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
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
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