High as the Waters Rise

by Anja Kampmann

  Waclaw, Mátyás said, wait.

  And Waclaw saw him, piecing together his few fragments of Spanish before the man. He was a full head taller than the fisherman, who stood there in his green undershirt over his bony chest. Mátyás talked at him, and the old man looked at him calmly, while his hands were already gliding out of his pockets, as if they wanted to grab something. A paddle. A stick.

  Next time, Mátyás said softly, I want a little hole, somewhere under the seats, well hidden. One that opens only when we’re far enough out. So far that we can’t make it back.

  Mátyás bent over him, speaking right in his ear.

  And I want you to watch, old man. Watch as we sink. Even though we just do the same damn work. Even though we pay for it, every day, in this shithole.

  You brought us here yourselves, Mátyás said softly.

  The old man looked at him.

  ¿Qué? No comprendo, he said calmly.

  Mátyás’s lower lip trembled with rage.

  He screamed the same thing in Spanish. But then he stopped.

  No es nuestra culpa.

  He said it softly, over and over.

  And then the old man came toward him.

  Much more softly, Mátyás had told him later, he’d said just this one sentence: Boy, what are you doing out here?

  They spent a few nights in a town nearby. As if they had the right to be there. As if everything were just the way it was, and none of them had a choice. Horses, thin as flies, pulled carriages full of tourists past them.

  Then an explosion in the Gulf of Mexico turned everything on its head. Helicopters filmed the black clouds south of the Mississippi Delta, over the Macondo oil field. They saw the platform sink in aerial photographs, but for eighty days the hole in the ocean floor couldn’t be closed. Deepwater Horizon. Mátyás avoided the cove and the beach, he was almost afraid of running into the fisherman again—he was right, he was fucking right, he said. Their relief when they sat in the plane back to the other side of the Atlantic was almost physical. Mátyás didn’t look out the window. But you couldn’t miss it. The smoke wasn’t quiet.

  Mexico was the slow rolling by of an empty freight car, the striking of steel against steel above the swells. It was the droning in their ears in the last hours of the shift, and Asle, whose voice carried over it all when he chided them, the cold sea wind on their necks and their feet icy in their steel-toed shoes. Peak oil, he roared, meaning that the men couldn’t let up, as if it would be their fault if at four in the morning their strength flagged. They were dog-tired. They could almost see the oil well bleeding out.

  16

  Northward

  In front of him on deck a family was having their picture taken, as if the blue were just a photo backdrop, the walls of the quay with the freighters, the yellow-white of the city, the Maltese limestone that they called golden in Irene’s store, two cupolas towered over the rooftops. He looked at the water, which was now widening ahead of him. They headed for Catania, the wind on deck picked up. Soon the island was no more than a bright spot. He thought of Troy. He thought of Brent, and how great the business still was when he started. He saw the curved rows of the dolphin’s teeth, the split skin and the mouth. Maybe it had never smiled.

  And of course Eugenio had lied. In the night, as Waclaw sat across from him in the container, he’d suddenly had the feeling that he really was traveling toward something. He’d told Eugenio of this Italy as if someone were waiting for him there, he’d said Alois’s name and saw how Eugenio closed his hands again and again, as if he were squeezing out a sponge: a new tic. He hadn’t said that Alois’s letters, stamped years ago, perhaps no longer belonged to anyone. His father had left him no more than that. After all the years, seeing Alois’s writing had touched him. It was only a few clumsy sentences in the middle of a piece of paper that seemed too big for them.

  And Eugenio? Eugenio would no more leave his container on that evening than on any other. He would just sit there, would watch the air coming in through the little sliding window as in a boat that was growing heavier, sinking farther and farther into the water. His parrot would tell him useful things that neither he nor anyone else understood. When they reached the open sea, the passengers stopped taking photographs. A strange silence fell over them.

