One is of his mother, coming home from church on a Sunday in May. There is a ray of sunlight touching the end of her nose, and the turned-up brim of her hat reveals a wide, smooth forehead. Although she is smiling, some distant worry is already casting a shadow over her happiness.

Then there is one of Alban on the terrace of the restaurant by the lake, sitting on the railing, with the gray water behind him and the misty, white mountain behind him, big and awe-inspiring.

The last one is of his uncle, taken the same day and in the same spot. The poor man seems to have wanted to compensate for his premature balding by refusing to cut what hair he had, which had grown to an unreasonable length despite Mildred's imprecations. The picture reveals that slow smile of his, frozen in mid-stream. Although his uncle was an affable man, Joseph doesn't recall ever hearing him burst out laughing. If you ask him, that was due to Mildred: she had snuffed his laughter out.

Now he remembers it clearly. The day before Massimo had left, between the sound of the dishes clattering and the water running to rinse them, he had heard bursts of angry voices. At first it had been just the two men, then she had joined in. That's right, he remembered it now, he'd needed to use the bathroom but hadn't wanted to cross the room while they were in there arguing.

He recalls as well that when Massimo would sweep the terrace he was never in any hurry to get the crumbs and the dust from out under Mildred's chair. It seemed he even took his time. He would see him on all fours coming and going with the broom, his hair brushing against her thighs. She would laugh in little bursts, a strange laugh, almost like hiccups. One day he had come across them, yes, a scene he would never forget: the broom on the floor and Massimo's head with the thick, black, curly hair, wedged between Mildred's thighs.

He had put his pile of plates down quietly and thought immediately of his uncle, who might return at any moment. He had run to the empty field and heaved a sigh of relief upon seeing that the road was clear as far as the first tunnel, five kilometers of grace time. Consumed as they were by the dirty pleasures they were taking, it was obvious they would get themselves caught one day. Now they had.

That clear image he has of them still makes him sick to this day. And his uncle's bruised eye, he hasn't forgotten that either, the blue Piedmontese eye. Throughout his childhood he had heard his mother refer to her brother's pale gaze, which he believed could see right through to his soul. Whenever his uncle would make one of his rare visits to their farm the hubbub surrounding his visit always included a certain measure of trepidation if Joseph's conscience wasn't entirely clear. He was convinced he would be unmasked at the very first glance. The apple he had nicked from the fruit bowl and eaten in hiding seemed to stick in his throat as he listened to his mother sing while she peeled fruit for the pie. When his father put the biscuit-tin on the kitchen table, the tin from which Joseph had on occasion helped himself without permission, he could withstand his mother's inquisitive gaze without batting an eye as she said,

"I could have sworn this box was still half full!"

Joseph would be immensely grateful then to his uncle for his silence. When he thinks about it now, the idea that his uncle had possessed this rare talent of detecting cheatery just because of his piercing gaze was ludicrous, and makes him smile. Those blue eyes his mother loved so much didn't see through anything. They had been taken in by Mildred, after all, when they had caressed her, been blinded by the iridescent sheen of her skin and the flaming curls of her thick hair.

*

During the brief time that Juliette and the grandfather had spent together, he had confided in her things which she had written on a piece of paper torn from one of her notebooks, which she had then sewn into the lining of her coat. Why would an apparently guileless schoolgirl go to such lengths? Some years later, she had told Joseph the reasons for her actions. It had not taken much to convince him they were well founded.

"I knew immediately that what he was telling me might be valuable one day, an account of what had happened… I was afraid of forgetting important details… I also had the disagreeable feeling that nothing was below Amelie, that she would snoop around anywhere, without scruples. As soon as people's backs were turned she would be going through their personal things, their papers. I don't think she was ever caught in the act, but everyone there was suspicious of her, they were always on their guard."

"Amelie is the one in charge out in this part of the world," the grandfather had told Juliette. "No one likes that fact, and in fact no one likes her. But we're trapped here, you know, Macon is ten kilometers away, she controls the means of transportation and does all the shopping herself. She picks up our ration tickets and then gives us what food she feels like sharing with us. I don't walk well, and my daughter is afraid of horses. As for the Alsatian gardeners, Lord only knows what she's told them! They know that they have to toe the line. She signed papers for all three of them, the father and his two sons, declaring that they were indispensable to her for working the farm. Should the fancy take her, or for that matter one of the visitors she receives at night, she can denounce them to the authorities. She has them in the palm of her hand!

"And they must be worried stiff! After nightfall, quite a few cars come and go here. I don't sleep much, and even though they stop some distance away, at the junction of the two roads, behind the copse, I still hear them. And then I hear footsteps in the grass, and the squeak of the door. Believe me, what an old insomniac hears from his room on the second floor isn't going to pass unnoticed by three hale and hearty men sleeping on the ground floor right next to the road, even if they are sleeping off a hard day's work. And those men are going to be asking themselves the same question I'm asking myself: who has a car these days? The answer isn't very complicated: the doctor, the police, and the Germans.

"The only person to whom she gives no trouble is Philippe, my grandson, her cousin. He's at boarding school not very far away and comes to see his mother, Amelie's aunt. She lets him come and go as he pleases and speak to whomever he likes. He goes to the wine-pressing room quite a lot and I suspect that the Alsatians meet him there. One day when I was talking a stroll near the entrance gate I saw the father go in first, and then not long afterwards his two sons followed him, one after another. Nothing unusual about that, it's where the gardening tools are kept. I sat down on a bench nearby, minding my own business. An hour later, no one had come out with a rake, or a hoe… they were all still inside.

"Now, that wine-press hasn't pressed a thing since Amelie arrived because no more wine is being made. The vines are being maintained but there's no more harvest. She's transformed one of the vat-rooms into a barn for the five cows she bought, that she grazes in a miserable little field behind the common areas. I wonder if she goes to milk them herself in the middle of the night—I see them graze, chew their cud, udders swollen from time to time, and yet never a drop of milk in the house—at least not in our quarters! All this to tell you, my little Juliette, that unless one is on a very peculiar mission, there is no reason in the world to go into the wine-press and stay there for hours. And yet every time Amelie goes out, Philippe and the workmen lock themselves in there. The place is full of abandoned vats, of nooks and crannies. If you ask me, they're hiding something. Or someone. I'm very afraid that this is all going to end badly: Amelie is a snoop, and she has some unsavory friends."

On two separate occasions, Philippe had come to the kitchen in the evening to pay him a visit. Joseph had been wary, he'd answered in monosyllables to the questions put to him in a slight drawl. He also recalled how he'd had to struggle to contain the attraction he felt to the casual and elegant young man, who had reminded him of Alban.