The guard continued looking at me. Clearly he was comparing me with the photo in the passport.

“It’s five years old,” I said. “I was only twenty.”

“Do you have anything else? Other papers that can confirm your identity?”

I shook my head.

“This was all I managed to take with me.”

He looked at the picture one more time, as if it could provide him with answers. Then he took out a stapler and two light-green slips of paper. With practiced movements he stapled them onto random pages in the passports.

He held them out to me. “Fill these out.”

“Where?”

“Here. On the forms.”

“I mean . . . where? Do you have a table?”

“No.”

I took the passports. He had left mine open at the page with the green form.

“Do you have a pen, then?”

I tried to smile. But the guard just shook his head in resignation. His eyes did not meet mine.

“I’ve lost mine,” I said.

That wasn’t completely true. It wasn’t lost—the ink was used up. Lou had been crying so much the other night on the road, sobbing softly with her face hidden in her hands. I let her draw. She drew thick blue lines of ink on the back of an old envelope we found on the side of the road. Drew pictures of girls in dresses and colored in the skirts. She pressed the pen down so hard that it made holes in the paper.

The guard rummaged through a box on the ground. He pulled out a battered, blue, ballpoint pen with a broken plastic casing. “I want it back.”

I had to fill out the forms standing up. I had nothing to lean the passports against. My handwriting came out wobbly and strange. I tried to hurry. My hand shook. Occupation. Last place of work. Last place of residence. Where we had come from. Where we were headed. Where were we headed?

“The water countries, David,” Anna used to say to me. “That’s where we have to go.”

The drier our own country became, the more she talked about the countries in the north, where the rain didn’t just come once in a great while during the cold months, but also in the spring and summer. Where long-term drought didn’t exist. But where instead the opposite was true: the rain was an affliction, arriving in storms. Where rivers flooded over and dams burst, abruptly and brutally.

“What are they crying about?” Anna said. “They have all the water in the world!”

Where we lived we had only the salty sea, which was rising. That and the drought. That was our flood. Relentless.

At first it was called the two-year drought, then four. This was the fifth year. The summer seemed to be without end.

People had started leaving Argelès back in the autumn of last year, but we stayed put. I had a job to attend to; I couldn’t leave it, the run-down old desalination plant that converted the sea into fresh water.