I wake in the sweltering night, perspiration running from my damp body, to the sound of scratching. It seems to be coming from the hill above our rear patio. I lean up on my elbows and peer out at the shadowy shapes of trees, the dark silvery contours of the boskage. What is shuffling or cutting its busy way through the foliage? My first thought is a snake sidling toward our open doors. I tap Michel’s shoulder. He mutters in his ocean-deep sleep, wriggles and returns to his dreams, oblivious. Now there is a tiny squeaking to accompany the rustling. I reach for a sarong not out of modesty, for there is no one to see me, but because I fear being attacked or bitten when I am naked. It’s illogical. I get up and patter barefoot out onto the terrace. The night is warm. The moon is full and shines across the treetops as though we had forgotten to switch off the lights. The sky is brilliantly clear, not a cloud in sight, galaxies of stars twinkling within a sharp navy heaven. The rustling continues but remains concentrated in the same place, which is at the foot of the largest of our green oaks. I cannot make out any shapes or movement because the trunk is enveloped in deep bushy growth. Fearful of going closer, I sit at the table where we have breakfast, my knees drawn up tight against me, and try to concentrate on other sounds of the night, whiling away time, inhaling the balmy air.
Everywhere smells sweet. Perfume from the twenty-four lavender bushes I have planted—one of the gardeners from our local nursery who knows me well now advised me that lavender planted close to the house keeps the mosquitoes at bay—wafts in heavenly drafts from the lower terraces. High on the hill, there is a bird trilling even at this hour. I catch an owl’s hoot, and then again the squeaking. It must be mice. I wander back to bed and lay listlessly on top of the sheet. I turn and watch Michel, his peaceful handsome face. It never ceases to amaze me how anyone can sleep so deeply. Nothing troubles him.
The squeaking is growing more insistent, the intervals more regular as though it is multiplying, and the rustling continues. If it is mice, there are plenty of them, and they do not trip lightly on their feet. I rise from the bed a second time and search for sandals and a wrap. Slowly, I make my way the few meters up the hill to the tree, crouch low on my haunches and discover No Name surrounded by a writhing mass of life. At close quarters, the sweetly cloying smell of blood thickens the humid night. She glances my way but makes no effort to greet or even acknowledge me. I move in close, and she growls. It is not a real threat, more an atavistic maternal response. In any case, she seems exhausted. Birthed out.
Gingerly, I touch her head and find her coat wet and sticky. Viscid fluff heaves against my arm. Overhead branches dapple the moonlight. Dawn has not yet broken, so I cannot make out how many whelped puppies there are. Five, maybe even six. I sit on the ground and keep watch with her. Pride surges within me for my elegant procreating Belgian shepherd. I quell a longing to rush around the rooms, beat on the doors and rouse every sleeping person. I doubt that Michel or our parents would welcome my rude awakening, it is not yet five o’clock. Still, I am too overwhelmed to go back to bed. So I decide to stay here, keep guard over the newborns and await their first sunrise.
Around seven A.M. Michel finds me conked out, curled up amid the stones and dusty dry earth at the foot of the tree. Twigs tangle my hair, indentations and dirt have creased and daubed my cheeks. I am brushed with blood and bits of gummy afterbirth, scantily clad in a bedraggled sarong.
“Chérie?” He is gently shaking me. “What are you doing up here? I have been looking for you everywhere.” No Name’s halfhearted growl draws his attention to the nest of life alongside me while I wake slowly, aching and sore, stones piercing my back, trying to work out where in heaven’s name I am. And then I remember. “The puppies, have you seen them?” I cry.
Aside from a zillion worms and ants and spiders and caterpillars and ladybirds and bats and lizards and geckos, and carp and those horrid feral cats, which took off the day after we found them, and probably snakes, but I prefer not to consider them, and thousands of rabbits and hopefully dozens of those almond-munching bushy-tailed red squirrels, these blind little mewling beings are the first, the very first life born to us on our farm. No Name’s puppies.
“How many are there?” I ask sleepily.
Michel puts his hand into the nest, which has been extraordinarily well fitted out. She must have been secretly foraging for days, when we were not around to notice. “Seven, I think.” He is moving furry balls aside to see if there is yet another furry ball beneath. “It’s hard to say, but you know, I don’t think she’s finished.”
“How can you tell?”
He shakes his head. “Look.”
