The Book of Pearl

by Timothee de Fombelle

  As I grew up, I felt those memories dissolving inside me. They hadn’t disappeared, but they had become ingrained in who I was. I was involved in theatre, I wrote stories, I made things or fixed them, I read books. Joshua Pearl was part of all of that. I no longer sought him out in other places. I didn’t even try to disturb him in the depths of my memory.

  But he wasn’t far.

  That night, he had popped up in the most unlikely place, on the makeshift dance floor of a fire station. Something had made him re-surface, in much the same way as the smell of toast in the morning reminds me of my grandfather, or the smell of oil paints can bring my father back to life for a second.

  I slept on the sofa, in the same place where I had collapsed twenty-five years earlier after returning from my stay with Pearl.

  The next morning, very early, as I was setting off in search of a café that might be open on Bastille Day, I found a package covered in white tissue paper outside the door to my mother’s apartment. It was waiting for me on the doormat, like a small, tired dog returning home after running away.

  25

  MEMORIES

  It was a square box in polished wood, with finely grooved beading to secure the sliding lid; and two slightly darker circles that receded when I pressed on them. Just holding it was enough to bring back the previous day’s dizziness.

  The fine craftsmanship was a telltale sign, as was the tissue paper, which I instantly recognized; even though the wrapping had been folded inside out so that at first glance I couldn’t see the Maison Pearl emblem.

  Lifting the lid revealed a first layer containing the camera and the seven films. Each item was held in its own perfectly fitted compartment. The camera didn’t seem to have suffered, and it was indeed my father’s. I was reminded of his hands at work on it, and of the third eye on his chest when he wore it slung around his neck.

  I noticed the ribbons in the corners for lifting the first layer, but I was wary of confectionery boxes that trick you into hoping for two layers of chocolates when there’s only one. Not that this was Maison Pearl’s style. On the lower layer was the Super 8 camera, together with its two films. Everything was magically made-to-measure. Two leather strips held the cartridges firmly in place, and felt-lined dividers supported the movie camera.

  I could feel my heart racing as I stared at the box in front of me on the kitchen table.

  Legend had it that a slim volume of Molière’s plays – stolen from the family home during the Second World War – had been returned by a German soldier thirty years later, with a note of apology. But was it fair to make the comparison? Pearl hadn’t stolen the images from me. If anything, I was the thief. He had simply reclaimed what I had tried to take from him. So why was he returning them to me now?

  As a small boy, I used to watch my uncles playing chess, sitting stock still beneath a parasol for hours on end. I always wondered what they were waiting for.

  Now, I was like a player contemplating a game of chess, occasionally picking up one of the objects only to put it back down again. Time seemed to stand still around me. I didn’t move a muscle as I tried to figure it all out. Ocassionally I would lean over the box to breathe in the smell of the wood, to find a message, a folded note somewhere, an explanation.

  Eventually, I put the lid back on the box and stood up.

  The key to the cellar was on the tray in the hall.

  I headed downstairs, rapping on the caretaker’s window on my way down. Behind her, in her office, I could see the Bastille Day parade on the television.

  The caretaker had a towel wrapped round her head. When she saw me, she pulled a sorry face to let me know my mother wasn’t there. She looked like a saleswoman apologizing for not having the right model in stock.

  “Maybe at the end of the month.”

  She waved her hand breezily, as if to imply the management couldn’t commit to a specific delivery date. But when I asked her whether she’d left a package in front of my door, her expression turned very serious. She replied that today was a public holiday – in case I hadn’t noticed – that she wouldn’t be climbing any stairs, and that in any event there was no post on the 14 of July.

  Behind her, the planes in the parade flying across the screen served as a reminder that I was intruding on a day of national celebration. We heard them shortly afterwards, roaring overhead above the apartment block, ready to bombard me for being so disrespectful. It was time to leave the caretaker to the marching columns of the French Foreign Legion.

  I rummaged around in the cellar for quite some time, before emerging with a box full of papers spattered with plaster.

  Two hours later I was on the train, trying to keep my voice down while using my phone.

  “I’m not coming back tonight. I’m making slower progress than expected.”

  Through the window, the forests hurtled past at three hundred kilometres an hour.

  “I’d better hang up. I’m in the library.”

  Sensing that the entire train was listening to me, I tried to muffle the last word with my hand.

  “Where?” inquired the voice on the other end of the line.

  “In the library!”

  On cue, a loud announcement from the buffet car came over the tannoy, promoting a range of hot and cold snacks, beverages and light refreshments.

  “Are you on the train?”

  “Not at all. My neighbour’s just fooling about. He wants me to hang up.”

