Dog Island

by Philippe Claudel

  “I was going to ask you about him.”

  “At this time you will find him in the town hall. His office is open. You take the first narrow street on your left as you leave. You go as far as the church, which you pass on your right. You reach a small square. The town hall is there. You can’t get lost. In any case, there are the flags.”

  The Café Owner left. The man had told him that there would be no point in coming to tidy up. He would cope on his own. He put down his bag without opening it, sat down on a bed, and lit a cigarette. From his pocket he took a flat silver-plated flask and took a long swig. He smoked as he looked at the photograph. He continued to gaze at it and, having stubbed out his butt in a yellow ashtray provided by a brand of aperitif, he unhooked the frame and tossed it on top of the cupboard.

  XIII

  THE DOCTOR WAS THERE WHEN THE MAN ARRIVED AT THE town hall. The man greeted him and said hello to the Secretary. He wanted to talk to the Mayor and when she asked him in what capacity and why, he leaned over the counter that separated her from him and whispered a few words in her ear that the Doctor did not hear but which immediately caused her to adopt a solemn expression, to look at the visitor apprehensively and to walk over to the Mayor’s office where she knocked three times, waited, checked her appearance, tucked in a fold of her blouse that had come away from her skirt, replaced her large breasts in the cups of her brassiere, patted her hair, and turned toward the man, closing the door behind her once the Mayor had told her to come in.

  A few seconds later, the Mayor emerged hurriedly from his office, the Secretary at his heels. He walked over to the man, holding out his hand, while displaying an anxious expression that he did not even attempt to conceal. He asked him to follow him. It was only then that he remembered the Doctor.

  “We’ll see each other later. I’ll explain.”

  The man was a policeman, of a particular kind, working on his own and without any real ties. Only discreet missions were entrusted to him, in the course of which he had total freedom of action. He was in a way his own boss and he had plenty of time. What mattered in his eyes and those of his superiors was success, and that always came with a price. The areas in which he intervened were often sensitive and needed tact and patience at one and the same time. The Mayor should not worry, he was not trying to persuade him that he belonged to some sort of secret service, not at all, and as if to prove it he took from his wallet a card on which there was a slightly faded and yellowing photograph of a young man who did not look the least like him but who must have been the Superintendent. He put the card away before the Mayor, who had nonetheless held out his hand, could take it and examine it.

  “As you can see, a simple policeman. You are probably wondering what I am doing here among you?” the Superintendent asked the Mayor, who could feel his body growing taut and his heartbeat slowing down.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t have the least idea?”

  “No,” gasped the Mayor, as he tried to maintain a neutral expression, but he was not gifted as an actor and even an idiot could have seen that a thousand thoughts were buzzing around in his head.

  “Do you really not know?” the Superintendent persisted, putting the Mayor through agonies.

  And as if to add to the councilor’s torment still further, he stood up, and began to walk around the office a little, as if he were at home and, actually, this aimless pacing about, this flowing walk, had no other purpose than to say just that, to make him realize that he was suddenly taking over, that it was he who would now be in charge and who would lead the dance into which he was getting ready to drag the Mayor, and with him the entire island, if he felt like it.

  “Is your visit connected to the Thermal Baths project, perhaps?” the Mayor dared ask.

  “The Thermal Baths? Ah yes, the Thermal Baths, people have already mentioned this to me. Let’s agree, you and me, if it’s simpler for you, that I am actually here for this project. My true purpose must not be known by all of your fellow citizens. You can introduce me in this way if you want to, but you don’t in the least need to. I couldn’t give a damn about your thermal plans, do you understand? I couldn’t care less. I’ve always been appalled by it all. The idea of people taking the waters and walking around all day in bathrobes, drinking large glasses of warm water to get rid of the stink of rotten eggs, depresses me. But if that’s what you want, much good may it do you! Develop your project! Transform your dying island into a clinic for chlorotic ghosts, it’s got nothing to do with me. By the way, you wouldn’t have something to drink, some wine, or something stronger? Yes, a stiff drink would be best. If you don’t mind, of course.”