I cannot see anything besides a mass of shining wet pelt which resembles a damp moth-eaten fox wrap unearthed from a long-forgotten attic. A second look reveals ejected placenta and a substance similar to a plastic bag filled with murky water. And No Name is not moving.
“We should wake my father.”
“HOW MANY NOW?”
“Ten.”
“Ten!”
“I think so. There won’t be any more.” My father pronounces this with such certainty that no one questions him, and he has a way about him with dogs. After all, until our splendid vet confirmed my father’s suspicions, none of us believed the dog was pregnant.
So ten is the final count. “See how she cleans them with her tongue.”
Now the puppies are as round and pristine and furry as mink tennis balls. Michel is taking photos while my father and Michel’s mother, Anni, keep watch, communicating with each other through sign language and intricate mimes. My mother is making tea, and Michel’s father is sitting at the table awaiting his breakfast, scribbling a list of ingredients for the cake he plans to bake later today. As for me, I am taking on board the reality of eleven dogs gunning all over the farm.
By evening, there are nine puppies. The general opinion seems to be that it was not a miscount. Either No Name ate one or it perished and she has buried it somewhere, although, as far as we know, she hasn’t left her site all day long. Any day now, Clarisse and Vanessa will arrive. They will be entranced, although I am not altogether sure how Pamela will respond. We will be eight people, two dogs and nine puppies in addition to the prehistoric carp surviving in our murky pond. Our menagerie grows. It’s becoming exactly the home I craved as a child. Carefree and casual, with animals and people falling over one another, books everywhere, guests dropping by to while away a happy hour or two, jam a few tunes with whoever can play whatever instrument, nobody being quite sure where anyone else has disappeared to because there’s loads of space and everyone is quietly getting on with their own thing. Heaven—just so long as I can creep off to my cool stone room and write in peace!
The farmyard spirit is taking hold of Michel, too. He is eulogizing about the possibility of planting a vineyard, acquiring a donkey, goats and bees. “Think of it—our own honey! And the goats can roam the terraces and eat the vegetation. It will save us the cost of cutting back the land.”
Yes, and of ironing the laundry!
Alas, his suggestions are impractical. The olive does not need babysitting, the animals do. And we are both still on the move, living our itinerant professional lives. Somewhere beyond summer, beyond days drenched with heat and familes and scrubbing walls (and fumigating the brown room before the girls get here) and endless puppy care, we have another life, all too easily forgotten as the days drift listlessly by and we swelter and burn under the relentlessly seducing sun. Retirement, even as producers of olive oil rather than television, is not yet in the cards. I think of the scarecrow farmer and his weekly visit to the village crémerie. I can’t quite picture myself in that role, yet after a sleepless night in the garden, I do resemble him!
What does amuse me is a shift I notice taking place. I have never been a practical creature, whereas Michel is far more down-to-earth, but there is a pendulum swing happening here. We are changing places, changing roles. He begins to fancy while I place feet on the ground.
LATER, TOWARD THE END of a sun-blessed afternoon, while still enamored by our new family of fluffballs, we receive a call from the girls. They want to confirm the hour of their arrival two days ahead of when we had agreed. In other words, tomorrow, and can they, please, please, Papa, bring two of their cousins with them, Julia and Hajo.
“But where we will sleep everyone?” I ask.
The plumbing is creaking, the water has turned a rusty autumnal shade—we cannot work out why—and half the house is crumbling. The cottage has not been touched yet, the brown room has barely moved on since my mother and I attacked it and we are, as ever, almost out of money. Even if we could afford rooms at our favorite hilltop hotel, they are no longer available, for he has sold his petite affaire to a restaurant owner from New York who has closed the place down for extensive renovation, intending to reopen it in readiness for next year’s film festival as an exclusive hideaway, set back in the hills overlooking the glamorous bay of Cannes.
“They are bringing tents and will sleep in the garden, and before you say another word, they want to. It will be an adventure.”
Tents arrive and, with them, a quartet of teenagers. How is it possible that only last year two prepubescent girls spent a summer with us and this year two stunning young creatures appear? The French have the perfect word to describe that awakening flush: pulpeuse. I love it. Pulpy, ripe. Their bodies and senses have woken up to the world. Of course, with such awareness come hazards. Julia, with her nubile figure, bewitching blue eyes and swaths of long, flowing blonde hair, is two years their senior and a sleek and enticing temptress she is. Hajo, her younger brother, is a few months their junior and, as so frequently happens with boys, seems to be five years younger. He is a Boy Scout of a boy. He helps Michel and Anni in the garden, collects wood, treats his grandparents with extraordinary love and respect and, when evening falls, happily accompanies the trio of girls to town but remains completely, innocently oblivious to their real interests: Les mecs. Boys!
