Сандрин Коллетт - Just After the Wave

They stop to have a snack, drink something, catch their breath.

“You okay?” asks Noah anxiously.

Louie raises his thumb. Right as rain. His brother laughs. In fact, he feels as if his bones are going to snap in two, he is aching so badly. When they set off again after fifteen minutes of rest, Louie’s arms feel like metal rods with joints that someone’s forgotten to oil, rusty muscles, raw nerves, and everything pounding dully in his forehead and his temples, as steady a beat as the oars in the water, and he often lets the boat glide ahead without rowing at all.

“Let me try.”

Perrine has sat down next to him. He looks at her, hands her an oar without saying a word; he hasn’t the strength to speak. Just his sunken eyes distorting his face, it feels as if they are pressing right into his head, the sockets sinking into his skull and pulling on his skin and sending a somewhat blurred vision back to him, but maybe it’s the sun on the water, anyway he cannot speak, he hands her one of the oars and that’s all, he’d like to smile but can only manage an ugly grimace.

“How do I do it?” asks Perrine.

He shows her. Noah is sitting cross-legged on the seat facing them and observes them, nods, Okay , tries to remember their movements. Perrine is a quick learner. It’s not that the boat is going any faster, but they’re sharing the effort, each of them holding their oar with two hands; Louie found them some rags to wrap around the handles, because of the painful blisters that appear on their fingers. And it’s not that the prospect of all the days ahead has stopped worrying them, but now they feel a bond, together, indestructible, all three of them paddling as best they can, even when Perrine lets the oar slip and the boat swerves to the side—so then Noah puts in an effort, makes up the difference, helps out, and they begin giggling because it’s too hard, because they’re dead tired and they can’t take it anymore, but they’re not alone, and they keep going, letting out wild cries to urge themselves on.

Early in the morning, Louie goes back to rowing on his own. Deep down, he’s not proud of himself. He warns them. It won’t go quickly. He’s aching all over. The other two nod their heads. They’ll help later, because just now Noah got out the two little fishing poles he found in the barn before they left, the first ones they ever used, when they were four or five years old, with hooks that have gone a bit rusty. The lines are short, so that they wouldn’t catch them in the leaves of the bushes—a precaution that is useless, now, but what can they do, so he skewers pieces of raw potato in the place of worms, and Louie shrugs his shoulders.

“That’s the way we used to do it,” protests Noah.

“And we used to have freshwater fish behind the house. Now, we have the sea!”

“So?”

“So, you can’t catch ocean fish with potatoes.”

“If they’re hungry, they’ll come and eat all the same.”

“Yeah, sure,” scoffs the older brother.

And yet he will have to concede it wasn’t a bad idea, because Perrine and Noah manage to catch three fish in the next hour; not a great catch, but better than nothing, and the fish are a decent size. Well? says Noah, showing off. All right.

They put them in a bucket of water.

“You’d do better to kill them,” says Louie. “It’s too hot, they’re going to die anyway.”

“It’s so they’ll keep longer, otherwise they’ll stink.”

“And how are we going to eat them?”

“Eat them… ?”

Noah looks out at the empty horizon. We need an island so we can make a fire and cook them. He taps Louie on the arm:

“Don’t you see any?”

“See for yourself. There’s nothing. Just the sea.”

“But I wonder if there isn’t something,” murmurs Perrine.

Of course, it’s just an almost invisible shape that could be nothing more than a veil of mist on the water. But you never know. They clamber over to her.

“There,” says Perrine.

“I can’t see anything,” says Noah.

“Maybe,” says Louie.

He looks at the sky. If they decide to go in the direction Perrine is pointing to, they will get off course. And they’ve probably drifted so much already, without knowing it, the boat turning on itself during the night, with its stern to the north when the sun rose, or to the south, or to the west, or who knows where. Is he sure he headed in the right direction every time? And yet he hesitates. If it is an illusion, a fog bank, yes. Should they try? Get closer. He’ll give it an hour, a lost hour or an hour on the way to respite, they only left the day before yesterday, and it kind of annoys him, We can’t go stopping already on the third day. So all of a sudden he makes his decision.

“We’re not going.”

Perrine gives a start. We’re not?

“Why should we go?”

Silence. The question surprises the three of them, even Louie who asked it, and they can’t find an answer.

“To cook the fish?” says Perrine after a few seconds.

“Just to have a look?” suggests Noah.

“And see what?”

“If there are people there who can help us.”

Louie frowns; he is so sure they are the only survivors that he hasn’t thought about that. No, the world has become… a desert. Emptiness. Nobody. Just the eleven of them, or the three of them, with nothing around them, only water. But if they can find the higher ground, that will change everything. They will see that life has not vanished and there are still thousands and millions of them, on the mountains, and surely they’ve rebuilt society the way it used to be, before, something he has already almost forgotten about.

“Oh.”

Noah laughs.

“You don’t think there’re any people over there?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“So shall we go and see?”

“Okay. Let’s go and see.”

May as well lug reality around with them: this is what Louie keeps telling himself as he paddles with Perrine, whose eyes are shining, and he cannot understand what it is that is driving her and Noah, their wide grins, this joyful air of theirs, the thought that they might find people they don’t know, he cannot help asking himself over and over: what for?

So they won’t be alone?

Do they think it will heal the wound of abandonment.

Do they think that through some inexplicable miracle their parents might be there—then that would mean that they, too, failed to find the way to higher ground.

And are they not enough, just the three of them?

Apparently not.

Nothing but bad thoughts in his head, Louie, so he keeps quiet, and rows, and pulls on his arms, heave. A little later, he raises his head to stare gloomily out at the island in the distance.

But there’s no more island.

He rises halfway to his feet.

“Hey?”

Looks at the others.

“Where is the island?” asks Noah in a little voice, reaching for Perrine, she’s the one who saw it first, so he grabs hold of her as if to a last hope.

And Perrine murmurs:

“I don’t see it anymore. There’s nothing there now.”

Louie got back on what he thought must be the right course, and now he is rowing again, without haste. Sitting across from him, the two younger ones look dejected. The water is playing tricks on them, creating mirages. Since the vanished island, there was one time they thought they saw a boat, another time the leaves of a tree. And each time, they held out their arms and stamped their feet and cried with excitement, launching into a song of celebration; and each time the boat got closer it banished the images and shapes, and they lowered their heads, pointing to a spot on the sea: It was there, right there. Louie, too, has visions. But he knows they’re false, and he forces himself to look elsewhere, to ignore the glimmer and the hope; if there was something real, he’d go right by it, for sure, with that way he has of frowning because the sea is playing tricks on them. He’d rather miss an island than head for one all full of joy only to realize, as he sails through it as if it were a fogbank, that it doesn’t exist. He’d rather die, yes: he doesn’t want to be disappointed. So he carries on, his eyes glued to his hands gripping the oars, and time seems to stretch to infinity, everything the same, hot and slow and painful, today, tomorrow, he can’t recall, all he knows is that nights have gone by.