  Later on, when the Mayor went to see the Doctor to tell him about the interview, he admitted that he had wanted to strangle the Superintendent.

  “He’s like the fledgling crows we used to search for in nests when we were children, do you remember? Insignificant little creatures, pinkish, warm, without grace or beauty, vulnerable. We didn’t expect them to be bad or malevolent, but remember how they started to peck until we bled when we picked them up? Well, this policeman, he’s just like them. Beneath his appearance of a post office employee, he’s a slumbering eel. He’s going to make us sweat time and again, I tell you. We’re not going to get rid of him easily. And his manners. I can’t stand his manners, his voice, what he says. Do you know how he spoke about our island?”

  The Mayor had eventually found a bottle of anisette in a drawer. He wondered how it could have got there, since he never drank it himself. He poured a glass for the Superintendent, and he put two drops in another glass, for himself, out of politeness. He could not bear this sticky drink, with its taste of fennel and medicine. They clinked glasses. The Superintendent tossed his back. He held out his glass again. The Mayor was obliged to refill it.

  “I don’t like water cures, as you have realized, but I don’t like islands, either. A large island is always too small for me. It’s the very idea of an island that is unbearable to me. Being surrounded by water. I’m a continental person. In the morning when I get up I like to know that I only have to get into my car and drive and that, a few days, a few weeks later, I can be in Vienna, in Moscow, in Baku, in Delhi or, why not, Beijing. I only like solid ground. I don’t like water, salty or fresh. I don’t like islands. I don’t like your island, which doesn’t even have the excuse of being a large island. It could be taken off the maps, who would complain? All of you? But do you matter? A few hundred human beings out of seven billion. I leave it to you to work out the percentage. It’s probably a thousand times less than the loss threshold they put up with in any industry. If I come here, it’s out of necessity. But I don’t like being here, just as I’m beginning to feel that I don’t like you. Basically, there’s not very much I do like. I don’t like society. I don’t like my country or the times I live in. I don’t like human beings any more than I like any species of animal. The only thing that I like without reservation, intensely, obsessively, is my job. Yes, I like my job. And then drinking, too. Without being, strictly speaking, an alcoholic, I drink a great deal, and without ever getting drunk. My doctor can’t understand it.”

  He drained his glass once more. He picked up the bottle. Served himself. Sat down with one buttock on the Mayor’s desk.

  “You probably find me badly brought up. Ill-mannered. Tell yourself that I really am and that I couldn’t give a damn. I couldn’t care less what you think or will think of me. I am not here to be liked. I am here to find a bone, to dig it up, to gnaw it a bit to discover the taste, and to take it away if I reckon it is needed by those who sent me here. But I’m annoyed that I have to be here. On an island. I wonder how anyone can live on an island, especially an island like yours, so wretched and so ugly. Dark, bleak, without beauty. I’ve never heard anyone talk about it, I tell you. It’s the arsehole of the world, Mr. Mayor. I’ve been told that mobile phones don’t work, that there is no internet connection. I thought they were teasing me.”

  “It’s b
ecause the island has been classified as a World Heritage Site. No aerial can be erected.”

  “Heritage Site my arse! A heritage site is beautiful! Human beings are beautiful! The men and women I’ve met since I arrived are all afflicted by a malformation, with squints, ears that stick out, or huge noses, limbs that are too long, weird teeth. The café owner I am staying with has six fingers on each hand. Six fingers! Have you ever seen such a thing before? They’re degenerates! You, Mr. Mayor, you look as though you’re not quite perfect. You have the body of a child and the head of an old man.”

  The Mayor confessed to the Doctor, after knocking back his glass of brandy, that he had been within an inch of punching the man in the face. No one had spoken to him like that since primary school and brawls in the playground. But he could not forget that the man was a policeman, and that even a mayor who has been insulted cannot give a hiding to a policeman, and what’s more, one who was a superintendent.

