Anna and the laundry. The teeny-tiny garments.

I swallowed and tried to concentrate on what I was doing.

A few spots refused to come out, remaining in the fabric like shadows. Dried blood from a scrape on the knee that had long since turned a rusty, brown color. Purple spots from unripe cherries picked one night in someone’s garden. They appeased our hunger pangs for a little while, but the craving in our stomachs was replaced by a sour sensation.

It was our fourth day in the camp. Already every day was the same. Jeanette’s office in the morning. Nothing new. Every day I asked if there was anything more I could do, anything else. But she shook her head. Then eat. Sweat. Listen to Lou talk, unable to pay attention. Pull myself together. Ask somebody about the time. Nothing new, no. Try to listen to Lou. Try to play. Try not to think—about Anna, about August, about the fire. Eat again. Wait for the evening, for the heat to abate. Sleep. Wait for the next morning and another visit to the Red Cross.

But today we were allowed to wash our clothes. Laundry tubs were set up on a simple workbench. Seven liters of water we had been given for this. A little treasure trove of water.

Lou was also washing her clothes. She was wearing only her underpants and scrubbing her shorts in a tub in front of her.

The door behind us opened. I turned around. It was a woman holding dirty laundry in one hand, and a small water jug in the other.

I nodded and said hi.

She mumbled a reply, took one of the tubs down from the shelf, poured some laundry detergent out of a can, sprinkled it across the bottom, and filled the tub with water, doing everything quickly and expertly.

She sat down on the other side of Lou. I tried to smile, but she didn’t seem to notice, was busy with her laundry.

She put a dress in the water, a floral print, it looked expensive. After that a blouse, made of a thin, silk-like fabric.

“Nice,” I said.

“What?”

“The blouse.”

“Thank you.”

She studied me for a couple of seconds before returning to her laundry. She was in her late thirties, maybe even forty. Her skeleton seemed to be pressing through her skin. Her collarbone stuck out, but not because she didn’t eat enough, more because she was like that, naturally thin.

Or maybe she was one of those who always watched her weight, exercised. There had been a lot of people like that before. I remembered it, that dieting was something women talked about. She was pretty, I saw that now—not beautiful, but pretty. Classic. The way you look if you come from a family where rich men marry elegant women. The families just become more and more attractive with each generation, until finally everyone forgets how ordinary people look.

One seldom saw her kind in Argelès. The tourists who came to the town were of a different sort. They liked the amusement park on the beach and the pedestrian street where you could buy knockoffs of famous labels. I had only seen her kind on the few occasions I had traveled farther north up the coast, in Cannes and Provence.