DAYS SPIN OUT. Contented guests laze, doing nothing in particular or find themselves chores to help us out while I write like a driven fury. My scripts are ready to first-draft. Michel is reading them, and I have set to work on my novel. And then, a delicious diversion—Klaxon! Klaxon!—as a truck coughs up the drive, stripping sprawling fig branches and denuding ripening fruit as it ascends. We have all been awaiting this delivery, I more feverishly than the rest. Finally, I am to have my ancient wooden table the size of a railway sleeper. At last. At last. We bought it in sorry condition months back from a fabulously eccentric secondhand furniture store on the Left Bank in Paris, near St. Sulpice, where the shop owner arranged to have it restored for us by an artisan carpenter in Mougins. But when he delivers it, he takes one look at the exterior stairs, the terraces, the length of the arched walkway and pronounces his work done. He and his two associates, with the aid of a pulley system within the van, unload our precious teak table, deposit it in the driveway and depart.
It requires six men to carry it and deliver it to its place. Quashia’s Arab colleagues rally to the call, shouting to one another in a language that none of us understand, with their dark faces and their assortment of hats. Polite men with decaying teeth, shabby clothes and shy expressions on tobacco-ravaged faces, always willing to lend a helping hand if there are francs in it for smokes. A makeshift team, troops up the hill, shaking hands with one another, shaking hands with us, then they go to work, moving as one, like our train of caterpillars, at the yell of an order—nasal high-pitched cries—until the table has been hoisted up the steps and positioned beneath the towering, majestic magnolia grandiflora, with its shiny bottle-green leaves and perfume from heaven, and there it will stay, we hope, for a hundred years. Sweating, resolutely keeping their gaze away from the three tender beauties sunbathing in itsy bits of string by the pool, the men refuse refreshment.
Each lines up solemnly for his fifty-franc billet dished out by Michel, nods his thanks, then wanders off contentedly down the drive, slapping his fellow countrymen on the back and Quashia, too, who has found them this rare moment of employment.
Pamela is the first to settle beneath the table. She waddles over and takes up residence like a rotund queen bee, then drops like a log and begins instantly to snore.
By and by, the puppies begin to appear. They creep forward inquisitively, one by one or in twos or threes, unkempt fluffy curiosity converging from everywhere. One cocks its little leg against a great wooden beam of table leg. I run, screaming, to chase it away, and they all scatter like a swarm of frightened rabbits, tumbling over one another in a mix of confusion and uncertainty only to sneak back again as soon as they sniff my absence.
They are still so gauche, so unsteady on their limbs, making nuisances of themselves at every turn, chewing feet, climbing bronzed legs, uprooting flowers and covering everything in earth. One little culprit steals one of Anni’s new sandals, which makes her laugh, but when she settles back into her book he drags it to the murky fishpond, where it is lost until a carp surfaces with a sandal strap trailing from its torso—do fish have torsos? At feeding time the pups are easy to locate, nine hungry mouths packed greedily beneath No Name with splayed legs, sucking at her tired chewed teats. Still, she is a model, patient mother.
But how my father indulges them! Whenever I mention the inevitable, finding homes for them, he offers to take all nine of them back to England until my mother shrieks and quite sensibly reminds him that there is a quarantine into the United Kingdom. Vanessa has volunteered to take one, a golden-russet chap she has christened Whisky. The other eight, heavenly as they are, will have to be given away.
MEALS ARE A HULLABALLOO of pleasure. Our long-awaited table is the focus of life, the epicenter of the day. Like a clock striking, a yellow or cobalt blue ceramic and terra-cotta plate clatters lightly onto its surface. The salad contained within it is a masterpiece of Michel’s cuisinary art: variegated leaves, striated, mottled, speckled reds and greens seasoned with herbs, olive oil, lemon or lime and garlic. A cork is drawn, liquid shot through with sunlight tumbles into glasses, a rainbow of fruit appears and each one of us, no matter what we are about, recognizes the signal. A meal is waiting to be devoured. Hajo returns from the village, laden with warm bread that divides at the touch. The epitome of the perfect house guest, Hajo also roams the inclines searching out kindling to bolster Michel’s collection of sacks of pine and magnolia cones stored and dried during the winter for the specific purpose of fueling our summer kitchen: the barbecue, which is working overtime.
