High as the Waters Rise

by Anja Kampmann

  Above him a frail old propeller circulated below the ceiling. Sure. Sure. For Francis it would make a difference whether he were there or not. They had both remained, maybe they should have gone long ago, Francis back when he’d grown skittish and had been overcome, in front of their overloaded plates in the mess hall, with hysterical fits of laughter, completely without sound. From the beginning, they’d teased him for his delicate frame, his swayback, and his mincing steps. Sometimes it looked like he walked that way intentionally, and he seemed to be the only one who didn’t notice it. Yet when they saw him again after months away—Mátyás was brown and boisterous and they laughed a lot—it seemed that something had happened to Francis.

  He’d only told Waclaw weeks later, and had pressed him back down into his chair when he tried to jump up.

  Quiet, Francis had said. You won’t do anything, promise me.

  Rage and panic mingled in his voice.

  One morning Francis had woken up, he lay in his bunk, his pants were pulled down, yes, his buttocks were bare, and he lay on his back. He hadn’t fallen asleep that way, it was still dark, he heard the first men in the hallway getting ready for their shift, and he felt down his body, his underwear was sticky with someone else’s sperm, he was dazed, he couldn’t remember. Shadows, not even a voice.

  Since then he hurried to leave the drying rooms, and he didn’t want to talk about it. He seemed underslept, tired in those weeks, wilted, while it grew hot, and the winds carried the sand of the Sahara all the way out to them on deck. Waclaw felt the fine grains between his teeth.

  He hadn’t slept. The sunlight rose early and soon fell evenly over everything: the mud walls, the few tired dogs roaming around the garbage cans by the parking lot, the sunlight on the salty sea and the pattern of the small, angled alleys that were suffused with weariness. He went to the reception and brought Jány’s suit and the rest of the things to the luggage room, where many such bundles already lay. He heard voices, and it smelled of coffee and baked dough and spices, and he knew that Mátyás would have dunked the flatbreads in a lot of syrup.

  He’d ordered the taxi to the back door of the hotel. When he got in, the driver’s music droned in his ears. Habibi. Habiiibi. Only when they were outside the city and he stretched forward between the front seats to turn down the old-fashioned black volume knob, did it get quiet, and the landscape passed by, torpid and shimmering under the early sun. A big, dry plain with a few streets running through it, just a few big cliffs and the hint of a sea that would soon glow beside them. A plain, as if it were made just for the light.

  Since they’d found gas near Kentira, they’d searched like mad in this area. A few Austrians had even tried it in the Sahara. Waclaw had been transferred from Foum Draa to Sidi Moussa; their assignment, the exploration well, had a name that consisted only of numbers and letters. His breath grew shallow, and he ran both hands over his face; for a moment he kept his eyes closed and held tight to the door handle. He heard the motor, and something that must have been fixed to the rearview mirror swung against the windshield.

  Stop! he cried.

  He opened his eyes and grabbed for the driver’s shoulder, for the tropical print of his shirt.

  Stop, he said again.

  The driver laughed.

  Here it is nothing! He pointed to the road, which seemed to eat into a dusty yellow endlessness.

  Nothing! He laughed and turned the music up a bit. Fifteen minutes, maybe, he said.

  Stop! He was almost screaming. Stop here.

  Deceleration. His bag. Even the early air was hot.

  The driver waved, bemused, and drove slowly, as if he wanted to give Waclaw a chance to wave him back, to get back in. Waclaw had given him fifty dollars, he didn’t want him to ask questions. Then Waclaw saw him turn, the taxi drove slowly by him once more, and then finally he heard it speed up.

  Then the flatness of the land, and again the feeling of numbness. Not even crickets. Just many sharp rocks. To walk. The road remained invisible because it was built atop an embankment. Which sloped downward. Then a call, which he didn’t pick up, another call, walking, the expanse.

  I will not come, he said. And walked. The telephone stopped ringing. Leave it.

  He was relieved, happy, until the thirst came. Fear of snakes.

