Lise wiped down the ancient table outside and they took out the chairs. There was no garden furniture apart from the table. A meadow of wild jagged grass stretched away for two hundred metres, ending in a row of trees and bushes on the edge of a sharp drop down into the valley, above the access road. The sun was going down on the other side of the faraway hills facing them. The track they had come from must be below, hidden by rocks and trees. The remains of the old village should be at the bottom of this hill, the village that Franck had read no longer existed. Only a few ruins were left.
They ate in the extraordinary silence. The birdsong gradually quietened down, merging into the evening calm. A woodpecker tapped away in the trees. There were no other sounds, save the buzzing of insects – late bees or weary flies. Lise already seemed at ease, to have become part of the scenery. Franck was disorientated, on the verge of panic, of leaving, of not being there, of taking refuge in the car, the huge great SUV that was clean and plush, without any insects … He wasn’t feeling good, but he said nothing. Lise could sense it. He knew she could sense it, but they didn’t talk about it. Biting into a crisp made a disproportionately loud noise in the silence, a crunch so loud that Franck feared you could hear it all the way down in the valley.
‘I think I could live here.’
Franck made no reply. In that sentence he might merely have heard a city dweller’s idealised notions of country living. But he could also hear the disenchantment of an actress who has abandoned all ambition, who has no desire to ever make another film.
The sun sank beyond the hill opposite, setting the woods ablaze with a colour that spread across the entire sky, a sky of velvety red. Lise freshened up in the shower. Then she turned on the old radio on the bathroom shelf. You could turn the knob through the entire FM dial but there was only one frequency, a station that played just music, with no adverts, news or talking. Lise turned the volume down to its lowest setting, thinking this would reassure Franck. When she went outside again, she came up behind him barefoot, and asked simply, ‘Feeling better?’ He jumped. It was dark now. A sliver of moon illuminated the mysterious outdoors. Inside, near the sink, Lise spotted a switch that must control the bulb outside, and luckily she was proved right. Franck inhaled. Seeing more clearly reassured him. Only, now that they were standing inside a pool of yellow light in which everything was visible, everything else was plunged into darkness and made even more disturbing, a sort of shadow that was infinite and completely impenetrable. Franck went upstairs to get the headlamp from his toiletry bag. He put it on and went back downstairs, the beam of light shining from his forehead.
‘Turn that off, Franck. Enjoy the silence, the fresh air. Breathe.’
Eventually their eyes adjusted and they could make out some shape. They could even see the row of trees on the cliff edge. Lise was sitting next to Franck, and he could not help turning his headlamp back on. The twenty-watt LED lamp cast a narrow beam that shone far into the distance; it swept the bottom of the valley, awakening thousands of white moths, some of which threw themselves into the lamp. With the beam pointing downwards, something came into view in the ravine. There was no need to confer; each knew the other had seen it. It had revealed itself to them both at once. On the edge of the woods, they could very clearly see two yellow glimmers, about two hundred metres away, two pupils that reflected the light, two narrow phosphorescent eyes, not too close to the ground. An animal was plainly standing there, watching them.
‘What’s that?’
Lise feigned a lack of interest, replying that it must be a deer, a doe, maybe even a fox or a cat; there were enough animals around here.
‘You have no idea what it is, do you?’
‘No, Franck, I don’t. But I think it’s pretty.’
There was a wide space between the two slanting pupils, giving the animal an intense look. The two fluorescent eyes seemed to be fixed on the house, unmoving, unblinking. Whether the beast was hostile or friendly, it was staring right at them.
‘Maybe it’s a wolf …’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I’m sure the woods are full of wild animals, I read it on the internet.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense, Lise.’
‘Don’t worry. All that matters is that it’s pretty, don’t you think?’
‘Well, maybe. Yes, maybe.’
August 1914
The dogs were lost without their masters. They couldn’t understand why the men were absent for so long. For fear of them wandering the streets and catching rabies, people tied their dogs up most of the time and did not let them stray far from their houses. No more long hikes for them, no more days spent outside following the men across the fields or into the woods hunting. In Orcières, dogs were never allowed inside houses; on the contrary, they usually kept well away. But now they crept timidly towards the door. It was obvious from the way they looked inside that they did not understand why the men never came out any more. They couldn’t even smell them now. And it was the same with the deserted stables when they looked there. With the oxen gone to the front and the sheep still up in the summer pasture because no one dared bring them down, the dogs felt as if part of their world had vanished without explanation or consolation. Instead of the words of their masters there was the howling of the big cats. Each time the lions and tigers growled up above, the dogs lowered their heads, afraid. They were so frightened by the noise that they no longer dared look up at the hill.
Since the lion tamer had moved up there, everything had felt wrong. It was he who had brought the storms. Before the arrival of the German and his big cats, the sky had never trembled under the weight of such terrifying clouds, there had never been such crazy storms of hailstones the size of ice cubes. And no one could remember such squalls of rain. From the middle of September onwards thick, heavy rain fell for hours at a time, then suddenly stopped. The clouds vanished to be replaced by sun and clear skies. But the next day the thermometer would go wild and the barometer plummet again. The beginning of summer had seen luminous, cloudless skies, but now they were unrecognisable, violent and roiling, flinging down treacherous hail, leading people to make dire predictions that the weather was broken, that winter would be freezing, that wolves would come out and that the war would never end.
‘It’s the bombs that are destroying everything. Apparently they’re bombing each other all day and all night long. Swarms of bombs, thousands of them, ripping through the sky and throwing the stars off course. Nothing will ever be the same again.’
There were no bombs to be heard in Orcières, only lions and storms. The other explanation for the strange weather was provided by La Bûche. La Bûche was the old blacksmith, a bit deaf from years of pounding metal and a bit addled by too much alcohol. He thought that all the storms were caused by the large metal cages the German had set up for his wild animals. There were three of them, it was said, and one of them was enormous, fifteen metres wide, and taller than the trees. La Bûche claimed that it was the steel that acted like a magnet on the stars … And people believed him. Since the lion tamer had brought all those metal bars on his huge wagon and assembled them on top of the mountain, the weather had changed. Some days it was hotter than Africa, but in the space of half an hour it had clouded over and begun to rain freezing stair rods. It wasn’t normal rain; it was more like stones thrown down by an icy firmament. Before the Hun, Orcières had never experienced so much anger and water. Down below, children cursed the sky, shaking their fists at the rocky overhang, and old people were too superstitious even to glance at the peak. After the torrential rains the soil was so eroded that silt flowed into the river and land turned to sludge. Ground that was already depleted, because there was no one to work it, now slid from the fields and gardens all the way to the houses.