We eat and drink and talk and go silent at the pleasure of the delicacies being passed from one length of our table to the other. As the days progress, we eat and drink in greater quantity, and the meals grow longer and more cheerfully abandoned. We have three languages here: French, English and German. At night, candles flicker and the warm light glows and dances across our faces, animated by conversation and flushed with wine. The bats swoop low and spin off, flying “after summer merrily.” Jazz reaches across the terrace from a makeshift system Michel has rigged up in the cool storeroom.
When Michel’s parents first arrived, my mother came looking for me to ask what language they were speaking.
“German,” I replied absentmindedly, busy with my work.
“For God’s sake, don’t tell your father!”
I glanced up, not really paying attention.
“Why?”
“We fought them in the war.”
Here at this table, we pass bottles and lift empty glasses to accept yet another refill, and such frontiers don’t exist. Michel is the conductor, for he is the only one of us who speaks all three languages fluently. With a turn of his head, he switches tongues. A glance to the left and he is with us in English; to the right and words unknown to me flow from his lips. His French daughters and their German cousins, Julia and Hajo, are able to converse workmanlike in whichever language is currently being spoken, but we Anglo-Saxons and Irish are a sorry lot. A lack of language is a poverty, and I resolve to add German classes to my list of chores and brush up on my Italian and Spanish, both as rusty as the plumbing. The odd German word is growing familiar. Essen is a meal or to eat; schnecken is being repeated frequently and debated on a great deal this evening, but I have not heard it before. “What is Anni saying?” I ask Michel.
“She is talking about the snails.”
“Ah, schnecken means snails, does it?” I sigh. Yes, the plants are infested with snails. I have passed several hours on different dewy mornings picking them off the stalks of various shrubs only to find that, by evening, they are back in greater numbers. Crustaceans crowded on top of one another, like bracelets of hippie jewelery.
“She is telling us that she has a solution for them and that I must take her shopping in the morning.”
I look at Anni, and she nods wisely.
“What is it?”
“You’ll see.” She laughs, and her merriment rings loudly across the valley, absorbed within the mauve hills.
THE NEXT DAY IS A brittle, dry day. Baking. Eerily still, deep heat which often precedes a mistral. My father and I are returning from the vet, where we have delivered a cardboard box full of restless puppies to be inspected. All are in good order, and as far as Dr. Marschang can say at this stage, these little ones are also purebreds. No Name must have been days, even minutes, pregnant when I discovered her. He has agreed to put up a notice in his surgery requesting homes for them. No Name is hovering, concerned by the disappearance of her brood, when Michel comes rattling up the drive with Anni. They have been shopping. As well as the usual provisions and the daily mountains of fresh food being consumed by our party, they have bought black pepper. Not one container, but twenty! This is Anni’s answer to the schnecken.
“They can’t abide pepper,” she explains to me.
I shake my head in wonder. How can she possibly know such a thing? Is it black pepper they are allergic to, or all peppers? Are they fine with salt?
I take myself upstairs to my den.
Toward noon, as I stare idly from the window and nurse in thought my work in progress, I notice our various guests at their holiday activities. My father-in-law, Robert, I know, is absent. I can hear the clatter of tins and pans in the upstairs makeshift kitchen, where he is baking yet another round of cakes and creating utter chaos, showering flour and sugar everywhere, transforming our inadequate cooking space into a ski resort. My father is by the pool sleeping, dogs crawling over him like flies on a cow’s rump; the girls are perched in an elegant trio alongside the pool, polished toes dangling in the water to keep cool, sunglasses hiding the mischief in their eyes, whispering hot secrets to one another and laughing skittishly. I discern wind in the trees. It looks as though a weather change is coming in, brought by the wind that blows in from Africa. Hajo and my mother are both alone in private worlds. He is whittling a branch or a piece of tree trunk he has retrieved from somewhere on the land, while she, under the pretext of reading, is frowning at her feet, worrying about something.
Observing folk busy about their leisure is endlessly fascinating to me. But where are Michel and Anni? Leaning closer to the glass, I catch sight of Anni bent low, vigorously shaking pepper over twisting flowers. She moves on to the tender young orange trees, which are shooting up at a remarkable pace and soughing in the wind. Michel trails behind her, shirt flapping, with a tray of pots. Half are empty. He accepts an empty container and hands her another full one, and so they continue. I will be fascinated to learn the outcome. My guess is that the wind will pick up and the pepper will be blown away while the snails will continue to cling fast.