  I was hunched over my phone, forehead to my knees, but I could tell that my neighbour had heard every word.

  “I’ve got to go, I’ll call you back when I’ve arrived – I mean, when I’m on my way…”

  I hung up quickly to avoid tying myself in any more knots. I didn’t even know why I was lying.

  “Sorry, that was my wife,” I told my neighbour.

  “Yes, I’d got that. Bravo.”

  He buried himself in his magazine, and I didn’t pay him any further notice. I had enough on my mind already. I was heading west, towards the edge of the forest that had been haunting me since the night before.

  I changed trains several times. The last one I took seemed unchanged since the day when I had travelled to the region for the first time. It stopped at ghost stations, just as it had done back then. I even thought I recognized the man who was fast asleep behind me, and the woman struggling with the broken lock on the toilet door.

  Before leaving Paris, I’d taken the maps I had retrieved from the cellar and spread them out on a table. The area that interested me was at the intersection of four different maps. I could remember, years earlier, spending whole nights overlaying the corners so that they gave a clear overview.

  But this time around, sitting in my mother’s kitchen, I opened the laptop I’d fished out of my bag. In a matter of seconds, I was a bird flying over the region that was reproduced with perfect accuracy on the map. How might things have turned out if I’d possessed this diabolical machine at fourteen?

  It took me less than five minutes to understand what had kept me awake at night for all those years. Pearl had gone into hiding in a geographical void, in the gap between four pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He’d had it all planned out: relying on a loop in the river which didn’t feature on any map, and which rendered my overlaying of the maps pointless.

  Today, satellites had remedied this mistake. On the screen, I followed the river between the green markings of the forests. I was like a wild duck heading upstream in full flight.

  And then the house appeared.

  It was a small rectangle, the colour of terracotta. Zooming in, I could even see the pontoon, which seemed to be disappearing into the sand. I was looking for something else, a trace, a presence, as if Pearl might still be there, waving to me from his island.

  When I stepped off the train, my first impulse was to find the spot I had set out from all that time ago. But this proved the worst way to begin my explorations.

  I found the back road, but it had grown very wide and busy. I ha
d abandoned my bicycle at the exact same spot, twenty-five years earlier. Now, cars roared past me, and the telephone box had been replaced by a triangular sign alerting drivers to the risk of wild animals crossing the road. I felt an urge to paint a bright red car on the sign, warning the poor stags of the dangers they faced in the vicinity.

  I set off through the woods. My map was virtually useless under the trees. I wandered blindly, in the belief that I was recapturing those smells, the memories of my flight, the sting of nettles and the stubbornness of brambles snagging my legs.

  A few hours later, I was sure I couldn’t be far from my goal – if only on the basis of how exhausted I felt. I was expecting to see the river or the outline of the house behind the trees. Just then, a poultry lorry passed by right in front of me, leaving me stunned and surrounded by feathers. I was back at the road.

  The sun was setting. I had blisters on every toe and insects in my hair. I needed to find another way of going about this.

  Perhaps taking pity on my tragic appearance, a woman pulled up and offered me a lift to the nearest village.

  “Are you lost?”

  “No. I’m just out for a walk.”

  “Are you sure you’re OK?”

  Beside her in the passenger seat, I must have looked as pathetic as a shrivelled old mushroom.

  She dropped me off on a stone bridge in front of the church. I noticed a Bastille Day Chinese lantern hanging from the balustrade as I heard the car drive away.

  Leaning over the greenish water, I knew at once what my plan was for the following day.

  I spent a peaceful night in a hotel called Le Cheval Blanc. I’d called home again, and managed to entangle myself further. I don’t remember what I said to my family that evening to justify a further postponement to my return: probably something about a hostage crisis in the library, or a train in the Metro being derailed.

  By seven the next morning, I was gliding in a boat between the alder and poplar trees. The hull crushed the water-lily pads, but the flowers popped back up again like corks; dragonflies landed on the oars; I had the feeling of returning to a source. Scattered on the banks, the few morning fishermen disappeared eventually. I could see trees leaning over the water and, in their shadows, fish rising to the surface. It was already hot.

  It was scarcely ten o’clock when I recognized, to my left, the detour that didn’t feature on any map. The river divided in two. So I followed the loop, occasionally leaving my oars in the water to take a close look at the map from the cellar. On that paper faded like parchment, the rectangle representing the house was still there.

  And then, after another bend in the river, I saw the tiled roof.

  I had done the sums a hundred times: how many years had elapsed, how long a man might live… I knew that what I was hoping for didn’t make any sense. But was there anything sensible about this story? As I approached the house, I was convinced I would see Pearl and his old dogs coming to meet me.

