The Book of Pearl

by Timothee de Fombelle

  Each of the packages in those suitcases had a three or four-figure number written on the bottom of it; presumably so that the man could identify the objects listed in his ledgers. I’d picked out a few at random, trying to grasp the meaning of his collection.

  He moved away from me.

  Over on the other side of the room, the ledgers that represented the missing part of my investigation were stacked against the window.

  Everything I’d seen in the suitcases the previous night had made me reel between wonder and confusion. I had no idea whether this man was a highwayman, a rag-and-bone man, a madman or a poet. The key to the mystery surely lay in those notebooks, which I had yet to open.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he mumbled. “I was thinking things over, on the train.”

  Aha! So he’d taken the train.

  When I’d first spotted his new suitcase, I’d assumed that all I needed to do was search the newspapers for records of burglaries that had taken place in the region during the preceding days. But in twenty-four hours, and on a return train ticket, he could have crossed borders. He could have stolen the Crown Jewels from London, Brussels or Madrid. Then again, was there any point in trying to find out? He was just as likely to have brought back a rusty old nail in a velvet pouch.

  “I was thinking about something…”

  The dogs blinked drowsily with each sound that escaped their master’s lips. My guess was that they only heard his voice on rare occasions.

  “Something that I need to talk to you about…”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s time for you to go, now.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you that I know all about it. What you’re experiencing. The girl. I said that, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you must go, if you are to leave her behind you.”

  “Leave who?”

  It was at that moment I finally noticed his accent and the unusual pattern of his sentences. He was trying to get a word out, but it was stuck in his throat.

  He tried again.

  “Sadness.”

  But I already knew what he meant.

  “It’s something that can fill one’s life. Turning round and round inside you, until you die.”

  Now he had my attention.

  “But if you’re able to leave your sadness behind you in the grass, then that is what you must do. Keep it hidden in the grass. Gently explain to it that you want something else, that you bear nothing against it, but that you’re off.”

  I was imagining a small animal, crouching in a meadow, and the sound of footsteps getting fainter, as the long grass was trampled underfoot.

  “What about you? What do you do with it?”

  He walked towards me, smiling, his eyes lowered.

  “With what?”

  “Sadness.”

  “I am no example.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “But you…”

  He trailed off, before admitting, “My sadness is all that I have left, if I am to return to where I come from.”

  “Where you come from?”

  And these are the words he said – I can still hear them, twenty-six years on.

  “I must keep my grief alive.”

  The dogs went over to lavish him with their affection in his moment of sorrow.

  “Where is the place you come from?”

  “Gather your belongings. I’ll be waiting for you on the pontoon.”

  He went outside with his small pack of wolfhounds. I walked to the window and watched him go over to the boat. Then I picked up one of the large ledgers and opened it at the first page.

  There were four words written in black ink:

  JOSHUA PEARL, VOLUME SEVEN

  And below:

  FROM 345 TO 487

  I quickly checked the numbers on my hand. Only one number corresponded with the ledger.

  I leant towards the window to keep an eye out. Pearl was still there, crouched on the pontoon. I ran to fetch my bag from the foot of the bed and quickly removed the camera. Without losing a second, I photographed the first page, hoping that the morning light would be strong enough. But I was at the end of the film. I rewound, using the little handle underneath the main body of the camera.

  Outside, Pearl was watching one of his dogs swimming. I took out a new film, tossing the other one back into my bag. The camera was ready to go again in a matter of seconds.

  I turned the pages of the notebook frantically, sliding my fingers down the numbers in the left-hand margin.

  410, 430, 460…

  461.

  I looked up. One of the dogs was climbing back up onto the bank, a live moorhen in its jaws. There was nobody on the pontoon now. My god.

  I put the open ledger down, no time to read it, and took a step backwards with the viewfinder to my eye. The white frame was blurry. Once everything was in focus, I pressed down on the shutter release.

  There was a hand on my arm.

  I have no memory of what happened next.

  Only that I woke up by the roadside, at nightfall, with my bicycle next to me in the long grass.

  7

  THE CASTAWAY

  Wrapping strips of marshmallow is a tricky business.

  They have a gooey, slippery consistency and, despite the icing sugar that’s meant to stop them from sticking, more often than not Jacques Pearl felt as though he spent his days slopping noodles into tissue paper.

  The customer watched him at work, her eyes agog. She was wearing a hat adorned with a bow on one side, a coat with a bow at the back, and low-heeled shoes each with a large bow on top. There was a silk scarf knotted to her handbag, too.

  This was clearly a lady who knew a thing or two about wrapping.

  The year was 1936. It had been raining solidly for two days, and the night before, Paris had witnessed its worst storm in twenty years, fiercer even than the bombings of the Great War.

  Pearl slid a ridged sheet of card onto the tissue paper, then heaped a pound of marshmallows on top, their square ends immaculately arranged like a chessboard. He cast a fleeting glance through the window to the pavement opposite.

  The boy was still there, standing on the cobblestones in the rain.

  Pearl started folding.

  “What are the black ones?”

  “They’re blackberry, madame.”

  “Right then, swap me a white one for a black one.”