I return to the world of the novel I am writing. In my imagination, I am on a sugar plantation in Fiji and a young arsonist has set fire to the crops. “Fire!”
LATER, I HAVE NO IDEA how much later, minutes or hours, Michel is at my door. “Carol! Chérie!” I look up but barely register his presence, lost as I am again in my invented scenario.
“Mmm?”
“There’s a fire. We should prepare ourselves.”
It sounds too incredible to be true.
“A fire?” I repeat stupidly. Michel has no idea what I am writing, and his news has confused me. “What fire?”
“Chérie, there’s a fire on the other side of the main road. Can’t you hear the planes?”
I have heard nothing. I rise from my trestle table, padding after Michel, then scoot back to save and switch off my work.
“The others are getting dressed.”
It is Saturday, midafternoon. I exit the house after Michel and am hit by a blanket of windy heat and by the roar of engines coming directly toward me. I lift my head and look skyward, and there, probably no more than twenty meters above our heads, a red plane swoops low and shaves the flat roof of our house, sending the gravel stones laid by Di Fazio into rising whorls before they clatter like running feet onto the terraces. Dust is everywhere, leaves are whipped from the trees and swirl about. This feels like an attack.
“I think we should drive to the end of the lane and find out what’s going on.”
Our little lane has been cut off by the fire brigade. No one can enter, and we cannot pass. A barrier erected within the last hour is being watched over by half a dozen hulking young members of the local fire brigade. Clots of people are huddled in groups. There is great activity, much argument. Most look like Parisians, lean and mean, smoking furiously, dressed in chic shorts, bathing suits with silk shirts thrown on hastily, jogging clothes, gold watches, designer purses clutched tight to their well-honed, neat-bosomed bodies. They are probably occupants of summer villas, living behind us or along the multitude of narrow tracks which wind inland toward the heart of Mougins. I ask one of the fireman what the chances are that the fire will leap the bridge over the road. He shrugs. “So long as the wind does not change direction, you are safe.”
“And if it does?”
“If it does, get into the swimming pool and wait for an airlift out.”
We are not to worry, he assures us, they know where and how manywe are. “How many are you?” he asks then as an afterthought.
“Ten, and two dogs and nine puppies.” One very fat dog, I am thinking, who will not be able to run for her life. If worst comes to worst, one of us will be obliged to carry Pamela. And what of all those puppies? I will have to pack them back into the cardboard box and try to keep them calm.
We hurry back down the lane to the house, where the cinders are falling like huge dove-colored snowflakes and are settling on the surface of the pool. All around us, the sky is changing colors. Our loved ones are grouped together clutching bags and various bits of belongings. They are staring skyward, where the reflection of the fire has twisted nature out of recognition. It is impossible to concentrate on anything except the fire. The distant cries of people carry on the wind, the force of which sends a towel left by the pool flying into the water, where it sinks like dead meat.
Michel moves to and fro, making mental notes about the wind’s direction. He is unwinding every hose we own, calling to anyone listening for assistance, and is attaching them at strategic points in the garden. Hajo is dismantling the three tents and taking them into the house for safety. I cannot stop myself from studying the scene, deciding what I might extract from the occasion for my story. The fear, the uncertainty and the threatening sky. Almost every word is shouted or drowned out by the skirring of the brilliant red Canadair planes (the color of the double-decker London buses), purchased from the Canadians and used to fight fires to great effect. Their presence is everywhere. If they are not overhead or passing to the rear of the hill, they are before us, diving into the sea, swooping like dragonflies. Their presence gives an urgency to the fire, which is still out of sight. The roar of their engines, no more than a few feet above our heads, brings real terror to the mood of things.
“I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to begin to soak the vegetation,” Michel suggests, which is what he and I, along with Hajo, are about to do when Quashia appears, damp from exertion, wearing a battered old Panama hat. “I think you need help.”
“How did you get through?” calls Michel.
“I saw the flames from the village and followed the towpath by the stream in the valley. The bridge has been cut off. There are fire engines everywhere.”
I am relieved that our parents cannot understand this, for I fear it would distress them. “The wind’s picking up, too.”
We all look out to sea, where the waves are foamy and white, a sure sign that a gale-force wind is blowing in.
