The Mahé Circle Read Online Free PDF Page A

jetty wall.
    â€˜See him, did you? He’s the tenth, ooh no, maybe the hundredth I’ve caught from that hole. They’ve got a housing shortage like us! When I’ve got this one, there’ll be another one along, because that’s a
deep hole.’
    And the doctor had stayed there, with the sun blazing down on the back of his neck, watching and listening, stupidly. He’d waited almost an hour.
    â€˜Stay here, because I’m telling you, I’ll catch him.’
    It was time to go back to his wife. He turned around, almost regretfully. He had not yet reached the other end of the jetty when he heard a shout and some boys raced past him, to surround the old man.
    Yes, it was true, he had got his conger out of the hole, a black, viscous monster, almost as thick as a man’s arm, now writhing on the uneven cobblestones of the jetty. The old man finished it off and
was carrying it proudly at arm’s length, its still-twitching tail dragging on the ground, and heaven knew why, it looked somehow obscene.
    Since then, whenever he thought about the jetty, he always saw the black head of the conger eel poking cautiously out of its hole, attracted by a repulsive piece of octopus bobbing about at the end of a wire. He imagined this sticky, snake-like
creature being pulled forcibly out of its tunnel, then its head splitting open as it was hammered with a stone.
    He wouldn’t get back to sleep now; perhaps he would drowse vaguely, dreaming of fish coming and going silently in a greenish world, watching each other from the corners of underwater avenues lined with rocks, and devouring each other.
Michel, in his cot, began to sing, as he did every morning. His mother tried to sleep a little longer. In the adjoining room, just a cupboard without windows, so that they had to leave the door open at night, Mariette was using the basin to wash.
    He wanted to find out whether they had found Frans Klamm yet. He was also curious to know how the girl in the red dress had spent the night. Had they left the three children alone in the army hut where their mother had died?
    He got up and dressed. He felt nostalgic for their previous holidays, which they always spent in the same hotel near Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre. They were welcomed
there with joyful cries, as if they were
members of the family.
    â€˜Good afternoon, doctor! And madame! Oh, hasn’t the little girl grown! I’ve kept you the same rooms as last year, with a view on the river.’
    They still had almost a month to go here, and if not for his self-respect, he’d have decided to leave already, to finish off their holiday in the place where they had been so happy.
    He dared not say so to his wife. And yet he knew that she felt exactly the same way. Of course she did. But he kept repeating, in contrary fashion:
    â€˜It’s marvellous here, isn’t it!’
    He went outside, while Hélène and Mariette got the children dressed. It had already become a habit, in scarcely four days, to go down to the harbour to watch the
Cormoran
docking.
    The heat was rising. Men like himself, summer visitors, were fishing in the harbour, where all they would catch were gobies, with their revolting fat bellies. Other incomers, women in summer dresses or shorts, were climbing down into the little
boats that would take them for a tour round the island, or to Port-Cros.
    He saw the mayor, still in his blue overall, with the same hat, pushing a trolley laden with empty orange-boxes towards the
Cormoran
’s jetty. Groups of local men, bare feet in their carpet slippers, not yet washed or shaved, were
taking the air and looking at the white outline of the ferry as it approached from La Tour-Fondue.
    â€˜So,
Monsieur le maire
, what’s happening?’
    The mayor raised his hat to scratch his scalp or mop his brow.
    â€˜We’ll see whether Polyte managed to find him.’
    â€˜What about the children?’
    â€˜Yes, well, we did try