With the exception of the children’s categories, the competition started at eight in the morning and continued until four in the afternoon, when the winner of each category was determined by spectators’ vote. The entire event took place just a few metres from the shoreline, with consideration given to high tides and low tides. On this one day of the year, people devoted their lives to building sandcastles. They were not professionals in the field, but people with fanciful visions. They built brilliant castles in the sand that were gone the next day. There was something dreamlike about it.
I’d written all this to my friend in the hospital because I wanted him to think about travelling to somewhere like the Magdalen Islands, a whole other world where the air was clean and fresh, and then, say, when the time was right, heading south to Nantucket to watch the whales. I dreamed unrealistically, that he could recuperate this way. Anyway, a couple of years later now, thinking about that letter, it stood to reason that he’d let his sister read it—the three of us had built sandcastles together, after all.
“I remember thinking how I really wanted to go there someday.”
“We could take your daughter when she’s a bit older.”
“Just the three of us?”
“Is there anyone else?”
She was silent.
“Let’s forget the sandcastles for now. We’ve got a treasure hunt going on,” I said.
We’d walked all the way back to the concrete stairs that led up to the road, and we still hadn’t found the lost earring, just a whole load of different seashells. We were tired, so we decided to lay out a plastic sheet and take a break. The little girl couldn’t sit still and went to play in the sand behind us. It wasn’t long before I heard her distinctive squeal.
“Have you found it?”
“Drinked it!”
“You drank something? What was it? Did you swallow it?”
“The doggy drinked the sea! Drinked the sea and made a funny face!”
The older man with the dog, seeing that we had headed away from the shore, had let it off its lead, letting it run free. Not that the dog was interested in running anywhere. Instead of jumping in and out of the water, it barely strayed more than a few feet from its owner, and seemed content to thrust its snout into the damp sand. Had the little girl seen it lapping up some water? I thought she’d been down on her hands and knees in the sand, but who knows where children are looking. I asked her what kind of funny face the dog had made.
“Doggy sticked face in the sea, then squished up its nose!”
“Its face got all wrinkly, did it?”
“Face said it was salty!”
“I bet it did.”
The dog had been thirsty so now the little girl was too. Her mother pulled a bottle of mineral water out of her rucksack and handed it to her.
We sat there, my senses picking up the feel and smell of the sea breeze. My ears were filled with the sound of the waves.
“It’s a shame we don’t have any beer. Here, you can have some of this, if you like,” the little girl’s mother said, handing me a plastic bottle of oolong tea.
I took a sip, then spluttered, “It’s salty!” I looked at the little girl as I grimaced. She looked shocked to the core.
“I give you water. Drink this,” she said.
I suppose jokes are a kind of language only for people past a certain age. Still, I couldn’t tell her I’d been faking, so I poured a tiny amount of the mineral water into the blue plastic cap of the bottle, making as exaggerated a performance of washing the taste away as I could possibly manage.
“Better?”
“All better now. Thank you.”
“Should give water to doggy too.”
The dog, who’d expressed his displeasure at drinking the salty water by wrinkling his brow, had followed its owner around to the other side of the rocks. They were heading for the next beach along. All I could see was the back of the dog standing still, its tail wagging up in the air, like a brush. This brought to mind another thing about the sandcastle tournament in the Magdalen Islands that my acquaintance had told me. Apart from the competitors in official categories, there were freelancers who built really ingenious stuff like a complete set of household furnishings, or an entire zoo. He had photos of the beach crawling with dogs, crocodiles, hippos, all with such lifelike expressions it was hard to believe they were made of sand. There was even a giraffe that supposedly was one-metre tall—not including the neck!
How handy it would be if seashells and earrings could be created on demand, I mused to myself. I lay down on my back, looking up at the sky, my legs extended past the plastic sheet. I didn’t care if I got sand on my borrowed mourning clothes. My gaze turned towards the little girl’s mother. I could see grains of sand on her slender neck. In the next moment a strong breeze sent a spray of sand towards me, and I squeezed my eyes shut. I started thinking about the comforting expression “The Sandman is coming”—Le marchand de sable est passé—and the next thing I knew I was drifting off. I have no idea how long I slept.
As I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was the soles of two feet, almost in my face. They were quivering slightly. I propped myself up, and the girl’s mother turned towards me. She’d taken off her hat and tied up her hair. It seemed she hadn’t changed in all the time we’d known each other.
“Good morning,” she said to me.
“Good morning,” her daughter imitated her.
“Fancy giving us a hand? If you’re up to it, that is.”
Mother and daughter were building a sandcastle. A small cone had already been formed, encircled by a moat that was about twenty centimetres deep. “We need to hurry—before the tide comes in,” she said with a smile. Suddenly she didn’t look like a mother. She looked like a woman in her mid-twenties.
“You’re not worried about her getting hurt any more? Not having any plasters and all?” I asked, mostly in jest.
She confirmed that everything was fine, then returned to her task. From where I sat, it occurred to me how her figure seemed rather like an ant’s, her upper torso wide, her waist very narrow, her hips wider, and time suddenly became warped.
