Just After the Wave Read online

  ALSO BY

  SANDRINE COLLETTE

  Nothing but Dust

  Europa Editions

  214 West 29th St.

  New York NY 10001

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  www.europaeditions.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © Éditions Denoël, 2018

  First publication 2020 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Alison Anderson

  Original Title: Juste après la vague

  Translation copyright © 2020 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover image: detail from a photo by Pexels, Pixabay

  ISBN 9781609455682

  Sandrine Collette

  JUST AFTER

  THE WAVE

  Translated from the French

  by Alison Anderson

  JUST AFTER

  THE WAVE

  To Anne-Marie,

  Fairies do exist.

  I know one.

  PROLOGUE

  Louie bent down to pick up the little wet thing the sea had brought to the shore. It lay there motionless, scarcely touched by the water, inching forward onto the earth. It was a blue tit, one of those they’d been trying to protect, before, because they were becoming rare. He picked it up and handed it to his father.

  “Here, Pata. Another one.”

  His father nodded and held it close. The others looked on in silence. They would go and bury it later, in the place where they had put the dead birds. This was number one hundred and thirty-four: Louie knew the tally by heart.

  And like the others, he went back to staring at the raging sea.

  * * *

  They were like drowned kittens in the rain, clinging to each other with their stunned gazes, their eyes blinking in the gusting wind and the warm downpours. That was the sea there before them, but not only before them. Behind them, to the left and to the right, there was also the sea. They hadn’t had time, in six days, to become accustomed, but they’d understood that the world would never be the same. They did not speak. They just held hands, all eleven of them, father, mother, and the nine children, their faces lashed by the demented weather, the near-constant deluge that obliged them to stay close to the house.

  Six days since the wave.

  The tidal wave had come and no one had heard it.

  Or if someone had heard it, it was already too late.

  Should they have expected it? What’s the point of tormenting ourselves, the father whispered, now that it’s done.

  Since then they had not seen a single soul; Pata had said they might well be the only survivors, because of that damned hill, which used to scratch the little ones’ feet on their way home from school at the end of the day, yes that hill had saved their lives because it was set too high and rose too steeply. The village was down below, in the valley, where there was nothing left to see. And still, at that moment they turned as one toward the village, as if they’d all had the same thought at once: there in the valley, it was all sea, again.

  The wave had swept over the world and taken everything with it: houses, cars, animals, and human beings by the thousands, trapping flesh and concrete walls alike to bury them beneath the swell and the terrifying currents, to crush them and swallow them wholeheartedly—and if the waters had receded, they would have left behind mangled fields, littered with dead bodies and the debris of bones, metal, and glass, but the waters had not receded, they had settled there, invasive and lethal, and for six days they had been transporting fallen trees, broken beams, and corpses with swollen bellies that the little ones watched drift by, trying to recognize them.

  And yet, for months the old folk had voiced their warnings. Even though they sensed that something was about to happen, they’d also gotten it wrong, and with a vengeance. But they were no longer here to talk about it, or shout about who was right and who was wrong, because they were all as dead as the next one, and their straw hats floated on the surface of the water, following the currents and meanders of this new ocean. But in all fairness it must be said they’d been only too aware of how the climate was playing up. They had been the first to stare at the heavens and gently nod their heads while frowning and muttering under furrowed brows. This wasn’t normal, they murmured, first among themselves, then before long to anyone who would listen. No, these winds whirling in circles, constantly returning to damage the crops and the houses, these air pockets that upset the animals and painted the sunsets yellow and purple, nothing good would come of it all, nothing anyone knew, and they nodded again, and waited, certain that some day it would come to pass.

  That other lot—the governments, the politicians—for sure they knew just as well. But not a squeak. No one spoke about it, other than a handful of nutcases doom-mongering on internet sites, and who were instantly taken for heretics and evil prophets, hauled before the judge or discredited by a dozen studies that had been signed, certified, and validated. The previous winter a few hundred inhabitants had left the region without saying a word—mustn’t cause the real estate market to crash and end up leaving empty-handed. People remembered them with a scornful sneer: Oh, you mean those scaredy cats? And now look.

  In short, the old folk had been right, because the heavens and the seasons had gone all out of whack, and an era of storms and small hurricanes had begun. It churned up the sea below them, and every time, the trees lost their branches, like scarecrows amputated first of one arm then the other, and the branches, the trees, crashing and rolling, had killed a few people and quite a few animals, the winds had lopped the roofs off the houses and the waves had dug holes and planted geysers in the sand by that ocean that no longer knew what was going on.

  But what the old folk had not foreseen was that the disaster—the real one, the enormous one, the one that had caused thousands or millions of deaths—there was no way of knowing, now—had come from somewhere else altogether: on the sunken island in the sea across from them, the volcano had collapsed, causing a gigantic tidal wave that had swallowed half the planet.

