Castle of Water: A Novel(19)
“Suit yourself.” Barry lifted the little pot by the handle and used his fingers to shovel the charred remains of the omelet into his mouth. The flavor was sharp and acrid, but then again, so was his hunger. “Why don’t we turn the radio back on? Some music might be nice.”
“D’accord.”
Sophie gave the little generator handle a few cranks and clicked it on, to the same Tahitian French-language station they’d been listening to before. It was playing “Ne me quitte pas” by Jacques Brel.
“You have to be kidding me,” Sophie snarled, before snapping off the radio. “Putain de merde.”
Barry burst out laughing—laughter tinged with darkness, possibly even madness, but laughter nonetheless. Sophie resisted for a moment and then joined in. Honestly, by that point, her grief expended, her tears depleted, she didn’t know what else to do.
The hours passed, and the sky turned a luminous peach before reddening and darkening to the tar pitch of night. Barry and Sophie sat on the beach and watched the slow surrender of the day, not saying much, both considering what this new development meant. Both thought about their friends and family, who were surely worried about them, if not totally distraught. And there was nothing they could do, not one single means by which they might telegraph their status and ease their concern. I’m alive, I’m here.… Je suis ici, Maman.… With luck and a little adjustment the shortwave could pick up incoming signals, but it was a painfully one-way conversation. The frustration of that fact was beyond description, the silent despair of Ebenezer Scrooge watching events unfold as a ghost, the longing of the wrongfully imprisoned to have the truth be told. The only human being either could talk to was sitting in the sand three feet away.
It was Barry who spoke first.
“We need a plan.”
Sophie turned her head, which had been resting on her tucked-up knees; she was wearing his shirt again, buttoned high against the cool night air. “What do you mean?”
“Well, we don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck here. It could be a while. I think we should make a plan for how to live here. We should walk around the island tomorrow, take note of everything, and see what we have to work with.”
“You mean like a system?”
“I guess so. I think a good start would be to figure out what food we have, and how much we can eat.”
“D’accord. I can do that with you.”
“We should climb the little mountain there, too.” He gestured with his head in the direction of the six-story cairn that formed the island’s spine. “We’ll get a better view of what’s around us.”
“Do you think there might be another island near?”
“Maybe. I mean, there are lots of little islands in this part of the Pacific. And if we see one, we can get to it on the raft. It still works, right?”
Sophie sat up and nodded. “I think so.”
“We’ll see.” Barry patted down his pockets for the pack of Russian cigarettes, finding nothing. “Do you have the smokes?”
“They’re in the shelter. Do you want me to get them?”
Barry thought for a moment and shook his head. “Nah. Now’s probably a good time to quit. If there is another island nearby, I’m going to have some serious paddling ahead of me.” He flashed a smile at her, a sly grin flush with confidence. He wasn’t sure where it was coming from, but he had summoned it from somewhere. Unlike his hardy midwestern forebears, he’d had no Great War in which to prove his manhood, no Great Depression to test his mettle. Perhaps this uninhabited island in the South Pacific was his Normandy beach, his own personal and palm-lined Dust Bowl. He had cheated death, he was still alive, and sometimes that fact alone was enough. “Now, let’s go eat some f*cking bananas.”
Barry rose from the sand and brushed himself off; he offered his hand to help Sophie up, and to his surprise, she actually took it. She even said merci.
16
The question may not have occurred to Barry and Sophie, who certainly had more pressing issues weighing on their minds, but it does merit asking: How, exactly, did a postimpressionist painter of the late nineteenth century and a Belgian chanteur from the middle of the twentieth come to be buried within feet of each other on one of the most isolated islands in the world? And more important, what was it about Paul Gauguin and Jacques Brel that convinced the two of them to visit their graves in the first place? To answer both questions, a little comparative history is probably in order:
It’s the year 1884, the impressionist movement is in full swing across Europe, and a young stockbroker by the name of Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin is not very happy at all. Stuck in a dead-end job, married to a Danish woman accustomed to the comforts of a decent, bourgeois life, and unable to tend to his beloved paints, he feels trapped, bound by conventions he cannot understand. His bohemian friends down in the quarter—Pissarro, Cézanne, and that Dutch oddball Van Gogh—see promise in him and urge him to devote himself full-time to his passion. After much arguing with his comfortably middle-class wife, he finally does, leaving behind the stock market forever. In the poverty that follows, she in turn leaves him, taking their five children right along with her. One can almost hear her voice berating him on her way out the door: “What the hell is the matter with you, Paul?” He sighs, he slumps beside his first half-finished canvas, he does not know.