Chapter 1
Not Even to Me
You’re picking up where you left off.
He jumped into my boat at a quarter past eleven, at the exact moment the Belfry let its quarter-hour fall into the fog, so that for one second I thought it was the carillon itself landing on top of me.
The bow dipped, black water slopped over the gunwale, and a man crashed to his knees between the benches, twenty centimetres from my boots. He had tried to catch hold of something. What he had caught hold of was my boathook, which I'd laid across the bow, hook in the air, like an idiot, because both my hands were full of tarp. The hook had opened up his hand. I knew it before I saw it: there was a small wet sound, not a cry, and then a smell of iron, warm, threaded through the cold smell of the canal.
“Shh,” he said.
He was shushing me. And I hadn't said a single word yet.
My name is Mila Desart. I was thirty-three that night, I had been a boatwoman in Bruges for four seasons, and on winter Tuesday evenings I covered the boats.
It isn't complicated work. Rederij De Reie has eight boats at the landing stage on the Rozenhoedkaai, eight wooden hulls painted blue, moored herringbone-fashion against the quay, and from November to February they only go out at weekends, when it isn't freezing and there are still enough hardy tourists willing to pay fifteen euros for a tour in a woolly hat. The rest of the week they sleep under green tarps that have to be stretched, laced and checked, because Bruges rain is patient rain and it finds every hole. Normally there are two of us. Jasper holds one end, I hold the other, he sings Dalida off-key, I tell him to shut up, he sings louder.
That Tuesday, Jasper was buried in bed with a temperature of thirty-nine and had left me a four-minute voice message announcing his imminent death, bequeathing me his mug collection and begging me never to tell his mother that he had been happy with a boy from Kortrijk in 2019.
So I was alone at the end of the quay, with a head torch, fingers I could no longer feel and a fog so thick that the façades on the other side of the water had vanished. All that was left of the Rozenhoedkaai was the yellow halo of two street lamps, the sound of water against the hulls and, high above, invisible, the Belfry counting out the quarters for nobody.
I was lacing up the seventh boat, mine, the one I steer from March to October and call De Reiger, the heron, because that's what has been painted on her stern since 1974 and you don't rename a boat without asking for trouble. I had the tarp half drawn over the bow.
And he fell out of the sky.
Footsteps first. Not his: his I hadn't heard. Other footsteps, two pairs, heavy, running over the cobbles from the direction of the Wollestraat, and they stopped dead at the top of the quay.
The man on his knees in my boat looked up at me. My head torch caught him full in the face. He shut his eyes against the light, and I had time to see a few days' stubble, dark hair plastered by the fog under a black beanie, a tight mouth. A face well into its thirties, tired to the bone.
“Turn it off,” he breathed. “Please.”
I turned it off.
I've often wondered why. I had plenty of time to wonder, afterwards. The honest answer is that he said please, and people who mean you harm rarely say please, and his voice was shaking in a way I recognised: not with fear, with cold. The voice of someone who has been in the water.
At the top of the quay, a torch came on. A white beam searched the fog, slid over the cobbles, over the railing, over the first covered boat.
“Hij is hier ergens,” said a man's voice. He's somewhere round here.
I didn't think. I lifted the edge of the tarp, pushed the man under it with one hand on his shoulder, and slid in beside him, under the canvas, at the bottom of the boat, where the rainwater collects between the floorboards. It soaked through my jeans to the skin in a second. Water at four degrees, maybe five. I clenched my teeth so hard I thought they would crack.
He was pressed against me. There was no room to be anywhere else. His chest against my back, his breath in my hair, his injured hand folded against his stomach, and I could feel the warm blood soaking through my jacket at the small of my back. He smelt of the canal, of sweat, and of something else, very faint, that I couldn't put a name to straight away. He was shaking. I was shaking. We shook together, under a green tarp, in total darkness, and above our heads the torchlight swept back and forth across the canvas like a lighthouse beam.
The footsteps came down onto the pontoon. The planks creaked. A boat beside us rocked: someone was putting a foot on its edge. Ours shifted in the wash.
I thought of my boathook. It was still lying on the bow, outside the tarp, with blood on the hook.
