From a Low and Quiet Sea Read online

  This mourning time must end, my brother, the old man said one day. And Farouk supposed the old man to have lost his mind. His arrhythmias perhaps had worsened and caused some coagulation and a blockage that may have led to haemorrhage – a minor stroke. This mourning time cannot go on for ever, the old man was saying now. This turning of your back on things. Farouk was lying on his side and the old man was sitting on the edge of Farouk’s bunk and he was narrow, this man, twig-like: he had the bones of a bird and the drawn, leathery skin of something ancient, something long dead but cured, preserved. His stomach lurched suddenly, he felt bilious at the thought, and the weight of the old man’s hand on his side through his blanket and his shirt seemed deathly, seemed infinite, seemed to be so heavy as to have stopped his lungs: he couldn’t draw in air; he was drowning.

  At last the man removed his hand and Farouk gasped and sat up in his bunk and the old man stood quickly and stumbled a little before righting himself. The three foreigners were standing at the far end of the tent and they were all looking intently across at Farouk and the old man and at something else, something that Farouk couldn’t see. And the old man turned suddenly and inclined his head towards the three foreigners and he motioned sharply with his hand and they at once filed out of the tent, and Farouk saw as they left that they were barefoot except for the biggest of them: he wore leather sandals that were buckled at the sides, but loosely, and they made a sucking and a popping noise as he walked, as the soles of his feet pressed into the leather and compressed and released air with each step.

  Again the old man said, This foolishness must end. And he was standing still and stooped, bent from the waist, and he had his left hand on his hip and his right arm was extended towards Farouk, and he seemed bigger now, somehow, to be looming, hulking, and Farouk imagined the old man’s hand to be a hand that had held weapons, that had done terrible things; he imagined the hand itself to be a weapon, capable of tearing flesh and smashing bone. This turning away from things must end, brother. You have an obligation to live. You have an obligation to go on with your journey, to see the worth of the terrible price you’ve paid.

  And Farouk could find no words for this old man, this poor creature who had lost his mind – had he been drinking saltwater? Had he succumbed to madness from the length of his wait, from the terrible monotony of his days in this open confinement, in this maddening rank of canvas tents? And the man was saying, It’s not natural that you should mourn like this. There are many others hereabouts who’ve lost far more – a man a few tents down has lost two sons, two fine boys, one in the fighting and one on the crossing. Wives are easily found, especially by men like you, and daughters are easily made. And Farouk was on his feet and his hands were at the old man’s throat and the three foreigners were back in the tent and they were dragging him away and holding his arms high behind him and the old man was backing away from him, pushing with his feet like an infant, and he had one of his clawed hands to his throat and his eyes were bulging from his face and his mouth was open and his features were contorted so that he looked crazed and demonic, and something crashed into the side of Farouk’s head and the day fell suddenly to starless night.

  He woke in a different place, a room with white walls, lit by a fluorescent tube. His head ached dully and his mouth was dry. Farouk realized there was a person present, a young woman who was sitting on a chair with her hands twined together in her lap, and her lap was level with his head, and she had an oversized sleeveless jacket on her small frame that was coloured a luminous orange, like a life-jacket, and she wore a light blue sweatshirt beneath that with writing on it but he couldn’t make the letters out, and she had glasses on with thin frames and her eyes behind the glasses were blue and they were full of some unreadable thing, some kind of silent knowing, and she was smiling a little and her head was inclined towards him as though in expectation of something, some action or utterance from him, though he couldn’t imagine exactly what.

