The Book of Pearl

by Timothee de Fombelle

  My eyes flickered open, briefly, as enormous human hands hauled me out of the water and onto a pontoon. I couldn’t move at all.

  Then I blacked out again.

  I can remember being in a strange state, where shadows flitted in and out, together with night birds and the laughter of the girl who had made me dissapear from the world.

  It was a busy, teeming dream in which I was trying to breathe and stay on the surface. A long, all-enveloping dream.

  I didn’t emerge from it until my body detected the gentle warmth of a fire nearby, the touch of linen sheets, the aroma of burnt pinecones. The idyll after the nightmare.

  The silence whistled and crackled occasionally. I was sheltered, safe. It was raining outside. The leaden weight of the blankets was just as it should be. Half opening my eyes, I could glimpse, beyond the white curve of the pillow, one, two … three black dogs lying close to a fireplace. Where was their master, the giant who had rescued me from the water? I raised my hand to my forehead and felt a bandage.

  “It was a branch from a bramble bush that wounded you…”

  The voice came from the foot of my bed, high up, as if the giant’s head were touching the beams. I couldn’t make out his enormous body in the half-light.

  “I used my nails to pull out every one of those thorns.”

  The warmth suddenly ceased to reassure me at all. I was picturing fingernails as long as sickles. How could I escape? I had heard that hostages always regretted those first minutes, when they still had a chance to get away. I tried to locate the door in the darkness. I would have to step over the dogs to reach it. One of them had woken up and was licking its paw.

  “You must have been bleeding for several hours. My dogs pulled you out of the water just in time.”

  A pinecone blazed in the fire. With my head resting on the pillow, I saw the room light up. And the man became visible. He was perched on top of a ladder, and he was tidying some red and brown boxes. He didn’t look like a giant or an ogre at all. He turned gently towards me.

  Thinking about it now, I remember that his face seemed to have come from another world. But I was so distracted by what he said next that for a long time I forgot all about that first impression.

  “You bled a great deal.”

  And as he said those words, I finally realized that the blood I had been following all along, the blood that had led me to this hearth, to these dogs and to this man, was my own blood. That was my discovery. Each time I had bent over, through my tears, a drop of blood had fallen from my forehead, and it had marked out a path.

  The wounded beast I had been tracking was me.

  3

  THE REFUGE

  I kept my eyes shut for a few minutes, trying to grasp what was happening to me. I could hear the scraping of the ladder at the foot of my bed. Let him think I was asleep. A plan was taking shape in my head, and I was waiting for the ideal opportunity.

  Suddenly, without a sound, I sat bolt upright and slammed my feet onto the floor.

  The drowsy dogs watched me dash for the door, try without success to open it, make my way back across the room whooping like a warrior, grab a poker for my weapon, drop it because it burnt my fingers, spin around, climb onto a table in combat position, open the window and throw myself outside.

  The three dogs didn’t move throughout this whole charade, and their master probably didn’t even look up from what he was doing, while I had managed to twist my ankle, letting out another roar and landing face down in the grass.

  Bravo. Some fights don’t make for much of a spectacle.

  So there I was, dragging myself along on my elbows. Since my tumble, I had covered all of one and a half metres in ten minutes. The rain was beating down more heavily now. I must have looked like an eel slithering through the damp grass. I could tell that I wouldn’t make it much further, despite there being no crocodiles snapping at my shins, and no butcher’s cleaver in my back. My departure had been met with total indifference.

  It was the same reaction when I returned to the dry of the house. Dead calm. The man was sitting at his table, making notes in an open ledger. I managed to limp, sheepishly, as far as my bed. The dogs were asleep in a heap at their master’s feet. He remained silent to begin with, absorbed in his work. I was shivering, and had pulled the blanket back over me.

  “What was that? An escape?”

  His head bent over his ledger, an invisible smile, not a hint of sarcasm in his voice. I felt all the more ashamed of my flight.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  He screwed up his eyes, as if this were some vast and unfathomable question; as if I had asked him whether God existed, or whether the universe had an edge somewhere, like a balcony you could lean over.

  Then he looked at me for the first time, holding me in his stare.

  Doubtless, there were four or five people like me hanging from his larder ceiling. For all I knew, he was planning to use my skull as a paperweight on his desk, and the small bones in my fingers to scoop out his snails at dinner, but somehow I no longer felt afraid. He had close-cropped white hair, a carpenter’s smock and the slender hands of a seamstress. I guessed that he was about sixty. He was turning a pencil between his fingers, taking his time, concentrating hard. And when I looked into his grey eyes, it was like stepping onto a seashore in the rain.

  I tried to resist his gaze. I kept telling myself that I mustn’t fall asleep. I mustn’t. I mustn’t.

  But that refrain, combined with my fatigue, made me drift off again.

  The girl made the most of my dreams to launch a fresh assault.

  She was about fourteen, so roughly the same age as me. In my sleep, she trampled on the pieces of me she had already broken. I could feel her bare feet on my body. It hurt, but I didn’t push her away. I preferred this to the pain of her disappearing.

