Salina, Aeolian Islands

There were dark years ahead: struggles throughout Europe, families torn apart, places where death became a way of life. There were betrayals, acts of revenge, and beaches stained black with blood.

And many would later discover that they had only glimpsed the surface of the nightmare.

There were dark years ahead.

But there was also Simon, with tiny Colette in his bell ringer’s hands, waving as the car set off again. There was the fire in the hearth at Auguste Boulard’s house, in the middle of the snowy plains of the Aubrac. There were Vango, Ethel, and Paul around his table, and old Mother Boulard standing on a stool, unhooking sausages from the ceiling. There was their crossing of the Pyrenees on foot, the passes, the chamois, the snow, and then the view of Spain and freedom. There was the Cat’s impossible quest for her parents, the hopes, the dead ends, the nights spent in theater attics sleeping next to a violin; and later, when she understood that she really did need to be afraid, there was the arrival of the young Sister Marie-Cat, disguised in the large white headdress known as a nun’s cornet, and welcomed at the Abbey of La Blanche by a beaming Mother Elisabeth. There were Esquirol’s journeys back and forth to England to keep alive the Paradise Network, which he had founded in the first days of the war in memory of his friends from rue de Paradis. There was Eckener’s melancholy as he stared at the reflection of the sky in Lake Constance. There was the good doctor Basilio’s return by boat to the Aeolian Islands, with a lesson learned in his heart. There were the flowers he changed every day, while he waited, on the table of the house in Pollara. There was the revival of a monastery across the waves, with enough honey to make gingerbread again, with bells tolled on stormy evenings; but without Pippo Troisi, who had returned to his capers and his wife.

Then came deliverance for Paris: flags, and yet more tanks, with Superintendent Avignon fleeing on the day of Liberation, joyous shots fired into the air, and the crowd braying around Nina Bienvenue. There were Mademoiselle’s farewells on the sidewalk outside La Belle Étoile and the tears of Casimir Fermini. There was a very young Russian soldier, named Andrei Ivanovitch, entering a camp in the south of Poland with his regiment, searching for two people he had never met before among the deportees he had just liberated.

“Monsieur and Madame Atlas?”

And, in front of him, the gazes that wanted to say yes.

There was so much waiting. But some returns were impossible.

At last, there was a fine autumn, the bells of Notre Dame ringing for no reason, fit to burst, and two figures holding tightly to each other at the top of a tower. There was a dinner to celebrate at La Belle Étoile, where everyone ate their fill of omelets. The Boulards were there, having traveled to Paris as guests of honor, as well as Paul in his uniform, covered in medals; there were speeches, there was white wine, and, at the end of the table, the Cat, very pale, because a letter had just arrived from Moscow.

And then there was a journey. Isn’t it customary to set off on journeys after such occasions? There was a walk toward the bottom of a crater that fell away into the sea, a hamlet, and, at the end, a house made of two white cubes. There were Vango and Ethel walking between the Barbary fig trees, overwhelmed and breathless, but nothing could stop them from approaching their destination. There was a falcon in the sky.

There was a woman coming out of the house close to the cliff, a beautiful figure with a red scarf over her white hair, watching attentively, her hand shielding her eyes, looking to see who was heading down between the Barbary figs. Two beings were coming toward her; there was nowhere else in the world they could be going.

There was a cry, a call. And that was all.