No one left on earth.
So between the drops of sweat that sting his eyes, he looks at Noah kneeling by Perrine, and he wonders if that is not the solution.
Have done with it.
“What?” says Noah.
Louie said it out loud. He bites his lips.
“Nothing.”
Knock the two of them out and drown them. Afterwards he will tie himself to the anchor with a rope and let it unwind. He imagines it. Going straight to the bottom.
No more children.
No more suffering.
The thought runs through him like an electric shock.
No.
And suddenly, Noah screaming and turning to him.
-
“There! There!”
Louie drops the oar with surprise, and it falls with a bang onto the seat and rebounds against his leg. He makes a face. Doesn’t even hurt.
Noah’s face, between exaltation and madness: You see it?
So Louie leans closer, all thoughts erased. And yes, he sees it.
“What… what is it?”
“Dunno. A rock? A house, maybe?”
“It’s little, looks like.”
“Can we go there, Louie? Let’s row there?”
No.
He looks at Perrine, motionless on the floorboards.
“No noise, then. We don’t know who lives there.”
Without a word, they reach for the oars. There is renewed vigor to their gestures, urgency, too, because of the little girl who has a fever and who has stopped talking, and their urgency is mixed with apprehension, more than that, a dread which is twisting Louie’s guts—will they find someone on that island in the distance, someone who will be ready to help them, or will they be killed for the boat and the food, and the water and the hens. Louie stops thinking: for now, they are going forward. And yet in his gestures, as they get closer, something is slowing him, imperceptibly, his fear is too great, there is superstition, too, will their luck see them through. Noah, on the other hand, is rowing diligently, his eyes staring at the horizon. The two brothers keep watch on the sea. A sort of latent instinct reminds them that the sea is all the more treacherous just when they think they might be about to escape, and that the traps are always laid for them just when they think they’re home safe. But the storm the night before has cooled the temperature, and, before night turned it gray, the sky wore a sparkling blue. Still, they are wary, they study the water all around them, the eddies, the currents they think they can see. Their hearts and throats constrict whenever they get the impression the sea is changing—uneasy, rising. In spite of their fear, they are so eager to reach the island that the air fills with their hopes and seems to vibrate in their eyes and ears; they want it to bring them luck. They have no choice: they have to save Perrine. Urgency transcends all their hesitancy, their fear, the trembling in their arms. Taking turns, they encourage their sister; she doesn’t answer.
“We’re nearly there.”
“We’re going to make you better.”
But just when they finally understand what is there ahead on the water, they look at each other, stunned. Noah murmurs,
“Are those… houses?”
He doesn’t say, Floating houses, but that was what sprang to mind. And only one of the houses is still above water, the other two, closer to them, are almost completely engulfed. All that is left of the first one is the roof, and they can see the upstairs windows of the second one.
“Yes,” says Louie in a low voice. “Houses.”
The third house, the one they can see from behind, and where they are headed, floats above, with a long wooden terrace level with the water, which makes it look as if it is sailing on the ocean. For a few moments they get the impression it is coming toward them, drifting, trundling along, and they pause to take a good look.
There are two figures on the terrace.
Louie and Noah both recoil, instinctively; What do we do? Louie starts to scan the surface of the sea, his heart pounding, looking for a wave, a current betraying some invisible presence, gliding through the water, he is already holding his oar aloft, he feels this throbbing inside him, too insistent.
But then he glances down, the same image as before, little Perrine asleep with the cloth over her eyes, her moans and sobs stifled by fever. And Louie makes up his mind all at once.
“Let’s go there. Perrine is really sick.”
“What if…”
Noah doesn’t finish his sentence. Louie nods his head, knowingly.
If it’s people who want to get rid of us?
But he hasn’t erased from his memory the despair that only minutes before made him imagine a terrifying outcome, a vision that will return to him if they don’t find any help, because the fatigue is there, deep inside him, and it’s more than fatigue: it’s renunciation. If he had to explain to Noah, he would just say that he can’t cope anymore. That his thoughts have shut down, that he has no more solutions to suggest, nothing, just emptiness of a kind he’s never known, vast and frightening, saturating all the space.
This is why they have to go there.
If it’s people who… ? We’ll see.
And anyway, at this stage…
The house looks like a huge wooden skeleton perched on the sea. Louie knows Noah is afraid, and he also feels an unpleasant tingling all over his body.
The two figures have come to the edge of the terrace, their hands on the railing to watch the boat come nearer. Louie narrows his eyes to try and see them better. Suddenly he says:
“Old ladies.”
Noah sits up. What?
Louie observes them. Yes: grannies, Pata used to call them, in the beginning, because they’d never known their grandparents. At the same time as he repeats it to himself, a flood of joy inside him.
Before the tidal wave, there were old ladies in the village. Sometimes on his way to and from school, he would help them carry their shopping, or pick up a scarf they’d dropped, and they would ruffle his hair. Give him some candy. They all had a particular perfume, of face creams and another era, and that faint tremor in their voices—or was it just Louie who couldn’t hear them properly, used to the clamor of a family of nine children, where you have to shout to make yourself heard.
And then the wrinkles on their faces, at the corner of their eyes as they looked at you, around their mouth as they smiled at you. It’s giving Louie shivers just to see them there now. Madie said all the old ladies had died during the deluge. He’s glad to see that it’s not altogether true. Noah, who is also looking at them, nudges him with his elbow.
The old ladies wave. Both of them are tiny, or so it looks, reduced by years and as shriveled as the crabapples from that tree they had at the end of the garden. One of them is thin, the other is round. They have identical hair, short and curly, white as snow with blue highlights—Like the sea, whispers Noah, fascinated.
The boat comes to bump against a pillar on the terrace and Louie doesn’t dare throw them the rope to moor it. In the eyes of the first old lady, who is right there next to him, he can see a terrible weariness, her resignation betrayed by a sigh; and yet, after a few seconds have gone by, she says, Well hello, children. What on earth are you doing here?
Louie detects that tremor in her voice, which brings back so many memories.
“My sister is sick.”
He adds, with a frown, to look serious:
“Really sick.”
He can see the old ladies shifting their gaze to the bottom of the boat, past the hens and onto Perrine, with the sweat on her brow and the cloth on her face. Their eyes open wide, their mouths forming an “o.”