  He walked southeast, toward the middle of the land. In the distance the foothills of the southern Atlas mountains towered into shadows for which he had no name. But he knew that this sand merged into the Sahara. He’d seen it. He knew that around Chbika the dunes rolled to the sea. It was a nice image, when you were just imagining it.

  He walked.

  The ground burned. Blazing distance. Thistles.

  Milena walked through the sand next to him, her steps bewildered by the expanse. She slid the tip of her foot over the ground.

  You didn’t call.

  You didn’t pick me up last time I visited.

  Her laugh.

  A visit, Wacuś! We wanted a life.

  Then she breathed out and was gone.

  All the wind in this vastness was like that exhalation, nothing stirred.

  He carried the bag on his shoulder, the reflective stripes on his pants caught the sunlight. And in the midday heat, a smell emanated from the oilskin, the boots, the helmet: a smell of machines and oil and the mud of the seas, a smell he knew, a smell that had always been with them. What did it smell like. Like all the time they would never have. He dropped the heavy things, first the work boots, then the jacket. As if it were that easy, as if he could just leave it all behind him. The freezing feet at four in the morning, the sweat when the afternoon light came at them from every direction. He took out the water bottle, the screw top stank of alcohol: reserves for the last hours of the shift. They’d never have let him bring it with him on the platform.

  The sun blazed.

  The desert was an hourglass of infinite parts.

  Lizards between the stones, dry shrubs. Beneath it throbbed the noise of metropolises, the beats, the brightly lit bars, no different than the unison of the desert, the stuff they snorted in the shabbiest bathrooms, the desert that lay beneath all of it, another desert, of forgetting. A desert where one could forget names, no longer speak a language.

  He reached a few distant huts.

  His skin was burned.

  This is no hotel, one of the men said. Waclaw offered him money, and they rolled out a mat for him in a shady corner. He stuck his wallet down the front of his pants. And slept.

  The images inside him were soundless, moments cut out of the course of time. Milena was strangely present. Here, too, the dancing of moths in the night. It was dark when he woke. They gave him lentil soup, squeezed some lemon in it. They sat around a fire. He with them; sparks flew, the wood crackled.

  His thirst was powerful. They gave him something to drink. He wasn’t the stranger who tells stories. He was no one at all. The dancing of moths, he had no fear.

  The corner in the hut. Patterned rugs, he heard their soft voices.

  A child with matted hair eyed him in the morning. Flat land all around, he must have walked far. He gave them almost all the money he had left. Breakfast: an orange.

  Then he took the rest of his things and walked. The indelible smell of his work clothes. He dropped them. The helmet with the chin strap and the signatures that they’d scratched in the plastic for him when they’d thought that it would mean something, no matter what happened. It would fade in the sun, in the low shrubs. The desert floor began to glow under his steps. After about an hour he heard an engine behind him: one of the men, in a jeep. He let Waclaw climb up onto the truck bed, drove. Cliffs in the dry light. Reddish, whitish, grayish, yellowish. The sun celebrated itself, there was no distraction from it. The man let Waclaw out where the high-rises began. He hit Waclaw lightly on the cheek. You okay? Waclaw saw his tea-black teeth and his dust-colored cloth. He wished the man would have just taken him back to the tent. Waclaw could feel that but not say it. The man sto
od next to the jeep and watched as he climbed down.

  Shukran, Waclaw said. And laid his hand on his chest.

  Then again: a room, a ceiling, a propeller.

  The reflective white of another unfamiliar shower stall. He lay naked on his bed, his feet on the duffel. This word: it caught at him every time, gave him an image of her chin-length hair. He didn’t move. There was the village street where they walked together, the fog lay heavy over the fields, her face was cold and wet. They’d gotten off the bus, Milena hugged him quickly, carried his new duffel on her shoulder, laughing. They’d spent all of August getting his gear together, relieved that there would be something left in the account at the end of the month, now that they’d even canceled the newspaper and barely left the house anymore. No going to the movies. The school bell that made him nervous, the job as a janitor, and the prospect of the worn steering wheel of the bus between the villages, the seats rubbed bare.

