Dog Island

by Philippe Claudel

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2018 Editions Stock

  Translation copyright © 2020 Euan Cameron

  Cover design by Lauren Harms

  Cover photograph by Vincent Massieye / Eyeem

  Author photograph © DR

  Cover © 2021 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Little, Brown and Company

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  First ebook edition: August 2021

  Published in the United Kingdom by MacLehose Press, November 2020

  Dog Island was originally published in France by Editions Stock in 2018 as L’Archipel du Chien

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-70525-7

  E3-20210521-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  Discover More

  About the Author and Translator

  Also by Philippe Claudel in English Translation

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  Tap here to learn more.

  Let me know at what time I shall be carried on board.

  LAST WORDS WRITTEN BY ARTHUR RIMBAUD

  Be happy if you are allowed to breathe again after grieving And blessed if death relieves you of all sorrow.

  GIACOMO LEOPARDI

  I

  YOU LUST AFTER GOLD AND SCATTER ASHES.

  You tarnish beauty, destroy innocence.

  You allow great streams of mud to flow everywhere. Hatred is your nourishment, indifference your compass. You are creatures of slumber, forever sleeping, even when you think you are awake. You are the fruit of a listless age. Your anxieties are ephemeral, butterflies that are quickly hatched, and immediately charred by the light of day. Your hands mold your life into a drab, dry clay. You are consumed by your loneliness. Your selfishness makes you flabby. You turn your backs on your brothers and you surrender your souls. Your natures fester on neglect.

  How will future centuries judge your generation?

  The story we are about to discover is as real as you may be. It takes place here, just as it could have happened there. It would be too easy to think that it happened elsewhere. The names of the people who live in this place matter little. We could change them. Put your own names in their place. You are so alike, products of the same immutable mold.

  I am sure that sooner or later you will ask a legitimate question: have you really witnessed what you are telling us? I reply: yes, I did witness it. Just as you did, although you did not wish to look. You never want to look. I am the one who reminds you. I am the intruder. I see everything. I know everything. But I am nothing and I fully intend to remain so. Neither man nor woman. Quite simply, I am the voice. It is from the darkness that I shall tell you the story.

  The events that I shall relate occurred yesterday. A few days ago. A year or two ago. Not more. I say “yesterday” but it seems to me that I ought to say “today.” Mankind does not like yesterday. People live in the present and dream of the days to come.

  The story takes place on an island. An ordinary island. Neither large nor small. Not very far from the country upon which it is dependent, but which has forgotten all about it, and close to a different continent from the one it belongs to, but of which it takes no notice.

  One of the Dog Islands.

  When you search for this archipelago on the maps, you do not notice the Dog at first glance. It is hidden. The children have trouble finding it. The teacher whom they have already nicknamed the Old Woman was amused by their efforts, then by their surprise when, with the tip of her ruler, she sketched the outlines of its jaw. The Dog suddenly emerged. They were frightened by it. It was like being with certain people whose character you do not really know when you first spend time with them, who one day bite off your head.

  The Dog is there, drawn on the flimsy paper. Mouth open, teeth bared. Ready to tear to pieces a long, pale patch of cobalt blue which the map has sprinkled with figures indicating the depths and some arrows that show the tides. Its jaws are two curved islands, its tongue also forms an island, and so do its teeth, some of them pointed, others massive and square-shaped, others again tapered like daggers. Its teeth, therefore, are islands. Among them is the one where this story takes place, the only inhabited one, at the very end of the lower jaw. Right beside the vast blue prey that does not know that it is coveted.

  Life on the island derives from the volcano that dominates it and which for thousands of years has spewed out its lava and its fertile scoria. It is known as the Brau. The name has a barbaric ring. It used to frighten the little ones, once upon a time, when the island delighted to the cries and laughter of children. Nowadays, after its last angry outburst, the Brau is digesting. Its crater is usually shrouded in a blanket of mist. It is allowing itself a very long siesta. A few rumbles from time to time. Muffled noises. The restless tremors of a slumberer, who shudders and goes back to sleep.

  The rest of the skeleton of the Dog is a mass of tiny islets, the majority of them minute, like crumbs of bread left on the tablecloth at the end of a meal. Deserted. By contrast, the one we are about to discover has pounded to the throbbing of men’s blood. It lingers there, like a piece of the world that has fallen into the azure sea. In its earliest days, there would probably have been a population of fishermen, in the time of the Phoenicians, descendants of pirates and thieves whose boats had run aground there, or who had hidden ashore to count their spoils.