  The train station smelled of urine and rusty steel, and he heard a few youths working on a vending machine with a hammer, trying to get a few packs of Camels out of it. The machine was old, and once they’d hacked a hole in the glass and cut the wire with pliers they found two packs, and smoked the dry old tobacco without filters. One of the boys spat the brown crumbs on the platform in disgust.

  The train station in Catania was small. From the water he’d seen a few salt flats, the glaring white in the pools. As the train pulled in, it smelled of rust and old iron; his hair was still sticky from the crossing. They traveled north for a long time. The train stopped at small stations, and when they finally rolled into the belly of the ferry that was to carry them from Messina to the mainland, the woman across from him had fallen asleep. She wore a jacket with small embroidered flowers, and he felt her knee fall against his. Then he closed his eyes as if also sleeping, so as not to alarm her in case she awoke. The train continued on land at San Giovanni, and while the mainland’s mountains, power lines, its blurry green and large buildings passed by, he concentrated on the jerks and bumps of the journey that pressed her knee against his. When he closed his eyes, it was as if they were traveling together. And while the train traveled up the coast, as passengers got on and off and a few beggars crowded around the doors, it made him think of the parts of the sea that currents flowed around, where the sailors once slaughtered their horses, the eternal doldrums: the horse latitudes, the Sargasso Sea, which is fed from outside, by other currents—Mátyás’s laugh, when he tracked down Wenzel in his cabin, when he sent signals with the glass of his watch to the passing freighters—and that now there was nothing there, only the bulbous brown algae that almost broke the surface.

  And it was all long ago: the floodlights in the harbor, the lights of the seaside promenades, a low marble bench, their legs, stretched in front of them as it grew light, as the high wore off, and they remained there, sitting, as the first street sweepers drove along the streets, a boulevard that knew of the sea, and the neon signs going out above it. Mátyás, his head on Waclaw’s shoulder, no longer laughing the way he had all night, and far away, as if they were still searching for something, their eyes wandered over the same hills and the mist and the light that was slowly rising, for a moment all was golden, all bright.

  It was evening when they reached Pescia. It was hot in the train station, he was sticky. In the train the temperature had been bearable, the heat outside the windows seemed far away, it had no color, one could almost forget it. When he stepped onto the platform, his body seemed to expand, his face felt hot, he couldn’t stand it. He stayed on the platform; a few times he felt the pressure of an unfamiliar bag against his shoulder.

  The train station was big, and light fell through the high, dirty panes. It seemed to come from far away, and the hall with its riveted steel arches seemed to come from another era, as if in a black-and-white photograph, people hurrying along in light coats. A gelatin silver print, and the woman from the train was already gone.

  05:32. He stood in front of the departures board for a while, undecided, there were no connections before the next morning. As he left the train station there were hardly any lights visible on the street—it was like in the village where they’d lived for a few years, Milena and he, with roller shutters that clattered down every evening, as if every house were a damn capsule, each its own blind world. Still, it had been hard for him to leave.

  It was an evening in late fall, a few days before he was supposed to go out for the first time, from the little village in Poland, on the Rowan X, his first platform in Mexico, which was hardly more than a word to him back then. He’d walked with Milena in the little bit of woods beyond th
e fields, they were looking for porcini where the power lines made an aisle through the pines. I’ve got one. Milena waved him over, pulled him down to her in the grass, past the mushroom’s brown cap. Her light skin against the red of her raincoat, her small, firm breasts. That the world disappeared around them quicker than usual, there was a rhythm and the smell of her skin, and that they lay there, closely entangled, before separating, then the cool air and the trees, coming back.

  They walked back very slowly. They stopped only when they reached the gate. I have something for you. Milena stood behind him, buried her face between his shoulder blades, and put something in Waclaw’s hand. A wooden handle. A French pocketknife.

