We walked for five minutes, maybe ten, passed some stone houses, a small farm. In two places I saw people. An elderly woman carried a sewing chest out to a car. An elderly man took a swing down from a tree. They were headed out, packing up, trying to make their way to the north, like everyone else. Otherwise it was deserted everywhere. Abandoned, here as well.

Only traces of the people who had lived here remained. Curtains that someone had chosen, garden furniture where someone had relaxed, chimneys from which smoke had risen, a garden rake that had drawn careful grooves in the gravel in the yard, the pétanque court where the balls had landed in the sand with a crunch.

I could have lived here, I thought, even though it was far from the ocean. Here, along this road, in this shade, I could actually have lived, this could have been my home.

Another house appeared, the last on this stretch of road before the forest. The house was neither large nor fancy, but it was a palace compared to our apartment at home.

It must have been abandoned a long time ago, or inhabited by someone who couldn’t be bothered to maintain it properly. The yard was overgrown with dry weeds and the paint was peeling off the front door. There were shutters covering all the windows.

By the side of the house I spotted the lid of an old-fashioned rainwater tank. It was locked with a rusty padlock. Could be as old as the house. Was there still water in it?

Lou walked into the withering garden. It had once been overgrown, but now the apple trees were dried up and the leaves on the branches were yellow.

There was a shed with the door slightly ajar, maybe blown open by the wind. Lou walked over and closed it. Then she turned around and pointed to something. “What’s that?”

Behind me, far inside the garden, there was something large and tall under the dark trees, covered by several green tarps. It was long and oval, with something sticking out on both sides. A kind of stand could be discerned on the ground.

Lou tugged at me. “Come on.”

The tarps were dirty and worn, but securely attached, held in place by ropes in different pale, sun-bleached colors: green, blue, and grayish-white, crisscrossing. Some of them were rotting. They had to be of cotton or hemp. But most of the plastic cords were still in one piece.

In some places leaves had gotten stuck between the ropes. The leaves had become tiny pockets of soil, where seeds had landed from which small plants were growing. Small plants which in turn dried up and died from the drought.

We walked over to it. I reached out and took hold of the tarp on top, trying to make out what it was covering.

It was soft, as if there were nothing behind it, but then my fingers came up against something hard—a beam? I slid my hand upward. The first beam met another under the tarp, and something was resting on them, something enormous, heavy. And then suddenly I realized.