The Book of Pearl

by Timothee de Fombelle

  Joshua retreated to the opposite pavement, to the exact spot where he had stood in the rain when Jacques Pearl had come to his rescue all those years ago. It was pelting down almost as hard as it had been that night.

  Where were they? What had happened over the last few months? Suddenly, he looked up at the window of the Pearls’ apartment and saw a very faint glimmer of light peeking through a gap in the curtains. There was hope! They were hiding inside; they were all right after all.

  Joshua skirted round the side of the building, pushed the door open and raced up the stairs. He tried to detect the scent of roasting lamb, or thyme, or potato gratin, hoping for any aroma to float down the steps; but the stairwell only smelt of rat poison.

  On the landing, he pounded at the door and waited. After several more knocks, he thought he heard a little noise on the other side, though it might have been the sound of his heart pounding beneath his coat. He went down two steps, slipped his hand into a hatch that was used for checking the lead pipes, and retrieved a key. Returning to the door he thrust the key into the lock, but it came up against another key that prevented him from turning it: the door was locked from the inside.

  He slid down against the door in resignation.

  A few minutes later, Joshua walked down Rue de Saintonge and stopped outside number 24. This was where the plasterer and his daughters lived; where, as a younger man, he had spent his final Christmas Eve before the war.

  In the stairwell, he met the youngest daughter, Colette, who burst into tears when she saw him. Unable to speak, she took his arm and led him up to the second floor. They were greeted by a tremendous silence. The whole family was sitting around the table, and the two older daughters looked at Joshua as though he were a ghost. The father stood up and shook his hand.

  “Where are they?”

  The plasterer couldn’t answer; instead it was his wife, appearing behind his shoulder, who spoke on her husband’s behalf.

  “It’s been several months now. The police came for them back in August. They’d rounded up the others the previous month, almost every shopkeeper in the neighbourhood. Four families went from our building alone.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  The father tried to speak, but again without success. His wife translated for him.

  “My husband went to the town hall and to the police headquarters three times to ask where they were. The butcher’s daughter was best friends with our youngest girl.”

  Colette was still sobbing behind Joshua, but it was the eldest, Suzanne, sitting bolt upright on her chair, who was the most overwhelmed to see him again.

  “You have to go into hiding,” urged the mother, when Joshua didn’t appear to believe what they were telling him.

  “Do you have somewhere you can go?” asked Suzanne.

  “I saw a light.”

  “Where?”

  “At their apartment.”

  “My boy…” the plasterer sighed.

  “Someone’s there.”

  “No,” said the woman, “no one’s there any more.”

  “I promise you I saw a light.”

  The man took Joshua by the shoulder and held him tight.

  “Where can you go?” asked the plasterer’s wife again.

  “There’s someone in their apartment.”

  “I’ll take him there,” said Suzanne, standing up. “We’ll have a look around and then I’ll come back.”

  Her parents let them go, since it was still ahead of curfew hour. Suzanne grabbed a woollen shawl from the hallway, and Joshua followed her out.

  As they walked side by side down the street, Joshua glanced under her umbrella and noticed that her face had become that of an older woman, at just seventeen. War makes you grow up fast.

  They arrived in front of the shop and stared up at the windows on the first floor. As night fell, the rain was coming down more heavily than ever.

  No light was coming through the curtains.

  They pushed open the side door and headed up the main stairs until they reached the Pearls’ landing, where Joshua removed the key from his pocket. The lock worked perfectly. He froze.

  “Just now, it was locked from the inside.”

  “Perhaps the key fell out on the other side,” said Suzanne.

  They entered the apartment and Joshua groped around in the dark, trying to find whether the other key had indeed dropped onto the floor. Nothing. The whole place was pitch black: the electricity wasn’t working.

  “Look.”

  Suzanne had found some matches and two candles in a drawer in the hallway, and they walked from room to room by candlelight. Everything was in perfect order, with the beds made and the dishes clean. And yet Suzanne remembered how the arrest had taken place at dawn on a bright summer’s day. Joshua was shivering, his hair soaked through from the rain, as he leant towards a photo of Jacques and Esther Pearl on their wedding day. The plasterer’s daughter seemed as moved as the young man.

  “My father spoke to Monsieur Pearl, who told him that you were in a camp in Germany. They should have used that in their favour to stay alive. The families of prisoners don’t get touched.”

  When she saw that he hadn’t reacted, she added, “But Pearl said it would’ve been dishonest, because you weren’t officially their son.”

  Joshua shook his head in the half-light.

  “So who are you if you aren’t their son? Maybe you aren’t Jewish? Maybe you can stay with us.”

  Joshua knew it was too late. And yet he didn’t regret choosing to take on the name of Joshua Pearl on the brink of war, even if it was akin to turning himself into game bird on the morning of a shoot.

  “I saw a light in here,” he said.

  He ran his fingers over the furniture and didn’t find a single speck of dust.

  “I could run away with you,” said Suzanne, staring at Joshua’s hands on the wood.

  He turned towards her.

