Dog Island

by Philippe Claudel

  XI

  ON FRIDAY THE 28TH AND SATURDAY THE 29TH OF September, two noteworthy events occurred which got on the nerves of some people even slightly more: on Friday, at about midday, two children found one of the Teacher’s dummies on the beach. Not knowing whom it belonged to, they informed the first adult they encountered: it was the Priest. He was returning from his beehive, carrying the honey he had gathered in two buckets.

  He accompanied the children to the beach, and, with his weak eyesight and his maladjusted spectacles, when he noticed the dummy he thought for a moment that it was a sort of pagan idol. He held up the crucifix of his rosary in front of the object, made the sign of the cross, and rattled off a prayer, inviting the children to join in with him.

  The two boys, slightly more aware than the Priest, drew his attention to the fact that it was a simple floating dummy of the kind used in swimming pools for training top swimmers and lifeguards. A human-sized torso, as heavy as a body, made of plastic trimmed with lead. When they turned it over, they realized that a message had been written on it saying that if the object was discovered, one was requested to advise someone whose name was written on the dummy’s torso, which was that of the Teacher. His address was there, too. On the dummy’s stomach there was another number, in Roman numerals: IX.

  The Teacher was still sitting at the table with his wife and little daughters when the two children knocked on his door. The Priest told anyone who cared to listen to him afterward that, when they told him about their discovery, the Teacher’s face was transformed and that he, without even waiting for the end of their story, set off running toward the beach, even forgetting to take off the napkin that he had tucked into his collar so as not to dirty his shirt.

  The two children went away. The Priest and his bees remained on the doorstep a little while longer. The Teacher’s wife and little girls appeared, their eyes filled with questions. The Priest summarized what had happened. The wife let out a long sigh.

  “The dummies are the only things that matter to him. I don’t know what’s come over him. I no longer recognize him.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you at church,” said the short-sighted Priest, who had drawn close to the woman’s face and was trying to scrutinize her. A bee had landed on one of the twins’ arms. It was wending its insect’s path over her fresh, young skin. The little girl was not frightened. Quite the contrary, with her forefinger she gently began to stroke the downy back of the tiny creature, which curiously enough did not appear to mind.

  “I don’t believe in God,” the woman replied in a flat voice, which the Priest read as regret.

  “That’s a great shame. He can be of such help.”

  “Who told you that I’m in need of help?”

  “Who would dare have the pride to assert that they do not need it?”

  Then the conversation took on a more mundane turn, for the Priest had long ago given up all attempts to convert atheists. Religion wearied him. He himself, it was thought, did not believe in it very strongly. He continued to behave as though he did in order not to leave the last of the flock on their own, people whom he had nevertheless shocked one day by telling them in a sermon that God had retired.

  “It’s not just the clerks in the ministries of the capital who want to work at seventy percent when they feel old age coming on. I rather think that God has done the same. He’s progressively suspended all activity. And it’s our fault.”

  Two elderly ladies had left the church amid a clattering of chairs. One of them even denounced the Priest and his blasphemy to the bishop in a letter covered in mistakes and holy water. But the bishop probably had other lost souls to get excited about and the sanctimonious creature never received a reply.

  The Priest could not resist giving the two little girls a brief course in beekeeping. He took his leave after having poured a little of his honey in a bowl which he had asked one of the girls to fetch for him.

  Returning from the beach, the Teacher walked quickly, in spite of the dummy he clasped in his arms rather like a dancing partner. He still had his napkin around his neck. America caught up with him with his donkey and cart. He invited the Teacher to climb up with his contraption. The sun illuminated the scene and from the surrounding vines there arose the sweet scent of bunches of grapes that were slowly drying on the stone walls.

  “I’m almost home. It’s all right. Thank you.”

  “Are you going to marry her? At least that one won’t be a bloody nuisance!”

  The Teacher did not react to the joke and left America alone with his laughter. The latter rolled along in silence alongside the Teacher, who was beginning to show signs of weariness, then he shrugged and whipped the back of the donkey which, without complaining, set off at a light trot.

  Several pupils in the class reported that the Teacher was not himself that afternoon. He gave them all a task to be carried out in silence that was so long that the youngest eventually began to doze off at their desks and the older ones became bored and started to daydream.

  During the break he forgot about them, leaving them on their own in the yard making a terrible din, not even aware of the racket, so absorbed was he in writing whatever it was, though it was probably not poetry, in his little notebook, all the while glancing from time to time at the dummy that he had propped up near his desk in a corner of the classroom, beneath the blackboard, and measuring distances on a large sea chart he had spread out in front of him.

  He worked late that evening. Swordy reported to the Mayor that the light had remained on in his house until two o’clock in the morning.

  “I got frozen outside in the alleyway.”

  “I’m paying you for that.”

  “With respect, you’re paying me to fish for something.”

  “Then tell yourself that it’s a type of angling. Would that make you feel better?”

