High as the Waters Rise

by Anja Kampmann

  The dark wood floor was scrupulously clean, and Patrícia wore a strong perfume, as if she could cover up the country smell, the tobacco, and the sadness in her shoulders. In the corner hung a pendant lamp from Morocco, lined with red glass. The merchant could say the price in five languages, and in all of them it was too high. Mátyás didn’t care.

  Patrícia gave him time to look around. Then she got something from another room, went out onto the veranda, and when he came out, she held out a telephone.

  Coll, she said. Coll.

  An open bottle of wine stood on the low round table.

  Every evening when she’d come home from work at the hospital in Kecskemét she’d called a different number: she’d called the headquarters in Texas and all the offices responsible for the West African coast. She spoke her broken English, screamed and fell silent. She alerted the fishery authorities as well. But there was no one there she could direct anything at. There was a letter addressed to her on a letterhead with no one behind it. He saw Patrícia under the open blue of the veranda, she yelled into the receiver, her grief was harsh, like metal rods hitting each other, while at the other end, the voices had long since withdrawn, to a place full of platitudes and promises, where time was an unbreakable band. But Patrícia didn’t live in that place. She was here, where the evening fell upon paths and wood that she’d known every day with Mátyás, since the same old lies had forced her mother to leave Budapest and move out to the country.

  That you can just accept it. Who says a search wouldn’t be worth it?

  She didn’t want to see the charts.

  That’s paper, she said. We have to keep asking when the others give up. That you can be so calm.

  Around her the shadows had begun to leave the bushes. Fluffy clouds, and the slight trembling of the poplars. A few swallows. As if someone had cut out this part of the world with scissors. Patrícia sat down, she stared implacably at Waclaw, as if expecting a reaction. He just sat there. He didn’t speak and didn’t drink.

  What is it? he finally said.

  You’re already done with it, aren’t you?

  She looked at him again. He seemed not to notice.

  He leaned forward and spat under the railings onto the dry grass. Then he looked out.

  What do you see? he asked, indicating vaguely before him.

  Then he traced the far edge of the grasses with his hand. He didn’t look at her.

  Do you see a line? He traced it again.

  It doesn’t go away. It stays there like a fucking black line. That’s the sea.

  A line that separates you.

  It just imprints itself on your eye and doesn’t go away.

  He drank the glass that she’d put in front of him in a single swallow.

  She looked at his hand, and then out again.

  Sorry, she said softly.

  He heard her accent clearly, even in just one word.

  Genug jetzt, he said. That’s enough.

  He felt the alcohol when he stood. His back was tender, and he could see his feet below sticking out of the long legs of his trousers, taking steps, almost automatically.

  8

  Rotabyl

  They hadn’t needed all of this. For six years they’d needed nothing from this land, and they hadn’t needed the woman with the heavy braid, either.

  Later that evening Patrícia had knocked again on his door and asked him to come down. She sat in a big wicker armchair that was covered with sheepskin, and she talked a lot, though he’d asked nothing. Mátyás had always looked back with some scorn. That’s behind us now, why else would we be here? Nothing but tragedy, Mátyás had said, do we need that? Now and then a saxophone inserted itself between Patrícia’s sentences, and when the record was over, he listened for a long time to the muffled repetition of the last groove. Patrícia talked. Of her father, who had hidden in a boathouse on the Sava before he’d been found by the Soviets and hanged after a show trial. Stars that were torn off the town halls with long ropes. A thin layer of dust lay on the throw cover. As if it had been a long time since anyone had lived here.

  And as she talked quickly on, Waclaw thought of the room in Tangier. What would she make it into in her mind if he told her about it? A labyrinth where they would be lost so long that time flipped over and Mátyás appeared in the middle? What if there were no middle? And they would just pick things up over and over again, things that promised or could deliver nothing, things that could undo nothing, as powerless as the Kossuth coat of arms that she kept mentioning, with stripes for the Danube, Tisza, Drava, Sava, with the Fatra, Mátra, and Tatra mountains. She said it like that, like a child, and it calmed her. Thirteen short days, she said, in which her father had raised the Kossuth arms while she’d sat at home, too young to understand, while her own story only began when he didn’t come back. When her mother bought cigarettes at the Csepel kiosk, and they walked hand in hand back home, where he would be missed and they would be forbidden to cry: the beginning of a story in which mourning clothes were forbidden, and soon the apartment in Budapest would be cleared out too. His face would be retouched out of photographs as if he had never existed, or as if there had only ever been another, whose story was yet to be invented by the same people who had broken three of his ribs with heavy oars when they found him in his hiding place. But what were ribs. Patrícia was drunk, she talked of Budapest and he did not understand. The two of them had lived far from all that. And he didn’t know what she wanted from him.

  She looked at him like a woman looks at a man when she has lived too long alone on a farm, and it made him uncomfortable. Patrícia did not look like Mátyás; it felt a bit as if she were talking about someone else.

  They’d had a different life out there at sea.

  He stood up. But then he heard something and turned back around. It was almost the same sound, almost exactly the way Mátyás had said it. Night after night after night.

  Jó ejszakát, she said.