  He noticed standing by the door a bulky man, young, pale and blotched, in scrubs that seemed a size or two too small. He spoke in English to the sitting woman, but his accent was unfamiliar and his voice was too fast for Farouk to make out all of his words, and she nodded but she was silent still, and smiling still, just slightly, and the expression in her eyes was still of knowing, of holding something dread away in store, of fear of the dread thing, the terrible weight of it, the dead weight of it, and Farouk began to tell her she should leave, there was no need for her to extend herself like this, to stretch herself to breaking just for him; whatever it was she knew she needn’t share, whatever news she felt she must break to him, about head trauma or contusions or possible concussions or delays or complications or refusals of consulates or countries or agents thereof to grant visas or mercies or passage or grace, or of lost identifications or lost purses or lost luggage, or bombed hospitals or dead colleagues or escalations of hostilities or conflagrations or annihilations or massacres or of the damage done to the cabin door when he and the complaining man had smashed it in just before they were knocked from their feet by the whirling storm, and again he heard the old man say: This mourning time must end.

  And he was screaming now. For them both to go to Hell. To go and leave him to his narrow bunk and his wait, to his watching of the sun’s widening arc and the sky’s deepening redness as the summer stretched the days and shrank the nights, to his wait, for Martha and Amira to prepare their house, to arrange their beds and their table and chairs, because surely the accommodation given to families was more salubrious than this, surely there’d be tables for their meals and not their laps, and chairs to sit on instead of bunks, and a door that opened onto a low place in the line of dunes that fortressed them against the sea, against the edge of the world, against the wind that might blow chilly at the summer’s end, if by then they hadn’t been allowed to continue west, to settle in a city or a town, in a small house near a hospital, where he would work and Martha and Amira would walk each day to school, and Martha would befriend the other mothers and chat to them about the things that occupy women, and she would pretend interest in these things, and maybe she’d resume her work some day, her examination of the smallest parts of life, of molecules and all their spinning massless parts. And he was screaming for the young woman with the thin-framed glasses and the high forehead and the long blonde hair to go, to take care of her own business, to leave him in peace, he was tired and he needed to sleep, and he was off his bunk now and he had his hands on her arms and he was trying to make her rise from her seat and his arms suddenly were useless, they were pinned behind him somehow, and the young man was standing beside the young woman and they were looking down at him, down at the floor, and the woman had a hand over her mouth, and then her hands were twined together again, and they were moving up and down as though she were pleading, imploring, praying to God.

  And so the storm came heaving down around him. The memory of it, as real and as violent as the thing itself. The young man and the woman stayed with him; he could feel the man’s hands on his back and he could see through his fingers the woman’s feet, the logo on her trainers, the mud-splatters on the sides of them, the greying laces.

  Their slow retreat from the empty cabin and the clamped wheel and the monstrous box connected to it, the trafficker’s terrible deceit. The complaining man saying, What fools we are, what fools we are, the tears carving lines along his fat cheeks, the swinging of the cabin door as they were knocked sideways by a violent list, the sudden acuteness of their angle to the sky, his thanks to God that they had hours of daylight left, that a ship might happen on them, a rescue ship, a navy boat, full of seasoned mariners who’d winch them to safety and bring them to land. The impossibility of making it back across the deck to the door of the hold, of hauling the door open, of remaining upright longer than a moment.

  The final mighty list and the exceeding of some critical point, some terminal axiom of gravity, the small boat’s surrender to the sea. The water’s shocking cold, the s
ilence. The splintered boom, floating. The grey craft looming, the uniformed men and women telling him they were sorry, they were sorry, they had come too late: the sea had taken thirty souls or more.

  There was no reason to believe them to be dead. He pretended now, to please the woman with the glasses and the pale blotchy youth. It seemed important to them, this pretence. Were there other ships on patrol that day? Had other navies sent their people into the storm, having seen on their radar some other stricken craft? Of course. People paid less than he had paid to leave the coast – some people left in inflatable craft, dinghies, a bare step above a plaything, and foreign navy ships and rescue boats were on patrol day and night, balms to the consciences of governments.

  He thought he should go to the tent and find the old man who had brought him food and water and clothes and apologize to him for attacking him, for squeezing his scrawny old neck, and then he’d hear the old man’s words, Wives are easily found and daughters are easily made, and he’d shake and his breathing would become fast and ragged, like a man who’d just run a hundred metres at full speed, and he’d have to sit on his bunk and empty his mind and gather himself.