  He obliged with a smile. At Maison Pearl, the customer was king. Hence the pearl-studded crown that had served as the shop’s emblem for half a century.

  Reopening the patterned tissue paper and replacing an almond marshmallow with a blackberry one, Pearl asked, “Do any of the other flavours take your fancy?”

  He was all too familiar with customers who dithered, and liked to nip any indecision in the bud.

  “No. Hurry up. My husband’s waiting in his automobile.”

  Pearl placed a fresh piece of tissue paper underneath the card so that there wouldn’t be a crinkle in sight. He glanced across the street again and resumed folding the paper over the marshmallows.

  “And the orange ones?”

  “I showed you those a second ago. The orange ones are orange.”

  “You don’t say!” said the lady, as if she were being taken for a fool. “So, give me half an orange one.”

  “I’m sorry, madame, but I don’t cut the marshmallows.”

  “And why not?”

  “We have never cut the marshmallows at Maison Pearl.”

  The lady seemed vexed by this news.

  “Now listen here…”

  Pearl interrupted his wrapping once again.

  “Since when have you not cut them?”

  “Let me see… We haven’t cut our marshmallows for forty-eight years. Or is it forty-nine? We’re in 1936 now, and my mother established the shop in 1888, after the death of my father, Abel Pearl.”

  “Is that really a proper French name?”

  �
��I beg your pardon?”

  “Do me a whole orange marshmallow, then, since you refuse to go to the effort…”

  “With pleasure.”

  Once again he changed the tissue paper, took his silver tongs and picked up an orange marshmallow, sending a flurry of citrus flavours across the room.

  “Actually, no,” she sighed. “Put that one back. My husband’s expecting me. This is all taking too long, and I’ll get plump.”

  The husband, the waiting, the waistline … Pearl listened to all these excuses with a tinge of weariness. He laid down the marshmallow and the tongs, and continued with his folding.

  “Dear me, it’s not very busy in here, is it?” she tutted, surveying the deserted shop.

  It occurred to Jacques Pearl that this lady’s guts might be a good substitute for the gelatine in his next batch of marshmallows.

  “The shop would usually have closed twenty-five minutes ago,” he said, without raising his voice. “It’s seven o’clock in the evening. I’ve sold twenty-seven kilos of marshmallows since this morning, despite the storm of the century. They were queuing outside in the rain as far as the hotel. No, madame, business is not doing badly at all.”

  “Are you losing your temper?”

  But Pearl didn’t even hear the question. His eyes were back on the drenched boy standing under the gutter with water cascading onto him, his feet in the torrent of the street.

  “Because if you are, I shall call for my husband who’s waiting in his automobile at the corner of the square.”

  “I won’t let him die in the cold and the rain.”

  “My husband?!”

  “I have to get him away from there.”

  “Are you … talking about my husband?”

  Pearl abandoned the package and the lady, skirted round the counter and headed for the door, grabbing an umbrella as he went. The customer was quick to brandish her own.

  “Leave him alone!”

  Pearl was already outside. He opened the umbrella and crossed the road.

  The boy was maybe fifteen or sixteen. He was standing bolt upright in his dripping clothes, his entire body shivering as he gazed at the shop’s emblem.

  “What are you doing here, my young friend?”

  He didn’t answer, or even seem to understand, but his eyes were glued on Jacques Pearl, as if he were establishing whether or not he had cause to be afraid.

  “Come with me.”

  Pearl covered him from the rain and led him away.

  They bumped into the lady, who was running through the rain with her marshmallows.

  “You’re all the same!” she said, looking at Pearl.

  The wind suddenly flipped her pink umbrella inside out so it looked like a flaming torch. She let out a cry and started gesticulating madly at an oncoming car. Pearl left her marooned in the middle of the road, spluttering fit to drown.

  The boy was soon sitting on a chair in the shop with a bath-towel draped round his shoulders. Jacques Pearl had lowered the iron shutter and was covering the marshmallow display shelves with a white gauze, as though he were tucking in his children for the night.

  “I’m in a bit of a quandary, here…”

  But despite his misgivings, Pearl’s excitement was palpable.

  “My wife went up an hour ago. She’s waiting for me. What will she say if I turn up with you? Where on earth have you appeared from?”

  But he didn’t seem overly worried about his wife’s reaction, as he started turning out the lights.

  “Try to say something to me, my young friend. Your name. Anything. What were you doing out there in the storm?”

  The boy said nothing. He’d stopped shivering. He stared straight into the filament of the light bulb above him, then watched Pearl as he performed his duties with precise, economic movements. Whether closing the door of the wood-burner, stowing the scissors into a drawer, passing a cloth over a dusting of sugar, or turning the key in the cash register, each motion was a glimpse of perfection. The boy was also studying the Maison Pearl emblem on the window.

  Pearl stopped suddenly.

  “Español?”

  For the past several months, young refugees had started crossing the Pyrenees because of the Spanish civil war. The French authorities were keeping a very close watch on them. But this boy didn’t seem to know that Spain even existed.

  Pearl removed his apron without taking his eyes off the new arrival, and hung it behind the counter.

