B007P4V3G4 EBOK (21 page)

Inez van Dullemen

The sea was where she was meant to be again: behind the white
coastline marked by groynes. The tide was low and the sea had
withdrawn into herself, her water smooth as oil, perverse, sweetly
smooth. I stared at her in disbelief, sitting on the collapsed dune, at
my back the grey, defoliated land of doom.

I had always felt on an easy footing with her. As a child I would
walk into the water, up to my armpits, and would allow myself,
touching the bottom on tiptoe, to be rocked lightly to and fro by
her surf. I had never been frightened either, unlike the other
children, of her unknown inhabitants; when I felt the touch along
my legs of a slippery passer-by, I would pull up my knees and
calmly let what was moving in the deep pass by. I caught crabs in
shallow coves and played with them by tickling them underneath
their armour with a little stick so that they would make big leaps
with were the clowns in my circus. And the grey seafog, too, I loved, which so suddenly could come rolling up the
coast so that it seemed as if the entire world was being rubbed out
with a wet sponge.

Now, I was sitting here on that gnawed lump of dune and
looking at my hands, covered in red scars, resting on the sand. I
had the feeling that a question needed to be answered, that there
needed to be an exposition of views between us. For I was sitting
here like something that had been released by her and cast back
ashore, quite like all those splinters and ribs of boats and the
twisted scrap-iron of Biloxi 's amusement park. Shards of china with
golden rims or decorated with daisies glinted among the sand. The
sea must have gulped down dozens, dozens of tea sets. Tea sets or
people: it had made no difference to her.

Already there were children back on the beach again, playing. A
little girl ran towards the waves to draw some water with a tea
kettle and pour it out over the head of one of those monstrously
large fair-ground dogs in orange those that had stood
in the booths of Biloxi - which had apparently been washed up. Its coat was drab with sand but it was still wearing its black plastic
specs on its head, and with these it sat staring at that perversely
smooth sea, like a tatty professor.

Why had I gone back? You won't find anything, they'd said to me,
you won't recognise a thing. But I wanted to gain a hold within
that floating irreality; I wanted to see something confirmed, to
assay the nightmare against reality. Even when I slept, I could still
feel the surge of the water; I would retch, spit my lungs out, feel
the black spiders running across my body until I woke up, bathed
in sweat. Not recognise a thing. Those words had been repeated too
often; my thoughts had run aground on them.

You will not recognise him, they had said; they've only been
able to recognise him by the ring on his finger: apart from that,
he's black and bloated. There's nothing left of his face; he barely
resembles a human being any more. But I did not believe them; I
thought he would still have to look the way I had known him. I
fought with them, I was hysterical. It took three of them, in the
end, to press me down on to the bed and give me a jab of some
sedative. Eight days after the hurricane, they had found him in the
top of a tree with a mattress on top of only corpse still
dressed, they said, for he was still wearing his Levis and his shoes.
Together with the other mortal remains, he was brought to the
cold stores of the meat factory, close to the airport, and he had
already been put in his coffin and sent to Vancouver when I was
discharged from hospital. His parents had claimed him for themselves - even the ring on his finger had not been mine but a signet
ring engraved with the family coat of arms - and that's how he
had been sent: like a dead, ringed, migrant bird, back to its place of
origin.

The entire morning the weather had been clear, without a breath
of wind, the water in the Gulf melting-blue, and you could see the
inlets lying there in the blindingly white sand; but gradually the
sky discoloured to an opaque drab-grey, and sea and sky became
one: a dirty-grey wall that rose up behind the blanched beach,
motionless and still.

We organised a storm party. For that's what you usually do
here on the Gulf coast; you have to sit out the time, indoors, while
the severe weather passes over. It was still hanging there, that
thick, fish-coloured fog that seemed to have been drawn up like a curtain; it was drizzling, but otherwise the weather was dull and
windless. We danced and the water rose steadily and began to run
across the terrace tiles. The needle of the barometer sank to its
lowest point. Our eyes strayed towards it without us mentioning a
thing.

