Dog Island

by Philippe Claudel

  That autumn, the grapes that had been laid out to dry turned into ash-colored berries. When they were squeezed, a dark juice was emitted that had a taste of burnt wood. The wine made from them was second-rate.

  Before Christmas, one family left the island: the father, the skipper of the small company that the unproductive S’tunella had ruined, the mother, and the children. They were the first. There would be many others.

  America, who had lost all his vines, which had been burned before being cut, went and took a job on the mainland. It is said that he now looks after the paths in a former zoo. Perhaps the one that the Superintendent visited when he was a child.

  They discovered Swordy hanging one morning in the cold storage room where he and the Mayor had laid out the bodies of the drowned. He looked like a large stalactite, such as one sees beneath the roofs of chalets in illustrated books of Norse fables, but as one drew closer to the stalactite, one noticed his bulging expression beneath the thick layer of ice, his mouth slightly ajar, and his tongue, which was sticking out.

  He had written a brief note to explain his departure and it was attached to his jacket with a fishhook. But when they let the ice melt around his body, the water diluted the ink, and all that remained of his message were the first words, “I know who,” and that was all. He knew. He knew who. So what. It had not saved him.

  The Old Woman, without asking anybody anything, started her classes again. Her knife-like silhouette and her blank expression could be seen through the school windows. Boys and girls listened to her, fearful and embarrassed. She taught them about a lost world of which they did not understand a thing. Many of them probably thought of the Teacher, in a mood of regret, their youthful memories recalling his smile and his gentle voice, and all the current knowledge that he knew how to impart to them. Mila probably thought about him, too. The Doctor came across her occasionally in the streets, her father, with his false hair askew, always drunk, holding her by the hand not in the way one should hold one’s young daughter, but in the way you would lead a woman or a victim to your home. The Doctor looked away.

  Then very soon, with the departure of most of the families, there were no more children. So there was no more school. The Old Woman buried herself away in her home, with her dog, which had become so old that it could manage only to drag itself about outside a little with its front feet, in the courtyard, and both of them waited there. They weren’t sure what for.

  There were no more boats at the quay. The waters of the archipelago were well and truly dead. The fish had fled from them as though they had become unhealthy. The fishermen must have gone into self-imposed exile, to follow shoals elsewhere, far away. Far from the island. Only the eldest among them, those whose lives were already over, stayed behind.

  All the crops disappeared beneath the streams of slow and dough-like lava that the Brau vomited out over two days the following spring, driving it as far as the doors of the first houses, reshaping the landscape, covering it with a thick and furrowed coat that caused the entire geography of the past to disappear.

  The few vines and orchards on Ross Hill that had escaped the streams of magma dried up during the weeks that followed and never turned green again. The Brau drank their sap, charred their roots, and poisoned them. All that remained of what had been the splendor and richness of the island for centuries were the rows of naked vinestocks on the bare hillock, gray stumps eroded by the termites, and leafless bushes on which even the sparrows did not deign to perch. The little town was sealed off by high, dark, congealed folds, resembling another sea, harsh and dead, sterile for eternity.

  The Priest died not long after his bees. He watched his swarms perish for lack of flowers from which to gather nectar and pollen. He filled the pockets of his cassock with all the dried-up bodies with their delicate wings that he found by the hives every morning. He returned to his presbytery in tears. He lay the bodies on his kitchen table. They formed a pale-brown mound. He spent his last days beside this chitinous pyramid, watching over the dead bees, praying for the salvation of their souls, for he had begun to believe in God once more, ever since the events that had occurred, interpreting them as the sign of a curse sent from On High to strike down all the inhabitants of the island, him first of all, who had enjoyed himself over so many years in the constant doubt of his Garden of Olives.

  After three days had passed, he crammed all the dead bees into his frying pan in large shovelfuls, and burned them. When this was done, he lay down on his bed, fully dressed. He died during the night, his hands clasping his rosary and his missal, which he had placed on his stomach, with his thick-lensed glasses over his closed eyes.

  No doubt there is a place in the Paradise in which he still believed a little, assigned to women’s high-jump contests, a curve in the stadium where he will be standing on the terraces, accompanied by a few bees, admiring for all eternity the shapely legs and slim waists of the young women dispatched too early, and who attempt, in graceful and sensuous arched movements, to topple over death in order to rejoin life.

  The church was closed; it had become a strange sort of ark, with its skeleton of a boat, but one in which no animal’s cry was ever heard, and where Noah continually failed to appear.

  Yet the Flood had well and truly taken place.

  XXXI

  THERE WE ARE. WE’RE ALMOST DONE. I HAVE APPROACHED the edge of the abyss to tell the story. It’s about to conclude. Creeping backward, I shall fade away.

  I shall return to the shadows.

  I shall dissolve myself there.

  I shall have left you the words. I will take away the silences.

  I shall disappear.

  I had promised you to be no more than the voice.

  Nothing else.

  All the rest is human and concerns you.

  It is not my problem.

  Time has passed on the island but it has sorted out nothing. That is not its function. Ovid wrote that time destroys things, but he was wrong. Only men destroy things, and they destroy men, and destroy the world of men. Time watches them do and undo. It flows indifferently, just as the lava flowed from the crater of the Brau one March evening, cloaking the island in darkness and driving the last living people from it.

