Dog Island

by Philippe Claudel

  The brevity of the Superintendent’s life resembled the lives of the three washed-up bodies. For them, ironically, it was the moment of their deaths that caused them to exist for the islanders, so much so that they live on still and always will, unbearable and accusatory, with every passing hour.

  XXVI

  THE MAYOR WAS STANDING IN FRONT OF THE DOCTOR. Both of them were silent. Both of them were on their feet. The Doctor was no longer smiling. The Mayor had not often seen him like this. Without his smile. Without the ridiculous dye with which he daubed his mustache. Without his elegant crumpled linen suit. It was Tuesday morning. It was not yet seven o’clock. The Doctor was wearing casual trousers and an old sweater over green pajamas that protruded at the ankles and wrists. The Mayor had put on a gray dressing gown. Gray like his hair. Gray like his skin. Gray like his eyes.

  Two statues standing side by side, with a huge gap separating them, apparently unaware of the small space between them in the beautiful room inside the Mayor’s house.

  “And those two men on the bridge, did you recognize them?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Certain.”

  “That shit must have other photographs. Photographs in which they could be recognized.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why weren’t they shown to us?”

  “So that the suspicion should be complete. So that no one should be spared. Those two men, they could be anybody. It could be you. Your neighbor. Anyone here. Why not me? That’s what he wanted. To ruin all our days for us. Ruin our lives. So that we all look at one another wondering who did that.”

  “The bastard!”

  “Make sure it’s the right bastard.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  The Doctor thought before he answered. And his response was the one you find in books, too well phrased, too striking and true for him to have been able to dream it up on this bedraggled morning. He had probably spent the whole night polishing it up, as sleep evaded him.

  “We shall all have to live with the suspicion, and do so until the hour of our death.”

  The Mayor weighed up his remark. He looked down at the floor. He replied in a quiet voice:

  “But you, you know me. You know very well I’m incapable of such a monstrous thing. Throwing wretched people into the sea!”

  “I know you,” replied the Doctor, by which he meant everything as well as its opposite, but the Mayor was happy to twist the Doctor’s words in the way that suited him. He had hoped for absolution. The Doctor continued:

  “But how would you describe what you did to the Teacher?”

  During the night, the Brau had once again reminded people of its existence. It had rumbled, a very long rumbling, not very distinct and almost pleasant, in fact, just as the caress of a massage machine can be when it soothes the soles of one’s feet, or one’s painful vertebrae.

  During this astonishing morning, while the Mayor and the Doctor stood there in silence, the Brau began to rumble again, but this time impatiently. It was a sort of short bark that caused the walls and the furniture to move, the doors to creak, and three plates to fall off the Mayor’s dresser. They shattered on the ground between the feet of the two men, who were wearing identical slippers. They gazed at the scattered pieces of china, the sharp corners and white rim which had been suddenly caught in the light and looked phosphorescent. Then they gazed at one another. Each wondered whether something else had not just been shattered irretrievably between them.

  They spoke about the Teacher once more and of the fate that had been agreed for him. They had lit a flame that would not easily be put out. Dozens of men and women had continued to sleep in the town square, impromptu guardians of a prisoner who they believed was accountable to them and on whom they demanded to pass judgment, and on whom, through the window of the cellar where he was being held, they had not stopped heaping insults.

  “Could you take another look at your report on the girl?”

  “All I did was write the truth. She hasn’t been a virgin for a long while.”

  “I know that as well as you do. But I also know that the Teacher has got nothing to do with it.”

  “What did you promise the girl?”

  “Nothing. She loathes the Teacher. He stands for everything she lacks at home, gentleness, affection, goodness. She must have dreamed of being in his daughters’ shoes, but she’s Furry’s daughter. Life is a lottery, as we all know. It’s enough to make people want to do harm. Some begin early. Childhood is not always a bed of roses.”

  “It’s up to you to persuade her to tell the truth now. You alone created this situation.”

  “I did it for all of us.”

  “No one asked you to do so, but if that’s what you like to think . . . In any case, there will always be people here who will continue to believe the Teacher is guilty, whatever you do, whatever you say. He has to leave. Quickly. The island is no longer the place for him. That’s what you really wanted, isn’t it?”

  “The island was never the place for him. It’s hardly the place for us any longer.”

  The Mayor bent down and began picking up the broken bits of plate.

  “Are you planning to stick them together?”

  “Why say such stupid things?”

  They were obliged to call on the Teacher in order to release him. The Doctor agreed to accompany the Mayor. They gave each other a brief moment to wash and change, and also to enable the Mayor to call at Furry’s home and talk to the girl. They met afterward outside the church, opposite the town hall, in the already intense heat of the day that was barely a few hours old. The sky no longer existed, lost as it was in a flat leadenness consisting of smooth, high clouds which the sun had heated without really showing itself. They could hear the ferry’s siren as the ship left port, taking the Superintendent away forever.