  The woman came each day for a week with a notebook and she coaxed him and cajoled him and, after a few days, exhorted him, to tell her his story, and he began to speak and she made careful note of Martha’s full name and of Amira’s, and their dates of birth and their appearance and all the things that had happened in their town from the time that he saw the crucified boy until the day they left in the trafficker’s jeep.

  When will the boats be raised? he asked the young woman.

  She said nothing for a while, just looked at him, and then she said, Some day, maybe, the boats will be raised. It’s all they can do now to tend the stricken craft and take the living from the sea to safety. She said no more and the silence between them grew heavy, because he knew she had more to say and he could feel the weight of it, how she carried it heavily, this thing she was about to say. Your wife and your daughter, she began, and she stopped again and looked from his eyes to the floor, and she began again, with more resolve this time: Martha and Amira are not in this camp, or any other camp. You will not find them. Accept this, Farouk. And he said nothing back to her, but he asked if he could return to his tent, a new tent he’d been given with a single bunk and a tiny table and a cushion for a chair, and she said that he might.

  He went to where the sand dunes were. To where he had thought the women and children would most likely be. He passed tents on the way to the dunes that had children in them, and men, and women sitting and standing and washing clothes and tending meals, and he lost his way a few times, and he read the letters and the numbers on the tents and he stepped through the straight ranks of canvas and tripped over guy ropes so often that a person watching would have thought him drunk, or an imbecile, and he reached the sand dunes and there was nothing on the far side but a fence, a thin barrier of wire stretched between wooden poles that leaned almost to falling in places, and gaps had been made in the fence along its length, and there was a shallow rocky drop from the far side of the wire to the beach, and there were no tents here, of course there weren’t; there was no special quarantine or quarter for mothers and daughters separate from their husbands and fathers, and the beach was empty save for a man in corduroy trousers and a white shirt, and he was barefoot, and the man looked up at him, and he shook his head, and Farouk looked back at the man, and Farouk looked up from the water’s edge at the man by the fence, and shook his head, and the man on the beach and the man at the fence fell to his knees and screamed, and his scream joined the wind that blew across the water from the east.

  And late one evening he walked from the camp to the water’s edge and he stood beneath the smirking moon and looked out across the sea, and he wondered at the stillness of it, as though its breath were held, as though it were too ashamed to reveal anything of itself to him, to admit to the violence latent in it, to the things it held, and he stripped himself naked and he walked out into it, and when he was a good way out, past, it seemed, the twin promontories that flanked the camp, the water still was only as far as his chest, and he lifted himself onto the surface of it and he struck out face-down for the empty horizon, and when he was sure he was far beyond his depth he flipped onto his back and looked at the long ragged tear of the galaxy, like a wound in the sky, weeping, and he exhaled and let his limbs fall still and he waited for the water to carry him down, and fill him, and slough his flesh and salt his guilty bones. But the water wouldn’t take him. Each time he was immersed he came back up, and he tried and tried to drown; he opened his mouth to fill his lungs with water but he couldn’t inhale it: his body pushed the flood back out. He kept himself perfectly still but the water buoyed him and held him at its surface and when his strength was gone and he could no longer resist it the current bore him gently back to shore.

