. At the lower edge were creatures with long tails and fangs, and in the upper left-hand corner, a single lighthouse was painted in the clouds.

  He knocked back his coffee.

  The heat on the streets was like a wall.

  He was in no hurry to get to the village. He stopped in an alley. It was as if what he saw had slowed his steps. Nothing more than a shop window displaying a single suit jacket; it hung on a wooden dummy, and there was something so inexplicably calm about it that he gazed at it for a long time. He thought of the men’s colorful T-shirts, the glow of the work clothes. The heat hung between the buildings, and the movements of the passersby were reflected in the pane, passing across the glass, behind which lay a deep, indistinct space.

  After a while he noticed a movement farther back in the workshop, where it dropped down to a lower level. It was the first time he saw Jány, with a pincushion clamped on his arm. He looked up from his fabric and came slowly to the door. His fine white hair was combed back, and the scant light of the street was reflected on his forehead. Jány. Úriszabó was written in white letters on the window; from inside it read backward.

  The tailor brought him a glass of water. It was still in the room. Waclaw looked at the dark cloth, nodded a few times. He’d need five days, Jány said, for a jacket, trousers, and vest.

  Do you want a vest?

  Waclaw nodded. For your size—we’ll plan an extra foot and a half. Four running yards.

  Waclaw chose a nine-ounce fresco in dark blue with oxblood stripes. When, after placing his order, he continued to stand in the room, Jány pointed to the stool by the window. Waclaw sat. It smelled of heated wool and horsehair, and he heard the crackling of evaporating water from the bottom of the heavy iron. He saw Jány’s slight hands under the bright light of the table lamp. The tailor measured again and again, his eyes assessed the length of Waclaw’s arms as if they might manage to poke out from the bottoms of the sleeves if he didn’t pay close attention. Adventitious shoots. That was the name for the shoots plants form in darkness; they grow quickly toward a light they hope to find farther off. They are pale shoots, thin and prone to sickness, and they start to form leaves only when there is enough light. Waclaw had always been thin. On the gravel paths at the edge of the mines, beneath the dark smoke that discolored the windowsills. Even in all the years at sea his upper body had never developed anything in common with the rounded shoulders of the other men. The tailor measured again and again, as if he couldn’t trust his measuring tape. Waclaw stayed on the low wooden stool as if he had no other place in the world.

  It’s very good cloth, Jány said. What do you need the suit for?

  Waclaw said nothing. He looked out. He looked at the frothing brown in the floodlights, the rainy light over the sea the next morning, the water that grew dark far below.

  Jány pushed the scraps of cloth into a heap, considering. A woman walked by on the street, the afternoon light on her felt hat, she carried a bouquet of flowers. He saw how she set her walking stick carefully in the depressions of the cobblestones.

  It was an accident, Waclaw said finally.

  He said Mátyás’s name and spoke of a sea bright as a blast furnace.

  It had rained. In the evening, the sun appeared in long rays; a crow landed before him on a streetlamp, the soft noise of claws on metal. He had walked to the island in the Danube, a yellow bridge. Beyond it a man lay on a park bench, his backside hanging over the edge, his hair long and gray. He held a radio up to his ear. This thing with music, even on the water: as if they’d always been somewhere else, already on land, and the interruptions were only dreams.

  Jány was proud of his gabardine. Waclaw was waiting for him the next morning in front of the workshop, he watched as he hung his tweed sports coat on a hanger, breathed on his glasses, and disposed of yesterday’s coffee filter with his sharp fingers. On the stool, Waclaw could feel the pain in his back increase and disappear, he saw the platform as it grew smaller beneath him.

  Around midday, the brass bells over the shop door jingled urgently: three men in coats, with briefcases. One of them was a bit older, with a wide jaw, big solid ears, an almost aggressive healthiness. He wore expensive buckled shoes and he stood there as if he could appraise it all in a single glance: Jány, the man on the stool, the unswept corners with scraps of cloth, the half-light, the worn wood of the mannequin. He spoke the name of the London tailor from Savile Row where he had shopped, drawing it out with luxurious pleasure. Then he looked at some jackets, and Jány pulled out his best fabrics, the Scottish ones. Finally, he wrote down prices on a squared notepad, and then scrawled bigger numbers after it. The future was a tall, slender figure, and it could hurry past. Waclaw heard Jány persuading the man in quiet Hungarian. His companions leafed through books of fabric samples, bored, Jány talked faster, and on his stool Waclaw looked at the floor, because he knew that it was only a few steps to the street and there was no need to look back. Soon afterward they were gone, and only the bells chimed after them.

  The tailor returned to his corner, picked up the iron, then set it back down again. He leaned on the trestle with both hands. His narrow nostrils trembled. Suddenly he seemed tiny between his dummies. I must ask you to leave now. Come back tomorrow. He remained standing like that until Waclaw had left the store. The light on the street was too bright to make out anything inside.

  That evening at the Gellért he walked barefoot up the stairs to the baths connected to the hotel. Mátyás had told him of the colorful tiles and the steam. On the way to the pool, in front of the tall lockers, and ami
d the distinct smell of chlorine, Waclaw stopped. Through a window in the hallway he could see the bathers below, the paddling of white legs in greenish light. It made him think of manatees. At a zoo. He wasn’t ready for other bodies. He took a hot bath in his room, but he couldn’t sleep. He shoved a pillow under his back, but even that didn’t help.

  6

  Chips

  The thin man had hardly moved from his stool for the past five days, and he barely spoke unless spoken to. He had seen Jány coughing secretly into a napkin, seen how his fingers occasionally trembled. He wasn’t in a hurry, Waclaw had said.

  He had long since lost track of what the individual pieces meant. And as he watched the tailor join the padding, the horsehair canvas interfacing, the pockets and all the seams, watched him bring the blind stitching and layers, from right to left, into their proper form, where all of this would remain hidden inside the jacket, he wondered whether one day a moment would come when someone would flip over a life, and all the individual layers would finally form a whole. Whether Milena would be one piece, and Mátyás. And whether someone who was missing would still be a part of it, like padding that remains in place forever.

  They were in the middle of a fitting, the future seams still run through with basting thread, when Jány looked up.