  Swordy said nothing and tried to understand what the Mayor had just said. Nobody made any comments. It was Saturday. It was early. Seven o’clock. The Mayor had invited the Old Woman, the Priest, America, and Swordy to the Doctor’s house. They were all there. They were sitting down in the waiting room. The Doctor joined them. He was carrying a tray on which he had put out cups of coffee. He was smiling, as he usually did, for he never lost his smile, even when he was announcing an incurable disease or the approach of death. It was like a mask. No one really knew what lay behind it.

  “Well,” began the Mayor, grimacing after having gulped down the boiling-hot coffee and replaced his cup on the tray, “if I have asked you to come, it’s because I have need of you. Need of you, so as to understand.”

  Following this introduction, and continuing to grimace so that one began to wonder whether it was the very hot and very strong coffee that was responsible for the words issuing from his mouth, he itemized the activities of the Teacher during the past three weeks, going back over aspects that everybody knew already, adding others that were known only to some of them and which they themselves had reported to him. He concluded with the events of the previous day, the dummy washed up on the beach, the afternoon at the school, the Teacher’s intense writing activity, his lateness to bed. Swordy let out a long sigh, as if to substantiate this last point.

  “That is where we are,” he concluded, clenching his fists and hammering on his spindly thighs.

  Then there was silence. The room had filled with the slightly sickly smell of coffee-filled breath.

  “You say that you need us in order to understand, but you’re not telling the truth.”

  It was the Old Woman who had spoken, in her gravelly voice, which all those who were present that morning—with the exception of the Priest, who at a young age had been sent to the mainland to a school for priests—were familiar with from their long childhood years, when it had made them tremble.

  “You’re crafty,” she went on. “You always have been. You don’t need us in order to understand, just to share.”

  “Share? Share what?” barked the Mayor, o
verplaying his amazement.

  “Your burden. What you want is not for us to help you understand, but for us to help you bear it. You are relying on us to comfort you.”

  Swordy and America stared at one another. All this was beyond them. It was philosophizing. It hurt the head more than the worst hangovers. The Doctor was smiling and sipping his coffee. The Priest was gazing at the ceiling. He seemed completely uninvolved with what was going on.

  “You’re talking nonsense!” snapped the Mayor.

  “Don’t make fun of me. You know very well what I mean. You don’t want to be on your own. You prefer us all to drown together. You want to take us with you. By telling us everything you know, you’re making us accomplices.”

  “No crime has taken place, as far as I know!”

  “Not yet. But there have already been three deaths.”

  Suddenly, at the same moment, a hum ran through the waiting room. It was like the rumble of a train arriving in the distance, advancing slowly but growing gradually louder, seeping into the walls, into the ground, creeping into the legs of the chairs, climbing up their spines so as to enter the bodies that were seated there and spread a muted vibration through them. At the same moment, the cups that had been replaced on the tray started to tinkle and the tray itself seemed to come alive as though the spirit of a dead waiter was trying to pick it up to take to the kitchen. The Priest made the sign of the cross and began to murmur a prayer. The others did not appear surprised or frightened. They waited. The sound rumbled on for ten seconds or so, then stopped.

  The Brau had returned to its slumber.

  “It’s been a long time!” said America, who was more embarrassed by the silence than by the quaking earth.

  “Fourteen months and three days,” stated the Doctor, who kept a scrupulous record—solely for the record, not to get anything out of it or for his edification—of the shudders of the volcano. Then, in an abrupt switch, he returned to the original conversation.

  “We cannot deny the Teacher’s responsible attitude and his perseverance. He is a knowledgeable man, and it is right that he should look for ways of perfecting his knowledge, of throwing light on dark areas. That the Teacher should try to understand why the bodies of these men have been washed up on our island is, after all, his right. What would be awkward is if he felt like sharing his discoveries, writing them down, slipping them into an envelope and sending them away.”

  “Who to?” the Mayor asked.

  “To people other than us.”

  “Why would he do that?” said Swordy. This early-morning conversation, in the waiting room that had always been a place he did not care for and was synonymous with injuries and pains of all kinds, was making him ill.

  “Out of vanity,” said the Priest.

  “Out of pride,” said the Old Woman.

  “Out of stupidity,” said the Mayor.

  “Out of innocence,” said the Doctor.

  America was the only one not to say anything. Swordy turned to him, expecting a comment to complete the outburst, but no comment came. America merely held out his empty palms in a gesture of impotence. Swordy looked at the encrusted lines of cement and dirt to be seen on them. He remembered that certain clairvoyants foretold the future by reading palms. He tried to do so, but all he saw were lines, hatches, and geometrical forms crushed one against the other. Chaos. Confusion. Nothing at all, really.

  They parted without having made progress and without having decided anything, either. But what was there to decide upon? The Old Woman was probably not wrong in the remarks she had made to the Mayor. He certainly wanted to make them feel that they were all united with one another, and that even though some time had elapsed since their macabre discovery, these same bodies still pressed down on them like a cast-iron weight. Not one of them wished to endure the embarrassment on his or her own. They all needed to share the burden.

  XII

  MIDMORNING OF THAT SAME DAY, THE FERRY ENTERED the port, having blared out its siren three times as usual as it approached.