  “I hope my wife won’t disapprove too much,” he fretted, but there was a smile playing across his face.

  Madame Pearl greeted them with loud shrieking. How could he have left the boy for so long in a sopping wet shirt? She unbuttoned it as if he were a five year old and rushed to fetch him some dry clothes. In a small bedroom at the end of the hallway, there was a wardrobe full of their son’s belongings.

  Jacques Pearl dressed their unexpected guest in the bathroom. Despite the collection of combs lined up below the mirror, he was unable to tame the boy’s wild locks.

  Pearl brought him into the kitchen looking as pale and handsome as a young bridegroom. A third place had already been laid at the table, and Madame Pearl was busy topping up the soup tureen from a large stockpot. Just next to it, potatoes were whistling away in some butter. Madame Pearl filled up half the room, but she billowed around with such ease that it was as if the varnished wood table lifted to make way for her, while the bottles and pepper mill moved aside for her blouse.

  Standing by the window, the boy was swaying too, overwhelmed by such gentleness, by such warmth, and by the scent of the waxed wooden floor.

  That evening, they settled him into their son’s bedroom.

  The Pearls didn’t even try to fall asleep. Holding hands in bed, they lay on their backs and listened to the boy tossing and turning down the hallway.

  They had left all the doors open to hear this other presence in their home.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll decide what’s to be done,” said Jacques Pearl.

  “Tomorrow, yes.”

  But they were in no hurry for tomorrow to come.

  The boy was exactly the same age that Joshua, their only son, had been when he had died two years earlier.

  “I have to say, his hands don’t look like a vagabond’s,” said Madame Pearl, suddenly an expert in the matter.

  “No.”

  “Listen.”

  They could hear a creak of the floorboards.

  As Jacques Pearl got out of bed, he felt a gust of cool air blowing down the hallway. The boy had opened the window and was watching the rain. He held one hand outside, cupping it to drink from the sky, while with the other hand he clasped a red blanket around his neck, which trailed behind him like the train of a young king.

  Without making a sound, Pearl fetched a jug and a glass, which he placed next to the bed. The boy turned round.

  The next day, Jacques Pearl sat him on a stool behind the counter. He left his wife to hold the fort, then took Rue du Temple and snaked down to the Seine, crossing Île de la Cité before heading up Boulevard Saint-Michel and knocking at the door of the asylum for the deaf and dumb. The idea had come to him as he studied the boy closely over breakfast. Perhaps he had escaped from an institution of this sort.

  Pearl stepped through the doorway and asked the gatekeeper if he’d had any news of a runaway.

  “Why? Have you found someone?”

  “No, no. Definitely not. But in this weather, I can’t help thinking that nobody ought to be outside long. Are you missing anyone?”

  “What age?”

  “Fifteen or sixteen? I… I’m just plucking a number out of thin air. Just a hypothesis.”

  “A what?”

  “A hypothesis.”

  The gatekeeper recoiled as if this were some kind of contagious disease, like hepatitis or pneumonia.

  “If, by some misfortune,” Pearl elaborated, “a boy of fifteen were to end up on the streets in this weather…”

  The gatekeeper sm
oothed his moustache with a finger.

  “No. All of our children are here, and in good health.”

  “That’s just as well. Good day.”

  Feeling relieved, Pearl was already heading for the door. The man’s footsteps pattered after him down the hall.

  “Monsieur!”

  He turned round.

  “If you’ve found a fifteen-year-old boy, you’d do well to take him to the police.”

  “I haven’t found anyone. Thank you for your time.”

  He withdrew rapidly into the street, just a stone’s throw from the Jardin du Luxembourg, as the sun was rising.

  On returning to his shop, Pearl saw that the customers were paying no attention to the boy in the corner sticking labels onto paper bags. He was applying himself well. Every now and then, Madame Pearl would glance over at him protectively, and when she saw her husband walk in, she jabbed an inquisitive chin at him. Pearl shook his head slightly to indicate there’d been no news. Their eyes met, glowing with joy.

  Having taken this single measure, Pearl decided that he had done all he could to unravel the mystery. Quite frankly, what more could he think of? Going to the police? He refused to entertain the idea for a second. And if someone had misplaced the boy, they only needed to come and ask for him back.

  This is how a stranger who had appeared out of the blue, a passenger in the storm, came to enter the Pearls’ home without anyone really noticing. He became known as “our young friend”, “the boy” or “the Spaniard”. Before long he proved himself indispensable. He worked hard in the shop, handling enough chores for three assistants. And when, thanks to two years of evening classes in Madame Pearl’s dining room, he learnt to speak French, it also became clear that, beneath his melancholy, he was intelligent, lively and charming, this grey-eyed boy with the faint, unplaceable accent.

  8

  THE OPENING

  Some of the girls were in love with him. One, whose name was Rosa, came every evening throughout the summer of 1938. He walked with her for an hour after closing time, escorting her back to the Passage du Prado where her father had a barbershop. On his return to Maison Pearl, he knew that the shop would be dark, with Madame Pearl spying on him from the first floor. He would head upstairs. The door was always left open, and the refrain from the kitchen would be the same, “Well, my boy?”