A damp autumn set in. You have to know what autumn’s like in Ville-d’Avray. October. November. In the hundreds of terraced gardens that rose in tiers up the slopes of the hills, the plants were turning brown, the trees were shedding their leaves. The rain started in the morning, stopped around noon, and resumed toward evening. The neighborhood seemed dead, the gardens perpetually darkened by the showers; the slate roofs glistened; the sodden leaves macerated in heaps. As soon as night fell, the wet asphalt reflected extensive yellow crowns of yet unfallen leaves. The same ruined, melancholy prospect was reproduced on every street, one by one. People went out less.

Often, during her habitual promenade in the Parc de Saint-Cloud, my sister found herself alone on the pathways. She’d walk fast, thrusting her hands in her pockets. Her ankle boots trod on broad, damp, slippery leaves, still red and freshly fallen, that covered older, decomposed layers, some of them dating from the previous winter. Because the trees in the park were veterans planted long ago, they held up better. Their fall foliage, with the shiny red, the buttercup yellow, the brilliant russet of certain varieties—exactly the same color as the dried stems of the chrysanthemums people would leave in pots in cemeteries or decorate crossroads with—made patches of fantastic light when the shadows were settling in.

On her way home from her walks, when she was passing the rows of houses, a dog would bark. Invisible behind a fence or inside a garage, the dog would then emit a long, slow whine heavy with furious violence. It must have been running from one side to the other of the sliding door, trying to find a way out. Sometimes the story Marc Hermann had told Claire Marie—about the dogs in the villages on the Soviet side of the Hungarian border—would cross her mind. She had perused some books. She’d looked up the names of towns. She’d read that the border guards would shoot at people attempting to get across. Had anyone shot at him? He’d talked of a dangerous life. The boundary lines were electrified. There was no place to hide on the open plain.

Some people, once detected, would start running hopelessly, not stopping when the guards commanded them to halt and trained their weapons on them. Hermann had told her he’d crossed over before dawn.

She’d imagine that the border cut through woods, through large expanses of dismal pastureland, constantly frozen in winter, through silent, somnolent villages; she’d think about the barking of the hostile, confined dogs.

She’d go to pick up Mélanie.

When they came out of the school, the children would chase one another, bounding along the sidewalks. The more the day declined, the more the light seemed to irradiate the leaves; it flared up inside the streetlamps, turned very yellow, and faded away in the damp, dark shadows.

Claire Marie noticed that, without thinking, she was going more and more often to the window and looking out, the way she’d done when she was little. All night long on the border (so he’d told her), searchlights would illuminate the barbed-wire fences and the watchtowers; and when she looked out at her street, those luminous circles and those pockets of darkness were what she’d see, as they’d been seen in former times by people desperate to leave, to change their lives.

“You’re not looking very well,” Christian pointed out. “I’m going to prescribe you some vitamins.”

What she didn’t tell Christian (but confessed to me in her account) was that one day, while on her usual promenade in the Parc de Saint-Cloud, she’d had the feeling she was being followed. The pathway she’d taken skirted a broad, rectangular lawn, one of those where picnicking was authorized during the warmer months. The changeover from summer to winter time had just passed. The park was empty, the light faint—going but not yet gone—and the sensation of early nightfall was heightened by a cloudy, overcast sky, a sky full of rain. A few meters behind her, she heard, at regular intervals, the sound of footsteps. At first she thought she was imagining the sound, but then it continued. She walked the path beside the lawn all the way to the end, without turning around, as if she hadn’t noticed anything; however, she kept a firm grasp on her umbrella. With relief, she spotted a couple to her right, began heading toward them, found a stairway, and went down, carefully monitoring the sounds behind her; they were scarcely more resonant on the stone steps.

A weak rain was falling. As she descended the steps, which led to another, lower path, she recognized the row of boxwoods running alongside it, pruned in the shape of little obelisks. This showed that she was approaching a more landscaped area of the park, near an exit; there was a fountain. She could make out several stone torsos, silhouetted against the darkness, as well as some statues in a circle—some kind of arbor, probably. The rain was falling into a central basin; a film of orange light (its source the streetlamps lining a road on the edge of the park) glimmered on the water.

The sound of footsteps had ceased, replaced by the shivering, continuous sound of the gently falling rain.

She stopped. There were several people around the pool. She approached them; she couldn’t say whether one of them, a man leaning over the basin’s stone rim, was the one who’d followed her. The rain was still pattering on her umbrella, as on a tambourine. She said to herself, I must have been dreaming.