High as the Waters Rise

by Anja Kampmann

  He went to the fishermen in the harbor and asked if they would take him. He offered money. Tomorrow, they said. And no farther than Tiznit. Airport, he asked, but they seemed not to hear him.

  He waited for the night bus. It drove through the twilight. A woman sat beside him; her daughter sat on her lap and fell against him in her sleep. She slept against his chest. The lights inside the bus stayed on all night. He didn’t move. It was warm.

  When it was already growing light, he saw camels tied up in a row under a streetlamp, but he hardly dared to move his head.

  The taste of salt was on his tongue when the bus entered the long line in front of the harbor; the motors of dented, overheated cars, the distant yapping of the border dogs, in the water the silent parasols of a few jellyfish. The border guards straightened their pants as they walked toward the bus. The driver had gotten out, and through the windows Waclaw saw bags being torn open, passports taken out and flipped through. The border guards stood silently and watched the driver hauling the heavy suitcases out of the luggage compartment.

  The air over the parking lot was cool after the cramped bus. He still had a little splotch of the girl’s spittle on his shirt when he took his bag and left. He knew this part of the journey. Freighters, the brackish water of the harbor facilities. This smell of rust and heat. He sat for a while on an iron bollard. His phone rang, and he listened to it with something like amazement. This sound: as if he were still important, as if he were still needed.

  Behind the harbor a broad street ran toward the high-rises that flickered in the distance, like the asphalt itself. Laundry was drying in front of the windows, a few thistles bloomed reddish on the ground. He soon reached a stoplight. Merchants with coolers in front of their bellies ran through the cars selling drinks, sweets, stuffed animals. A few tall trees next to the street.

  He was about to put down his duffel when he saw a woman sitting in the shade, wearing blue plastic gloves. Two girls, still very young, stood behind her. In her left hand she held a plucked chicken over a pot, in the right, a knife, which she stabbed into the cold bluish flesh. Then she looked up. As if he were disturbing her. As if he were witnessing something not meant for his eyes. Her look was brief and hard, and he saw her wide eyebrows. The girls stood there in embarrassment. They edged in front of their mother and tried to smile.

  Waclaw continued on. He let himself be driven to the airport as if he were in a hurry.

  14

  Malta

  The clasps of his duffel were worn and dull. Evening was falling when they reached the airport at Luqa. He’d had to transfer in Rome and had to wait a long time for the connecting flight; the doors of the gates snapped open and closed and he’d watched how everything arrived and continued onward, and when they took off, he looked down at Rome and at the Coliseum, and it wasn’t the city he knew. He could walk again across the Piazza del Popolo, thirsty among the water fountains, Mátyás was with Patrícia and Waclaw wandered aimlessly, though he knew they’d see each other in three days. He’d sat on the Spanish Steps and not dared to call Milena, gelati, marble, nothing helped. From the plane it was no more than the outline of some city where they could no longer be found.

  He didn’t want to see any swimmers; he sat between the big rocks on the water and listened to the gurgling. A distant lighthouse whose nondirectional beacon didn’t reach the spot where he sat. He avoided the artificiality of the promenade, the sounds of the tourists: the bored, slightly anxious forward movement of their rubber soles.

  Malta, Patrícia had said to him. What did you two want with that place? You need something official for taxes, he’d said.

  Malta, stone of shimmering white, the cupolas and hotels. He sat for a while on a bench near the quay. Yachts and yacht owners. Cruise ships slid by like huge floating apartment buildings. From the top deck passengers were filming the departure from the harbor. Valetta, they’d write on their vacation videos. Maybe they’d discover him there, weeks later. A spot on the rocks. What’s that? No, he’s not hurt.

  It was nearly eleven when he reached the alley. He went to the bar and sat down, she ignored him awhile before putting down her rag and coming over. So soon? she said. Bad? She smiled, gave him the key. There were still two guests in the bar. An older man and a boy in a faded T-shirt: California. He saw the man’s leather shoes brushing the boy’s shin and ankles. It smelled of aftershave.