  The next day, at dawn, it was no longer raining. The house felt deserted. A small patch of sunlight spread towards the bed. I scanned the room for the bag I’d arrived with. It had vanished. As I tested a foot on the floor, I discovered that I wasn’t ready to leave yet. The pain was too acute for me even to take one step.

  I sat on the mattress and began to look carefully around me. Until this point, I’d been so focused on the urge to escape, and concerned only with the exit and the enemy that I hadn’t really taken anything in. But now that I had finally stopped, I was absorbing the extraordinary place in which I found myself.

  It was a large square room, a bit smoky, with two windows. The oak ceiling was supported by posts. There wasn’t much furniture: the table I had seen the previous day, a long counter with drawers, a few stools. On one section of wall, logs were piled up and held in place by large metallic rings. With this stockpile of wood rising to the ceiling, autumn and winter could have lasted for centuries. There was also an armchair that had seen better days, four bulbs hanging from the beams, a sink, a staircase, some baskets and an old bicycle propped up against a circular saw in the middle of the room, flaunting itself as if it were the height of stylishness. But it was what was behind me, close to the bed, which made the room look so peculiar.

  The entire wall was lined from floor to ceiling with luggage. There were hundreds of suitcases piled high along the entire length of the room. They were all different, made of cardboard, leather and wood. They came in every shape and size, some with decorative hinges, some canvas, some shiny or matt; their colours ranging from red lacquer to saffron yellow, black ebony to ecru, along with dark browns, shades of tobacco and royal blue.

  It looked like a sorting office in an old-fashioned railway station, with the smoke from the fireplace partially obscuring the mysterious wall just behind me.

  “Are you off somewhere?”

  The man who had just walked into the room didn’t answer, but strode over to the table where he put down a bag.

  My bag.

  “What about you, then? What did you come here to find?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. I was running
away from my sadness, but with what aim? In search of what comfort?

  “Were you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Won’t someone be looking for you?”

  “Who?”

  He was standing with the sun behind him.

  “Do you have a family?”

  I had everything I could ask for on that front, the complete set in every size: but nobody at home would be looking for me. They thought I was away for the week. Since I didn’t know what the man planned to do with me, I wasn’t keen to reassure him.

  “What about you? Do you have a family?”

  Again, a dark cloud passed over his face, a chasm in which the answers floated light years away. The door swung open, letting in one of the wolfhounds.

  The man began to lay out the contents of my bag on the table.

  “What are you doing?”

  I tried to stand up, but I’d forgotten about my injured ankle: it felt as if several rounds of ammunition were being emptied into my right foot. I fell back onto the bed.

  “They’re fragile. Don’t touch them.”

  He picked out the objects very carefully, arranging them in a square.

  On the table, there was now a flick-knife, a notebook, a camera, six films in their black and grey boxes and a small Super 8 movie camera, together with a brand new film.

  “Leave them, they’re mine.”

  He handled the camera first.

  “I was going to throw all this in the mud,” he remarked.

  Another storm of bullets in my chest. The only traces I had left of the girl were rolled up tightly inside one of those films. A few undeveloped photos were my only treasure.

  “I don’t know why you came to my home with these things.”

  “I was lost. I didn’t mean to come to your home.”

  “Is this yours?”

  “Yes.”

  As it happened, the Super 8 belonged to my father, the camera to my mother, and I had taken the unused films from the chest of drawers in our sitting room. So, strictly speaking, none of it belonged to me, apart from the memories captured on the films. And I wasn’t even sure that those memories were mine any more either.

  The man had his back to me now. He seemed to be thinking.

  Today, I understand all the threads of destiny that became knotted and intertwined in those few seconds. I have a clear view of what his story might have been, and mine too, if my bag had been flung into the mud. So why, when he had lived in fear of being tracked down for so many years, did he tweak that other thread, the thinnest one, the most fragile, the one that put him in danger? Why did he choose the most uncertain path?

  He gave me back the camera.

  How could he have guessed that this great risk, the risk of trust, would save him years later?

  I think it was the cruel girl hidden in the spools who saved us both, by stealing a tear from me as he turned and saw me trying to hide my bloodshot eyes.

  A few seconds later, he gathered up the objects and tossed the bag onto the bed, where it landed next to me.

  “Don’t use anything in that bag, for as long as you’re in this house. Agreed?”

  The door creaked and the two other dogs sloped in.

  “Understood?”

  “Yes.”

  4

  THE GIRL

  Almost to my annoyance, on the third evening I managed to walk as far as the fireplace. I was feeling in less of a hurry to recover. The house had ensnared me with its dark wood and tiles, like a cage that protected me from my sadness.

  Leaning my shoulder against the wall, I contemplated the few steps I could scarcely believe I had taken. Beside me, the armchair was warming itself like an old toad by the fire. I didn’t dare sit down; the flickering of the flames in its creases made it look like it was breathing. On the other side of the room, the wall of luggage also appeared to be alive. It had cast me under its spell from the very first.