“IT’S FINE FOR YOU, YES? To stay here with us a little longer. You’re going back to Tokyo tonight, right? So this is the only chance we have.”
She was fifteen, and her cleavage was dusted in sand. As usual, she’d cut out a photo of a medieval French castle from a travel magazine and spread it out on the beach, and she was asking her brother and me to help her build it. We gave her our opinion that it would be impossible to build such a castle, but she wouldn’t listen. She’d brought a camera to photograph the end product, and she was determined to get it done. In the end we were construction workers creating a replica of Carcassonne, complete with towers positioned equal distances apart and sturdy walls dotted with embrasures. It was noon by the time we started, and the tide was rising. We had to rush, keeping one eye on the sea all the while.
It got to be just like she said. Creating something that we knew would be destroyed was giving us an unexplainable sense of accomplishment that was the opposite of transience, and it was a spur for me as well as for her brother, who must have already been carrying the illness inside him. If we were going to recreate a medieval castle, marking out the plot in the sand and then surrounding it with a moat was the easy part—but if we did that first, we wouldn’t be able to get inside of the castle and build all the parts there. Better to build the main part of the castle first, I said, the part that was like the keep of a Japanese castle, then stabilize it before moving on to the walls and then the moat. But we had to do it her way. She created an enclosure that guessed at the size of the finished castle. She tiptoed, bending over like a flamingo in the tight space, scrunching up her body as she formed the towers and walls. Her hips and buttocks, which had not yet found their shape, flashed in front of me, very close. I remember the surprise I felt as though it was yesterday. I might have been digging a bit too enthusiastically and slic
ed open my middle finger on a broken seashell. I washed the sand away in the seawater, and pressed a tissue hard against the wound until the blood stopped. She then wrapped a plaster that had a cartoon character on it around my finger.
When I stood up, I felt a little faint from lying in the sun. The tide was coming in, the waves beginning to crash against the shore. I walked down to the sea, washed sand off my hands and scooped some water to splash on my face. I looked down, and saw, among the fine black and brown gravel shifting in the waves, a pale shard. I thrust my hands into the gravel, trying to grab hold of it, but the next wave came along suddenly and carried the beautiful pink fingernail of a shell away. A loud sigh escaped me, and as I turned around, I saw a woman who was once again a fifteen-year-old girl. Her lips, dusted with sand, looked like a fingernail. A crescent moon.
IN THE OLD CASTLE
THE ENVELOPE CONTAINED A LETTER, folded into quarters, and a single black-and-white photograph, which was out of focus. A man was sitting on a chair that had been wedged into a narrow-domed niche in a stone wall. He’d had to hunch his shoulders to fit. His left hand was on his knee, and his right hand, index finger extended, was pointing upwards. The cheap flash had made his stubble-covered face contrast so unnaturally with his surroundings that it seemed to float out of the frame, like the head of a wax doll. His eyes were wide open, staring straight into the camera lens, no sign of averting his gaze. There was no mistaking who this man was. The half-smile on the right side of the mouth could only have belonged to me, and though it was rare that I took off my glasses off in public, my face was unmistakable. I was much thinner than I am now, with sallow, sickly looking cheeks. I stared at the photo for a while, as though it was a picture of a complete stranger. Then I started reading the letter, which had been written with a blue pen.
“I bet this photo will come as a surprise, after all this time,” the sender had written. “Do you remember when you came to visit us at our house? It was a long time ago. We spent the day drinking cider, and then you had a little nap. In the evening you and I went for a walk into the hills, up to the old castle…”
I’d met my friend, who was a little older than me, through my work as a translator. One day—it must have been ten years ago—he invited me to come and visit him at his home in Normandy. I took him up on his offer, and we agreed on which train I’d take. That seemed to be all the preparation that was required. My plan had been to get cash from the ATM in the station, but when I got there, I realized that I’d completely forgotten about my weekly limit, and I couldn’t withdraw enough to cover my ticket. I also couldn’t use my credit card unless the purchase was over a hundred francs, and my cheque account had insufficient funds. I was effectively almost penniless. Fortunately, I had just enough cash on me for a one-way journey, but it was an inauspicious start that left me feeling a bit despondent. Still, everything went fine at first. As soon as the platform of my train was displayed, I walked through the ticket gate and boarded. I found a seat on the right side of the carriage, then remembered how, the previous night, my friend had gone on at length, saying I should sit on the left. I was about to get up and change my seat when I heard some excited voices, and before I knew it there were German pensioners everywhere—and not only in my compartment. It seemed they’d taken over the whole carriage. So I stayed put. Beer and snacks were now being passed back and forth, and as the train pulled away from the station, guttural sounds filled my ears. I had the unworthy thought that I needed only some sauerkraut and sausages to open a German pub.
An older woman, who’d sat down next to me, opened up a tourist brochure—apparently the group were going to visit the home of a famous Impressionist painter, which included a museum and his famous gardens. It was clear from the way she chatted with her friends that everyone was quite excited about the excursion.