  A fog had rolled over the fields in front of them, next to them there was only the rusty gate, its paint flaking off, chips of white and red. As he walked through the night, he remembered this rust, the dirty white of the gate. Milena had stood close behind him, as if trying to encourage him to keep walking. But he stood there and couldn’t. He wanted the folded knife in his pocket to disappear, he wanted to turn around, he wanted all that and to be back behind the gate in this familiar world, while they were already trudging through the darkness, and soon reached the first streetlights and fences of the village. The empty mushroom bucket hit his knee as he walked, it was still sitting outside the kitchen window when they awoke the next morning. It had filled with rain overnight.

  He left the train station behind him, but he didn’t look for a room. It was late, and he didn’t want air-conditioning, or the colorless slippers, the breakfast, the portioned fruit. He walked. He didn’t know where he was. At some point he found himself in an industrial area with large concrete surfaces, a gas station, endless fences, finally a highway and the flash of neon lights, a flat building, the music droned out to the street. He saw the outlines of people through the windows: a run-down bar, two dancing poles like measure lines in the middle of the night. He was thirsty, he went in.

  The black welts of countless rubber soles on the metal legs of the bar stools. In a corner, darts players aimed for the middle of a circle, the place stank of sweat and cigarettes, there was the clacking of billiard balls, fiber-optic lamps, a clogged sink over which he hastily washed his face. Through the swinging door of the men’s toilet he heard women’s voices, their chirping laughter. He stood at the bar. The music was loud, old rock songs, a Lakers game on a TV screen. A woman in yellow edged past him, her skirt so tight that it puckered over her hips. Waclaw ordered a beer, a man thrust himself next to him, did he want a game, he yelled in Waclaw’s ear, he had a girl, black as that eight ball. Waclaw shook his head, he held his duffel with one hand, he ordered another beer and drank. Pepsi, the man shouted, stretching up to him, she’s called Pepsi. In the end it was the bartender who nodded to the man to leave Waclaw in peace. For a while he stood there watching the tall man behind the bar, who dropped other people’s money into the till without looking.

  He had to think of Pippo, their old drilling foreman, whose dry humor had held them all together. You could barely sense it back then, even Francis could work normally. Waclaw noticed the change only when Pippo wasn’t there. Without him the whole crew seemed to wear down like a drill head under the excessive demands, and they returned to land leaden and as if wounded. The bartender was a bit older, the skin of his throat leathery, and when he needed to find something, he put on rimless reading glasses that seemed foreign to his face. For a while, Waclaw just drank his beer. The train ride lay behind him like a blurred landscape, he’d thought of the standpipes and of the winter, of the narrow cabins in which they’d told their stories. That time was like a tunnel which was now gradually growing dark.

  The door slammed, and a horde of guests staggered out. Soon there was only a small group of men at the other end of the bar. They wore baseball caps and sweatpants, he’d seen their trucks outside in the parking lot, a few locals were with them. Through the window Waclaw could see the outlines of the vehicles, a single streetlamp. He wiped the bar with his sleeve and wrote Alois’s address on a scrap of paper. The only light came from a beer sign, perhaps that was why he pressed the pen so hard into the paper. It was pointless. The bartender stood in front of him. He looked at Waclaw over the edge of his reading glasses.

  Where did you come from? he asked, looking at the new guest as if he were trying to place him as a certain species, without success.

  From the sea, Waclaw said. Dal mare.

  It was the sentence he’d practiced with Eugenio in the container.

  And where are you from? the bartender asked again. Waclaw looked at his glass. It was cool, and gleamed like all the glasses around him. After a while, he shrugged.

  It was a long time ago, Waclaw said.

  The bartender inspected him, as he sat there on his stool. Waclaw had wrapped his suit jacket tight around him, like a bathrobe, or as if he were cold. But it wasn’t cold. Someone called out from the other side of the bar. Waclaw felt for the duffel with his foot. A large digital clock hung between the bottles. 03:02. Outside, the night. The bartender came back, rinsed a few glasses, and kept pushing his sleeves up. I’m Felip, he said, and Waclaw nodded. The weariness inside him was as solid as a piece of wire that divided everything. New names surfaced, too many faces, it had been this way for years. Everything could only wash over him now. He thought of the narrowness of the recreation rooms, the big buckets of grease that the roughnecks smeared like earwax on the ends of the pipes before they were screwed together.