  When those who had camped out on the square caught sight of the Mayor and the Doctor, they approached them. The night and their hatred had contorted their faces, making them look like old scraps of crumpled paper. The men’s cheeks were dotted with black hairs. The women’s had taken on the color of dishwater in the midst of which two red eyes and parched lips revealed abstract features. They all smelled and were all tainted with the same fever that made them long for death; a fever that had probably plagued those who watched at scaffolds once upon a time, who, as the heads fell off and the blood gushed, were suddenly provided with a brutal direction to their lives, a lungful of power and pleasure.

  The Mayor’s words did very little to calm them. In a way, they deprived them of the person who, within a few hours, had become the reason for their existence. They had been robbed. They had been pickpocketed. What did it matter to them to know that the girl’s remarks had been misunderstood, that the Doctor was no longer sure of anything, that the Superintendent himself had exonerated the accused?

  Certain words create walls that other words never manage to break down. The Mayor told them to go back to their homes. But at home there was nothing but a daily newspaper crammed with tedium and rehashed items, monotonous and already familiar, which had already done the rounds and made them feel ill. Whereas there, on the town square, they suddenly felt different. It’s very tough to come back down from one’s dreams.

  The Mayor took the precaution of locking the door of the town hall as soon as they were inside. He slowly climbed the main stairs to his office, where he made some coffee. The Doctor watched him. Neither of them said a word. Their minds were filled with all the images that the Superintendent had planted in them. Then, still without a word being exchanged, they went down to the cellar. The Mayor held a cup of coffee in one hand and a bunch of keys in the other. The Doctor was fingering his first cigar, which he had not yet lit. He had not yet managed to display his well-known smile on his plump, round face. Just as he had given up dyeing his mustache. Paradoxically, this made him look younger and more frail.

  The Mayor knocked at the
door of the cellar, not so much to obtain permission to enter as to warn the Teacher of their arrival, perhaps so that he would have time to rearrange his clothing. He put in the key and fiddled with the lock. He pushed open the door ready to greet him, but the words remained stuck in his throat: at the foot of the makeshift bed, his eyes closed and his face slightly blue, lay the Teacher.

  No one could have been more dead than he.

  XXVII

  WHAT IS SHAME, AND HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE AFFECTED by it? Is it shame that connects men to humanity? Or does it merely underline the fact that they are irreversibly removed from it?

  They had killed the Teacher. It has to be said. They did not kill him with their own hands, of course, but they had constructed his death, in the way that one builds a wall, stone by stone. Each one of them had brought his own stone, or prepared the mortar, pushed the wheelbarrow, carried a bucket of water, held the trowel, poured a little sand into cement that was too watery.

  His death was a shared deed.

  His wife was clearly not mistaken when, on the following night, a night of pain and incredulity, she knocked with both fists on every door, not so much in order that they should be opened to her, as to indicate that, behind every door that remained closed, there was a guilty person inside. She spat on every door, not omitting a single one of them, as she yelled wolf-like cries in every small street of the town, pouring out her fury in a language that did not consist of words but of death rattles. Her two little daughters followed in silence, their faces pale and calm, like a tragic escort, holding each other’s hand.

  Only one door opened to her knocking. That of the Old Woman. The Old Woman, who stood before the Teacher’s wife, who said nothing to her, who looked her in the eye, who said nothing when the woman spat in her face, who still said nothing when the woman slapped her, five times, slaps that were like punches, which caused the Old Woman to stagger but not to fall down. And the Old Woman continued to stand there, with spittle on her forehead and cheeks, the reddish marks of the blows on her temples and cheekbones, and an eyelid that swelled up and turned violet, while the woman and her two little girls resumed their implacable procession and the night gulped them down like bitter milk.

  Had the Old Woman opened her door in atonement? So that, in this way, she alone could represent the island? So as to take the place of each and every one of them. She had offered herself up to the woman’s fury and her blows, for the sake of everyone. In their place. In their name. But the Old Woman may not have been bothered about anything other than herself; her gesture had no hint of nobility about it, and if she had opened the door, it was only to show that she herself was very much alive and all right, and was not blaming herself for anything, to let people know that she had both her feet on the ground and that the fuss about the Teacher’s wife did not affect her, and would not prevent her from living.

  When the Doctor hurried over to the corpse, he could not help noticing how cold and stiff it was. The Teacher had been dead for many hours. His blond, curly hair contrasted sharply with the color of his skin, which was not pale, but had a slightly bluish tinge with blotches here and there, which made the Doctor realize that the wretched man had died from asphyxiation.

  The thing responsible for this stood immediately beside the body, huge and parallelepipedal, haughty in its metal corset, its jaws open wide above its throat filled with flying sparks, diffusing its carbon monoxide breath, invisible and odorless, around the dim space of the enclosed cellar.

  The Mayor, who had also realized what had happened, rushed over to the basement window, which had been completely obstructed by a thick blanket and plastic sacks. The Teacher had probably done this in order to try to muffle the insults that the crowd outside was yelling at him, as though directly into his ear. He was far from being an idiot. He was aware of the boiler being there and of the dangers of gas, but it is difficult to believe that he should consciously have acted in this way and chosen to die like this. He was weak. He was exhausted. His thoughts were no longer clear, and whose would have been in his position? He did not want to die. He had not assessed the consequences of what he was doing.