Suddenly, towards evening, the wind pounced and made the
entire row of windows quake in their frames, and we saw how
the mist was torn to shreds and began to whirl in front of the
windows in long trails. We clambered up to the top floor and
heard the roar with which the water burst into the house. Because
it was a summer house, the walls were only thin; it wasn't that big
either. Peering down over the bannisters, I saw how the chairs and
the sofa rose up and began to spin. The electricity had failed but
we had torches with us, for one who lives on the Gulf is always
prepared for calamities. I felt how the whole house began to rock
and suddenly a black star shot through the ceiling as chunks of
plasterwork dropped down upon our heads.

'I'm getting out,' I said to Fritz.

He tried to prevent me. 'That's madness,' he said.

We looked at one another. 'We're going to die,' I said, 'but then
we may as well do-it-out there.'

I climbed out of the window and clutched a divan cushion that
came floating by on that upward surging mass of water. With the
beam of my torch, which I was still holding in my hand, I looked
for Fritz who was straddling the window sill. He hesitated. He
could not swim. I heard him shout as he jumped: 'Help me.'

Then he went under and did not come up again.

I flailed about, searched for him. Now you could no longer see
anything but black: black clouds scudding past and occasionally
letting through a glimmer of light. I felt a wild, ice-cold rushing
about me but my arms mowed through the water of their own
accord; my body knew what it wanted: there was an animal in me,
an animal captain who had assumed command; it was as if my
spirit travelled along as a simply didn't have a say in
the matter. Between the backs of waves I made out specks of light
from other torches, and I heard voices crying out for help. I
shouted back but in the tumult my voice was was also
impossible to reach one another. One after the other, I saw the
lights go out.

All was movement, eddies, waterspouts, wind that cut off your
breath. Furniture, driven insane, panicked into a stampede like animals, shattered everything that got in their way, smashing each
other to pieces, to smithereens: all those possessions that had
always stood, good as gold and ready to serve, in kitchen-diners
or sitting rooms, now rampaged at us, random, in an annihilating
attack of rage. We ended up trapped in between, our bodies ripped
open like squishy melons. More people were done in by furniture
than by the water, I should say. You had to fight cupboards, beds,
trapdoors, chairs; all those consumer goods you had cherished now
seemed to be out to crush your ribcage, to pile up on top of you
and push you under water. I fought to stay on top of them, to
keep my mount like on the backs of crazed horses. Uprooted trees
gathered the floating household goods in their tops and pushed
these out in front of them. I was in danger of getting caught up in
the branches. I was continually pulling at something or climbing
on top of something; my arms seemed about to be tom off. But I
did not give up: within me was that animal that wanted to live. In
the end, I managed to get hold of a door on which I could keep
myself afloat; I kept the broken-off blade of an oar in front of my
mouth to create a lee in which I could breathe. The cry of voices
had fallen silent and I believed I had floated out into the Gulf, for
nothing stuck out above the water any more, no tree tops or
telegraph poles or roofs of houses. There was nothing other than a
huge mass of water.

A large dog came swimming towards my door, tried to climb
on to it, almost made the whacking thing turn turtle. I kicked his
head with my feet: off! You or me, one of us has to cop it: the law
of the jungle. But when the wind began to abate a little, I floated
to a standstill in the top of a tree; I still had to be over land,
therefore. My door was wedged among the branches and I understood that I was safe. I was bleeding heavily. My leg was tom
open from my knee down to my ankle and I ripped up my blouse
to apply a tourniquet.

Then the spiders came. They did the same as I had done: climb up,
out above the water to dryness and few measly cells full of vital
force and with claws to grip a hold. I flicked them off me but they were
determined and ran with their hairy legs across my body: spiders
wishing to reach Noah's ark. (Noye's Flood', a picture from my childhood,
illustrated bible: naked men and women on a rocky outcrop above the water, a
lioness with her cub in her mouth, and sucklings with round tummies, all with
the same curves as the waves, everything very fleshly, outrageously sensual.
A woman with streaming long hair hung by her fingertips from the outcrop.)