  The spiral staircase was narrow and steep.

  He dropped his bag in the corner of the room, lay down, listened to the noises of the street. The room was in a side street off the Is-Suq covered market, in a few hours the first vendors would be setting up their stalls. Sometimes he’d watched the dark shadows moving between the stands as if setting up a stage. Irene came up the stairs, her steps heavy. He stood up and waited for her at the window.

  She pulled the curtains closed while her hands were already unfastening his belt. She lay under him and let him do what he liked, she didn’t meet him halfway, she didn’t stretch toward him. He’d wanted to just lift up her dress, but she took it off completely and lay under him, a pale landscape. On good days she stood up against the wardrobe; then her body seemed more resistant, with more tension. Standing behind her he could imagine the woman who’d set out years before, who’d gradually let her body become exhausted by the Mediterranean sun. Her back still had the shape of a younger body, narrowing toward the waist. But her face, when she met him in the bar, had something so disappointed about it, her voice grated metallic over a background of cigarette smoke, and she left long pauses between her sentences, which she herself didn’t seem to notice.

  Sometimes he tried to imagine the faces that had accompanied her for a while; sometimes he was horrified by how little she expected of him. The smell of peach-scented cleaner drifted through the cracks in the bathroom door. It was a wordless darkness, in which they sweated without much excitement. Afterward she touched him, and he lay still until she was asleep.

  He’d been coming to her for a good two years, and she asked nothing in return, just a present now and then, as if he did actually owe her something after all. After the fall of the Wall, she’d set out from a small town in Thuringia and ended up in Malta, the bottom edge of Europe, she said, where people like you and me wash up like animals after an oil spill. The thing that people have to lose is what we lack. Irene babbled when she was drunk, and didn’t open her store until noon or so: shell necklaces that she’d made herself at first, then begun importing from China. Tourists booked island tours with her—to old film sets and far-flung coves, and he was sure she’d had a relationship with most of the tour guides at some point. It meant nothing to him to lie beside her, it didn’t feel like betrayal, and even if he were to see Milena again, everything that happened here would be without significance.

  He lay in the half-light until the noise from the market became intolerable. The traces had dried on his body, they often reminded him of salt, the dried edges of puddles that crystalize in indeterminate heat, salt lakes, dry landscapes where the light stabs your eyes. But while trailers rattled over the cobblestones outside, and an unfamiliar body turned over to the clatter of empty boxes, while merchants whistled and he looked through a slit in the window screen that fluttered in the light wind, and when he finally sat up, the bony shins and the residue of night on his skin, it made him think of a skim of ice that had spread to his rib cage and covered him. A new kind of ice, something that could have come only from inside him.

  He dressed quietly and threw on a shirt, slipped his bare feet into shoes, walked to the stand at the corner of the square, and had them put together a cardboard box filled with ham and olives that he would leave by her door, as he had often done, without going in. The morning was cool, and the vendor looked at him thoughtfully. Everywhere, for years, people had seen at a glance that he was from somewhere else.

  That there was something unfinished, something yet to be continued.

  In the church several candles were burning on a w
ire rack. Maybe it was only the midday heat that had gone to his head, the wandering around an island, and the fact that they hadn’t even mentioned Mátyás when they announced the termination of his contract and his summary dismissal to his voice mail. Two old women under dark scarves knelt in prayer closer to the front. The thick stone walls screened the heat, a few voices trickled through the streets like a light drizzle. On a pedestal stood a saint with a beehive at his side, everything was carved out of white marble. After a while, Waclaw looked up again without knowing what it was about the saint that bothered him. He carried an old-fashioned straw beehive. But there wasn’t a single bee to be seen. And what was the point of a hive without bees? A structure for everything that had once been alive, now empty. Strangely contorted, the figure looked over his shoulder at a small round window that, if it had once been colored, had now been replaced with plain glass. He left.