  A cyclone picked a woman up one time and carried her for many miles and dropped her at her former husband’s door, unhurt. This miracle made them remember how they loved each other and they married again and had more children and lived happily ever after. An ever-after given by the wind. The sea could do the same then, surely. Carry a woman and a girl in a warm and gentle eddy for a thousand miles, along the edge of a continent, to a river-mouth, to a river, to a sun-warmed lake, and leave them on a pebble beach to rest until he found them there, and brought them home. He told that story to delegations from England, and Italy and Austria and France. Groups of officials sent to cherry-pick souls for their programmes, their projects, their exercises in mercy. He told them about the king and the beautiful girl he’d imprisoned and the slaughter of the songbirds, and they’d sit and gaze at him, and look at one another, and ask him to stop and for the number of his tent, and they’d take a copy of his camp identification and make a show of stapling it to his application and they’d thank him for his time. Some of them were angry with him, and asked him why he wasted their time. And in the end he found himself aboard a plane, and he was seated by the window looking down at the toe of Italy, and there was a family behind him spread along two rows of seats, of people from Aleppo, a mother and a father and two daughters and a son, who had walked to Turkey and sailed to Ios on a raft, and there was a family behind them from Urum al-Kubrah and they were chattering and laughing, and they had all looked sadly at Farouk when they had gathered at the delegation’s office for their journey, and the men had sympathized with him, and one of them described how he had lost his brother and his parents in the fighting, and Farouk listened and returned the man’s sympathy but he held his secret to himself, his sacred store of knowing, that Martha and Amira were alive, and were travelling on another tide.

  Lampy

  HE COULD SEE through his bedroom window that the gorse and trees on the hill behind the estate were whitening but the grass was staying green. That salt-and-pepper snow would never stick. Lampy remembered how his heart would break when he was small, watching all the snowflakes die their deaths, kneeling downstairs at the sill of the bay window like a boy at prayer. And often he was at prayer, or trying to barter with God at least: a month of sweets for just one inch of settled snow. Or a terrible hard frost to crack pipes and close the school. Or both. For that he’d promise a month and more of fasting and obedience, a second Lent for just one day of whiteness. But God rarely played ball when it came to snow.

  The first dirty joke his grandfather had ever told him was kind of about snow. He was ten or eleven and they’d been pucking a sliotar across the green in the centre of the estate, short pucks and low, for fear their ball would land in a neighbour’s yard and cause the hassle of having to go in through a gate and maybe getting caught to be making talk. All anyone was ever after was news, Pop said. People nosing and looking for stories. Pop caught the sliotar clean and dropped it and he lowered his hurley to his side and regarded the sky with his lips pursed and his nose cocked, and he licked the index finger of his free hand and he lifted it stretched to the breeze a
nd he said, I predict that … if we all pull together … we’ll have a white Christmas! And he wheezed into the evening air, and his joke and his raspy laugh floated out from him in a yellowish cloud and vanished into the breeze. And it was a proud moment, a small becoming, being told a dirty joke directly like that, and being expected to get it, and to laugh.

  Lampy could hear his grandfather now downstairs hawking and spitting into the range. He could just make out the sizzle of his phlegm. His stomach lurched a little at the sound. His mother didn’t work on Fridays and he knew she’d be listening for him, looking out at the road now and again, watching for nobody, waiting for him to come down and eat the breakfast she’d made for him and left in the oven on a low heat in spite of Pop’s protests that he should be told tough shit if he won’t eat it like a normal Christian when it’s made. Twenty-three years old, in the name of God, and still being babied. His mother would be twisting a tea-towel in her hands, back and forth, as though trying to wring some peace from it, some way of settling herself. He could hear her downstairs, moving around the kitchen and the front room, busy always, moving always, talking to herself in a way that would seem strange to anyone not used to hearing her; laughing here and there at some recollection, some good story she’d been told and had kept for herself, for the times she was without company. It sometimes seemed to him that his mother lived in a world of ghosts and angels: they swirled and flocked about her all the time. She read book after book, about angels, and about awareness and mindfulness and the afterlife, and she saw signs everywhere: in magpies’ numbers and robins’ stares and chickens’ wishbones and the sudden appearance of feathers, tiny and white; all these things were messages from angels, or from her mother who was dead a few years before Lampy was born, and had to be mulled over and deciphered. She’d address them directly sometimes, and she’d still herself to receive their answers, her head angled to one side, her eyes filled with light, and she’d nod her thanks after a few moments, and go on about her business with a smile.