  He held on to the doorframe. It was almost Mátyás’s voice.

  He looked back without answering.

  Just those two sentences: Good night. And: Leave some warm water.

  In the night he went over. Held up a lighter in Mátyás’s darkness until his thumb was red and hot.

  In the morning the Honda was already kicking up a long cloud of dust behind it by the time he got to the door, and he stood barefoot in the early sunlight, undecided. Everything in this place where Mátyás had grown up was held together with an overflowing light, and yet Waclaw heard him running. He could hear Mátyás’s soles running away across the gravel, over and over.

  Mátyás had driven with his uncle across a countryside ordered by feeding times and seasons, where Patrícia’s palpable accusations weighed less heavily. There was the silence over the straw they loaded, the splinters in their arms that quickly grew inflamed, the farm chickens, the sizzling in the pan, the grudging good mornings with no room for sadness, and the way Mátyás hurried to wolf everything down, the aluminum Soviet fork in his mouth and the compote that Patrícia pushed slowly across the uneven wooden table. He could live here in peace, his uncle had said, he belonged here. But Mátyás couldn’t find this belonging anywhere inside him.

  Around midday Waclaw leaned against a bale of straw in the barn. He’d put on only the vest. It was a bit shadier here, and he wanted at least to tell Patrícia goodbye. On his knees he held a picture book that he’d taken from Mátyás’s room. Dinosaurs with stubby arms, volcanoes spitting their sooty clouds into a violet sky. Bringing fossils to life. He looked at the drawings: layers of sediment, foraminifera, the smallest particles, as incomprehensible as luck. As if all the mud and the noise of the shaker screens required another story, something that belonged to them and to their time out there. The fairy tale behind the oil. Mátyás had even filed away the name of the asteroid that had hit the Bay of Campeche millions of years ago, Chicxulub, he said, working hard on the pronunciation, imagine that. Waclaw leafed slowly, looking caref
ully at the pictures. Lizards, basking sharks, primeval forests, meter-high ferns. He didn’t know what about it touched him so much. It was something different from the tons of chemicals they pumped down with the drilling fluid. Then he heard a sound. Swallows flew under the roof, and at first he didn’t know where it came from. Something moved in the hay, and he heard a muffled fall.

  Shortly thereafter a girl came over to him, brushing off her hands. She wore frayed cut-offs, her untidy hair hung just past her bony waist. She smiled. She seemed to know who he was and said her name so softly that he didn’t understand it. Mátyás, she whispered; it sounded like a question. He shrugged. Then he nodded. She beckoned for him to follow her. She walked fast, he could barely keep up. She walked along the dirt path to a pasture fence that he’d seen only from a distance. Then she pointed through the wooden rails.

  It was a stretch of yellow grass, where some horses were dozing in the distance. He’d already seen the image repeated endlessly on the bus ride.

  He leaned on the wood.

  How nice, he said softly, thank you.

  What had he expected. There was nothing here but land and creatures, and he thought that it would have made Mátyás nervous. In the end he’d gambled so much in the weeks on land that it only made the next shift harder.

  The girl looked through the fence at the animals. It was time to go.

  Waclaw turned around.

  Nem! the girl called.

  She pointed to a distant spot. A single horse pranced nervously among the flies, a bit away from the herd.

  Mátyás, she whispered.

  As the girl rode off, the rack on her bicycle clattering, he climbed through the fence and sat on a rock underneath one of the meadow’s few trees. It was an oak, the leaves were already yellow from the heat. He saw the herd walk to the watering trough, he saw spiders running through the dry sand. He stood up only when he heard the engine of Patrícia’s car.

  You’re still here, she said. Her hair was combed back severely, and she felt in her bag for her cigarettes. Waclaw propped himself with one hand on the shed where she’d parked the car.

  Did you send the girl? he asked.

  The girl? She tried to smile.

  What’s with the horse? he asked.

  She looked at him. Then it looked like she was going to laugh, and he wasn’t sure whether she was laughing at him. He didn’t want to stand there waiting, he had no patience.

  The horse, he said again.

  You don’t know? Patrícia asked. He didn’t tell you?

  Matyi, the great horse breeder? For years we barely had enough money for milk, then he has some, he takes his dollars and buys a Thoroughbred that’s completely crazy. Only his uncle, the old fool, made sure that no one messed with it.

  She looked at him. He didn’t tell you?

  Waclaw shook his head silently. He said he was going to go and pack his things. But then he sat exhausted on the bed for a long time. It smelled of wood, and he thought of the Andes. Mátyás had wanted to take off around now. His slightly crooked teeth as he’d told Waclaw. He wanted to travel, he said, alone. The sand was on their shins, they were sitting on the coast near La Rochelle, the water was still cold. Mátyás, talking about his itinerary, fields on steep slopes, a railroad track on high trestles, a refined journey with a view of the ice caps on the Nevado de Acay. But it was as if the highest of these peaks had already been reached, in the exhaustion with which they listened to each other, with the breaking of night that made the distant villages float like buoys on the water. Mátyás wordlessly embracing him until Waclaw stroked his forehead like a child. How he paused after describing a peak, a valley, a city. As if the sentences reached far beyond what he was saying, as if it were here that the real distance began.