  Closed shutters, mildewed limestone balustrades. He walked downhill, the light was yellowish. Somewhere was the sea that he’d once set out for, that had been with him even in sleep. But now there were only these smoking candles on an altar, and he saw the kneelers before him: countless pleas, hundreds of days, the wood soft as soap.

  And there were the market flagstones that would stink of fish for a hundred more years, there were the fish, long as an arm, shimmering like aluminum, boys who schlepped the tubs full of water, red and bloody, a few meters to the next gutter. The cats sleeping in the ruins, the pigeons with mangled feet, cathedrals, bridges, cherubs, saints, believers, prayers, protective amulets, holy candles, eight-armed candelabra, and the hunger of these streets, the hunger that drove him in exhaustion back to her domain. Irene wouldn’t come from the bar until late in the night, and he was glad of this door that he could close behind him for a few hours.

  Then something drove him out again, in the night, the gutters smelled putrid, he saw young men dancing joyfully on a last empty terrace, he passed an encampment, behind a wall were hundreds of dilapidated RVs, lone figures pushing shopping carts and small wheelbarrows with things in them: boxes, goods, the rest of a life or a dream, the half-light, the prostitutes on the corner of a narrow alley, people carrying plastic bags. On a curb, the worn-out face of a woman who looked at him, what else is there, you’ve been seen, recognized, the cold light of tall streetlamps, he walked.

  A few nights he drank so much that even Irene stayed away from him.

  He’d hardly slept. He sat at the edge of the piazza. Two street performers stood in front of a church, their faces painted white. But the midday heat was so strong that no one walked across the square voluntarily. Behind a man disguised in livery, an angel walked to the steps in front of the church, from under which he retrieved a shabby backpack. They flopped down, legs spread, in the shade on the stone steps, and they smoked and looked wretchedly tired in all the light. It’s like a prison, and you know it. He heard Mátyás’s voice in his ear. They’d fought. It was March. Mátyás had just begun planning his trip. His Andes. The rooftop of what world? The sirens had started to get to them: magenta alarm, yellow alarm, the hurrying to the meeting points, H2S, the exercises, the routines. The angel brushed a hand through the white of his face. The first stores closed for the coming lunch hour, pigeons walked in the shadows, once Waclaw thought he saw a banded one. He walked as if he, too, were in disguise, as if there were no one left who could tell him who he was or what he should do here.

  That evening he sat awhile at the bar, they’d had a broken conversation, from which Irene kept disappearing to pour or mix something or to cut lemons into eighths. He’d tried to tell her about Cairo, about the coops and the sacks of corn that the boys carried up to the roofs for the pigeons, he’d caught himself saying my boys, and then, perhaps because it was easier, about the gleaming blue-lit cruise ships on the Nile.

  When the door opened and Patrice came in, for the first time he saw that night a flicker of something like interest on Irene’s face. Patrice was tall; he grinned broadly and greeted a few of the men, then burst out laughing when he recognized Waclaw, and came over to him. Irene had to stifle a smile, and gave him a sign: she crossed her fingers and pointed to Waclaw. Patrice looked back and forth between them, grinned, and asked what they were drinking.

  She went to get beer.

  Patrice talked a lot. He hadn’t been at it long. Waclaw thought of the Austrians he’d met at the edge of the Sahara. They’d talked only of the heat, of scorpions, of Vienna, of their carports and wooded mountains. Patrice was different. He talked about the gas fields that would soon be tapped. It seemed to interest him.

  And do you know what the field is called? he said.

  He waited until Irene was back with the bottles. His face contorted into a grin.

  Aphrodite, he said. It’s called Aphrodite.

  He looked back at Irene. His grin stayed the same width.

  Aphrodite, Patrice said again. Perfect, right? South of Cyprus.

  Again, she gave him a sign. He looked at Waclaw.

  And the next field over? Patrice asked.

  He reminded Waclaw now of a quizmaster from the nineties, only without a bow tie, and there was no vacuum cleaner to win.

  It’s named after a sea monster, he said, answering his own question. Now Patrice raised his eyebrows. One of those guys must have been some jokester, he said.

