“That’s it,” says Louie.
“No more gas?” asks Noah.
“Nah.”
“Are we almost there?”
Louie looks around him. No way of knowing. He would give anything to see, far far off on the horizon, something that looks like land, but no, and his throat constricts like the night before, the same irrational temptation to turn around and go back to their island, the one that will be submerged in a few days’ time, it’s stupid, really stupid, he murmurs to himself. How much time have they saved with the motorboat, he has no way of knowing; how long they will have to keep rowing across this monstrous ocean, he doesn’t know either. So to forestall any false sense of joy, he says:
“I don’t think so.”
Noah grumbles.
“There’s nothing but water. It’s stupid.”
“We have to get going, now,” says Louie, handing him one of the two oars.
“I don’t know how,” whines Noah.
“Try.”
They paddle unevenly; Noah cannot get into the rhythm, hasn’t the strength, he lets the boat turn when Louie sculls on his side, at the age of eight you don’t have much in the way of muscles, especially when you’re just a little shrimp.
“You have to make an effort,” complains Louie, “I can’t row by myself for days on end. But hand it over, I’ll make a start. When I get tired, you’ll help me.”
He takes both oars and puts them in the oarlocks, settles onto the seat, and, like Pata, cries out with his first pull, Heave! He doesn’t like sitting like this, which means his back is to the horizon, which prevents him from seeing where he’s going, unless he twists around every two minutes, craning his neck to make sure they’re not wandering off course—but what is their course, when the horizon is slack, undetectable, so monotonous you could weep.
Heave, says Louie in his mind, to give himself courage.
Because where courage is concerned, he hasn’t got a lot left.
-
For a long time, the water dripping from the oars between two strokes is the only sound drifting over the sea, slow and regular. Louie’s arms are aching, and so is his back; the sweat is stinging his eyelids as it trickles down his brow. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t know whether Perrine and Noah have noticed that he is slowing down. He doesn’t want Noah to help him yet, the boy is dozing under a cloth for protection from the sun, he can do another hour, anyway, and then the heat will start to decline, and his thoughts decompose, extenuated, there is nothing but water, oars, and the sound of his breathing.
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?”