While we were having this conversation, as it later became clear, the President and his men were getting ready to deal their final blow against you. And in fact, it wasn’t as though we didn’t sense that the Shark felt the need to take some action, considering the compromised position he had found himself in on the heels of the stork fiasco and the expert’s escape from the island. The President’s authority on the island was crumbling, and he was having a hard time getting the people to believe in him now that they faced having to live with the snakes. There was no doubt he was planning a new operation, but the question was, how was he going to win the people over so that they would accept it?

  I SPENT THAT NIGHT on pins and needles. That thing they call a premonition must really exist, I think. A person can sense ahead of time that something bad is about to happen. As I anxiously tossed and turned in bed, Lara asked me what was wrong. I said, “Nothing,” but, knowing me as well as she did, she persisted. I told her of my fears. My heart was fluttering like a bird’s. Lara revealed to me that she felt the same way. As it turned out, the two of us had been wrestling with similar dark premonitions.

  After this disclosure, we sat outside in the yard, even managing to shrug off our fear of the snakes. Though we tried to comfort each other, it did no good. Our agitation was simply too great. The jasmines continued to give off their perfume at regular intervals in the meantime, but in our frame of mind, there was no comfort in them anymore. We had to figure out the future—that frightening and uncertain future of ours that loomed before us.

  An announcement distributed to our houses the next morning informed us that we were to gather at the café early that evening. On receiving the flyer, we immediately realized that our premonitions of the night before had not been in vain, yet there was no way for us to have foreseen the events I’m about to describe.

  THE PRESIDENT introduced his speech by expressing his deep sorrow at the fact that everyone had been swindled at the hands of the expert. No one could be trusted in this day and age; morals had gone by the wayside. We’d seen as much with our own eyes; the very expert who had been recommended to him had turned out to be a fraud and run off without having found a single solution for dealing with the snakes. The President was ready to pay out of his own pocket for the damage incurred by the islanders, and so on. We listened to all of this without believing a word of it.

  Then the President disclosed his new plan: since the snakes were still a problem, we were going to resort to the only solution left, which was to reduce the number of foxes on the island. Initially beneficial and of great service to the island, they had bred to excess and were now more harmful than beneficial. By reducing their numbers, and simultaneously raising the number of seagulls, it would be possible to reestablish nature’s balance on the island and help solve the snake problem.

  I squeezed Lara’s hand. So then, the guns would reappear, and the once-calm islanders, each of whom had turned into a hunter in the meantime, would now be organizing a full-gear fox hunt.

  After giving instructions for everyone to show up on the pier the next morning, the President said, “Now let’s get to another matter. Dear friends, you’ll recall that I made the choice to come to this island for reasons of security, and for the sake of being able to live in a secluded corner of the world far from terrorists after all the years of service I gave to my country.”

  A few people nodded a polite yes, to indicate that they did indeed recall the point. Lara and I were all ears, wondering what he was getting at.

  “But unfortunately, dear friends,” the President said, “I’ve failed to do this. The dangerous enemies of the country and of the regime have turned up before me here, too.”

  “What now?” we thought as we looked at each other. What was he getting at?

  Just then, I heard Lara murmur, “No! It can’t be…” I turned to look. The President’s two men were bringing the Writer into the garden, bound in handcuffs. Immediately I shot up from my seat and made to go to him, but the President said, “Sit down in your seat. First listen to what I’m going to say, and then if you wish, you can go on.

  “Recall if you will, dear friends, when we had our picture taken together. It was on one of the first days I came to your beautiful island. Well, those same pictures have been uploaded to the computers in our capitol and carefully investigated, exposing, as a result, the big secret of that friend of ours we so dubiously call the Writer. This person is a political convict who has escaped from prison, is an enemy of the regime, and has fooled you all by changing his name.”

  On hearing these words, everyone turned and looked at the Writer’s face, but he went on boring his eyes into the President with a rancorous stare.

  “Isn’t that right, Mr. Writer?” asked the President. “Shall I go on to reveal what other special skills you possess, or have I said enough? Will you be the one to say that your wife was a subversive like you and committed suicide in jail, or shall I?”

  An unspeakable pain shot through my heart. Clearly, the President was speaking the truth. This was the secret that lay behind the endless sad expression in the Writer’s eyes. Though unsophisticated in these matters, even I knew that prison suicides were a controversial issue. I had also heard that opponents of the regime who had been thrown in prison with no proof of having committed a crime, and for reasons unjustifiable even by the regime’s oppressive laws, would be reported as having committed suicide, when the truth was that they had been killed. And of course there were, in fact, those who had actually committed suicide, rather than choose the horrendous conditions under which they would have had to live.

  Lara dissolved into a flood of tears.

  The President then stated that the Writer would be held behind bars that night and taken away on the motorboat the next morning, after which he would be placed in the hands of justice.

  The revelation had come as such a shock that Lara and I sat there completely numb, unable to move. I had no idea what to do in a situation like this.