  Just as, in former times, a black armband was placed on a person in mourning, the earth now wears the color of the dead, and that of funerals. This will endure for thousands of years. One way or another, there has to be a punishment.

  The Doctor spent several months in bed, with a powerful fever. Yet he showed no sign of pathology. He was slightly delirious. His mind was confused. He shivered even when it was very hot outside. He treated himself with herbal teas of thyme and small glasses of warm brandy to which he added sugar. He had hypnotic dreams, either filled with visions or very dark like the empty spaces of the universe.

  He got better. Everything returned to normal again. His first visit was to the Mayor. One morning.

  The Doctor found the Mayor changed. He had suddenly grown older. His complexion had become yellow. His gray hair had turned white. You would have thought that it had snowed on him. He had never been very stout but he now floated in his trousers and his shirts. He had sold his boats and closed his warehouses. He was still Mayor, but Mayor of what?

  He poured coffee into the cups. The Doctor could hear the Mayor’s wife preparing the meal in the room next door. They wanted him to stay for breakfast as usual, but as usual he would refuse and would transport his large body home to feed himself on a little bread, olives, and solitude.

  “Do you know the dream I woke myself up with today?” the Doctor said in order to fill the silence.

  “How do you expect me to know? I’m not inside your head.”

  “Fortunately for you. You’re lucky.”

  “Would you prefer to be inside mine?”

  The Mayor had spoken with an air of sad defiance. The Doctor replied with a smile, with sadness, too.

  “It was a dream that was just like a nightmare, but which wa
s not frightening, even though it was filled with horror. You and I had been summoned, I don’t know by whom, to go to the beach, as on that fateful morning long ago. And we arrived there together, you had called to collect me, or the other way round, I’m not sure and it matters little. We had tried to run or to walk as quickly as possible. We were out of breath, I smoke too much, I’m too fat, my feet hurt me, and you’re just skin and bones, with no strength. We made a strange couple of runners.

  “The weather was gray. The sky very low. The Brau invisible in its cloak of clouds, and the sea appeared irritated, with small, nervous waves that smacked into one another and struck the shingle. There were some large stranded shapes, lifeless and tossing about, perhaps four, five, or six of them, we could not see very well. There was a sort of drizzle that prevented us from seeing clearly, and a mist, too, that came from the volcano, a vapor that smelled of kitchen stenches and sewers.

  “We didn’t need to speak to one another. Each of us knew what the other was thinking about. Each of us said to himself, there, that’s it, it’s beginning again, so it will never ever end. And we continued walking. We drew closer to the shapes. We saw that, alas, we had not been mistaken, that once again these were drowned people, young black men, who looked as though they were brothers of the original three drowned men, who were just as young as them, just as dead as them, just as peaceful in their death.

  “We dragged them to the shore. What was it we had done to deserve this? Or what had we not done? We began to weep. I had never seen you weep. And I no longer remembered that I could weep myself. When we had finished laying them out on the shingle, and we had looked out to sea, we saw through our tears that streams of other corpses were emerging, and that some of them were already washing up at our feet. Then we began again, we pulled them up onto the shore. We laid them out alongside the others.

  “And the sea still brought in other drowned people. There was no end to it. We were exhausted. We were still weeping. Our arms and our backs hurt. We were breathless. We weren’t the only ones. Without our realizing it, all the inhabitants of the island had gradually appeared and all of them were dragging corpses, and all of them were weeping just as we were weeping. At every moment the sea was steering toward our feet dozens of corpses that were of an age at which it should be forbidden to die, and they all had the same solemn expression on their faces, one that entered our souls and asked that we be held accountable.

  “The hours passed. It was not morning. It was not evening. There was no longer any night. There were only these drowned bodies which the sea never stopped setting down in front of us all, you, me, and all the others on the island, and we dragged them onto the beach until eventually we could no longer see a single pebble; the beach had become a vast open-air cemetery, a cold chapel of rest, and there we all were, the inhabitants of the island, of this island which is the only one of all the islands in the Dog Archipelago to be inhabited, inhabited by wretched, ridiculous, old, selfish men, lost and in tears.”

  The Mayor had listened to the Doctor without interruption. There was a long silence. He raised his coffee cup to his lips and drank from it, wincing slightly, while continuing to look him in the eye. The sound of the clock behind him seemed to have grown louder. This gave him a headache. He continued to gaze at the Doctor, and he began to shake his head slightly, as one does in the presence of someone you feel sorry for because it distresses you to realize that he is not quite in his right mind.

  “But my dear fellow,” the Mayor eventually murmured to the Doctor, who was waiting anxiously for him to say something, “why do you call it a dream?”

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  PHILIPPE CLAUDEL is a university lecturer, novelist, film director, and scriptwriter. He has written fourteen novels that have been translated into several languages. In 2009 his film “I’ve Loved You So Long,” which draws upon Claudel’s eleven years teaching in prisons, won the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language. Among his novels, Grey Souls won the Prix Renaudot in France, the American Gumshoe Award, and the Swedish Martin Beck Award. Brodeck won the Independent Foreign Fiction Award in 2010.

  EUAN CAMERON is a literary translator from the French and a former publisher. His previous translations include works by Patrick Modiano, Didier Decoin, and Paul Morand, as well as biographies of Marcel Proust and Irène Némirovsky. His debut novel, Madeleine, was published in 2019.

  Also by Philippe Claudel in English Translation

  The Investigation

  Brodeck

  By a Slow River