“How much water do we have in the bassin?” Michel shouts to Quashia.
“I switched on the pump on my way up here.”
Michel nods, relieved, and hands out hoses. “We can manage this, chérie, you ought to stay with the family.”
I retreat as the men begin to run the hoses up and down the hill, watering wherever the nozzles will reach. The sussuration of water spraying and falling on a day as relentless as this has a cooling, tranquilizing effect which I am grateful for; whatever posture of artistic detachment I might be laying on the occasion, the truth is I am scared and trembling.
There is nothing more we can do but wait. We sit silently listening to the crackling, even though for the moment the fire is still on the opposite side of the bridge, or we make inane jokes to keep the fear at bay. Eleven of us, plus the terrified animals, staring at an aubergine sky. Those who smoke are smoking too much. The rest of us are trying to remain calm. Quashia, perhaps because he is too restless to sit or does not feel comfortable being a part of the family, has gone to climb the hill. Michel tries to stop him, but he insists that he can better warn us from there.
It is a question of the wind which is building. Trees are bowing and swaying as though attempting to tear themselves from the earth and fly unencumbered with the wind. And then it changes direction, an instant turn about as immediate as switching still-life into animation. Within seconds the flames leap the bridge which crosses the road and are now right behind us, burning fast toward the pinnacle of our hill. We are all on our feet.
“FIRE! FIRE!” It is Quashia.
We run to the rear of the house, and at the very summit, beyond the unfenced limit of our own terrain where the vegetation has not been so rigorously cut back, is a scorching wall of fire which reaches the tips of the tallest pines ascending toward a confused, overwrought heaven. It is the most terrifying sight I have ever witnessed. The flames leaping toward the bruised and moody sky seem to be performing a war dance. I stand gazing up the hill, horrified and petrified.
Beneath us, the first of the fire engines hurtles up the drive. It is shortly followed by a second and then a third.
Michel tells us to collect our passports and keep them at the ready. Clarisse admits to being scared and wraps an arm tight around my waist. I love her for the confidence. Pamela whines like a frightened baby. Robert, munching on one of his cakes, is still covered in flour. Anni, stalwart and unafraid, empties the last remaining pot of pepper onto a rose bush and lights yet another cigarette.
“The hills are on fire and you are cut off,” announces the hirsute chief of the four pompiers who have descended from the fire engine. “Someone set light to the trees in the pine forest over on the other side of the hill. We almost had it under control, but le mistral is picking up fast, changing direction and we can’t contain it.”
My eyes are weeping now from the smoke as well as these words. The heat is beating like a drum and tightening my skin. It is raining ashes. They are drifting through the air and falling on the terraces and floating in the swimming pool. It is like a blanket of gray snow. I have no idea what will happen to us. “Should we dive into the pool?” I ask weakly.
“No, go on with whatever you were doing. We’ll keep you informed.”
Continue with what we were doing! Even those rare moments of literary inspiration pale in comparison with this real-life drama.
An army of men pours out of the red vehicles and begins pounding up the hill. Each man carries what looks like a knapsack on his back. In all, approximately one hundred and twenty men are beating their way toward the summit of our hill. I have never seen so many fine-looking, fit fellows. Whatever fear had taken hold of Julia and our two girls has been forgotten. They are giggling and posing as dozens of handsome, lithe, young firefighters in their navy-blue uniforms go charging by. I confess to also being thrilled by them, their maleness and phenomenal physical prowess.
Now the pool is being sucked dry, and the chlorinated water transmitted up the hill by meter after meter of ample piping to be sprayed onto the fire. The dogs won’t stop barking. Puppies are peeing and scooting all over the place. We are overwhelmed by noise and activity and chaotic fear.
What will happen when the pool is emptied? I ask myself. Certainly there is not enough to quench this conflagration. Will the fire then beat its way down the hill, killing the men and burning all in its wake? How can they hold such a fury at bay? Never mind, put a stop to it.
Suddenly, three or four of the small planes are arriving, droning and circling like great angry insects. They fly low, barely ten meters above the treetops, dropping tons of red powder on the wall of flames. Then they circle back, heading for the bay. I watch them dive, plunging their noses into the sea, nozzling up gallons of salty water. They return, one after another, a ceaseless aggressive procession hell-bent on beating back this twist of nature. Gallons of the Mediterranean Sea mixed with the red powder are dropped like bombs onto the flames. And so it goes on. Four planes, each making ten or fifteen trips an hour. It is a mesmerizing spectacle.
