What Lot's Wife Saw (10 page)

He stuck his head between the pages. “The Dead Sea is seventy-seven kilometres long and sixteen wide, its median salinity is over ten times higher than an ocean’s, thus not allowing the diffusion of oxygen in its waters and, so, no fish live in them. However, there are a number of micro-organisms that thrive in these anaerobic conditions, like cyanobacteria and flavobacteria.”

That schoolbook must have had us in mind
, thought Book, accepting a cup from the man’s hairless fingers.
We are the bacteria
. He breathed in the oxygen-starved air of the lounge.

“You lost relatives in the Overflow, did you not, Mr Book?”

He’d lost something even more valuable – his faith. The Overflow had hit when he was fifteen, so, in a way, he’d neither been young nor old, more like ageless. At fifteen one hasn’t developed an adult sense of the stages of life and divided as one is between the lost youth and the anticipation of adulthood, one borders on non-existence. The momentous events that crushed him had banished him forever to some aged hinterland where the delicate clover of faith does not flourish.

The worst thing was that he had just managed to discern the first signs of a promising future. He’d smelt its own aura from a distance, like that desert traveller who senses rather than sees the oasis he’s approaching. Life had begun to be exciting, lit up by the weird light of his transformation to maturity. Down had appeared on his upper lip, his shoulders were getting wider, his voice was growing deeper, last year’s shoes were cramping his toes. In place of pigtails, Mélanie had adopted a short cut, Gustave was wearing contact lenses and Book’s three sisters had grown old enough to get to school by themselves, which had relieved him of the tedium of escort duty.

The twins and little Fabienne always finished school earlier than him and would still stick their faces on the window of his class. When they saw him emerge later, they’d ask, hopefully, “Will you walk with us, Phileas?” He’d shake his fifteen-year-old head and shoo them away since their untied laces would spoil his image. They’d join hands and go on their way, blowing tufts of hair out of their faces, sharing sweets and lollipops.

He’d then be free wander into the vineyards with Mélanie and Gustave looking for treasure the Moors had buried in those hills long ago, but that no one had ever found. He remembered the warm smell their bodies gave off, their dusty elbows, the conspiratorial glances, the sun that ripened the grapes, drugged the lizard and maddened the fly. Mélanie was turning the pages of the metallurgy book with her toe, and then listing the properties of silver. Gustave was measuring distances along the ground with a metal yardstick, while Book was suggesting that they begin digging from the south. As Book bent down near Mélanie, he was excitedly hoping that she would notice how his biceps had grown larger and how muscle, sinew and veins were bulging in his arms. And the treasure, which surely had been buried there to lure them to spend hours alone, remained conveniently hidden in the rich earth, obscure, undefined, unreachable like all the treasures of youth, whose purpose is to be eternally sought and never dug up. The sun was setting faster than he’d hoped, Mélanie was looking at the large masculine watch on her wrist, which looked like that of Cousteau and had begun to hurriedly gather books, maps and compasses. Their feet bruised the invaluable roots of the vines as they tore back home. The faster this day wound to a close, the faster the next would arrive, full of promise.

And the next day arrived without any warning or realisation on Book’s part that it bore portent rather than promise. To be exact, that afternoon, he’d been eating pancakes with honey when he had heard his mother say on the telephone, “But, it’s autumn, Aunt Mildred. Adam cannot abandon the grapes.” She frowned and motioned them to stop dripping honey on the tablecloth. “Aunt Mildred, don’t cry, of course we wouldn’t leave you alone at such times. I’ll send Phileas over, who speaks English. I’ll put him on a plane tomorrow, that’s a promise.” The twins angrily clattered their forks on the plate and complained that they too could do with missing a month of school. “Why is it that Phileas gets to go alone to Ireland, and fly in an aeroplane to boot? How come he has all the fun?” He stroked the down that was turning a shade darker on his upper lip, and explained that whoever couldn’t say “condolences” in English would be of little use to Auntie. In fact, he’d been unaware that he had relatives in Ireland … and what a silly name, Mildred! He searched for Dublin on his globe to show the dejected twins, hiding his fear of flying alone behind the bravado of a supercilious expression. He also worried whether Gustave would muscle in and replace him as Mélanie’s favourite companion if he was absent for a long time. He certainly could trust Gustave as a loyal friend, but Mélanie’s rapid maturing was beyond either of their control.