  With his ever-present air of arrogance and pompous self-assurance, the President was saying appalling things with his cruel, thin lips. He was asserting that the Writer was the reason for the failures on our island and ranting that social morale was extremely important, as borne out by his personal service to the state, and that it was this very morale which the country’s traitors most attacked.

  Lara and I finally managed to gather our wits and stand up.

  “We don’t believe what you’re saying,” I said. “Our friend represents good on this island. You, on the other hand, represent evil. Everyone can bear witness to that fact. It isn’t him but you who’s brought this island to the state it’s in. Until you came, this island was—”

  Just then I felt a sharp pain at the back of my head, my eyes closed, and a wave of heat rose through my body. I have no recollection of what happened next. My head was throbbing when I opened my eyes. I was in an unfamiliar room. It must have been a room with no windows, something like a cellar. When I tried to force the door open, I found it locked. It wouldn’t open.

  According to what they told me later, the President’s men struck the back of my head with the butt of a gun. Having knocked me unconscious, they dragged me off and locked me away in the President’s cellar. Though they didn’t hit Lara, they took her someplace where they also locked her up under police custody.

  When they let us go the next day, the Writer had already been taken away on the motorboat. We never heard from him again.

  No, we never heard from you again, dear Writer. As you might imagine, all kinds of rumors cropped up in your absence. Calling me a traitor and Lara spineless, the neighbors now rushed in with all kinds of wild claims about you. They said you were a subversive to begin with, and said, with even greater conviction yet, that you were to blame for everything that had gone wrong on the island. In other words, my dear friend, you were responsible for everything that had happened. No one would believe us anymore because both Lara and I had been branded as untrustworthy for being friends of “the guilty one.” Very few people still spoke with us.

  All of this we endured, keeping our cool and gritting our teeth, but one day that patience came to an end and I punched a man in the face. Yes, me! I know how much you’d be surprised if you could read these lines; after all, how could someone like me do something like that?

  But that man had been saying that after the motorboat had made it out to sea, they’d tied a heavy block of iron to your feet and tossed you overboard. What’s more is that he’d said this with virtually no remorse, as if sharing the news of a good deed they’d done. One of the President’s men had supposedly let it slip in the middle of conversation, after which the rumor evidently spread like wildfire.

  Lara and I never believed a word of this. Even imagining you locked up in a prison back on the homeland was better than thinking of you as dead. Maybe someday, we would get on a boat and be free of this island, too; maybe we’d see you again, and talk to you again, and maybe you would even lay into me again on account of the way I’ve written this story.

  Oh, my dear friend! Where are you? Where are you really?

  So many rumors were sprouting up so quickly that it was as if the things we were hearing had begun to take the form of some kind of fable. You’d managed to escape from the hands of the President’s men as they took you away on the motorboat, as one story had it—although unconvincingly. How could you have escaped when you were out there in the middle of the sea, your hands cuffed and a blindfold around your eyes?

  Nonetheless, Lara and I couldn’t help but wonder why a rumor like this should turn up. Maybe you really had escaped after all, but there was some mix-up in the details of the stories that were going around. Maybe instead of at sea, it had been once you were on land that you’d escaped. The President’s men locked up your house and pronounced it off-limits. Luckily, they’d been somewhat slow to act. After making a visit to your place—in search of a keepsake, I presumed—Lara returned with a notebook in her hands, containing your notes. I must admit, I was surprised; I’d never seen you in the act of writing.

  The notebook was indecipherable in parts, with one section set aside for what seemed to be the book you were going to write, though we were hard pressed to assign any significance to it. The notes in your journal, on the other hand, absolutely fascinated us. We realized that after going back home, you’d continued to give thought to what we’d talked about, having taken notes on the subjects in question, and on the unfolding developments in our lives.

  Your sentences were all witnesses to the life of pain that you led, your thoughts enlightening, and my heart grieved as I read them. I remembered with gratitude your determination to live as a writer who preferred to take part within a noble and honorable movement rather than be a savior, and as someone who felt obliged to tell the truth as well as awaken others to it, willing to stand alone in doing so. I vowed that I would someday get your book published and read by the public.

  So then, if I had to sum up what happened after you disappeared, it was a series of still more dreadful events.

  The President and his men set off on a fox hunt that lasted for days. They would return swaggering early each evening, fox corpses in hand like so many trophies. As for the baby foxes, they would hook them on the notches on their belts. But kill and kill as they might, the foxes had proliferated to such an extent that they still couldn’t kill them all. Besides which, it was impossible for them to check every rock cliff, and beneath every bush.

  Following an accident in which one of the hunters shot one of his friends in the leg, the President/Shark and his men put their heads together with the islanders, having now turned them all into monsters, and decided to try out a brand-new method.