“Rather puts to shame those air shows you took me to when I was a kid,” I whisper to my father, who is as always deeply impressed by such displays of organization.
“You’ve got to hand it to the French,” he mutters, but he’s not really talking to me. He’s somewhere else, lost in his war, perhaps. I cannot say. I lean in and give his hot, peeling flesh a stroke.
I want to walk up the hill to get a closer look, but Michel and Quashia call me back. The weight of the red avalanche, they warn me, is sufficient to kill anyone foolish enough to be standing beneath a plane’s load. I listen to one shrill crack after another as whining trunks snap and collapse to the needled earth, and I consider the fate of those firefighters, all of whom are at risk should the plane misdirect its lethal cargo. I have always harboured a child’s romantic regard for firefighters and lifeboat men. They have always been my heroes, and nothing today dents that illusion.
BY EVENING, THE FLAMES have been beaten back. Slowly, the engines begin to reverse and depart. We are left with an empty pool, exhaustion and a strange sensation of deflation mingled with immense relief. Something tremendous and sinister has roared through our day, and now a disconcerting, cautious tranquility has taken its place.
“We’ll be back tomorrow,” the chief tells us, “to refill your pool. We’ll be keeping a couple of men on the hill tonight in case the wind picks up. It needs only one burning ember…” It is usual here for the mistral to drop at night. No matter what gale force it has blown during the day, by evening it quietens. I have always found it one of those curious feats of nature—how the wind knows when the sun is setting—but it is so. We are left with a view that is as clear and pure as freshly drawn water.
Michel and I hike the steep, stony track to survey the extent of the damage. Four young men are standing together. Their eyes shine blue and bright beneath faces smeared with soot and sweat. Everyone shakes hands. They are welcome to join us for dinner. They thank us but do not accept. It is not possible for them to leave the site. In any case, as always, they are well prepared. Stores of water and food have been lodged beneath a living tree. Its verdant life is almost jarring amid so much blackness. Charred tree trunks are lying like history everywhere the eye can see, but not on our land. Not one tree, barely a blade of grass has been touched. Now I understand why the local councils are so strict about keeping the land cut back. There was nothing for the fire to take hold of, nothing to burn.
Still, the sickening aroma of fire is everywhere. My cheeks are burning just from standing so close. Heat rises like a sauna from the charcoaled earth. Everywhere, tortured black skeletons of trees are etched against the fast-fading day. Our water bassin has been drenched in red powder.
“You should cover that,” a young fireman remarks.
It is true. Quashia has been nagging us about it all summer. I step up onto a three-rung ladder attached to the side of the bassin and peer in. The water within is tinted pink, and there are several birds floating lifelessly at surface level. Did the fire carbonize them, were they caught in a slipstream of wind and heat or have they fallen victim to a normal day’s drowning? Pine needles are inches thick on the bed of the basin. The water looks stagnant as well as pink. Its murkiness could well be the reason for our rusty water.
“We’ll clean it out for you tomorrow,” one of our night-watch team reassures us.
A curl of smoke can still be seen here and there among the embers in what remains of the dwindling light and curling roots, snapped and torn from the dry earth. Pines that were dead but not burned have been uprooted, ripped from the earth by the sheer weight of the water falling on them. The newly dead surround us in an arboreal cemetery. Life laid waste against a ruined sky.
We should leave them to it.
“Bonsoir. If there’s anything we can do…” calls Michel.
They shrug shyly and then an earnest-faced, dark-haired fellow in his early twenties steps forward. “Monsieur?”
Michel turns.
“Nous avons vu les chiots… ils sont à vendre?”
The puppies, are they for sale? they are asking.
We have eight to give away, I tell them.
Two young men now step keenly toward us, assuring us they would give them good homes. Sans doute. It is agreed, they will take one each. Tomorrow morning, before they go off duty, they will choose their puppies.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Sunday, is almost as eventful as the previous day. Cars arrive, a huge tanker bearing almost a reservoir of water negotiates the winding drive, splintering what’s left of the fig branches in its wake, to refill the pool. This is followed by an official from the council administration, who arrives in a sleek silver-gray Renault. He is a short, stocky individual who wears a dark gray mustache and struts like royalty with his hands clasped behind his back. Most unusual, I think, because a true Provençal’s hands are half his conversation. When I run downstairs to greet him, he asks to speak to the man of the house, which infuriates me. It is typical of a certain machismo which is prevalent on this Riviera coast.
