To Leave with the Reindeer Read online

  You’re finding that the animals have gone quite far away, you’re finding that they haven’t come back and aren’t going to come back, that you’ll have to go looking for them, to hunt them and follow them into unlikely parts outside the towns, into the wastelands, overgrown meadows, fallow lands, copses, stretches of wild grass and brambles that the metropolis leaves in its wake. You decide, against your parents’ wishes, that you will go in search of the animals, that you’ll leave home. And to prepare for your future journey, you begin, from the age of five, to ask your parents all kinds of questions, questions to which they give evasive replies. This confirms you in your conviction. Your parents know nothing about abandoned animals or wild children, whereas you – you will know.

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  Cities are not made for wolves, nor wolves for cities. When wolves appear, a crisis has occurred, upsetting cycles and regions and territories and the entire distribution of species. But we’ve known for decades that the distribution of species is now a human concern, and that we can redefine and redevelop territories by populating them with creatures we have chosen, exactly like a game of chess or draughts. For example, the wolves’ installation in the city is now thoroughly planned out, the relevant authorities have given their consent and the logistical arrangements are on track. For a few months, the wolves will be settled, cared for, observed and fed by the two breeders who will accompany them on their journey, talk to them, reassure them, provide for them. And, assuming their stay passes without incident, we can then look ahead to establishing them in the long term, for the pleasure of old and young alike.

  You don’t know the Sandman, or the Bogeyman, or ‘The Little Mermaid’, or ‘Monsieur Seguin’s Goat’. Instead, thanks to a record that you’ve listened to over and over since you were six, you find out that children who lie to their parents may be eaten by wolves. This does not unduly frighten you. In order to lie, you would have to talk about things that happen to you, which you do as little as possible. In any case, nothing or as good as nothing does happen to you, you spend your time daydreaming your life.

  It may not be immediately obvious, but rehousing wolves in a new territory demands unwavering determination. You have to fill in stacks of forms at the Ministry of the Environment and the town hall, establish contracts with feed suppliers, remember every single link in the chain, without which the slightest hiccough – a nip, a child’s tumble, with the consequences we can all imagine – could take on dramatic proportions and give rise to long-running legal proceedings intended to attribute responsibility to someone, since the wolves cannot assume it. If wolves could be held responsible for the murders they commit, that would change everything. But wolves are not responsible. That responsibility, therefore, must fall to others, to a range of departments, people and offices, and will fall into the gaps and cracks in the system, should there be any. Generally, let’s remember, there are no cracks.

  Your father reads you very few children’s stories but there’s one he reads again and again, and which, for that reason, fascinates you. It’s the story of Hans, a young stranger who, in order to rid a small Rhenish town of all the rats that overrun it, comes up with a strategy. He walks out by the town gates while playing a tune on his pipe, enticing the rats along behind him, enchanted and seduced by his music. The rats’ eradication brings about the people’s happiness.

  We must not neglect the issue of housing the wolves to be kept in captivity in the city. Yes, we will house them. We will offer them trees, rocks, shelters, enclosures, dens, dwellings, holes, corners, cages, benches, polling booths, ponds, racks, cubicles, moats and public parks, and we will instal these accommodation zones in environments that are sonically, thermally, acoustically and hydrometrically adapted to their lifestyle.

  The story your father tells is happy, yet it makes you uneasy. Perhaps because it’s your father, usually so uncommunicative, who’s telling it. Perhaps because at the end of the story he always sings a German nursery rhyme, not a word of which you understand. Perhaps because you wonder why your father speaks German. Perhaps, really, because there’s a bit of the story missing.

  The wolves should have access to sufficiently extensive playing fields that they can roam and run without impeding traffic and without endangering human life. To ensure this, the city plans to fit out trenches that are open to the elements yet separated from the streets by unscalably high walls. Rather than being dependent on bulldozers, pneumatic drills and mechanical diggers to build these living quarters, we’ll make use of pre-existing features of the territory: abandoned archaeological digs, hydraulic barriers unused for decades due to long-term drought, former open-pit mines. While we would like the population to benefit fully from the animals’ close proximity, our difficulty lies in the rarity of this kind of structure in the immediate vicinity of our cities. This is why, following due consideration, the authorities have opted to make use of castle moats. Deep, and well preserved down the centuries thanks to the high-quality materials used to build them, these are ideal for housing wolves freshly arrived from the peri-urban tundra. And they are especially suited given that in the Middle Ages, in their untouched natural settings, castles would have been surrounded by wild animals from which protection was essential. Housing wolves within our towns and in our castles will provide a timely reminder of our history.

  You can’t recall what becomes of Hans the piper after his adventure. Either your father always breaks off before the tale’s end, or you haven’t remembered the moral. Years after your father stopped reading you this kind of tale, you learn that Hans was not paid for the good turn he did the town and that upon his reappearance the inhabitants even tried to stone him in order to avoid their debt. Bent on revenge, Hans decided to use his pipe to seduce and enchant the hundred or so town children who, just like the rats, followed him out of the gates and were never seen again. In retrospect, it seems to you that, under the pretext of recapturing something of his own childhood, your father turned fairy tales to decidedly murky ends.

