The smoke, that morning, was not yet smoke but a colour: a low copper laid out over the vineyards to the west, the very tint Marcel's pots had when he polished them on Sundays, maintaining (with that seriousness that came to him only before small things) that an oxidised copper is a copper that has stopped believing in itself. Renée stood in the kitchen, where she had stood for fifty-one years, inside the house that was not a house but a sediment: every object set down where someone had set it, the chipped jug no one threw away because to throw it away meant admitting that the hand which had chipped it was no longer there, the jars in her mother's handwriting, the post-office calendar stopped on a year that seemed to her like yesterday. Beneath the sink, in the half-dark that smelled of detergent and of iron, the toolbox rested: the flaked green metal, the handle that still held the shape of his grip, the spanners arranged by size out of a fussiness Renée had hated for forty years and that now, come to think of it, was the only prayer Marcel had ever known how to say. There was, in that box, the size-thirteen spanner he had bent on purpose one November night, the night Sylvie was born, to reach and tighten the bolt of a cradle that creaked and that no straight tool could reach: a spanner ruined by one man, for the need of that one hour, which Marcel had kept bent the way one keeps the date of a birth, never straightening it, because straightening it (he said) would have been like telling Sylvie that that creak had never happened. On top of the wardrobe, up high, where you had to climb onto a chair, the box of photographs: the yellowed cards, the serrated edges, the faces no one could name any longer but which she named all the same, one by one, the way you count the sheep that do not come back. She watched the copper grow denser. She did not think "the woods are burning." She thought, without noticing that she thought it, that someone up there was polishing the pots badly.

Then there was a knock.

The gendarme was young, drenched, the radio on his chest crackling numbers; behind him, in the street, a running engine throbbed like a held-back animal. He said the words everyone says in these cases, evacuation order, now, at once, and Renée heard them arrive from far off, translated, as though it were being explained to her in a language she had studied as a girl. "One thing, madame," he added, looking into the dark interior of the corridor with the haste of a man who knows how to count: "one minute. You have two hands, but in the car there is only one seat for you, not for the house." He stayed on the threshold counting the seconds the fire had lent him.

Renée went to the sink. She bent down, took the box by its handle, felt the honest weight of the iron pull at her wrist; she set it on the table. She climbed onto the chair, lifted the box of photographs down from the wardrobe, felt it light in an almost offensive way, cardboard and nothing; she set it beside the toolbox. Then she stayed like that, both hands suspended over the two objects, her fingers spread at the same height, like someone blessing or someone who cannot choose between two children, which is after all the same gesture reversed. She had spent her life not separating: keeping together the living and the dead, the jug and the hand, the copper and the Sunday, convinced that keeping everything was a way of losing no one; and now a voice at the door was asking her to do the one thing she had never learned, that is, to decide that one of those two presences would remain on the table while she went out, and to remain on the table, today, did not mean to wait. Her right hand came down on the green metal; it rose again. Her left brushed the cardboard; it drew back. There was a logic that tempted her, if it can be called logic: the photographs she knew by heart, every face filed behind her eyes in a place the fire does not enter, whereas the tools no, the tools were gestures, they were the way a hand sets itself upon the world to mend it, and that is not kept by heart, that is lost when one loses the iron that taught it; so that to take the toolbox seemed to her, for a moment, to be saving the part of Marcel she could not rebuild alone. Marcel dead in the box of tools, Marcel dead in the box of photographs, and she still in the middle making the calculation that no calculation dissolves. The gendarme said: "Madame." Then the hand closed. A single thing in her fist.

In the car, the object pressed against her belly and the seatbelt refusing to fasten over the bulk, Renée realised she had got it wrong. Not that the other choice had been the right one: she realised only that she was holding the wrong thing for a reason she could not name, the way the tongue finds the word three days after it was needed. She had taken the toolbox. The photographs had stayed on the table, the faces turned to the ceiling, and as the car went down the hairpin the copper outside the window was turning orange, then something simpler than orange, and she understood (too late, with the frightening calm of one who understands too late) that she had saved his hands and left his face; that she had chosen the instrument and not the image because a part of her, the most ancient, still believed that with those tools everything could be mended again, the house, the box, time, and the fire instead does not mend and does not come back. She looked at the seat beside her.

It was empty. No hand to hold filled it.