  There are vines, olive groves, caper orchards. Each cultivated acre bears witness to the stubbornness of those ancestors who patiently snatched it from the volcano. On this island you are either a farmer or a fisherman. There are no other choices. Young people frequently want neither the one nor the other. They leave. The departures are never followed by homecomings. That is how it is and always has been.

  The Dog spews out inhumane seasons. Summer dries up the people and strikes them down. Winter chills
them to the bone. Bitter wind and cold rain. Months of shivering lethargy. Their houses have been around the world. In photographs. In magazines. Without even asking, architects, ethnologists, and historians have decided that they belong to the heritage of mankind. This made the islanders laugh, before it irritated them. They can neither destroy the houses nor convert them.

  Those who do not live there envy them. The idiots. Built of badly pointed lava brick, the houses look like huge huts built by a population of dwarves. They are harsh to live in. Uncomfortable. Dark and rough. You either suffocate or you freeze in them. They surround the islanders and they oppress them. Eventually the islanders come to resemble them.

  The island’s wine is a sweet and heavy red that derives from a variety of grape which grows only here, the marula. The buds of the grapes look like magpies’ eyes: small, black, shiny, and without any bloom. Harvested in about mid-September, the grapes are then laid on the walls of the vineyards and caper orchards, protected from birds by thin nets. They dry there for two weeks before being pressed, then the juice is left to ferment in the darkness of long, narrow cellars that are hewn from the slopes of the Brau.

  When the wine is bottled later, it has taken on the color of bull’s blood. You cannot see the light through it. It is a child of the depths and the belly of the earth. It is the wine of the gods. When you dip your lips into it, it is sunshine and honey that come into your mouth and flow down your throat, as well as the bottomless chasm of the other side of the world. Old people used to say as they drank it that they were simultaneously sucking at the breasts of Aphrodite and of Hades.

  II

  IT WAS A MONDAY MORNING IN SEPTEMBER, ON THE beach, when it all began. It is called the beach, for want of a better term, even though nobody can swim there on account of the reefs and the tide, nor relax on it because it is made up of rough, sharp volcanic shingle.

  The Old Woman walked there every day. The Old Woman was the former teacher. Everyone on the island had passed through her class. She knows all the families. She was born here and she will die here. No one has ever seen her smile. They scarcely know her age. Probably not very far off eighty. Five years previously, she had been obliged to give up the class. From then on she took her daily walk early in the morning, with her dog, a mongrel with melancholy eyes, who liked nothing so much as chasing after the seagulls.

  She was always alone on the beach. Whatever the weather, nothing in the world would make her give up this walk by the sea, in this desolate place which you would think had been snatched from a northern country, from Scandinavia or Iceland, and tossed down there just to irritate people.

  That morning, the dog was prancing around her as it usually did, leaping up at the taunting large birds. It had begun to rain. Still only a light, cold drizzle, and the sea was rolling in with mean waves, short and strained, that broke upon the shore in a dirty foam.

  The dog stopped all of a sudden, barked, and set off on a mad run that took it fifty meters or so away, toward three long shapes that the swell of the tide had thrown up on the beach, but which it was still tossing around, as though reluctant to relinquish them completely. The dog caught their scent, turned toward the Old Woman and let out a long howl.

  At that moment, two men also noticed the shapes on the beach: America, a bachelor who produced a little wine and was something of an odd-job man, who from time to time came to inspect what the tide had thrown up—cans that had fallen overboard, lost wooden planks, nets, ropes, bits of floating wood. He saw the strange shapes in the distance, got down from his cart, patted the flank of his donkey, and told it not to move, to stay there, on the path. There was also Swordy, so called because, although he was not very bright, he was without question one of the best catchers of swordfish on the island, knowing the habits of the great fish—the depths at which it lay, its moods and cycles—and able to fathom its routes and tricks.

  The boats had not gone out that day. The weather was too bad. Swordy worked for the Mayor, who was the biggest fishing employer on the island. He owned three motorboats and cold storage rooms in which to keep his fish, along with those of ten other skippers who were too poor to possess their own.

  Two days earlier, while everyone was away at sea, a gust of wind had blown away three buoys with some lobster pots that Swordy had set down in the open sea, having borrowed the boat for a full day and a night, with the agreement of the Mayor.

  That Monday morning, he had come to the beach to see whether the tide might have brought them in. It was the dog’s long howl that alerted him. He was walking at some distance from the Old Woman, who had not heard him. He saw her accelerate suddenly and stumble on the shingle, almost fall, and recover herself. He sensed that something was wrong.

  He spotted America, who had just left his cart and was also walking toward the dog.

