On A Day Like This (19 page)

He thought of the evenings with Nadia, or rather the same evening over and over. Emptiness was repetition, he had thought at the time. But that wasn’t right. Emptiness lurked somewhere beyond repetition. Fear of emptiness was fear of disorder, of chaos, of death.

Andreas had wanted to drive all night. But when he saw the signs for motels again, he decided to take a room and rest up for a few hours. The motel was just next to the highway exit. In a convenience store next door, he bought himself a few cans of beer. The motel’s front desk was manned by a sleepy North African man, who asked him to pay for the room in advance.

Even though Andreas was tired, he couldn’t fall asleep. He drank beer and watched TV until his eyes fell shut. In his dream he was driving. He saw the center median and then he didn’t see it, he felt its rhythm like a series of dull blows to his head. The car tumbled into a dark abyss, and the center median flew by and its rhythm accelerated like a drum roll as he fell unstoppably down.

Andreas woke up bathed in sweat and feeling just as tired as when he’d gone to sleep. It was early; dawn was just breaking outside. He took a shower and carried his bags downstairs. There was no one at the desk. There was a card showing the hours breakfast was served, and a number to call in case of emergencies.
Andreas didn’t want to waste any time, and he decided to drive on.

As he stowed his suitcase in the trunk, his eye caught the bundle with the hunting goddess statue. He unwrapped it, and ran his fingertips over the gleaming bronze body, the tiny breasts, and the little face, which had always reminded him of Fabienne’s, which over the years had come to stand in for Fabienne’s face, and which, as he now saw, was nothing like her. He felt the bow and the quiver with the bent wire arrows, the short tunic she wore, the legs frozen in mid-leap, the feet, of which only one touched the base, on tiptoe. He weighed it in his hands. He thought of throwing it away, but instead he wrapped it up again and carefully laid it in the trunk.

At noon he passed Bordeaux. He bought a regional map at a gas station. After looking for some time, he found the campsite that Delphine had told him about,
Le Grand Crohot
. A road led straight into the sea, and ended there. There were no buildings on the map, the only thing there beside the name was the symbol for a view.

The highway cut through pinewoods and low scrub. The traffic was heavy, and when the road got narrower,
a few kilometers from the sea, it came to a dead stop. The very last bit of road took Andreas almost an hour. The sun burned down on the car, and he began to sweat.

The road ended in a gigantic loop. At the edge of the road were hundreds of parking spots in the shadow of tall pines. Many of them were occupied, and here and there he could see people in swim suits, unpacking their things or picnicking next to their cars. Andreas drove on, very slowly. After a couple of hundred yards, he reached the entrance to the campsite. The reception area was closed for lunch, and wouldn’t open until two. Andreas parked the car and called Delphine on her mobile. She didn’t answer. He listened to her recording all the way through, but he didn’t leave a message. Presumably Delphine was on the beach and didn’t have her phone with her.

Next to the entrance gate was a map of the campsite. There were two hundred spaces, and a couple of dozen little cabins that were marked as brown rectangles on the map. It would take forever to find Delphine, and presumably she was swimming anyway. Andreas decided to go down to the beach, and to come back here later. In the shade of the car, he changed his clothes, put on some sunscreen, and pulled on a T-shirt. Barefoot, he crossed the campsite in the direction where he thought
the sea must be. The campsite seemed to be quite full, but he didn’t see many people. The few he passed wore casual clothes, tracksuits, shorts and T-shirts, and sandals. At the edge of a great expanse of sand, rimmed by some café tables and chairs, a couple of men were playing boules by themselves. So this was the Paradise that Delphine had raved about: long rows of tents and campers under a canopy of tall pine trees, a food shop and a washeteria, little paved footpaths, and every hundred yards or so a building housing toilets, and another with showers and wash basins. On some of the sites a little tent had been erected next to a big one, on others windbreaks had been put up to shield the occupants from nosy passersby. Hammocks and clotheslines with wet towels hanging from them had been suspended between trees. In front of some of the tents, the pine needles had been raked to little paths, edged on either side by pine cones.

Andreas had always had a horror of campsites. Once, he had agreed to go, and had spent a week in a tent by the Mediterranean with a girlfriend. All he could remember were damp clothes, sand everywhere, stinking toilets, crowded beaches, and dance nights, whose climax was the duck dance. He left the girl shortly afterward, for some reason or other.

Andreas got to the end of the campsite. He had no idea now where the sea was. He wandered about among the trees. Finally, the woods thinned out, and a high dune rose in front of him. He trudged through the hot sand. Only now did he feel how tired he was. Once up at the top, he turned to look back. He could no longer see the campsite, only an endless wood, and, a little way off, a mighty bunker, half sunk in sand. The thick concrete shell had cracked open, and the walls were smeared with graffiti.