That evening, his father brought tears of laughter to their eyes as he described Aunt Mildred’s laces, her flowery teaset on the pre-war sideboard and her glasses, fogged up by her constantly wet eyes. He advised him to enjoy the trip, practise his English, visit all the museums he could and not lose patience when Aunt Mildred read him the Holy Testament at night. She used to do the same with him, and he could assure Phileas that, for teenagers, there’s no soporific more powerful.

Book slipped out the window that night and ran over to Mélanie’s house and tapped lightly on her window. He told her that he had to go and that he’d be away for a whole month. They sprinted over to wake Gustave and ended up sitting in the shed with the lawnmowers. They vowed eternal friendship and sealed it by mingling their blood in the dark. Gustave gave him the precision measuring stick that they’d used for treasure hunting to guarantee that Mélanie and he wouldn’t search for the Moors’ treasure in his absence. Mélanie consulted her Cousteau wristwatch and told Phileas that he’d be crossing the central European time zone and so would be living an hour ahead of them. Gustave wondered whether that meant that he could inform them of world events an hour before they happened. Book promised that if that were true he would call them on the telephone and reveal the winning lottery numbers an hour before they’d be drawn. They’d laughed out loud, rolling on the floor, until Gustave’s dog started barking and lights flew on in the Thomases’ veranda, which precipitated a hasty exit through the hole in the shed wall.

He didn’t linger when his mother kissed him as the little ones were looking on and he feigned annoyance and wiped some imaginary saliva from his cheek. He hoped that his face didn’t betray how forlorn he felt as he heaved the suitcase into the taxi and followed it in. The twins leant down to the lowered window to show him words in the Franco-English dictionary and little Fabienne traced a butterfly on the dusty pane. The vineyards had never before seemed so attractive and hospitable as they did that morning.

Ireland proved to be everything he’d imagined it to be. Perhaps due to the time difference, Book felt that he was in the wrong reality and time. He filled pages and pages of letters in his best calligraphy to pass time. “I’m certain that the Moors passed through Dublin,” he wrote to Mélanie, and pretended to have found ideograms on depressing towers and on the stained-glass windows of Gothic churches to excite her interest and to attract Gustave’s admiration, but in reality, to make sure they remembered him. During those first ten melancholy days in Ireland, he’d thought of them every minute of the day – the first ten days of his new circumstances and the last ten days of the world he had known. Strangely, in those ten days, they’d all managed to write him a letter. His mother, “How did Auntie like the shawl I sent?” The twins, “Also, the word for
cercueil
in English is coffin, which must be pronounced something like our coffee.” Even little Fabienne, “Okay, I’ll draw a hippopotamus for you, but promise not to laugh.” Even his father, who hated writing, “We miss you, goddamn it, and now I keep finding the car keys where I left them,” and Gustave in his illegible scrawl, “Vateau examined us in algebra. Jammy bugger, you missed it!” and, of course, Mélanie, “Is it the same moon we gaze at at night?” Mélanie had never been as tender as she’d been in her letter, which filled him with hopes and longings. He would bury himself deep under the covers, holding his precious letters in his hand and reading them again and again to ward off the fears that arose from having a strange roof with the wooden rafters over his head, from the creaking of the great iron bedstead every time he moved and from the padding of Aunt Mildred’s slippers on the floor as she admonished herself, “Oh, I’ve misplaced my glasses again”, “Oh, what have I done with the aspirins now?”, “Oh no, I’ve left the cooker on.”

*

He stood awkwardly next to his black-clad aunt, holding her hand while his completely unknown Uncle Ervin was being covered with shovelfuls of earth by the gravediggers. His aunt wiped her misty glasses with a lace handkerchief. “It’s only right that a Book attends this funeral – it’s a very good thing that you came, my boy, because Adam’s forgotten that he’s Irish. Ervin had always said that if a Book didn’t throw a handful of earth on his grave, he’d never get to heaven.”

Returning home, and while Aunt Mildred had been ransacking her bag for aspirins, Phileas tentatively had said that perhaps his presence wasn’t necessary any longer and, in any case, her nephews were coming from Canada to collect her in twenty days. His aunt complained that she had to sort photographs, pack bags, shut down the house and hand the keys over to the estate agent. She also had to savour a last cup of tea in her garden. How could she possibly do all that without a Book by her side?