  There were few passengers: some local inhabitants who had gone to deal with business matters on the mainland and were returning home; Pill, who worked for the pharmacy and suffered from a club foot and a liverish complexion, who delivered the Doctor’s weekly order to him; two elderly ladies who were nicknamed the Sisters, without anyone actually knowing if they really were, who came every year at the same time to visit one of their cousins and stayed until Christmas; and also a middle-aged stranger, neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither young nor old, who appeared to be the perfect embodiment of ordinariness, one of those men whom people never notice, whom waiters in cafés ignore in spite of their insistent raised finger, and whose existence women are unaware of even when they brush up against them.

  The man was carrying a bag of the type that traveling salesmen used to have when traveling salesmen were still a breed that roamed the world.

  He was the last to come down the gangway of the ferry, and then found himself on the quayside, taking stock of where he was. It was not hard to understand, from his expression and his slight hesitation, that he was setting foot on the island for the first time. When the man became aware that there was only one café in the port, and that his choice would therefore be limited, he set off toward it.

  The few fishermen sitting around a table were discussing the imminent S’tunella, their hopes for it, their calculations, and the exact moment they should set off, for each of them was still waiting for the signal for departure.

  Every year, this signal is given by a small, unofficial group, made up of the oldest fishermen on the island, who gather one day without actually being consulted at the far end of the jetty, on the last bench facing the sea, just as certain animals that carry on age-old rituals of love, hunting, and death congregate in certain places, guided by their blood, their instincts, and their desires.

  People were waiting for this moment. When they were seen making their way toward the bench, which no one here would have dared to occupy at this time, the atmosphere of the town filled with electric particles. They were watched from afar, even with binoculars at times. People murmured. They tried to guess what they could be saying to one another. They awaited their decision, which they delivered with marked succinctness and an effective sense of abbreviation, and which was enough to suddenly transform the little port, drowsy until then, into a vibrant space filled with cries, movement, and color.

  The door was open. The man entered and greeted the customers, who stared at him without responding, which did not appear to upset him. In a corner at the back he noticed a priest wearing a cassock, his head bent over a sports newspaper that he was trying to read through thick-lensed spectacles as he gently waved away some bees that in turn fluttered about and settled, like airplanes in large, crowded airports, on the pages of the newspaper. The man walked over to the bar and set down his bag by his feet.

  “A glass of the local wine.”

  Only a foreigner speaks like this. An inhabitant of the island would never express himself in this way. He would simply ask for a glass of wine, because the only wine served here is the wine of the island. Everyone would refuse to drink any other. It is a matter of honor.

  The Café Owner said nothing. He grabbed a glass and a bottle. He poured the wine into the glass, and the man seemed to appreciate its almost black amaranth color. He put down a banknote that he had taken from his trouser pocket and sniffed the wine before tasting it.

  The customers as well as the Café Owner lost interest in him and went back to what they had been doing, the customers to their whispered conversations, the Café Owner to his accounts, which he was working on in some pain, to judge by his anxious brow and the pencil that he chewed between his yellow teeth. The man took his time drinking his wine, and when he had finished it, he ordered another glass. When the Café Owner came over to him again with the bottle, the man told him that he was looking for a room for a few days. He had things to do here.

&n
bsp; “To do with the Thermal Baths project?” asked the Café Owner.

  “The Thermal Baths? Yes, indeed,” the man replied, “the Thermal Baths, obviously. What else?”

  He sensed that nothing further was needed to reassure the person he was addressing.

  “There’s no hotel on the island, but if you’re not fussy, I have a room with a bed and a bathroom. It’s just around the corner. I can show it to you.”

  The man followed the Café Owner, who had taken a key from a panel behind the counter. They walked twenty meters or so, as far as a metal curtain which indicated that there had once been a shop here that had closed a long time ago.

  “A haberdashery,” the Café Owner explained to the man. “My mother used to run it. The shop didn’t survive her. I’ve refurbished it inside. I let it occasionally, to seasonal workers who come for the capers harvest, or to fishermen, too, when there are not enough of our own men.”

  He drew back the curtain and opened the door that still had its bell. The room was square, the walls had been whitewashed. Two single beds, each against a wall, a small table by a window, over which hung a nylon curtain printed with a pattern of palm trees and pineapples, a cupboard in one corner and a door at the back, behind which were the lavatory and the washbasin. The floor was made up of large, uneven slabs of lava on which thousands of feet had trod. The damp at the bottom of the walls revealed some phosphorescent green atolls.

  The only decoration was a photograph hung above one of the two beds. In black and white, within a watermarked and misshapen frame of gilded plaster, it depicted an elderly woman with her hair in a bun who squinted slightly.

  “Will this do for you?”

  “It will be perfect,” said the man.

  The Café Owner informed him of the price. The man insisted on paying a full week in advance.

  “You can have breakfast in the café. I open early. As to meals, my wife cooks for some people. If you feel so inclined, you must tell me a bit in advance. I imagine you want to see the Mayor?”