  All three—the Old Woman, Swordy, and America—arrived at the same time at the spot where the drenched shapes were bobbing about in the waves. The dog looked at its mistress, let out another little bark, then sniffed at what the sea had just produced: the bodies of three black men, simply dressed in T-shirts and jeans, barefooted, apparently sleeping, their faces against the shore.

  The Old Woman spoke first, “What are you waiting for? Pull them out!”

  The two men looked at one another and then did as the Old Woman said. They were not sure how to pick up the corpses and hesitated. They eventually took them by the arms and dragged them out backward, laying them side by side on the dark shingle.

  “You can’t leave them like that! Turn them over.”

  Again, they hesitated, but eventually they managed to tip the bodies on their sides and suddenly the faces of the dead men appeared.

  They were less than twenty years of age. Their eyes were closed. They seemed to have dropped into a harsh sleep that had twisted their lips and marbled their skin with great patches of violet, lending their faces an impenetrable expression that resembled a reproach.

  The Old Woman, America, and Swordy all made the sign of the cross at the same time. The dog barked, three times. The voice of the Old Woman was heard once more:

  “America, do you have a tarpaulin in your cart?”

  America nodded. He walked away.

  “You, Swordy, go and warn the Mayor. Don’t talk to anyone else. Come back with him. Don’t delay.”

  Swordy did not argue and he set off at a run. Death had always frightened him. You could hear the sea after the gust of wind that had swept over the island during the night, and you could even smell it inside the houses because it had cast its salty spittle beneath the doors, between the disjointed stones and down the chimneys. He had slept badly, too, tossing and turning in bed, getting up to pee or drink a glass of water.

  The Old Woman and the dog stayed near the corpses. They looked like a painting in a museum—instructive, but it made you wonder what moral it could be illustrating: the infinity of the sea, the bodies of three young black men, an old woman and a dog standing beside them. You sensed that it must mean something, but could not have said what it was.

  America returned with a blue plastic tarpaulin.

  “Cover them,” the Old Woman said.

  The bodies disappeared beneath the synthetic shroud. America placed some large pebbles along the edges to stop the wind blowing it away, but it still managed to sweep through underneath. This made a tearing, ruffling sound, like the big top of a circus.

  “Where do you think they come from, Miss?”

  In spite of his forty years, his large manly fingers, and his face that was as chapped as an old bar of soap, America found his anxiety and his childish voice returning. He lit a cigarette.

  “Where do you think?” said the Old Woman abruptly.

  America shrugged and took a puff, waiting for a truth he dared not utter to be mentioned. But when the Old Woman said nothing, he murmured, hesitating like a pupil unsure of his response, and jutting his chin in the direction of the pale distance to the south.

  “From over
there . . . ?”

  “Of course from over there! They didn’t fall from the sky! You were never very smart but you watch television like everyone else, don’t you?”

  III

  SWORDY HAD NOT DELAYED. LESS THAN HALF AN HOUR later, they saw him coming back, rounding the tall rock that blocked the beach and concealed it from the view of the town and the port. The Mayor was following, but there was also another figure, large and cumbersome, that of the Doctor.

  The Old Woman cursed under her breath when she spotted him. The dog welcomed the new arrivals by seeking pats it did not receive.

  “So what’s all the mystery about, this idiot wouldn’t tell me a thing!”

  Swordy hung his head. The Mayor was irritable. He was as thin as an anchovy, with a lean, sallow face and gray hair. He was sixty. The same age as the Doctor, whom he had known since childhood, but the latter was the size and shape of a barrel, bald and ruddy. A large mustache, dyed black, covered his upper lip. He was struggling to regain his breath, dressed in a linen suit that had once been elegant, but which was now covered in stains and had holes in various places. The Mayor was wearing fisherman’s overalls.

  “I told Swordy to tell only you.”

  “The Doctor and I were still working on that damn plan for the Thermal Baths! Are you going to tell us what’s going on, at some point?”

  “Show them.”

  America understood. He bent down and removed three of the stones keeping the tarpaulin in place. The wind flew into it and created the shape of a plump belly. At the same moment, two large, alarming seagulls dropped from the sky. They skimmed over the men, who instinctively drew their heads into their shoulders, before the birds rose up again and vanished into the clouds.

  At the sight of the bodies, the Doctor dropped his convenient smile for a brief second. The Mayor cursed, using the old dialect, in which Arabic has mingled with Spanish and Greek for a thousand years and more. He frowned, and his forehead became heavily wrinkled, an indication of the circumstances he could see arising from this discovery, and of which he was swiftly taking stock.