  “I want to run away with you,” she repeated, her back pressed against the sitting room window.

  When he saw that she was crying he took a step towards her, but his foot caught a stray object on the carpet. He bent down and picked it up: it was a woman’s shoe, a sort of blue-leather ballet pump. Madame Pearl’s foot would never have fitted into such a slipper, not in a million years.

  “Is this yours?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He’d already forgotten about Suzanne’s tears and his impulse to move towards her. He kept turning the shoe over in his hands.

  “Maybe it belongs to the girl who worked in the shop,” she said.

  Joshua recalled how the letter he’d received from Jacques Pearl in the prison camp had mentioned a young girl.

  “What was her name?” he asked.

  “Léa.”

  “Did she live here?”

  “No.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She must have been taken with them. She used to arrive at the shop very early; that’s it, she’ll have been taken with them.”

  Joshua remembered the photograph of Maison Pearl with the small, faint footprints in the snow. Yes, this slipper might belong to Léa. He thought of all the footprints that had been erased for ever, and he placed the blue slipper in his pocket.

  “If they find you with me,” he said to Suzanne, as the water coursed down the window behind her, “they’ll take you too. Anyway, listen: this is no time to be running away.”

  “And what about you?” asked Suzanne. “Where will you go?”

  Joshua didn’t answer, but turned round to take one last look at the little apartment before they left. He double-locked the door and replaced the key in its hiding place.

  He accompanied Suzanne back to Rue Saintonge, but he didn’t want to go upstairs.

  “At least let me watch you leave,” she said, stoically holding her folded umbrella against her. “After that, I’ll go up to join my parents.”

  And so he set off through the pud
dles, without once turning around.

  A few buildings along, sheltered in a doorway, another young girl was watching him. She stood barefoot on the pavement, and in one hand she clasped a blue shoe.

  Without realizing it, Joshua had stolen her other blue slipper, the one that had fallen off her left foot when she’d jumped backwards to hide in the folds of the curtains. The same slipper that had checked Joshua’s movement towards Suzanne.

  21

  UNTIL THE FIGHTING IS OVER

  When Joshua Pearl crossed the demarcation line into the free zone, heading back towards his refuge in Provence, there were hundreds of tanks on his heels, as well as the stamping of thousands of pairs of boots. So bitter was his sense of loss that he had no idea this day, 11 November 1942, had been chosen by Hitler to invade the south in order to occupy France in its entirety.

  He arrived, his hands in his pockets, on the night of a full moon. The earth had been tilled between the trees.

  In the distance, he had just spotted the roof of the Pilon farm with its undulating tiles, when two shadows pinned him to the ground and bundled him into the ditch. A voice hissed at him not to move. Doors slammed close to the house and a car started up, driving along the track right next to them.

  “That’s the police,” the voice informed him.

  Joshua finally recognized his assailant. It was one of the Pilon twins with a bandit’s scarf around his face.

  “We’ve been waiting for you for four nights,” said the other man. “I’m glad that’s over. Welcome.”

  Joshua was black and blue from his tumble and didn’t recognize this second grinning shadow, who was holding out a hand to help him up from the mud.

  “They came for you the day after your departure,” the man explained. “Someone had turned you in to the police, and they searched the house and found the weapons.”

  “What weapons?” asked Joshua.

  “Ours.”

  In these few sentences whispered in the ditch, Joshua was discovering that the twins were not the same men he thought he’d known. For a long time now, they’d been part of the secret army preparing to liberate the country. And the young women called Constance or Juliette who took up their nights, the ones Thérèse Pilon used to complain about so frequently, were in fact the secret code names of resistance operations.

  By chance, when the police had come to the farm, the twins were on a windy mistral-swept hilltop, preparing for an act of sabotage. They had been warned just in time not to return to the farm, and had set themselves up in the scrubland. From there, they organized a secret resistance movement, known as the maquis. They hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye to their mother, who was left on her own with her almond trees.

  Jo Pearl was greeted as a brother in arms by the ten or so men who lived between the shepherds’ huts dotted across the high plateaux of Provence.

  Their leader went by the name of “Captain Alexandre”. He was tall and thickset. When Joshua was presented to him, he was working at a table in a corner, next to a window that overlooked a small drinking fountain. On the lime wash wall, Alexandre had pinned a photo of a small and very old painting: it depicted a woman shining a candle for a traveller.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Pearl.”

  Joshua was staring at the picture, which was luminous as a flame.

  “You need to find a nom de guerre. Nobody here keeps his name from before,” said Captain Alexandre, his pencil hovering over an open notebook. “We all assume a combatant name. Where are you from?”

  “Somewhere very far away.”

  Alexandre smiled at the man standing three paces from him, and jotted a few lines in his sloping handwriting. Pearl could only make out three words: grief and crystal clear.

  “Well? What will your name be?”

  “Iliån.”

  “Do you have a sweetheart?”

  Iliån didn’t answer, but his eyes had lit up.

  “Her name?”

  “Oliå.”

  He hadn’t said her name out loud for the longest time.

  “She won’t get in the way of my work,” Iliån reassured the captain, who was staring at him.