  Che hai fatto là—on the sea? the bartender asked, looking into the dishwater.

  Waclaw drank from his glass. Oil, he said finally.

  He didn’t want to talk, fished for some money.

  Lately he’d hated running into the others on land. He’d looked for excuses to stay in the hotel.

  The bartender looked at him. How long? he asked.

  Twelve, Waclaw said. Twelve years, I think. He didn’t look up, though the bartender was standing right in front of him.

  The bartender went to the last guests at the end of the bar, they sat calmly behind their glasses, the light fell on their hairlines, which had receded over the years. None of them were young. The smoke wafted over their heads like in a snowglobe, where everything happens far too slowly.

  He refilled their glasses, then came back to Waclaw. He leaned forward.

  Do you know what they remind me of? He gestured toward the men.

  Waclaw looked up briefly. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to hear it. Over the years it had become easy to make jokes. It cost nothing. Someone was always ready to laugh about the Filipinos in the kitchens, or about the management pricks. It always had to be late and they had to have drunk too much. The bartender pushed his glass against Waclaw’s. Then he looked over again. But the way one looks out of a train at a place one is leaving. As if he were suddenly far away. Far from the smoke.

  When I stand here, it’s like birds in winter sometimes. You feed them, and they come close. You can see how fragile they are, how broken some of them are. They come every evening. And they always remind you of the great cold waiting outside in the fields. Maybe that’s what makes them so beautiful.

  Or whatever you want to call it.

  He looked at Waclaw. Waclaw drank. He looked over at where the others were sitting. One of them wore a track jacket and had stood up, he’d started to tell a story in a southern dialect that Waclaw didn’t understand, his arms waving as he talked, like a mayor giving a speech. They laughed. And the bartender laughed too. Then he suddenly turned to Waclaw and made a hurried motion toward him with his hand, like a huge spider. That close! he cried, and Waclaw flinched. He could hear him. Once again it was only the laughter of some bartender.

  You don’t forget that winter, he said. The days stretch over it like thin ice.

  Right, Bernie? he called, and walked slowly to the other side of the bar. Bernardo, he called again, tilted a glass and filled it from the tap, slid it in front of the mayor. The bar sparkled like the sh
arp runner of an ice skate. When he turned around again, Waclaw was gone. He had slipped out the door like a shadow. Like the shadow of a boy with a pocketknife.

  17

  Everything I No Longer Am

  He’d left far too large a bill on the bar. Waclaw left the town behind him, walked down the big street, but not toward the train station. For the first time in a long while he had the feeling of not wanting to go back at all. A milky film lay between the hills, covering the land, the air was cool and he felt the dampness slowly creeping into his clothes. He turned fifty-two that night. There was no lawn he had to mow, surrounding no house filled with voices or familiar smells. There were no quinces and no jam. There was the night and a fog that had come after a short afternoon shower. In the early gray he walked on the asphalt, just to hear his own steps. He was tired, and he smelled the cigarette smoke, his skin felt sticky, his ears like cotton after the din of the bar.

  Jagged fields and shrubs in this whiteness. He didn’t care. Maybe it was this fog that he’d been searching for the whole time, even back then, when he’d called Milena to tell her he’d not be coming home between shifts. He’d blamed the weather, which was a lie, and then spent two weeks almost motionless on that beach, watching the rich tourist women stretch their legs in the sun, stiff as ikebana twigs, while in the evenings at the bar the girls smiled at everything, not pushing his hand away while they danced over him. He slept with two of them; each time he felt the clumsy indolence of their disconnected bodies as he penetrated them. He’d liked the feeling of sand, the rolling of the Pacific waves, and he’d thought of his father, of their first vacation on the Baltic, of the brown seaweed and the jellyfish that had lain on the sand like clumps of gelatin, and he’d watched himself sink into this distance, as into a stickily sweet bath: just sand, and the gentle feeling of floating away.