  He was tired. It wasn’t his bed. Out the window he saw a distant strip of green. He didn’t go down. He didn’t turn on the light. He lay in the dark and felt his back aching.

  Moonpool. He’d gone again through the two safety doors into the interior of the Ocean Monarch that night, to the edge of the moonpool where the instruments reached down into the sea: a great rectangular basin, the noise of the machines and the sound of the iron bars. They’d secured the instruments because of the storm. From high above, Waclaw saw the waves sucking at the platform, pulling back, only then to pound loudly and violently again; bubbles rose, a slight sparkle, then the water broke on itself, sprayed up. Come back, he’d said, as if the whole ocean were before him. He’d whispered it, softly at first, and then over and over again. The waves broke fiercely against the artificial boundary and soon they came: workers, faces under helmets, they held his arms and brought him away, and on the flickering screen in the control room you could see how a tall, thin man who’d gone out without his work things, in only cloth pants and a light-colored sweater, let himself be led away, reluctantly, but then with his head lowered, as if he’d lost the fight and everything he’d staked on it.

  He felt the arms of the men who held his sides and heard voices saying his name, and he had to think of the cameras that would record it all, and that it was true, what the little screen showed: that everything was blurry, his world, cut off at the edges.

  He spent the day on the rock. He looked at this horse that hadn’t existed. Rotabyl, what a strange name. In the heat, he could see the veins under its thin coat. It stretched its neck at little noises, snorted through the air, he didn’t try to get it to come to him. He sat motionless. His arms burned. The gulyáskrém burned too, in his throat. He knew he would never get this dust out of his suit.

  And here Patrícia cut bread for the evening and saw him in the meadow, and watched him coming toward the house, Waclaw with sunburned arms and only a vest on his skin and his trousers almost gray, the dust in his nostrils. He walked slowly. He had known nothing of this horse that seemed to him like a mythical creature. He went down two steps on the cellar stairs, the cold stone, the smell of fruit that was stored, bottled and preserved, fruit that pressed against the inside of the jars, colorless and soft, this sweetness, as if that were all that could be skimmed off from that time. It was cool.

  He stood beside the shelves in the narrow, shady hallway; nowhere was the person who was still with him less visible. He wanted to cry with anger, there was nowhere he could still look, Mátyás’s smile, which he could return like his own. He was a mirror without an object, he was the cellar stairs and the cool darkness of the cellar stairs, and he let Patrícia find him there, It’s not a good place to say goodbye. She laid a blanket over his arm, and he walked with her through a wide, dusty landscape. It was the same grass, the land stretched away to all sides.

  Thick tassels were sewn on the blanket: old curtain material that Patrícia spread out on the ground. There was the sound of reeds being pushed against one another by a dry wind. A small pond, maybe an arm’s length deep. He watched her set out spicy sausages, peppers, and bread on the blanket. They drank a thin wine that tasted of resin. A small bush kept the sun away, but the heat seemed to rise from the ground. They didn’t speak of the house and the cellar. A long time went by in which they didn’t know what to say or what could be said. Then he saw her press her lips together, her face contorted slightly, and she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and tried to smile.

  Then she drew a line in the sand with her finger.

  In our family there’s a tradition, she said, and her voice sounded rough, and deeper than usual. As if there were no air, or she couldn’t get enough of it to speak the strange English words.

  In the morning after a death, someone draws dark lines with soot under the eyes of a child in the family. We say that all the tears that cross this line reach the person who is gone. I took coal, normal coal. Mátyás was eight, and I was already done with my training when our mother died. And he cried a lot on that day, and then never again. It was January and still cold, his uncle had his hand on the coffin as we walked through the village, as if he had to make sure that the cart reached the end of
the street safely. In the evening Mátyás fell asleep with János’s heavy hand on his chest.

  She smiled briefly. János has that knack from working with the horses, he can calm anything. Patrícia drew her finger through the sand. With the same finger she carefully drew a line across his ankle. She didn’t look at him.

  Did he tell you about Ostia? she asked then.

  He took another sip.

  Yes, he said softly.

  And he could see Mátyás taking off the expensive watch and the expensive patent leather shoes and becoming a different person to pick up his half sister from the airport. Waclaw had wanted to avoid the topic. The whole masquerade, all for this unknown woman. He wanted to go. His skin itched from the dust and grass.

  The sun was already low, the little pond lay there like liquid metal, motionless. Slowly, he stood up.

  She asked whether he would still be there tomorrow.

  He didn’t answer right away.

  They could call me at any minute, he said. Then I’ll have three days.

  Patrícia sat up.

  You want to go back?

  She tugged on the cords of the blanket.

  Come with me tomorrow, she said then.

  The kitchen was full of tiny flies when they came back in. They circled under the lamp and drowned in the glasses, and Patrícia cursed when she turned the light on. Átkozott! Goddammit! She threw away the bottle of vinegar. Then she opened the refrigerator and stood there in the crack of light, and Waclaw could see her bare, bony feet, her buttocks under the fabric, some dust stuck to the backs of her knees.