  According to the father, who was interested in geology, it was the northern flank of the volcano that had slid into the water with a colossal crash, one hundred million tons of rock, Pata figured, and this had caused the first wave, which was approximately three hundred feet tall; if he had to put a number on it, even a rough estimate, the wave must have shot forward at a speed of two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles an hour. The only thing in their favor was that the groundswell had headed out to the Atlantic; along the coast, they’d only suffered the fallout—a meager consolation when they gazed out at the drowned world around them: the floodwaters had spread over the entire hinterland, and on this too Pata had thought long, concluding gravely that the sea had surely moved three hundred miles inland. Everyone here knew that the same disaster had already occurred a very long time ago, and back then it was the western flank of the volcano that collapsed and produced a groundswell which, despite the distance, went all the way to America, devastating the coasts.

  Louie was the only one who saw the wave.

  Since then he had been crying at night, and his mother stayed with him until he fell back asleep.

  He had seen the wave because he was the one who tended the hens; at seven p.m. precisely, when they had all finished their homework, taken their shower and put on their pajamas, at seven p.m., before supper, it was Louie’s job to check one last time that the chicken coop was properl
y closed; six months earlier a stone marten, must have been, or a fox, had killed half their poultry, getting in through a loose wire fence, and Louie had sworn never, ever again. He had reinforced all the gates, and kept a close watch. But that night, it wasn’t the hens he’d been looking at, eyes wide, so wide you’d think they’d never close again, it wasn’t the hens that had caused the earth to tremble and his guts with it, sending him to his knees. The wave, towering like some watery monster, made him cry out in terror. It had darkened the sky for miles around him, like a yawning mouth, and had launched its attack on the world, on man and beast.

  Louie had run like hell, barricading the front door behind him, screaming, panting, stammering, his mother thought he’d gone mad, he didn’t know how to explain, not until the shock of the tidal wave caused the ground to tremble and the walls to shake, and the waves broke all the windowpanes.

  They wished they could forget that night, all of them, from the parents down to the baby, that night that had left the house streaming with water and their minds full of an inextinguishable terror, the sea slithering everywhere, its tongue lapping up everything in its way, everything it could rip off and tear and take with it to the deep heart of the water, whence nothing would ever return. By the following dawn, wherever they cast their gaze it fell upon a gray, blue, or green expanse, tufts of grass breaking through when the depth must have been only a foot or two—but nothing anywhere else. So much water you thought you were in the middle of the ocean, for indeed it had become an ocean, with a few rare islands emerging in places where, a few hours earlier, there had been a world.

  Rocky ground, and the collapsed volcano.

  They had all known, since that dawn, that the house was barely standing. The constant wind made it creak day and night. For a day or two they had hoped they’d spot someone on the sea, encounter a poor soul so they could convince themselves that there was still something alive on this earth turned ocean; they could not conceive of the fact that everything might have perished, even if the sea never stopped its constant careless hustling of lifeless bodies, They look like little boats, murmured Noah as he watched them go by, and Madie and Pata didn’t scold him because in fact that was what they looked like, like when you put empty walnut shells on a stream to watch the current catch them, and they dance and shudder and capsize.

  So there it was, they had waited and nothing had appeared, other than three or four small boats they had seen in the distance, but which never came any closer, boats fleeing in haste, toward higher ground, said Pata, and no matter how they shouted their lungs out and waved their arms, the boats had gone far away, turning their backs on the volcano, returning to the drowned countryside where only two days earlier cars had been speeding by.

  Yes, they knew that they had to leave. Despite Pata’s reassuring words, by the sixth day the waters had not subsided. The sea level rose, and he kept saying: it will go down. The little ones had stared at the ocean, sure that at any moment it would drain away, like a siphon swallowing the contents of a sink. But the sea was doing just as it pleased and it stayed there, maybe slightly lower than on the day after the cataclysm, but there it remained, and there was still too much of it. So of course there was no other option than to leave, to abandon land’s end to the wind and tide, to leave behind forty years of one’s life, or fifteen, or one, for all of them it was wrenching, and as the days went by departure became ever more imperative. But they were rooted there by disbelief, by their sense of panic that had not yet yielded to calm but rather turned their legs to jelly, and the only thing they could do, in the end, was hold hands, all eleven of them, on the shore, and look out at the sea and the volcano that had been the source of so much pain, the sea that never stopped rising and the volcano: there was no guarantee that a third flank was not about to slide into the sea and drive the waves out to conquer the hills.

  Leave, they murmured in the void.

  Pata had to finish repairing the boat that they moored all the way at the bottom of the steep path, in the inlet where they went fishing when there was no school; it had been damaged by an uprooted tree, gored on one side, and the wave had deposited it at the top of the garden with immeasurable force.

  But every morning they had to find food and drink, too, and enough for the twelve days the voyage would last if they wanted to reach terra firma. Madie and Pata had studied the maps and planted their fingers on the same spot at the same time, and they’d said, There, and there, we’d be safe—but the thing was, to begin with, if no rescuers came to find them they would have to sail for twelve days, maybe twelve days of complete solitude, they couldn’t just go off like that as if it were some picnic.