  Instead, they now had something else ahead of them. How big is a platform? Milena asked. The length of three streetlamps: and they walked up and down the stretch of village road, they stopped and stood, Milena hugged him close. Three streetlamps, and then the world ends.

  13

  Brent

  Morning came like a foot stomping, as if the cities, Budapest, Grand Socco, the alleys, the walls, were nothing more than the land that he’d seen from the water: made only of light and wind and sand that could shift and layer again and again without a trace. He started when his telephone rang. He must have fallen asleep.

  It was Patrícia.

  Where did you get my number?

  It was in Mátyás’s things.

  She said nothing. He considered what else she might have found, but nothing else occurred to him. Scribbles in Mátyás’s papers, Hungarian, that he might have overlooked. There was a soft hissing in the connection.

  Waclaw?

  I’m still here.

  Maybe there’s something to it. The thing with the black smokers, with the gold.

  Ich hab’s dir schon gesagt. I already told you.

  But why not?

  He could see her, on the terrace, next to the wood varnish that would change nothing. All that light. The dust and the house.

  He felt the light breeze from the ceiling fan.

  What’s it like there? she asked.

  She spoke more softly now.

  He thought that he didn’t know.

  He stared at the ceiling. He thought of the dusty, almost bare palms on the beach, the herds of goats in the alleys.

  The shadow of the fan.

  There’s no one here anymore, he said.

  A car door closed.

  He hung up.

  The apricot-colored walls of the hotel, the balcony with the seven iron bars on the courtyard and the sea. An ashtray next to the bed. The warning in small print next to the remote: channels above 72 would incur “extra costs.” He saw Victor before him again, the movie room, the bored lust of the men who turned to the side in their bunks, as if the thin walls could swallow sounds. Those first times sharing a room with strangers.

  Much later, one evening in the village, Milena had said that they were already calling her a widow. He was just packing his things. They sat silently in front of the stove all night. Alone, a person can become so angry or sad, it rubs their eyes dull.

  This duffel: the feeling of being unable to get up.

  He was awake in the dawn, occasionally he fell into a light sleep. He left the room once to get something to eat, he sat next to a dirty mop in the corner of a bar, over the dishes stood a rose, mounted in a frame of glass and silver, on it the greasy fingerprints of countless summer days. Ornate scales forced themselves through a pair of computer speakers, droning up and down, daaarling, it didn’t escape the notice of the young man behind the bar when Waclaw put a tough piece of meat back on his plate.

  That afternoon he saw a stocky figure with a flat face and a checked shirt in the courtyard. His walk, as if he were carrying a heavy bucket in each hand. Troy had always been there a bit before them, he came when the fields and the bedrock were still being developed. He gave Mátyás prophesies about the depth at which the rock would become particularly hard, and he was always right. He came from Perth and had a reputation. Some said he could hear the rock. But he avoided the big drilling crews, and Waclaw rarely saw him. He limped. Troy had grown old.

  And Waclaw knew where he could find him.

  That night he took a taxi to the edge of the city. Sidi Ifni was small, and it wasn’t a long drive. The bar was squat and stood at the edge of a cliff. Inside, there was a heavy wooden door, behind which the drinks were poured.

  He found Troy out behind the bar on a low bench, his sharp knees pointing toward the sea far beneath the cliff. Here one could hear the waves smacking against the sand in the darkness, the gurgling under the cliffs that stood on the sides of the bay. Like large animals. Like something that waited.

  Sit down, Troy said.

  He smoked as he had learned to long ago in the army, he hid the glow with his palm. He lifted his chin as if thinking about something, and even in the semidarkness Waclaw could see that the skin underneath had grown slack. Troy’s English was a friendly singsong.

  Waclaw gave him a beer.

  Thank you, mate.

  He asked Troy what was new out there.

  He said, not much. They’ve expanded the area. To hell, he said, it’s steep. Like this. Troy tilted his bottle just slightly to the side.

