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But the most surprising event occurred a little later, when the first mists were beginning to filter through into the lower town in the mornings. One day, as if by magic, everybody forgot the boating tragedy, the woman sitting on the bank, the drowned man stretched out on the grass. As if they had never existed!
The people of Villiers talked about power cuts, the schedules for which were printed in the newspapers; about the meat shortages just starting, about Princess Elizabeth's wedding: about the stars in The Best Years of Our Lives… And if anyone had taken it into his head to refer to the previous summer's inquiry, he would have committed an unpardonable gaffe, like telling an old joke that people no longer find funny.
Besides, soon the autumn floods covered the site of the ill-fated rendezvous and the bank where the man and woman had frozen in their involuntarily theatrical poses under the eyes of the spectators. The boat, whose side the people of Villiers had liked to poke their fingers into at the spot deeply torn by the collision, ended up among other wrecked vessels, its terrible singularity effaced among the peeling hulls, half hidden in the mist.
The expanse of meadowland covered in water was so bleak, the branches of the alders so trembling and tortured that it no longer occurred to anyone in Villiers-la-Forêt to ponder what kind of love or hate had brought two strange Russian summer folk together on this riverbank.
Night has fallen. A moment ago the old keeper stopped talk-