  “I preferred to persuade myself that I had misheard, or that he was totally drunk, despite what he had said. I controlled myself. I told him that in our arsehole of the world, as he called it, we were not actually cut off from everything. We have television.”

  “Big deal! Television! We’re in the twenty-first century! Wake up! Do you think you can live cut off from the world? Well, as it happens it’s the twenty-first century that brings me here.”

  Then the Superintendent launched into a frenetic tirade. He spoke to the Mayor for half an hour, draining the bottle of anisette, and the Mayor began to wonder what this maniac, who had stepped right out of a performance by a clown devised by a lunatic, was driving at.

  “People never really know what they have above their heads. For thousands of years, they put God there. This suited them. They were down below. They sweated blood and tears. And up above, there was God on His cloud, who created them, watched over them, saved them, or damned them. And then man thought he was clever. He got rid of God. Tossed Him in the dustbin. Spent a little while intoxicated by this minor murder he had performed, and then became aware of the void he had created. Man’s unique characteristic is always to act too quickly. Always. It began to alarm him, all this empty space. He tried to heat up some old dishes, but everything had a burnt taste. At that point, he became really frightened. He took refuge in the only place that remained to him: Progress. Mind you, it has existed since time immemorial. Give a man fire, some iron, and a hammer, and in a matter of seconds he will forge a chain to shackle another man who looks just like his brother and keep him on a leash, or use a spearhead to kill him, rather than make a wheel or a musical instrument. The wheel and the trumpet, they came later, much later than the chain and the spearhead, and in the meantime a great many people had already been slaughtered. And when the wheel was invented, it was only so that the slaughter could be taken farther afield, like the sailing ship, so that the whole world could benefit from it, and the trumpet was only used to cover up the cries of those who were being murdered and to celebrate the butchery. Full stop. And today we have the satellites!”

  The Mayor listened in astonishment to the man’s long, angry diatribe, wondering whether he was dreaming, whether he was in a novel, whether it was the middle of the night and he was in his bed, with his wife beside him in her long pink nightdress, and her aroma of soap and lavender, and the wind from the sea humming in the narrow streets outside, in the throes of a nightmare such as he had from time to time and which left him dubious and pensive in the morning.

  “I even pinched myself. But no, I was not asleep: I really was in my office with this insane person who had appeared from nowhere, who had left me in peace during the sixty years I have lived so far and whose existence I was thankfully unaware of, who was talking to me about satellites, who was trying to convince me that God, compared to satellites, is cat piss. That, thanks to the satellites, the notion of God has been raised by ten to the power of fourteen.”

  The Doctor was smiling. His smile made the Mayor feel even more irritated, even though he knew that this smile meant nothing. It did not mean that the Doctor was smiling at him. It was his own way of displaying his face, just as he, the Mayor, displayed his with an expression of continuous annoyance and noticeable irritation, including during those moments—rare, it’s true—when he was happy and relaxed.

  It has to be admitted that the Mayor was extremely patient with the Superintendent, not interrupting him at any point while he was delivering a verbal outpouring about power and the brilliance of satellites, in which scientific properties were merged with metaphysical meanderings. The earth was being tapped. The world under surveillance. Naïve and credulous men, idealistic and blind, were taking to the streets to demonstrate in democracies, against the restriction of basic freedoms, for the right to a private life, and other bits of similar nonsense. They signed petitions, wrote opinion columns, questioned their members of parliament in this way, while the least of their actions and gestures, their movements, their remarks, were being observed at every moment, and it would require a great deal of money and political willpower that was not yet in evidence for the life of each one of them to be registered and for the tiniest details to be filed away. For practical purposes. One can imagine which ones.

  Following this, the Superintendent, after a sad glance at the totally empty bottle of anisette that he had thrown in the wastepaper basket, came back and sat down opposite the Mayor, thrust his hand into his briefcase, and pulled out a wad of twenty or so pages which he tossed onto the desk with a casual flick of his wrist.