“He is busy,” I insist. “How can I help?”
He shrugs, wearied by the knowledge that he must deal with a woman. “I need to inspect,” he informs me curtly.
“The fire damage?”
He nods impatiently. But of course! Squinting, he looks about him with a calibrating eye, ascertaining what we have or rather what we have not, because that certain turn of the mouth and pout of the lips tell me that he considers the place a ruin. “Beaucoup de travail” is his informed opinion. It makes me laugh because it recalls the estate agent, Charpy, who fled at the prospect of the work needed here. I am way past bothering to explain that as far as we are concerned, renovation is part of the joy of the place. Instead, I offer to escort him up the hill. We make our way to the back of the house, where he halts and tilts his head skyward. It is clear that he was not expecting such exercise. Glancing at his watch with a monumental sigh, he begins the climb, leading, not following.
The young men who have kept guard all night look very weary and desperately in need of showers and clean clothes but are as cheerful as the evening before. We all go through the handshaking routine, and they lead the council official on a guided tour of charcoaled tree trunks and grizzled brush. I stay where I am, taking in the view. The dense scent of charred wood pervades the early-morning air with the same persistence as last night. He takes his time, this official, crunching across acres of ravaged land before he finally returns to me.
“You are to be congratulated,” he announces.
I am quite taken aback.
“Vous, votre mari, vous êtes des bons citoyens, and you are most welcome here in our commune.” He shakes my hand warmly. “I want to meet your husband.”
We traipse back down the hill, and I feel as though I am in the company of a different human being. He is whistling, looking about, pointing at this and that, nodding at the ruin and our olive terraces. The young men follow, carrying their rucksacks and moving wearily. Michel offers everyone coffee, but the firemen prefer to get off home. They leave, promising to return later to choose their puppies. Over a glass of vin rouge—it is not yet ten o’clock, and our parents regard this man with shock—the council official asks Michel what we do for a living (ah, les artistes, maintenant je comprends!) and if we would object to a photographer from the local gazette, the Nice Matin, dropping by. Not to photograph us, he reassures, but to take shots of the damage. Our privacy is sacred. Michel gives our consent.
The rest of Sunday is a series of comings and goings. The fire brigade returns to make a reconnoiter and decides that two more men are to be posted. “There is a light wind, and you can never be too sure.”
The photographer arrives, an unshaven scruffy chap, who appears far more interested in the girls in their bikinis, who lap up every glance of attention as though it gives credibility to and feeds the rising temperature of their sexual awakening. And then the crowning moment of the day, the four firemen return late in the afternoon, spruced, shaved, showered and dressed in civvies. Handsome as mythological gods. Four of them in one battered outdated car. The girls rush to and fro, combing their hair, changing their clothes, searching out lipstick, snitching mine, and then return to posed composure in deck chairs in the garden, making quite sure that every puppy has been dragged to their sides.
Much bending and caressing and displaying of helplessly adorable creatures takes place and, I suspect, arrangements to meet later in Cannes for cups of coffee. Finally, four yawning puppies are chosen. They cannot be taken tonight, as they must spend a little while longer with their mother, which means that each of the young men promises to return at regular intervals to keep an eye on “his chosen companion.” One young fellow must have lost out, I mutter amused to Michel, who is blithely unaware of what I am talking about.
After supper at our table, the girls, with dear Hajo as their escort, scuttle off to the bright lights of Cannes while we, the veterans, settle sedately on the upper terrace to watch the new moon and the stars appear. After a mistral, the view is always crystalline, as though the whole of nature has been polished. We can see every detail on every hill. Fortunately for the girls, we cannot see what they are up to in Cannes!
Tomorrow our parents are leaving. It is a sad yet complete moment. We have experienced the gamut of life’s offerings together here: birth and death and time shared. As always, farewells create a deep and melancholy emptiness within me, and I feel the loss swelling as Michel opens the final bottle to be shared between us all for this summer. We sit in silence, quaffing, listening, appreciating the soft sounds of evening. And then, suddenly, there is a noise that none of us recognize. Short, sharp, tiny and repeated.
“What’s that?” asks Anni.
We all of us listen concentratedly. Frowns and bemused expressions take shape in the candlelight.
I watch the families puzzling over the distant hiccuping and I simply cannot resist. “It’s the schnecken, Anni, the snails.”
“What about them?”
“They’re sneezing!”