Invisible Love by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Howard Curtis Page B

the hope that he would pick up my voice, but he never appeared.
    I felt extremely sad. I burst into tears. It was absurd, of course, to cry on an evening like this when I had just come back to life, regained my freedom . . . I had merely clenched my jaws over the deaths of my parents, and yet I felt sorry for a stray dog I had only known for a week.
    The next day, I was part of the group that left the camp.
    Once more, we walked for hours across the white plain. Nothing had changed. We were back with the same forced marches we had already suffered . . . Some collapsed, just as had happened before. And just as had happened before, nobody stopped to prevent them dying in the powdery snow.
    Suddenly, to the left of the column, I heard barking.
    The dog was running toward me.
    I kneeled and held out my arms. He threw himself against my chest and frantically licked my mouth. His tongue surprised me, disgusted me a little, scratched me a lot, but I let him cover me with slobber. This dog kissing me with such love was the girlfriend who wasn’t waiting for me, the family I no longer had, the only creature who had looked for me.
 
    The other prisoners overtook us, continuing on their way in the snow. The dog and I continued laughing and yelling, drunk with joy, happy to be reunited.
    I didn’t get up until the tail of the convoy was out of sight.
    â€œCome on, dog, we have to stick with them or we’ll be lost.”
    He nodded his flat head, grinning from ear to ear, his tongue lolling from right to left, and ran by my side to rejoin the group. Where did we get the strength?
    At the end of that day, we spent our first night together. Subsequently, nothing ever separated us, not even a woman—I didn’t meet your mother until he had left me.
    In the school where our group stopped overnight, my animal huddled against my thighs, I suffered less from the cold than my companions. Better still, stroking his satiny skull, I rediscovered the contact, the tenderness, the weight of a physical presence. I was blissful. When was the last time I had willingly touched a warm body? For a moment, I had the feeling that my exile was over: wherever I was, as long as I had my dog beside me, I would be the center of the world.
    At midnight, while the marchers were snoring and the moon hovered behind the misted-up windows, I looked hard at my sated companion, his ears pinned back against his head, his guard-dog stance relaxed, and gave him a name. “I’m going to call you Argos. That was the name of Odysseus’s dog.”
    He frowned, not sure he understood.
    â€œArgos . . . Do you remember Argos? The only living creature that recognized Odysseus when he returned to Ithaca in disguise after twenty years’ absence.”
    Argos nodded, more to be obliging than because he was convinced. In the days that followed, he liked recognizing his name in my mouth, then proving to me, by obeying me, that it really was his.
    Our return was slow, broken, and erratic. The strange cohort of Auschwitz survivors staggered across a devastated, deprived Europe, where migrants joined grief-stricken local populations uncertain who their masters were. We, the skeletons, were dragged from temporary Red Cross posts to permanent ones, depending on what transport and lodging was available, trying to avoid the last of the fighting. To get back to Namur, I crossed Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, before getting on a ship in Istanbul, sailing via Sicily, landing in Marseilles and traveling across France by train as far as Brussels. During that journey, Argos never left me. Of the people we met, some merely shrugged, but many remarked on how well trained he was . . . Not that I had tamed him or forced him to do anything—I was too unfamiliar with the world of dogs—but united by affection as we were, we were delighted to hear this. I just had to think about turning left for Argos to veer in that direction. When