  They had cyanide brought to the island. They were going to inject the dreadful poison into meat, which they would leave in the forest as a way to lure the foxes in their hunt. And indeed, that’s exactly what they did, with devastating consequences. This time it wasn’t only the foxes that were poisoned, but every species of creature that ate the meat. The island had become a death camp. The ground was so thick with the corpses of foxes, rabbits, partridges, turtles, sparrows, frogs, martens, and jackals that you had to step over them at every turn. The hunters were gathering up dozens of dead foxes a day and dumping them into a pile on the pier grounds, and still all this death wasn’t enough for them. It was as if they’d come to breathe nothing but death, place their faith in nothing but death, talk of nothing but death. Were these people who, at this point, were suffering frightful bouts of hysteria on days they saw no blood the same calm, cheerful, and affectionate people we’d once known? Or was it that, little by little, we were losing our minds?

  One day on my way to the pine forest, I saw a poisoned fox as it writhed in pain. It was tossing itself this way and that, no doubt from eating the poisoned meat. I doubt that I’ve ever witnessed anything more unbearable than this in my entire life. The poor animal was twisting and turning around its big, bushy tail as though its flesh was being eaten alive. It had such an excruciating look of pain on its face—I couldn’t even begin to describe it. It was as though the skin on its face was being stretched back, its teeth exposed because it couldn’t close its mouth. Had I had a gun in my possession, I would have killed it on the spot to put it out of its misery. It suffered a long and painful death instead. The memory of it haunted me for days.

  A few of our neighbors had fallen sick, as well. The doctor said it was because they’d ingested the poison. It appeared to us as though the President’s face was also turning pale and taking on a decidedly yellowish hue. Some claimed that the animals that had been poisoned would go to the mouths of springs, only to die there and thus poison the island’s spring water. Which was to say that we had all begun to drink water laced with cyanide.

  Meanwhile, there was talk that you, dear Writer, had returned to the island and were hiding in the forest, scheming secret operations against the President, his men, and his followers. There were also suspicions that someone was helping you. The islanders’ attitudes toward us began to grow stranger than ever.

  Lara and I had begun to grow sickly, as well. It was high time we left the island, and really, we should have already left by then. We were waiting for the next ferry. We were going to get our stuff together and escape somewhere far away from this living hell of an island. In bed at night, I would twist and turn with questions for which I had no answer. So as not to disturb Lara, I would resist my urge to throw myself this way and that, thinking for hours on end instead, only to realize that she wasn’t sleeping either, but was caught up in a maelstrom of dark thoughts of her own as she tried not to let on.

  “Are you awake?” I would ask her. “Are you awake, sweetheart?”

  Then we would step out into the garden and talk until dawn about where we would go, what city we would settle in, what we would do for a living. Lara would say that she could find a job as a waitress, or if worse came to worst, that she could work as a maid—neither of which sat right with me. After all those peaceful years on the island, the thought of returning to that other world chilled me, barbarous, merciless, and hideous as it was. Yet Lara was right; we couldn’t go on living on that savage island anymore. What a shame it was for our secret paradise to have ended up this way. I would keep thinking of the same things and asking the same questions over and over again: Why didn’t we have friends anymore? When we’d lived with them on the island like brothers and sisters, sharing days and nights with them, why had these people I’d once called angels turned into our enemies? These creatures weren’t our islanders. A look of anger mixed with suspicion had settled into their eyes. They were no longer telling us of the decisions they were making.

  When they saw that the cyanide was killing all the other creatures, I believe they did away with this measure, too, because, according to the buzz that was going around, the President was in hot pursuit of another idea.

  The foxes could easily hide within the secluded corners of the forest, which was making it very difficult to shoot them. In order to force them out of their hiding spots, a controlled fire would be set in the forest. When the foxes ran out of the forest to escape the fire, they’d be finished off by the hunters lying in wait for them.

  Since no one opposed the President, this plan was put into effect as well. A fire was set on one of the shores of the forest, sending off flames and plumes of smoke that we could see even though it was a good distance away from us. As the fire spread, the foxes and all the other creatures came running out and away as fast as lightning. It was difficult for the hunters to hit these swift animals. Still, they went on shooting at them with every effort they could muster, firing off one round after another. Lara was trembling as she covered her ears, rambling incoherently. It seemed to me that she was having a nervous breakdown.

  The islanders had now focused the full brunt of their hatred onto the foxes, virtually forgetting the seagulls. And when the doctor said that the fox is the most contagious animal in the world, the fear and hatred among the islanders shot up even more, to the point they became something you could almost hold in your hands. He said that the cats and dogs that were bitten by foxes would catch their rabies and spread it to humans. As I listened, I wondered whether the rabies had already begun to spread on the island. Our islander friends were shooting with such enthusiasm and drunken rage that only rabid people could have shot that way.

  The smell of soot reached our noses just then, as though wood were burning somewhere close by. Soon after, we saw smoke begin to fill the garden as shouts broke out here and there: “Fire! Fire! Everybody run!” It wasn’t long before the heat of the approaching flames hit our faces.

  My dearest friend, the islanders had so given themselves over to this shooting and killing spree that no one had noticed that what had begun as an offshore breeze was steadily building into a strong wind. Or rather, I should say, when they did, it was too late, and the forest fire had swallowed up everything in its path with the force of the violent wind.