He couldn’t see the sea from here either, but he could at least hear the sound of the surf. He passed through a narrow cleft, and climbed another few yards. Then he suddenly felt the wind, and saw the sea ahead of him, and below him the beach, which seemed to go on forever in either direction, before losing itself in a yellow haze. The beach was almost entirely deserted. A couple of hundred yards from Andreas, people lay a little more closely packed. Blue flags were stuck in the sand, and a lifeguard sat up on a raised chair. Children stood in the water, young people, parents with children, entire families. They stood close together in knee-deep water, in front of the back and forth of the waves, as though waiting for something to happen. They looked small in the sea, which had no scale. Andreas slithered
down the dune. The nearer he got to the sea, the smaller he too seemed to become. He felt very alone, abandoned—a feeling he had often had as a child. He turned south, and away from the blue flags.

There were only a few people dotted about on the sand, bronzed couples, lying side by side or in embraces. One woman lay limply across the back of a man, her legs dangling off to the side, it looked like a failed attempt at some outlandish copulation. The distances between the bathers grew larger. Only here and there did Andreas pass groups of towels and umbrellas that looked like the final outposts of a vanishing civilization. He walked on. From time to time a naked man passed him, and as they crossed, each averted his eyes, as though the meeting was painful or embarrassing to them both. Andreas walked close to the water, where the sand was firm and the waves straightaway erased his traces. Sometimes he walked on a thin sheet of water, that was pulled away from under his feet, until he had the sensation of walking sideways. He turned around and looked behind him. There was no one there, not a sign, not a trace. He took everything off except for his sunglasses, and lay down in the sand. The feeling of solitude had grown weaker, the further he was from the last human. Now it had quite disappeared. He felt as though he himself was no longer
human. He lay on his back and looked up at the sky. Its blue was so porous, that he could feel the blackness of space behind it. The wind kept up, and the crashing of the surf was a continuum, the individual waves were not identifiable. You would have to be here for weeks, thought Andreas, sit naked for hours in the sun and the wind, and turn brown, dry out in the salty air, be softened by the blowing sand like driftwood, become tough and resistant. Then nothing more could happen to you. He fell asleep and awoke again. He sat up, and looked down at the water. The sun was low in the sky. The sea had withdrawn a little, the waves were a little lower, but the wind had freshened, and pushed Andreas, drove him on. He shut his eyes. He saw himself and Delphine sitting in a sidewalk café on the Champs-Elysées. What a coincidence, he could hear himself say, and Delphine said: Why didn’t you come to the station to see me off? My car broke down, he said. I lost your address. Sentences he remembered reading, it was long ago.

What a coincidence it was that he had met Fabienne, Nadia, Sylvie, and Delphine. That he had gone to Paris, and now come here, to this wide beach. It was coincidence that his parents had met, and before them his grandparents and great-grandparents, however much
they might have wanted to think the opposite, however much they might have wanted to persuade themselves that destiny had brought them together. His birth, any birth, was the last of an endless row of coincidences. Only death was no coincidence.

He thought of the chances that had brought him and Delphine together, and separated them again. A sudden shower of rain, a telephone call at the wrong moment, a whim would have sufficed to bring the whole complex edifice of little events and unimportant decisions to a crashing fall.

He got up and headed back. The wind was in his face, and sometimes it was so gusty that it sprayed his face with a fine foam. At the place where he had crossed the dune, he hesitated for a moment, and then walked on, toward the blue flags.

He imagined moving in with Delphine, in Paris or Versailles or wherever. He no longer had any possessions, and she didn’t seem to own much either. They would settle in somewhere, buy furniture and kitchen equipment, perhaps a TV and a stereo. He asked himself what they would do with their time, with such time as remained to them. But that didn’t matter. He had to find Delphine and speak to her. He had to call the doctor, to pick up the test results, even if they finally didn’t mean anything.

There were still quite a lot of people on the beach, but not many in the water. The sun was low over the sea, against the light, the swimmers were only visible as black outlines. Even so, he recognized Delphine immediately. She was standing in the water with her back to him. He shouted to her, but the noise swallowed his voice. He went up to her. The water was cold and murky with spinning sand. He stopped a few yards behind Delphine and watched as, with mechanical movements, she jumped into the waves, got up, took a few steps back, without reason and without end. Sometimes she dropped to her knees, and disappeared into the water, and then she got up again. Finally she turned around and made for him with quick loose strides. She was wearing a flowered bikini, and her body was glistening and wet. Her head was lowered, and she was looking at the water in front of her. It wasn’t until she had almost reached Andreas that she noticed him. She said something he couldn’t hear, and laughed and kissed him. They hugged each other so tight that it hurt. Delphine’s body was cool. Over her shoulder, not far away, Andreas saw another couple embracing, and he felt he was seeing himself and Delphine, as though he were a very long way away from it all. Only the crashing of the waves was very near and held him.