  If you ask me, he said. And waved the thought away with his hand.

  They see it as a matter of area now. But the oil doesn’t come from that alone. And then you poor devils have to go out there again.

  It will be a while, Waclaw said.

  But it will happen.

  They were silent.

  The night was clear.

  The door swung open and closed a few times, people walked over the gravel to the parking lot, music played in a car.

  I heard about your friend, Watts, Troy said.

  Yes. He held the bottle as if he couldn’t move.

  Yes, Troy said.

  They looked out. A distant freighter thrust itself slowly out into the night.

  You know what I’ve never understood, even after all these years? Troy finally said.

  You shoot the cannon, and the sound goes down and the reverberation hits the ocean floor. And all you do is wait for an answer. But there’s something between the shot and the first signal. I don’t mean just the time. No matter how short the interval is, there will always be a gap. You know, my whole life just revolves around that space.

  It’s strange that you guys are looking out here, Waclaw said.

  They’re looking everywhere.

  Troy shook his head.

  I could be somewhere else.

  Waclaw stood up and went to the bar. He bought four more bottles, and they were ice cold, and he carried them out, and they didn’t clink them, but they drank.

  I was one of the first on Brent, Troy said.

  It was a night like this one, I was young and couldn’t sleep. I went up onto the helideck. The moon was almost full, it was spring, still cold. Maybe something had woken me. The sea was blue and silver and ice cold. Northeast of Shetland.

  He paused, as if he needed a breath.

  And then I saw it. Their backs first, a whole family. There were a lot of them. As if they were bathing in that strip of moonlight. Watching to see what we were up to. I never saw so many again. Not a single one in the last few years. I guess they understood what we were up to. But when you see them, you believe that they were there much earlier. That we’ll never have anything on them. And the oil fields, too. As if they’d been there for all eternity. But they die quicker than flies.

  They sat. Chairs were put up in the bar, they could hear it.

  Where to? Troy said finally.

  We’re at the same hotel, no?

  No. I mean, where to, Watts? What are you going to d
o?

  He felt the bench against his back. The air was warm, but he was freezing.

  North.

  You quit?

  Don’t tell them I’m here.

  I won’t. No.

  Troy put his bottle down. The glass crunched softly against the sand.

  Do you know that we learned it from them? The seismics, to use the reverberation?

  They took different ways home.

  Each through his own night.

  A dog followed him for a while. It was thin, and its hind legs trembled. Behind the houses was the sea, and the horizon was dark and far and roaring. The night was clear. It wasn’t yet light when he got the rest of his things from the luggage room. Sometimes he wished he’d never have to fly again, he wished to walk, with her, wordlessly through the fields, past the little river with the rapids. The dark wood of the footbridge against the snow. He remembered how the fog was so thick that it dripped from the trees, a flickering sound, like a plodding, in an otherwise motionless brightness. Birds squawked. Sometimes he’d still called Milena. She must have known it was him. They hadn’t said a word, just stood there, an endless distance on the other side of the germ-covered earpiece of the platform telephone, where people were already lining up in the hallway behind him; now and then he heard her breathing.

  Waclaw folded his things. He stood on the balcony and kicked against the railing, while outside the heat was already creeping over the parking lot. Sometimes the sound had calmed him out there, kicking against metal, as if this sound were a memory, his own ticking, not perfectly congruent with the running of the machines.

  At midday he sat under an umbrella, bent over a tortilla, he felt gristle between his teeth, and the corn tasted sour. A woman watched him, she ran a hand over her belly, he couldn’t decipher her smile.

  He left Sidi Ifni by bus. He knew that the CEOs came by helicopter, their necks always freshly shaven, and they seemed pale beside those who had already been toiling out there for weeks. For the normal workers there were shuttles and taxis. Waclaw stood with the others in the concrete public bus stop. He was taller than most. A few women sat on the sidewalk, the men smoked in the shade a little way off. When he saw how the full the bus was, he turned around.