“I’m having a great time here,” he wrote to Mélanie that evening, which nearly released the tears he’d been holding back. He propped the letter on the pillow so as not to spoil his calligraphy. “My aunt promised to give me Uncle Ervin’s Swiss army knife, which also has a chisel. Did you really mean what you asked about the moon, Mélanie?”

He was wondering whether he could dare end “with love” rather than persist with the Moorish phrase they’d been using, when he heard Aunt Mildred’s cries from the living room. The cries didn’t stop and so he got out of bed to see what was happening. The television, which had been switched off for days due to the mourning, was now on. Neighbours had rushed over to Aunt Mildred’s house to tell her that she must switch it on. Phileas Book desperately tried to follow the newscaster’s convoluted presentation, to make sense of the pictures and of the screams of the people in them. He’d screwed up his eyes and stretched out his hands, palms facing the set, as if trying to forbid the pitiless news from invading the room. In the paranoid months to follow, he came to the conclusion that he had stretched out his hand as a gesture of farewell – not to his lost loved ones, but to his lost adolescence.

That night, he climbed back into the iron bed, lit the bedside lamp and drew out the measuring stick that Gustave had given him. He measured his shadow and calculated that he was one metre, forty-eight centimetres tall. That was the full extent of his family now.

The Dead Sea, which Book remembered as tiny and harmless from his geography lessons, swelled unexpectedly that autumn. It drowned Israel and Egypt and poured into the Mediterranean. For days the sea levels rose, inundating the lands of North-west Africa, of Turkey, the Balkans, Italy all the way to Vienna, parts of Switzerland, France up to Paris and the eastern half of the Iberian Peninsula. Thankfully, after the initial storming of the coastlines, the levels rose more gradually, allowing many areas to stage a torturous evacuation. This resulted in a tremendously overpopulated North Europe and a massive wave of refugees that the other continents accepted.

The price exacted by this “beneficial” prolongation of the cataclysm was the publicity, the digital images which, with twice the fury, invaded dry homes through their television screens, filling them with horror and with the guilt of survival. They had been condemned to watch the evolving disaster in stark detail and to be mercilessly whipped by the intonations of the news announcers, “Today Lyons was lost beneath the waters!”, “Tomorrow, the last rooftops of Milan lose their battle with the rising sea!” They were forced to witness the inconceivable. Book, who that fateful autumn was inexcusably in Ireland, was glued to the television, frozen, watching the homeland he’d left behind being gradually erased from the map. Which merciful god was it that had sent the fifteen-year-old Book to Aunt Mildred, with her congested nose, her lace and her aspirins? What cruel twist of fate had inscribed his name on the list of survivors rather than that of the missing, believed drowned. Unless the drowned are actually the ones left above the surface. The lower city, which shivers in the dark mirror of the port of Paris, might be more real than its three-dimensional sister.

“One or two sugars in your tea, Mr Book?” asked the man.

When he shut his eyes the images of destruction that the television had seared permanently into his brain would vividly reappear. Dead fish covering terraces like silvery snow; seabirds entangled in the death grip of television aerials; houses, broken in two, floating away; ships aground in the crags of the Alps. In Spain, bulls had run amok in fear and stampeded in the direction of the water, meeting it, true to their nature, head on, but losing their last fight like monstrous lemmings. People were trying to clamber on tables or wardrobes, then scrambling onto roofs for safety and watching in horror as the angry serpent of water snaked its way to their perch, demolishing walls and ripping up foundations as it approached. Prisoners, neglected in all the panic behind locked bars in Italy, drowned like rats. The skeletal old woman near Ephesus who refused to take the hand offered her by her rescuers made the point as her expressionless face disappeared inch by inch under the water that so often life after the disaster could be unfavourably compared to oblivion. The face of that old lady gradually and stoically refusing to participate in what followed sealed the tomb of the era of logical reactions to stimuli.

Unfortunately the Evil did not reach Ireland, where the fifteen-year-old Book was waiting, so it could drown him and expiate his guilt. After some time, the underground reservoirs were depleted and the water levels stabilised. A huge lake had been formed between three continents, from Gibraltar to the Red Sea in the south, and the Black Sea to the north. The bottom of this monstrous lake was festooned with the remains of the romantic civilisations of the past that East and West had strived so jealously to guard.