  “They were only photocopies. Photocopies of color photographs. To begin with, I didn’t understand a thing. On the first ones, there was some blue, some ochre strips with irregular contours, some darker points of unequal sizes, and some red lines that linked certain of these features. You would have thought it was a reproduction of an abstract painting.

  “On the next ones, there was less blue and more dark points, some red lines and some very small dots circled in green. That’s when I recognized the open jaw of the Dog. They were aerial shots, taken from his famous satellites no doubt, of the archipelago, of all the islands, and of our own, of course, which I had never seen like that before, vertically, as though I had suddenly become that eye of God of which the Superintendent had spoken.

  “Some of them are fiendishly precise. You can make out the vineyards, the houses, the church. You can see wine growers, peasants in the orchards, and groups of men and women at the harbor. Other photographs show boats at sea. I recognized some people who come from here, and there were others whom I didn’t know.”

  The Mayor paused for a moment, gave the Doctor an irritated glance, knotted his fingers, and resumed.

  “And then there are boats that don’t even deserve that name, like a sort of barge with a cargo that I originally took for timber, like planks pressed one against the other. You can’t even see the cockpit. You have the sense that a barge was loaded and that it was launched without anyone bothering what would become of it afterward. One of the photos of these small boats made me shudder because I suddenly understood: what I first took for planks were men. Men standing, or lying down, huddled together, crammed into old tubs, and some of these tubs were being towed by boats, by fishing boats.”

  The Mayor waited for the Doctor to react. For him to say something. For him to help him. But the Doctor remained silent, sipped his glass of brandy and rolled a cigar between his plump fingers, pausing to light it, delaying a little longer the pleasure of drawing the flame to it, of inhaling the first puffs, of tasting the haze of warm smoke in his mouth which would leave its flavor of forests, of damp earth, and dead leaves for a long time.

  “You’re not saying anything?”

  “What do you expect me to say?”

  “Do you understand, at least?”

  “I think I’m beginning to understand.”

  “And doesn’t that frighten you?”

  The Doctor raised his eyebrows. Scratched his mustache, which at this time of
day, the very beginning of the afternoon, was still extremely black.

  “Don’t take it as bravado, but I don’t know what could frighten me. Fear is a sensation I no longer experience. I’m not bragging about it. I didn’t even have to make an effort for it to be like this. The last time I was frightened was when my wife was ill. And fear didn’t help me at all. It didn’t stop the illness. It didn’t make my wife less unhappy. It didn’t prevent her from suffering and it didn’t relieve me of my grief when she died.”

  The Mayor was suddenly annoyed that the Doctor should mention his wife. He could once more see her gentle features, her large dark eyes in her pale face. He felt irritated by his own oversensitiveness, and continued angrily:

  “But I’m not asking you whether you are frightened on your own behalf! But whether you’re frightened for our sake, for the community, for the island, for what we have done?”

  The Doctor could not stand it any longer. He lit his cigar. He did so ceremoniously, for he considered it to be one of the most solemn things that existed in his life. A protocol, or an homage. Or both of them combined. He gave a few puffs, exhaled the smoke, and smiled even more.

  “And why should I be frightened for our sake, as you say?”

  “I don’t believe you have really understood. I thought you had guessed. Do you know what is on one of these bloody photographs taken by his wretched satellites?”

  “Judging by the way your eyes are trying to pop out of their sockets and your neck is swelling up, I’m going to know very soon.”

  “Well, we are there. All of us! That famous morning, on the beach! You can recognize us perfectly. As though one of the seagulls flying overhead had pressed the shutter release. It’s frightening! You can make out the Old Woman, her dog, Swordy, America, me! Do you realize that these blasted things fly at hundreds of kilometers an hour in the sky and it’s as though they were watching us through the keyhole! I can’t get over it! Bloody hell!”