Surrounded by large Germans, which made me feel squeezed into my seat, I tried my best to ignore the barrage of consonants. At some point I fell asleep, dozing until some commotion woke me up. We’d arrived at the station where the Germans were to get off, but the compartment door wouldn’t open and the travellers were trapped inside. A red-faced older man was pushing down on the door handle, banging on the glass and shouting for someone to let them out. It was the franticness in his voice that snapped me awake. Since I’d been on a French train before, I knew to tell the man that he needed to pull the handle up, instead of pushing it down. My intervention didn’t go very well, however, and in the end the conductor had to come around to resolve the problem. I had been no help whatsoever, and the entire group rushed past me without a word of thanks. I didn’t feel especially worthy of gratitude, but there was a part of me that felt that I should have got something for my trouble. Nevertheless, my attention soon shifted to the question of whether my friend, who was useless at keeping promises, would actually be waiting to meet me at the station. And also whether his girlfriend had been able to take the day off work to be there too. He’d finally met “the one”, he said, and he was eager to introduce me to her.
It turned out I needn’t have been concerned. At my stop, only a handful of people got on or off the train, and I saw my friend right away, with his unshaven cheeks and his year-round uniform of jeans and cotton shirt, standing next to a woman who was about a head taller than him. She was clearly over forty, and was wearing no make-up. Her clothes were so shabby that I almost felt sorry for her—a stained STOP AIDS T-shirt, light brown trousers clinging tightly to bulging buttocks, with back pockets turned inside out, looking like rabbit ears. My friend introduced us, we kissed each other on both cheeks, and the three of us were soon talking like we were old friends. I felt content to be in the company of a cheerful woman. It felt like it had been a while.
The route from the station to where they lived took us along many roads, including one elegantly lined with trees. We passed farms where cows stood in clusters of two or three—a picture of pastoral bliss. As we got closer to the city, such scenes were replaced by supermarkets with giant car parks and traditional stone houses interspersed with modern residential developments. It was an uneven townscape that made me feel quite uncomfortable.
Their house was new, on the outskirts of town, and had been built according to a model that allowed for a minimum of comfort. The kitchen, with fitted sink, was immediately on the left as soon as you walked through the front door, washing machine and refrigerator slotted in next to each other, uniform in height. There was a toilet and bath in a room spacious enough to be mistaken for storage. There was also a bedroom, lined with wardrobes fitted with enormous mirrored doors and a bed so big there was barely floor space. The main room of the house was about twenty-five square metres and had no built-ins. Instead, the walls were lined with home-made shelves.
We went out into the garden and sat at the table there, gulping down large glasses of strong-smelling cider from a local farm. The neighbour’s cat crawled under the hedge to join us. We talked about anything and everything. They told me how they’d got together. At some point, I crashed on the sofa, and my friend and his girlfriend went out to buy food for dinner. By the time they came back, it was already past five.
“I’m going to make a tart for dessert. Which would you like—rhubarb or raspberries?” the girlfriend asked me.
“Rhubarb,” I answered without hesitation. It was the right answer—she apparently loved cooking the stuff, and loved the taste too. While she prepared our meal, my friend suggested we go for a walk to the old castle that was being restored in the hills behind their house. As he explained, the pile of rubble that everyone had ignored for years had recently been identified as the residence of an eminent archbishop. This discovery had caused something of an uproar, and the place was suddenly enjoying a great deal of attention.
After passing through the winding streets of the old town, we stopped to buy cigarettes at the only cafe that was open, then turned down a narrow path between two houses. Eventually we reached the wood, where the soil was mouldy, rather like compo
st. The distinctively fine rain of this region mingled with the soil to create an aroma that you could almost taste—sweet, tangy. The path seemed well trodden, and was snugly enveloped in a tunnel of brush. A fragment of a rainbow was visible through the early summer leaves. We aimed for the top of the hill, frantically driving our creaky knees ever onwards, occasionally taking a break to sit on a fallen tree and talking in short bursts.
My friend had always had trouble finding a girlfriend, and it was an unexpected series of events that got him to be in this position—cohabiting with someone who was not only ten years older, but who also had, in her own words, “already done the marriage thing”. The reason they’d decided to live in a place so inconvenient was because she worked in a bookshop in a nearby city. Living here also meant that he could spend time with his seven-year-old niece.
My friend had doted on his niece ever since she was a toddler. One of the tales he liked to tell involved the first time she’d been taken to church to attend a wedding, when she’d broken the joyful yet solemn silence to ask her mother if the priest believed in God. My friend was living with his sister’s family back then, and his niece had almost motherly concern about her uncle. “Everyone else is in a couple. Why are you all alone?” she’d ask, whenever they saw each other. When he finally met his girlfriend and introduced his niece to her, his niece’s response was not what he had expected: “Her belly sticks out a bit, but you’re making progress!” This unaffected declaration caused my friend’s slightly plump girlfriend to freeze for a moment, but she burst out laughing after the child had been scolded. The following morning the little girl had been given permission to go and wake the couple, who were sharing a room. She must have got shy, however, because she couldn’t bring herself to knock on the door. Instead she fidgeted, unsure of herself. My friend’s girlfriend could hear the niece walking back and forth, and without doing anything to her hair or putting on any make-up, opened the door to wish the little girl good morning.
The Bear and the Paving Stone Page 8