  Introducing wolves into a city requires a degree of practical nous. The romantic dream of a return to nature is of no use to us here. Thus, we have decided against wild wolves, undomesticated wolves or those wolves, known to be dangerous, that roam freely along the border between Italy and France, crossing motorway bridges, taking tunnels and highways, slipping beneath security fences and breaking into sheepfolds by methods known only to themselves. Those wolves are not suited to a project of this scope. We will leave them to evolve in the reduced spaces of old Europe as a reminder of our archaic ancestral fears. The others, the city wolves, born in parks and fed by human hands for several generations, are easier to transplant. Moved for aesthetic, ecological, economic and touristic reasons into the aforementioned moats, they will have been selected according to strict criteria of personality and sex. We will choose members of just one family forming a single troop or pack and used to living in near-incestuous closeness. In this way, the tribe’s members will be obliged to regulate the extent of their own aggression while they live together in their trenches – which by this token we will call the communal trenches.

  Stories from your childhood stay on your mind for many years. You find out not only that Hans is a small-time criminal, but that Rosemary’s Baby, the Roman Polanski film, was released in 1968, three years after your birth. Contrary to the family legend, your mother therefore could not have seen this film during her pregnancy. You wonder what use your parents meant to make of this lie, what use exactly they have made of it.

  It is vital to measure in advance the degree of friendship or enmity that exists between this and that wolf in the pack and to avoid cases of flagrant hostility between brothers, cousins, parents and children. These cases are not rare. Very often, within the clan’s hierarchical structure, individuals of the same sex will fight for the dominant position. Wolf is the enemy of the wolf.

  You try to think of questions your parents won’t be able to answer and which will force them to let you experienc
e the world for yourself. One of these questions recurs over and over, eating at you. Where do the reindeer go after Christmas?

  We have several techniques we use to set them off, you have to be patient. The best way to get them howling is to separate certain wolves from the pack, we pick one or two, separate them from the group, we handle them, they don’t like it, at some point they snap, they howl to call the others, then the public really feel like they’re out there on the steppe with the wild beasts, it’s very impressive, genuinely awe-inspiring to hear.

  When your questions become too tiresome, your parents ban you from speaking on pain of losing your tongue. You can hardly believe they’d put their threat into practice, you can’t really picture them wielding sharp instruments intended to cause pain, you see them more as kindly figures and, besides, they’re your parents. Despite all this you refrain, prudently, from pestering them to give you the moon. You’re learning that silence can protect you.

  To forestall any risk of violence within the community, we have already carefully selected the members of the troupe and begun to take the sexual drive of the females in hand by means of strategic sterilisations. These interventions must take place over the next few days. Indeed, it’s best to anticipate a period of several weeks between sterilisation and the moment when the neutered animals are introduced to their new living quarters, so that those animals substantially traumatised by the scalpel have time to begin healing. The wider public must not learn that the wolves selected for them may have been mutilated before their move into the trenches. The pleasure of watching them lope around a park, encounter urban furniture and considerably modify its uses, could be wrecked by a pointless further insight into the conditions under which the whole operation has been carried out. Ecologists and animal rights campaigners often have a narrow and naïve conception of nature, and do not know that a wolf in captivity, correctly cared for and overseen by its masters, has a far greater life expectancy than that of its peers in the wild. Man is not wolf’s enemy.

  Your mother ventures a range of explanations for the survival of reindeer after the snow. One consists of saying they retreat to remote parts of the forest to raise their children and teach them how to pull Father Christmas’s sleigh when their turn comes. You aren’t sure this explanation is good enough. Even while continuing to enjoy the presents brought by their labour, you so wish they could abandon the sleigh once and for all, quit their yoke and travel as far as the farthest tundras of the East.

  We are never truly friends with the animals we train. We have to keep our eyes peeled but when we enter a cage the fear vanishes, we’re in our own world, we’re on a totally different planet.

  You imagine the reindeer racing through the snow, their flight towards the legendary East and their disappearance into the Siberian tundra. You wonder if Father Christmas makes it to these remote regions when he has to go looking for his animals. You picture him alone on foot, calling the name of each in turn for a good part of the summer as he tries to find them. But when Christmas comes round, you forget the reindeers’ freedom and focus on the presents you’re hoping for.

  The quantity of food the wolves require will be calculated and fixed in advance by the handlers. Principally made up of unsold poultry and red meat packaged for the hypermarkets, this food will be bought at preferential prices thanks to a partnership with the shopping centre chosen to undertake daily deliveries of the meat, that is approximately 250 kg per week, or 2 kilos of meat per day, per animal.

  In the circus where I used to work, it was very hard, I didn’t have food for the animals, sometimes I’d see a donkey or two up on the hills, I’d head out with a sledgehammer, the handler would come with me, all done on the sly, and we’d be back with the food by nightfall. It’s a dark memory.