“Niks,” said a second voice, younger, almost shrill. Nothing. “He went along the Dijver. I swear he went along the Dijver.”
“You're swearing to a lot of things tonight.”
A silence. The kind of silence in which you can hear the heart of the man pressed against you. His was going even faster than mine, and mine was pounding fit to burst.
Then the torch moved away. The planks creaked the other way. The footsteps went back up onto the cobbles, ran towards the bridge, and the sound dissolved into the fog, the way everything dissolves in Bruges, at night, in December.
We didn't move for a long time. I was counting. I count when I'm frightened; it's a habit. At a hundred and eighty, the Belfry struck the half hour, very far away, muffled, and the man let out a breath he might have been holding since the Dijver.
I switched the head torch back on under the tarp, pointed downwards.
His right hand was split open across the palm, from the base of the index finger to the heel. A clean cut, deep, bleeding without letting up. He was looking at it the way you'd look at someone else's hand.
“You need stitches,” I said. “You need A&E. Sint-Jan is ten minutes away.”
“No.”
“You're going to bleed to death in my boat. She's a 1974 boat. She's done nothing to deserve this.”
He gave a sort of laugh, a short laugh deep in his throat, and it hurt him.
“Not A&E,” he said again.
I unwound my scarf. It was a mustard-yellow wool scarf my mother had knitted me the winter I arrived in Bruges, because she thought people from Bruges dressed “like closed umbrellas”. It was enormous. My mother knits every scarf twice the necessary length, on principle, because in Ostend the wind goes three times round your neck. Two metres of thick wool, with a stitch gone wrong every ten rows, wherever she had been watching the television instead of her needles.
I took my boat knife out of my pocket, the one I use to cut frozen ropes, and I sliced the scarf in two.
“What are you doing?”
“Vandalising my mother's life's work. Give me your hand.”
He gave it to me. I folded the first half into a pad, pressed it against the wound, and pulled tight, and wound, and pulled tighter, until his fingers went white and the yellow began to turn brown. He didn't make a sound. He had broad hands, battered, the hands of someone who carries heavy things, with calluses on the knuckles. I was holding both of them in mine, and for one second it felt like the most intimate thing I had done in a long time. Which says a great deal about my love life since Namur.
The other half of the scarf I wound round his neck.
“Your teeth are chattering,” I said. “I can't hear myself think.”
He looked at me. In the beam of the head torch his eyes were a pale grey, almost green, like the water of the reien in March when the silt settles. He looked at me as if he were trying to decide something, and that something was costing him.
Then he felt in his jacket pocket with his good hand, and he took my hand, and opened it, and put something in it.
A key.
A brass key, as long as a finger, warm from his body. A bit with three teeth, a worn bow, polished by years of thumbs. A piece of string threaded through the bow, and on the end of the string a small brown card label, the kind people used to tie to luggage, with a single number written on it in pencil, in a careful, slanting hand.
47.
“I don't want this,” I said.
He closed my fingers round it. His bandaged hand over mine, heavy, wet.
“Don't give it to anyone,” he said. “Not even to me.”
“Sorry?”
“Not even to me.”
“That makes no sense. You've just given it to me. If you ask for it back, it means you want it, and if you want it, why are you giving it to—”
But he was already lifting the tarp. The cold air rushed in, heavy with fog. He hauled himself out of the boat in one movement, without putting any weight on his right hand, and crossed into the next boat, then the one after, stepping over the covered gunwales the way you cross a ford on stepping stones, without a sound, towards the corner of the quay, towards the Huidenvettersplein and its brick façades that could no longer be seen. The fog swallowed him as he went. First the legs, then the back, then the beanie. All that was left was a patch of yellow, at his neck and on his hand, floating in the white.
I stayed on my knees in the icy water, the key in my fist, watching him go. I was soaked to the bone, I had his blood on my jacket and half my mother's scarf missing, and I hadn't even thought to ask him his name.
At the end of the quay, he stopped. One second. He didn't turn round. He just spoke, not loudly, and the fog carried his voice to me the way water carries sound at night, from one bank to the other.
“Thank you, Mila.”
I had never told him my name.