Майя Лунде - The End of the Ocean

Girls.

But she was right. It was cozy. Everything was compact and neat, everything fit together, could be taken apart, stacked, closed up and secured.

We explored the boat for a long time. Lou kept crowing with joy, like she was playing in a playhouse.

She took out cups and plates from a cupboard, white with blue letters.

“What’s written on them?”

“ Navigare vivere est ,” I read.

“What does it mean?”

“It’s Latin and… something about navigation, about being at sea, that that’s life. Sailing is life, maybe… yes, I think so. Sailing is life.”

Wow. I was impressive.

“Sailing is life,” she laughed.

Nothing compared to the sound of that laughter. I would do anything to hear that sound.

When she discovered that the dining-room table could be lowered to the level of the surrounding benches, she was overjoyed.

“They fit!”

And there was a mattress that could be put on the table, so the benches and table became a bed.

“I want to sleep here.”

“You can’t very well sleep on the table.”

“Can too. And you can sleep in there.”

She pointed inside the forepeak.

“Or in the bathroom,” she said.

There was a compartment with a toilet inside between the saloon and the forepeak.

“You want me to sleep in the bathroom?”

“Yes!”

She was sweating from the heat, red in the face. Locks of hair had come loose from her braids and hung over her eyes, but she didn’t care, just pushed them to one side.

“But there isn’t room.”

“You have to sit on the toilet all night.”

“The captain’s orders,” I said.

Afterwards, when the sun was low in the sky, we sat in the cockpit, facing each other on the benches. Her feet didn’t reach the floor, so they dangled freely. Lou stroked the woodwork of the bench with her hands, thinking.

“I’m patting the boat.”

“I’m sure it likes that.”

“Nice boat.”

She kept stroking it, lovingly. But then she stopped suddenly.

“Ow!”

She held up her right hand, so I could see her little white palm. A splinter was lodged in her flesh next to her thumb.

“It hurts!”

I took her hand; the splinter was in deep.

“Take it out!” she cried.

“I don’t have anything here. We need a pair of tweezers.”

“Take it out!”

“We’ll go back. To the first-aid barracks. They’ll have what we need.”

“I don’t want to! Take it out now!”

“Lou, you have to go down the ladder.”

“No!”

I tried to persuade her.

I coaxed, I cajoled.

Finally she started climbing down the ladder in a fashion, but she didn’t want to use her right hand and tried to hang on using just her fingers, whimpering incessantly.

“It’s just a little splinter,” I said.

“It’s huge. Huge!”

We left the boat without putting the tarps back on, walking down the road while she hollered. It was a dumb boat. She was never going back. She even hated it.

“Shitty boat.”

“It’s not the boat’s fault,” I said. “It’s just that nobody’s been taking care of it. We can see if we can find some oil. Then we can polish the benches and oil them. Or varnish. Maybe there’s some in the shed. Then the splinters will disappear. And then it will be completely smooth.”

I realized that I liked the plan. I wanted to return tomorrow, I wanted to work on the boat. But Lou didn’t want to.

She kept howling, dragging her feet down the road, stopping constantly, asking me to wait, but when I waited and called “come on” in my nicest voice, she didn’t come. She just stood there.

And I had to walk back to get her, leading her by her left hand, while she held her right hand up in the air demonstratively. The entire time she complained about how much it hurt, in a voice ever increasing in volume.

“You have to carry me. Carry me!”

And I was losing my patience as well. That was enough now, enough. I drew a breath, as if air in my lungs would calm me. It didn’t help.

My cheeks were hot, my heart was pounding hard and Lou wasn’t quiet for a single second.

“Lou, please. You’re a big girl. You have to walk by yourself.”

I spoke softly, but tried to inject a kind of authority into my words. That didn’t work either.

That’s how I ended up putting to use all the tricks I knew.

I didn’t have all that many of them.

First I begged.

“Lou, please, sweetie, please calm down and start walking.”

Then I commanded.

“Lou. That will do. I can’t carry you. Now you must come.”

Then I threatened her.

“If you don’t come now, you won’t get any dinner. I will eat your dinner. I will eat everything.”

She would have to go to bed hungry, I said. She would get very hungry. No dinner if she didn’t pull herself together, behave like a big girl. Stop acting like a crybaby.

And finally I tried bribing her again.

“If you start walking properly now, you will have your dinner. Mine too. Along with your own.”

But nothing worked. Finally, I pulled her up onto my back, just as she wanted. Her legs curled around my waist, she was far too tall.

“Here I go, carrying you,” I said, “just because you have a tiny splinter in your finger.”

“It’s not in my finger,” she fretted. “It’s in my hand.”

And I kept carrying her. She was a sack on my back. Heavy and shapeless. And horribly sweaty, hot and dirty. While she whimpered and whined.

The sound was killing me. No, it could drive me to commit murder.

Nasal wheezing, uhuuhuuhuu… uhuhu… uhuuhu…

She hadn’t been this way for weeks. Months. She hasn’t behaved like this on a single occasion since people started fleeing from Argelès, since our city and our home had been destroyed.

Like a child.

Finally I can see the ocean meeting the sky. It grows lighter; the sun will soon rise behind me, above the mountains in the east. I keep on, towards open water, wait for the wind, look at the meter—the diesel tank is full, I can keep going like this for a long time and in the course of a few hours no doubt the wind will help me.

I take in the sensation of the helm against my hands, the smooth, varnished woodwork; I have to steer manually, there’s not enough wind and it’s too unstable for the self-steering wind vane. There are skerries astern, so I set my course for the southwest. Maybe they’ve discovered it by now, what has happened in the harbor, the ice bobbing in the fjord. Maybe they have discovered it and simultaneously noticed that I am gone, too. They will figure it out before long, certainly—the company, the police, Magnus—but by then it will already be too late, I will already be far out at sea.

The feeling of being underway, that’s the best thing about a boat, knowing that you will get there, but not knowing when. Having a destination, but having not yet arrived.

I glance at the twelve containers of ice. I put them in the saloon, stacked them on the red wool-upholstered couches. It’s cramped but I can still reach the cooker, the instruments, and I can creep into the forepeak cabin and sleep there later, but not out here on deck, not on the open sea.

In the course of the morning the wind picks up—a light, early summer wind from the southeast. I raise the sail, the wind catches hold of it, that’s how it should be, just like that, surging forward in a broad, diagonal cross. I adjust the wind vane, am so glad I have it instead of autopilot, those cheap mechanisms rust just like that. The manufacturers advertise that they will last forever, are maintenance-free, but at sea nothing is maintenance-free, salt and water will sooner or later have their way with everything, the way nature sooner or later destroys everything man-made. I drag cushions out of the cockpit’s stowage space aport, lay them on the bench and settle in there, turning my face towards the sun. It is warm, prickling my skin. It has been a day and a half since I last slept; now I shut my eyes and drop off for a few minutes, awaken again, glancing around me quickly. No vessels in sight, land is already far behind me. I can glimpse only a strip of land on the horizon in the east, there is nobody here but me. I can rest a little more, because I have control over the boat, can steer it alone, like so many solitary skippers before me, like Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail around the world alone. How did he manage it, without a wind vane, without GPS, or an echo sounder, for 74,000 kilometers? He was fifty-one when he started in 1895 and his journey lasted for four years. He completed the sailing trip, but perished in the end, was lost at sea and nobody found him, maybe the Spray is still sailing the seven seas, maybe I will meet it out here, maybe only time and gender differentiate us, for the solitary sailor’s loneliness overshadows most dissimilarities.