  The Doctor pushed the door wide open. The air, which had been poisoned by the fumes from the boiler, immediately cleared. The Mayor gazed at the corpse, incredulous and panic-stricken. He was probably telling himself that the Teacher was proving to be even more of a nuisance dead than he had been alive. That was his triumph, basically, because the dead, whatever anybody says, are always right.

  The Secretary, who had just arrived, was sent to find the Priest. She was made up and fragrant as though she was going to a ball, but nothing was said to her other than that the Priest was needed. He came immediately. Curiously, not a single bee accompanied him. He did not seem surprised, but he looked profoundly saddened. He stood in silence before the corpse, which had been put back on the bed. He did not say any prayers, make the sign of the cross, or bless the Teacher’s body. After a long and heavy pause, he turned to the Doctor and the Mayor:

  “Can you smell him now?”

  “Who?” asked the Mayor.

  “Him,” said the Priest, pointing to the dead man. “Your new lodger. He is here,” he continued, tapping his skull with his forefinger. “In each of your heads. He has just moved in. He’s not going to leave. From now on, he will remain with you until the end of your lives. Day and night. He won’t be at all noisy, but you will never be able to evict him. You’ll have to get used to it. Good luck.”

  And having wiped his thick spectacles with his cassock, he left them both there, to ruminate on these remarks from a real estate agent–philosopher, before going to inform those who did not yet know that, during the night, they had become a widow and orphans.

  XXVIII

  THERE IS A RUSSIAN NOVEL THAT DESCRIBES A CITY deserted by all its inhabitants. We are not told the reason why they have fled. The author remains enigmatic: war, disease, nuclear incident. We know nothing. We never will. The time period is not specified, either. The city is undamaged, but empty. The doors of the houses are not closed. Anyone can go inside.

  The author writes a series of long descriptions that can be boring. Life has receded from the city like a wave drawn away by the backwash. In many of the houses the table has been set, in the kitchen or the dining room. Bread has been laid out. Water in the jugs. The dishes are in saucepans, placed over extinguished burners.

  The food has not rotted, and it is as though their departure took place only a minute earlier. Here and there a chair has been knocked over or a cupboard left open, both of which are evidence of the hurried exodus of the inhabitants.

  Such is the first part of the novel, which takes readers into a great many streets, and leads them inside a great many houses. A strange atmosphere then takes hold, like that of a dream, a curious dream where we are not sure whether it is pleasant or disturbing.

  The reader finds himself almost drifting off, but continues his visit over the course of a hundred pages or so; and when suddenly, on entering the corridor of a building at the invitation of the author, he discovers a man busily trying to open a letter box, he experiences a profound shock. Everything until now had been the setting and the surroundings, inert things, and here, all of a sudden, was a man. A man busily engaged in a simple task, collecting his mail.

  But the man is struggling to open the door of the letter box. He does not have the key. We tell ourselves that he may be trying the wrong letter box, but he perseveres, even though he still has not managed to open it. In the end he gives up, goes upstairs, enters the first apartment, and walks around it. Then he enters the second, and then the next one.

  All of a sudden we wonder who he is and what he can be doing here. He is not a thief. He is not stealing anything, even though he frequently touches things, such as the fabrics, and picks up picture frames and stares at the photographs. His face remains expressionless.

  As he leaves the building and as he enters another house, he comes upon another man. Or rather,
the reader discovers this second man, because the first one does not appear to see him, just as the second one doesn’t see the first. They jostle one another, but take no notice of the other person.

  And the novel continues, some women appear, some children, old people and other men. The town fills up with this new throng of people, silent and speechless, who have the distinctive feature of consisting of individuals who are totally indifferent to one another and are invisible to others. Only the reader can see them.

  Then he understands. Or rather, the author lets him understand. He makes him realize that they are all dead. That none of them see one another. That the town has become the city of the dead. We don’t know whether there are still any people who are alive somewhere. But however that may be, this particular town is no longer for them. It belongs solely to the dead. They have chosen to come here, if not to live here then at least to frequent it. It thus becomes a dreadful town. A town that is impossible to live in. On closing the book, the reader feels frightened.

  On the night following the death of the Teacher, the little town was deserted. Its inhabitants driven away. Buried. Vanished. Disbanded within the thick walls of their houses. The doors on which the Widow had pounded with her fists, her fists and her yells, all shut.

  And today, the island has become the town in the Russian novel. The soil is dead, due to the incandescent vomiting of the Brau, the waters are stagnant and contain nothing but the wreckage of boats. The hours, which bring neither joy nor hope, are lifeless. Only the dead now make themselves at home, in the streets, in the houses, in the squares, around the harbor. The Teacher, the three young black men who were drowned, their fellows in their thousands, countless numbers, swallowed up by the waves or pushed overboard. The town is too small for all of them. The island is too small. They walk along the streets, dripping wet and silent, without hatred or anger. They are unaware of the others, but the others see them. They remind them who they are and who they would not have wished to be.