I must have suffered bouts of unconsciousness. I saw the
spiders with lifesized faces, climbing up towards me; their legs
snapped, broke off or became entangled: they became one single,
dancing mass, teeming above me in the sky. Occasionally, something would drop on to my face with a dry tap; then I would wake
with a start. I saw the moon lying, scythe-shaped and thin, on her
back in the paling sky. The shine would have to be that of dawn. I
threw up the water from my lungs and saw corpses floating by:
the miserable rag of a poodle, the corpse of a that fat
boy from the Oyster Bar who had always looked so suggestively
at my breasts while, tauntingly slowly, he set the cutlery, and who
had such flabby hands, quite as flabby as his oysters. A settee
floated by with a seagull on top of it for a did I dream
that? A beam bobbed past with a man who had tied himself to it
by his trouser-belt, but he was dead, with his skull half bashed
away. As the water dropped ever further, I saw that beneath me in
the tree a child's dress was hanging, red with yellow little flowers,
the material billowing out a bit. There was still a little body inside
it. It hung across a branch with its head in the water while its silky
hair fanned out on to the pulsing waves.

With the lull and the drop of the water level, a silence had
arisen, simultaneously, one in which you only heard the lapping of
the waves. I am the only one left, I thought.

But later on, the enervating yackety-tack of a helicopter passed
overhead and voices began to call out in the drowned landscape
beneath me. It was the man from the post office in Biloxi who
found me. He tried to carry me but he was of slight build and,
moreover, so exhausted from wading through the water that after
every ten paces he asked: mind if I take a rest for a moment? In the
end, he found a floating piece of corrugated board and managed to
lay me down on top of it so he could push me the rest of the way
across the rapidly falling water and through all the rubbish.

That's the only thing I can still remember.

I now began to climb over the edge of the dune. I knew exactly
where I was, for I could get my bearings from the lighthouse and
what was left of the marina. The roads inland were covered in a
thick, dried-up layer of mud, and barricaded in many places by
crashed-down trees, boat hulls, and cars spread around at all
angles. Beyond were the woods. But these had been thinned out,
had become transparent, and the spring light beamed down sharply among the bare branches. A tree stood beckoning me slowly with
a piece of grey net-curtain as if it was beckoning me in, to a
landscape of ghosts; clothes dangled from the branches, sleeves
without hands, waving.

White sand covered the dead moss and all the wood had been
corroded by the salt water; everything had a sheen of silver. You
could see exactly how far the sea had run inland, for everywhere in
her footsteps barnacles had stayed behind, and oysters, cloaked in
their grey-ish lacework, and razor clams, still quite perfect. And,
like a cuckoo fledgling in a strange nest, a barge sat grounded
among the torn-down pine trees. I passed along underneath her
red-leaded keel: I walked along the bottom of a submarine landscape.

Skeletons of houses lurched askew in the ground, grinning with
black window openings and fluttering with the last remains of a
tattered awning. The bared beams of their attics resembled the
bones of fish stripped of their flesh. On top of a roof sat a chubby
armchair the springs of which dangled like entrails from the seat.
This was all that remained of the little summer palaces, those little
temples of luxury. Plaster, glass, chipboard, everything crunched
beneath the soles of my feet. Otherwise there wasn't a sound. But
perhaps there was, after all: I heard something that was like the
tapping of a stick. You could see a long way through that leafless
forest and some hundred metres away from me I saw a strange,
shady character with a bulky sack over his shoulder, who looked
inside the empty window spaces and poked methodically among
the objects spread across the ground. Someone's walking over my
grave, my grandmother would always say when something gave
her the creeps.

I quickly walked the other way, looking round about for identifying marks. Hadn't this been the house of the preacher? In my head,
the voice of the radio newscaster sounded: the preacher had been
washed out of the window and had managed to keep himself afloat, but
his wife and seven children had drowned. It was as if I saw him sitting
like job on top of the remains of his house.