  “Yes, a picnic!” exclaimed Sidonie and Emily, clapping their hands.

  So whenever the weather allowed, Liam and Matteo, the two eldest, took the big rubber raft that they used to play with in the sea, and with Pata at their side they went to search over by the nearest houses, yesterday’s neighbors, the ones they used to say hello to on their way home from school or work; but there were no more neighbors, and the houses had vanished under the water. The only thing they found, and which brought them some small consolation, was another little hill twenty minutes from the island, a hill that had been spared and where a field of potatoes was growing, and they’d gone back there to pull up a few spuds, This will give us something in reserve, said Pata, spreading his arms, months to live on. The second time, Louie wanted to go with them, but the older boys pushed him away.

  “You’re only eleven, you’re no use.”

  And they were fifteen and thirteen, almost little men, with their smiles full of delight, for them the tidal wave meant adventure, no more school, and they didn’t care about the rest—they were bound to be rescued someday.

  “Beat it, with your gimpy leg,” growled Matteo, pushing Louie aside when he did not move.

  And Louie lowered his eyes to look at his leg that earned him the nickname Limpy when his brothers were angry, this damned crooked leg he’d been born with God knows why, and which his parents only discovered when he was old enough to start walking. The nearby bonesetter had told them it would mend itself. He had manipulated the little boy’s leg, recited prayers. It will be fine, he’d concluded with a nod, and nothing had changed. Louie had his game leg and his older brothers knew only too well how to remind him of it when he started clinging to them or pestering them, tattletale, they said, so he went off to see Perrine and Noah, who’d been born just after him and before the babies; the babies were all the ones who were not yet seven, which was the age of reason: Emily was six, Sidonie, five, Lotte, three, and Marion, just one year old.

  When they were in a neat little row on the shore looking at the angry sea, holding hands—except for Marion, tight in Madie’s arms—Louie wondered what had happened in the middle.

  The middle being the three of them: Louie, Perrine, and Noah.

  In the middle, something had gone wrong.

  Louie had a twisted leg, Perrine was blind in one eye, and Noah, at the age of eight, was no taller than a five-year-old. Before them, Liam and Matteo were handsome and well-built; after them, the four little sisters had not the slightest flaw. So what had happened to them?

  Three rejects. Maybe there was no explanation.

  It just landed on them, that was all.

  So because there was no answer, Louie squeezed the hands of the dwarf and the one-eyed girl, as the older brothers called them when their parents were out of earshot, and the little ones smiled, never taking their eyes off the ocean, squeezing their fingers even harder, and that was enough, Louie held his leg very straight, blinking in the gusts, while inside, he was singing.

  * * *

  What on earth were they going to do now.

  The boat was almost completely repaired, but that wasn’t what worried them: Pata had predicted that the waves would subside, but they were getting more skeptical by the day, and couldn’t help but
check the water level in the basement or on the flagstones in the garden. Madie was the only one who’d had her doubts ever since the first morning. And yet she could have succumbed to the ease of believing what Pata said; it would have been comforting, the thought that everything would revert to the way it had always been, that the sea was bound to go back where it belonged, and that underneath, they would find the swing, and the blue pebbles surrounding the flower beds, and the green bench—and further down, the village in the valley. Yes, if she listened to the father of her nine children, she would be convinced through and through that the sea would give them back their land, the grass, the trees. She would even have conceded that the more time went by, the greater their own chances of seeing the gray waters ebb away, because who had ever heard of a flood that stayed forever, the world was in perpetual motion and would force the waters to recede, it couldn’t all just stay like that, motionless, such things didn’t happen.

  But Madie didn’t believe it, she really didn’t, and there was no comfort for her. She refrained from saying how, on the contrary, years ago, on the other end of the planet, there was land that had been devoured by the desert, and all the people had fled, and the rain never ever fell again, and no plants ever grew again, to bring the people back. Those lands had died under the sun, for good, the same way that now their own fields had been drowned, forever, six days earlier. The waters were no longer rising, but they weren’t receding, either, as if the ground had been covered with an impermeable web, and nothing could budge. Everything was frozen. There was no end to Madie’s worry.

  But she pretended everything was all right, and went on smiling. She didn’t really have to try very hard, to be honest: she loved her little children, and even her idiot of a husband who so stubbornly hoped the water level would drop. She looked at them and knew that her life had meaning because she was there with them all, and that they had miraculously survived the huge tidal wave. Her kids were laughing in the morning sunlight, holding hands as they ran outside before scattering over the three and half thousand square yards which were, henceforth, nothing less than their entire world—they were right when they said as much, at that moment their mother was redrawing the horizon, there were eleven of them, just eleven in the whole world. And all at once she forgot her anxiety, she forgot nostalgia. Her entire body trembled for them alone, the nine little children she’d brought into the world, and with their father she had laughed for joy every time it happened, she mustn’t give up, ever, for every single one of her children justified her efforts, her fatigue, her constant readiness.