She couldn’t tell him that she had lost both her watch and her sense of time. That’s what happened when you prepared yourself to die and sank down into the big black deep where time no longer existed.
He had left a rolled-up rug on the floor of the cabin. She didn’t know what a rug was doing on a fishing boat. It was red, and woven in a beautiful pattern; it belonged on a tiled floor in an elegant room. If they have rugs like this in their boats, she thought as she unrolled it and curled up to wait, then I wonder what kind they have in their homes.
All sounds had ceased after that. The clatter of iron tossed onto asphalt, men’s voices, cars that started up and drove off. As the sun set the clouds turned a pale pink until all the colours vanished and the sky looked black and heavy. No moon, no stars, not a single fixed point. Like a silent prayer, a certainty that the world remained the same.
Slowly she pressed down the handle on the steel door. The smell of gasoline and the sea washed over her. She stepped quickly over the high threshold, closed the door behind her, and huddled on the boat’s deck.
The darkness she’d been waiting for had not arrived. The harbour was bathed in the yellow of sodium lights that were taller than church towers. She crouched there quietly and listened. A mooring line creaked when the boat moved. The rattle of a chain, the water sloshing gently against the quay. And the wind. Natural night-time sounds. That was all.
She grabbed the mooring line and slowly, very slowly, pulled the boat closer to the quay. With a dull thud the boat made contact.
She felt the rough surface of stone against her palms. Dry land. With her uninjured leg she kicked off and heaved herself up onto the dock. She rolled over and landed on her stomach behind a pile of rolled-up fishing nets. When she looked along the quay she saw a similar net with a rug covering it. So that’s what the fisherman uses those rugs for, she thought, to protect his nets from the rain and wind, or from animals that roam about, looking for fish scraps.
A few seconds passed, or maybe it was minutes. Everything was quiet, except for the wind and the beam pulsating on and off from the lighthouse.
She took a deep breath and then ran, stooping forward, moving as fast as her injured leg would allow, past a harbour warehouse. With his finger the man had drawn on the floor the way she should follow the wall out of the harbour, continue along the shore, and then go up through the town. To the bus station. From there she could catch a bus to Cádiz or Algeciras or Málaga. Cádiz was the name she recognized.
She stumbled over some pipes and heard the sound reverberate between the stone walls. Quickly she pressed herself close to a container.
There are guards, she thought as she listened intently. I can’t let myself be fooled by the calm and the quiet, and besides it isn’t really quiet. I can hear the surf striking the seawall, and the wind making the sheet metal clatter somewhere nearby, but I don’t hear any footsteps, and no one can hear mine.
She looked down at her bare feet. Her shoes had been swept out to sea, along with her skirt and cardigan. Now she was dressed in a green jacket that she’d found draped over her when she awoke on the deck of the fishing boat. In the cabin she’d found a towel and tied it around her hips as a skirt.
She pulled the cap further down over her forehead, climbed carefully over a pile of rebar. Hunched over, she ran the last bit before sinking onto a heap of empty plastic bottles bound for recycling.
This was where the harbour ended. She was hemmed in. In one direction was the high wall, in front of her a stone grate two metres high, and beyond that more harbour warehouses. She could see a section of street through the gaps, and some flowering weeds had pushed up through the holes in the asphalt. In the distance the ruin of a huge fortress loomed like a stone skeleton against the sky.
Her eyes hurt. She felt the strain of trying to focus in the yellow light, which was neither bright nor dim — more like a never-ending dusk. If she closed her eyes she would plunge into emptiness. It had been a long time since she’d slept a whole night through.
She got onto her knees and paused. That was something she’d learned in the past few months: to look all around, take notice of everything, and carefully plan her route.
Then she heard the sound. A vehicle approaching, inside the harbour area. She flattened herself against the ground and held her breath. The beams of the headlamps struck the wall right next to her feet. Bottles and other rubbish glinted in the light. That was when she caught a glimpse of the stairs leading up over the wall, white steps carved into the stone only a few metres away. Then semi-darkness descended again. The vehicle had turned and was heading away. It hadn’t stopped. Thank God it hadn’t stopped. She saw the blue light on its roof before it vanished in the direction of the gates, and the noise of its engine died away. A police car.
She raced up the stone steps and scrambled over the wall. To her surprise she landed on something soft. So far everything she’d encountered in this country had been hard: asphalt, stone, and iron pipes. But now she had soft sand underfoot, and it was like being caressed by the ground.
An umbrella lay overturned on the beach. Just for a moment, she thought, I’ll take shelter, I’ll rest here for only one breath of God’s eternity.
She picked up a fistful of the fine sand and let it run through her fingers. Tilted her head back and looked straight up at the black sky. The wind blew into her face and tore off her cap.
When is this wind going to stop? she thought. When will the wind subside and the sea grow calm?
She stood up again and realized that her leg would no longer support her. Her foot felt like it wanted to leave her body, and she had to drag it behind her.
Crouching down she continued along another low wall that kept the sand from drifting across the road and turning the town into a desert. Sharp weeds cut her feet. She raised her bad foot to see if it was bleeding and discovered that she had stepped in dog shit. Her foot stank. She couldn’t make her appearance in this country with such a foul smell clinging to her foot, but it was too far to hobble down to the sea and rinse it off. What sort of person had she become? She rubbed her sole on the sand to get rid of the stink, then wiped away her tears with her hand and got sand in her eyes. The sand was everywhere.
I could walk along the road instead, she thought. Like a normal person, not like a thief or a dog afraid of being beaten. The road was lit, and she knew it was dangerous. Yet she straightened up and soon the asphalt of the road was beneath her feet. For a moment she felt like a human being again. Someone who walks without fear.
As if such women walk barefoot through town in the middle of the night, she thought. And just then she caught sight of something lying on a slab of concrete, a resting place by the road.
I’m hallucinating, she thought, I can no longer trust my eyes. She went closer and found that her eyes hadn’t deceived her. A pair of shoes. She reached out her hand, but hesitated and looked all around. Was it a trap? Was somebody trying to trick her? But who would think up such an odd idea?
It was nothing short of a miracle. A gift from God. She hesitantly touched the shoes lying there. They were real. And they were made of gold.
All right, she thought and picked them up. They were quite ordinary cloth shoes that had been dyed gold, but still. They almost fit. Just a little tight in the toes. She didn’t intend to complain. Some divine power had placed these shoes in her path. Wearing these shoes she wouldn’t have to step in dog shit.
For the first time since she had come ashore she turned around and gazed back. On the horizon, across the straits, Africa loomed like a gigantic shadow. How close it was. She could see the mountains and the scattered lights in the dark.
Then she walked on, and did not turn back again.
Please let this be a nightmare, thought Terese Wallner when she awoke, lying on the beach. Let me wake up again, but for real this time, and in my own bed.
Slowly she sat up, a terrible pounding inside her skull.