  “You mustn’t see her, or talk to her. We’re all soldiers and monks here until the fighting is over.”

  “I promise. I won’t see her.”

  The fighting lasted for nearly three years. Iliån found himself at the heart of this invisible army, which spun its web from the mountains all the way to the sea. He kept hidden, spied on traitors, blew up enemy cars, lit night fires so that weapons could be parachuted in. He never left any trace behind, and he changed shelter as soon as darkness fell. He was a cicada by day and a cricket by night. In winter, he reverted to the white hare of his childhood, becoming once more the elusive animal who disappeared in the snow.

  He was often alone, and took his orders from messages slipped into his hand in some corner of a wood. It was rare for him to see his companions, and rarer still to see Alexandre.

  And yet he had never forgotten a particular encounter with the captain. One night, they had both spent hours listening out for the throbbing of a plane that never came. They were expecting cylinders full of weapons to be dropped in a lavender field. Joshua was sitting on his heels, perfectly still, not batting an eyelid. He could hear the breathing of the captain when he placed his revolver in front of him.

  There were long periods of silence between them. When Alexandre finally spoke, Joshua felt as if his leader had been reading his thoughts all the while. Each word bored a tunnel into him and shone a light down it.

  “Remind me of that name again.”

  “What name?”

  “Your sweetheart’s.”

  Silence.

  “Oliå.”

  “Are you thinking about her right now?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Iliån didn’t answer.

  “You should try to imagine what she’s doing.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Everything starts from that. And life comes just behind. It follows the imagination with fierce loyalty.”

  Around them, the night was quiet and still.

  “When the world is ready to understand that,” he said, “when the world is ready to really believe…”

  In the dark, the rustling of his sleeve betrayed a sweeping gesture: a gesture to indicate war.

  “…We’ll stop all of this. And you’ll find your Oliå again.”

  Could he hear Joshua Pearl’s secrets, simmering away?

  “But nobody’s ready to believe yet,” Alexandre went on. “They must have tokens of proof, do you understand? Proof.”

  Joshua was surrendering to the resonance of these words, which made him feel less alone.

  “They must have tokens of proof.”

  The plane didn’t come; no weapons landed on the long rows of lavender. When day broke, they went their separate ways.

  But for Pearl, that night was a moment of illumination. Taåg had consigned him to exile in this world. Rather than trying to find the way out, he should change this world and its reluctance to believe in the stories from the Kingdoms. Doubt was his prison: he could only break free from it by finding tokens of proof. That’s what would reverse the spell and return him to where he came from.

  Iliån would find these tokens. He would collect them one by one. In the meantime, he had to survive.

  Occasionally, there were betrayals. Captain Alexandre used to say that war had turned him into a monster of justice. Even the most righteous battles have their monstrous aspect.

  Above all, Iliån experienced the tiny miracles that embellish lives given to a cause, to fighting the great battles.

  Joshua Pearl woke up one day in a country at peace. The enemy had been conquered, and American soldiers began to arrive. Their tanks suddenly resembled carnival floats, with jubilant crowds trailing after them. They handed out cigarettes and chewing gum.

  Joshua was pre
sent at the reunion of Thérèse Pilon and her sons. Standing back a little, hat in hand, he was very moved by their fervent embraces. They made an effort to include him in their celebrations, but he knew there was now one person too many under the almond trees.

  The next day, he decided to leave while the house was still asleep. He got dressed in the farmhouse kitchen. There was a small parcel on the table, and on it was written:

  He picked up the package. Someone had guessed that he was about to leave. He didn’t open it, but tucked the object in his bag as a little treat for later.

  As he left, he grabbed a fistful of almonds from a tree to complete his provisions. It was 20 August 1944. Two hours later, he witnessed the columns of liberators on the road. Children were sitting astride the tanks’ guns; he climbed up as if he were hopping on a bus, and spent three days heading back up north amid the festive atmosphere.

  It was at the gates of Paris, which would be liberated the following day, that Joshua Pearl finally thought to open the little package.

  He immediately recognized the cord and leather pouch that had been wrapped in a page torn from a notebook. Instantly, all the commotion around him dimmed. All he could hear was a muffled hubbub.

  In his hands was the slingshot from his childhood; the one he had never been without, until that final night when he had been banished from the Kingdoms. An object from home had just joined him in exile.

  And inside the wrapping, on paper with blue lines, there were six words in a childish hand that was round and careful. Six words stolen from Captain Alexandre:

  22

  SORCERESS

  “Who have you locked in the glass chamber?” asked Taåg, suddenly bursting into the corridor of the armoury.

  The captain of the archers was walking swiftly to catch up with old Taåg.

  “Has His Majesty spoken to you?” Arån asked.

  “No.”

  All Taåg knew was that they had captured someone near the source of the lake. He felt increasingly distanced from the king’s confidence. After being ostracized for three years for opposing Iån’s schemes, he had resumed his place at the young king’s side; but he had never truly regained the power that had been bestowed on him at the beginning of his godson’s reign.