  It’s called Shithead, Waclaw said.

  After which sea monster? Irene asked.

  Leviathan, Patrice said. They’ll bash each other’s heads in over it. Patrice laughed.

  Huge fields, he said.

  They’ll last ten years at most, Waclaw said.

  He looked at Patrice. Waclaw didn’t know why he made him so angry. He was naïve. He’d jumped on the bandwagon. But he was dumb, too.

  Patrice was still grinning.

  To Leviathan, he said, and raised his glass.

  Irene stared at Patrice. She hung on his every word. On his crew cut.

  Waclaw drank.

  They will, he said.

  He left.

  He could hear Mátyás’s voice when he sat barefoot in the dark on the sharp cliffs, when none of the lights of the distant freighters were meant for him.

  They’d called it Woodpecker Cove because it grew narrow between the cliffs, narrow and straight, coming to a point, like the beak of a woodpecker. The cliffs weren’t particularly high, but steep enough to keep other visitors away. It was hard to climb down in the dark. He sat on the edge and waited until dawn began to break.

  Only gradually did the black dash become visible, sharpening in the distance like a line someone had drawn with a ruler to divide something. As if there were no movement there, no current.

  Mátyás had had a technique, letting the big waves wash over him. He dived diagonally into them, allowing them break over him in order to avoid getting caught in the rollers, which pulled your legs out from under you and dashed you against the ground. He called it floating. Above him, the danger, just gently brushing his back. A light oscillation, like in a boxing match: he floated, he let the waves roll by.

  Waclaw had sat on the shore, and here, in the sudden peace of the cove, he’d felt something beginning to work away at him. The images of his accident suddenly resurfaced, though that was all before Mátyás, and he’d long hoped to be able to make a clean break, as if with Mátyás everything would begin anew. But in this sudden peace it all came back. The cot, the numbness in his arm. The big tongs, they said, had sprung back and smashed into his shoulder; his head had hit the derrick as he fell. Waclaw couldn’t remember. Perhaps out of carelessness, he’d not secured himself, the carabiner hung useless at his waist. A barely repressible weariness, which was a privilege of the rig elders. He’d known others to whom similar things had happened: the platform slippery in the rain, a warning shot, most didn’t come back.

  Waclaw.

  They’d called him by his first name and pulled him down, his suit was soaked. Then he’d awoken on a cot, even narrower than his usual
bed, a light was shone in his face. He’d been fucking lucky, they said to him over and over.

  In the following weeks he’d lain in a dim room in Cairo, listened to the noises from the street. The city was a strip of smog and light, his finger lay without feeling on the pillow in front of him, pointing in no particular direction, a long railroad embankment that ran directionless through the land. Perhaps that was the first time he realized that he couldn’t go back to her. That was years ago, and he’d wandered through Cairo for weeks before he’d discovered the boys, the coops, the pigeons high above the city. A few times he needed to be close to a woman and went to Farangis—on a platform such addresses were easy to come by. Only much later had he met Mátyás on the safety course.

  Here, in the cove, he’d grown uneasy. Sometimes they’d ridden in a motorboat. Along the coast. The water clear. The days stretched.

  He was tired after that night. The swimming, when it was barely light enough. The black smoke of a distant tanker. The salt burned on his skin, his linen shoes were torn, he smelled of algae. He could already hear the bells as he was climbing up the cliffs. The distant ringing. He took a detour to the cathedral. St. Paul’s. People were streaming through the six columns of the entrance portal, and Waclaw walked around the building until he found a corner—a projection off one of the aisles of the church. He could smell the cool stone as he laid his head against the wall, then he heard the organ, as if behind the wall’s foundation lay another room. The resonance was strong, and he remained standing there for a long time. He still had the melody in his head when he carefully pushed open the door to the bar. Irene wasn’t there. He went up the narrow stairs and washed the salt from his skin, raised the sheet and let himself fall onto the bed. Everything was still quiet, except for the rumbling of the organ in his head.