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  Your grandmother, your father’s mother, is a serene and very discreet old lady. She has no stories to tell but she makes Polish dishes which she then tries to force-feed you, swinging between entreaties and commands to reinforce her case. For Easter every year, she buys a live carp, dunks it in the bathtub, lets it flail and exhaust itself, then seizes it with her bare hands and knocks it dead in the sink with a hammer, a capacity for violence unguessable from her old lady’s physique. The blood spurts over the sink’s enamel sides; the creature twists and fights to escape but your grandmother’s triumph is total. There is never a survivor. All the carp die inexorably in her sink, one after another, and end their days in the form of that sweetish, insipid dish that you can’t stand and that, with a mixture of repugnance and community pride, we call Jewish carp.

  To stop the wolves taking live prey on the land allocated to them, wires and spikes aimed at preventing birds from settling within the zone should shortly be laid out. The spectacle of one of our canines tucking into a meal of mallards or swallows could really shock our fellow citizens and give rise to undue hostility towards the wolves.

  You spend your weekends fishing for plastic ducks using a rod furnished with a hook. While keeping your focus on maximum efficiency, you consider how pleasurable it must be to fish for the great carp which swim in the very depths of the lake, to feel their weight on the line, to disengage the hook from each gaping mouth before throwing each one back in the water. You sense that this longing is worse even than your longing for a pet. You don’t mention it to your mother. In order to lie, you’d have to speak.

  There was a time when the law anticipated the breeding of species as prey for animals that fed exclusively on live creatures, but that law was amended by another, such that the wild individuals could at no juncture be described as engaged in torture, which, however, they were, back when all animals lived in the wild. We may recall that in those days, the predator would begin to devour its prey even before administering the final blow, a method understandably judged to be inhumane by the authorities responsible for human and animal well-being. This is why our veterinary services have transformed wolves, the big cats, snakes and bears, all traditionally partial to fresh meat, into carrion-eaters.

  Your mother has decided that the assimilation of Jewish families into the French nation is sealed by their celebration of Christmas. She believes her progeny should not feel excluded from the festival all children talk about and so keenly anticipate. Therefore, you write regularly to the old white-bearded gentleman, of whom you demand a pet, a little ball of fur that you could stroke, feed, fuss over and kiss, that you could play and chatter with endlessly and that you’d look after. But as Father Christmas does not seem to be listening, you decide that, as soon as the banquet has been consumed, you will leave with his reindeer, to take your revenge.

  The chickens arrive frozen whole and we post them beneath the fence. Sometimes we stuff their rumps with beef mince and put medication in it, not antibiotics but vitamins, so the wolves’ coats stay shiny. The wolf’s well-being guarantees man’s safety.

  For one of your childhood Christmases, your parents plan a big party with all the grandmothers, grandfathers, uncles, great-uncles, aunts and great-aunts, cousins, second cousins, nieces and nephews, sons- and daughters-in-law who belong to the family by a range of crooks and branches that you have never pretended to understand. This substantial crowd squeezes into the dining room to await the moment of gift distribution. Since the previous evening, an enormous paper-covered cube has been waiting beneath the synthetic fir tree that your father consented to buy, waiting for you to open it in front of everyone. The excitement is at its peak and the ceremony is about to begin. Sitting on the floor, you tear off the wrapping in a frenzy to reveal a gigantic doll kitted out head to toe as a nurse. Your disappointment is so acute that it triggers an appalling crying fit, the cause of which nobody in the family, with all its branches and generations, can discover and which in large part spoils the festive mood of this huge reunion.

  While the circumference of the accommodation zone is normally effected by means of an exterior enclosure intended to head off all attempt at escape and all unauthorised entrance,
whether by people or animals, the facility envisaged here, a vast trench both deep and completely open to the skies, will require none of these structures and will therefore exhibit great architectural elegance and almost ethereal lightness. The security zone, a strip 1.5 m wide at its narrowest, that separates spectators from animals, will at a few points become a railing placed in such a way as to prevent spectators from leaning over and touching the animals. We know that children find wolves irresistible, and that mothers’ vigilance can be compromised by their little ones’ curiosity, unaware as they are of the gap between fairy tale and real life. For the wolf, a man is a man.

  You wish you could like what the other little girls like, you’d like to play with dolls as they do, you’re embarrassed that you don’t play with dolls but you just can’t make yourself do it, you ask for pets, soldiers, lorries, garages, teepees, superhero costumes, and by force of attrition your mother gives in to some of your wishes; you acquire the Indian outfit with feathers sticking up behind your head, and the Zorro cape, but the pet, the little ball of fur that you want to carry about with you, to fuss over, stroke, feed, look after, to which you’d confide your secrets, your sorrows, your disappointments and your desires, you’ll never have that.

  The open-air sections, strictly reserved for the wolves, will measure 100 m2 at most for a couple and 20 m2 for every additional wolf, which for a family of twelve gives an acceptable living space (300 m2), though substantially smaller than the average area available to them in northern Canada or eastern Siberia. These sections must be enclosed by fences. The type of mesh, the spacing of the bars, the layout of the supporting posts and the different options for attaching all this to the ground have been subject to a number of studies, and the results suggest that Layher parts, with a galvanised wire mesh cladding 4 mm in diameter, will be the most appropriate and safest option. The mesh will be buried along its entire length and to a depth of 40 cm. Thus, the animals will have no means of escape.