  The man’s footsteps rang out on the wooden floorboards upstairs. I’d noticed that he only went up there occasionally, to swap a few mysterious suitcases and trunks or, late at night, to go to bed, because I was in the downstairs bed where he usually slept.

  I was also dressed in his clothes, which I’d found laid out on my mattress the first morning. They were the kind of clothes I haven’t worn since: a splendid pair of trousers, thicker than theatre curtains, a waistcoat in knitted black wool and socks to the knee.

  My host treated me as if I were a guest of honour. From the first day, he never asked me when I intended to leave.

  Outside in the dark, the dogs could be heard snorting as they emerged from the water. I felt at ease, standing there in the gloom. The windows were always covered with dark cloth as soon as night fell. No light could have been visible from the exterior.

  I was trying to figure out this man’s existence.

  He lived hidden from the world, busying himself with perplexing tasks, working on his notebooks or immersed in his boxes and suitcases, ready to leave at any moment with his mountain of luggage. How had he come to be here? Through the window, I had watched him gathering the last vegetables of the autumn in the strip of kitchen garden between the water and the house. He roamed the woods for a few hours every day with a slingshot wrapped round his wrist. He would return home with a rabbit or birds, which the dogs carried.

  Standing there, close to the fire, I noticed a small frame hanging from one of the posts that held up the ceiling. I made my way over to it like a tightrope walker, my injured ankle so precarious that I was afraid even a gust of air or a piece of grit might make me trip.

  It was an old black and white photo of a strip of pavement and a shop window from a bygone era. The door was ajar. There was snow outside, and inside stood a man and a woman, presumably the shopkeepers. On their window, two words, sparkling like the sign of a jewellery shop, read:

  And just below:

  This little confectionery shop, Maison Pearl, looked at once very simple and very sophisticated. Three boxes had been put out on the pavement, in the snow, awaiting delivery. In the bottom right-hand corner of the photo, somebody had written by hand:

  Christmas soon. As you can see! Business is good.

  The shop’s doing well. Look after yourself.

  Don’t worry about us.

  I could also make out a date written more clumsily, in different handwriting: 1941.

  I remember that this image changed the way I viewed the man and his house. A person who displays a photo of a sweet shop in his home can’t be all bad. And the handwritten note reassured me. It was a sign from the outside world, correspondence between people, the words we write to share our news. That photo of Maison Pearl did me no end of good: it introduced a familiar note into the mystery that had kept me between those walls for nearly three days.

  “You can walk?”

  I hadn’t heard the stairs creaking, but the man was already standing in front of the fire, staring at me.

  “Was that your family?” I asked, pointing to the photo.

  “In a way.”

  He was at risk of becoming talkative, and I wanted to make the most of it.

  “What’s in those suitcases?”

  “Come here, so I can see you walking.”

  I took a few steps towards the fireplace. He was almost smiling.

  “You see, she won’t be the last to make you run through the forests.”

  “Who?”

  I stared at him without understanding. He was amused and pushed me into the old armchair, where I landed softly.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “About the girl who made me run … what did you just say?”

  He crouched down in front of the fire, in the same position as when he was cooking. He made me two meals a day, which he pulled out of the flames like a blacksmith. But on that particular evening, he wasn’t spit-roasting one of the little birds his dogs bro
ught back for him and which he stuffed with ground chestnuts. He was simply watching the embers.

  “Did I already tell you about the girl?” I asked.

  “You’re not to touch anything here. Understand?” he replied solemnly, trying to change the subject. “Don’t open the suitcases.”

  “Have I talked to you about the girl?”

  “No need.”

  “How d’you know, then?”

  “I know nothing. I saw what state you were in.”

  He poked the fire with a branch, before adding, “I know. I’ve jumped from a moving train before, and it hurts rather less.”

  I couldn’t follow half of what he was saying, but each word moved me. Yes, when I had left my bicycle in the grass to set off through the woods, I did feel as if I’d just fallen off a train.

  I’d discovered that hidden behind the shock of first love was a bullet that shattered into a hundred pieces on impact, and it was called heartbreak. First love is a double-barrelled shotgun that doesn’t forgive. That was what I had experienced just a few days earlier, and the earth was still trembling beneath my feet.

  “I don’t even know her name,” I explained. “She didn’t leave me with anything. You can’t understand. Nobody can.”

  Still he didn’t move. I’d just told him something I wouldn’t have confided in my best friend or in my brothers. But without seeing his face, I realized that all this was familiar to him, that this pain had already touched his life.

  He stared at his hands, which had spread before the embers – pale hands, onto which the flames and all his memories were reflected.

  “Tomorrow, I won’t be around,” he said. “I’ll leave the dogs here, and I’ll be back the day after tomorrow. Look after the fire, please.”

  He went up to bed without trying to prise any other secrets out of me.

  A day and a night.