  The pontoon was covered in sand. I ran my boat aground and stepped onto the bank. The door hadn’t swung open. The walls and roof were being eaten by vegetation. I took a few steps in the long grass.

  “Monsieur Pearl?”

  I called out faintly enough for there to be a chance that he might not have heard me; a chance that this could be the reason for him not appearing. It was a bright sunny day, after all, and he’d probably stayed inside in the shade. Pearl would be over eighty by now. He had every right not to come to meet me. He would be asleep in his lumpy old toad of an armchair.

  “Can I come in?”

  When I pushed the door open, it fell straight down like a drawbridge.

  Coming from the midday glare, my eyes took a while to adjust to the interior of the house. I edged forwards along the door, which was now lying in the dust. The house must have been deserted for some years. There was no sign of anyone living there. The bed, the dresser, the stone sink – they had all disappeared. And the great wall that had so enchanted me? Those hundreds of piled-up suitcases? Where were they? What traveller could set off with so much luggage? An Arabian prince leading his caravan of camels?

  The evidence suggested that I’d dreamt it all up, that I’d furnished this place with my imagination.

  Which was why I latched onto the old circular saw that had been left in a corner. It was exactly as I remembered it, with its belt and motor. There used to be a bicycle propped up against it. I suddenly found myself wondering how a saw had found its way into Joshua Pearl’s house, and why I had never been surprised by its presence. Is it normal to have an enormous saw next to a bed? Or a bicycle? Even those memories I thought I was rediscovering seemed to be faltering.

  I moved deeper into the gloom, searching for anything I might recognize: a forgotten suitcase or the dogs’ drinking bowl. But all I found were the ruins of a gutted barn on the banks of a river. I leant against a beam and stared at the light filtering in through the windows.

  I had been inside here before, I was sure of that. I remembered the fire and the kettle, the smell of the dogs returning from their swim and the stormy grey of Pearl’s eyes. I didn’t need to find any traces of him. I wanted to find out where he’d gone, and why I’d been sent that box. What was I meant to do?

  Stepping back across the threshold, I put my hand up to sheild me from the glare of the sun. Then, as I flanked the wall of the house, between the water and the pear trees, my foot tripped on something.

  There, covered in wild grasses, was a mound of earth, rectangular-shaped. I knelt down, with both knees on the ground, and brushed aside the reeds and butterflies.

  It was a grave.

  26

  OLD BEFORE HIS TIME

  Nobody who lived in Paris during the post-war years could fail to remember Maison Pearl.

  The tiny size of the confectionery shop belied its extraordinary success. Throughout the neighbourhood, people would speak of the Jewish couple, murdered in the war, whose only son had taken on the business in 1945 at the age of twenty-five. On his return, the young Joshua Pearl’s first job in the shop had been to chase out the brigands; they had used it as a secret base for their thriving black-market operations during the last years of the war. Behind the lowered iron shutter, they had stockpiled mountains of cured meat and sugar, all with the tacit blessing of the police, who had themselves been bribed with sherry and wine from Spain.

  The Pearl boy spent the first year restoring the ransacked shop. He only had one photograph showing how the window looked before, and he set to work, single-handedly repairing the woodwork, brass and mirrors. He re-established relations with suppliers, and brought up old vats and marshmallow moulds from the cellar. He even managed to unearth the shop’s emblem, with its pearl-studded crown.

  Maison Pearl reopened its doors in the autumn of 1946. It was an immediate success, despite the shortages that marked those years. French confectionery had always enjoyed a fine reputation, dating back to the end of the previous century, but the decade after the war was etched into the memory of many a sweet-toothed Parisian as the “marshmallow years”.

  Pearl worked day and night, entirely on his own, without even an assistant to help in the kitchen. He made, sold and delivered marshmallows by the thousand. His working day never ended: he even slept under the counter in the shop instead of using the apartment up on the first floor, which was kept sealed off behind its curtains.

  The modest glory of Maison Pearl did not come without jealousy. The rumours began appearing in the very first year, but thankfully they were swept aside swiftly enough. When the war was over, there was a lot of talk about swindlers passing themselves off as the descendants of dead or missing families. Neighbouring shopkeepers started saying that the Pearls’ son had died of Spanish flu ten years earlier, and that the “Pearl” who’d inherited the business was just another impostor fleecing the dead and turning a profit out of tragedy.

  These suspicions threatened to become serious, until one morning a small glass display case appeared next
to the cash register. It looked like a miniature cabinet of curiosities, and inside it were half a dozen war decorations, military crosses and Resistance medals, as well as army enlistment records in the name of Joshua Pearl, photographs of him in his Spahi uniform, and letters bearing the signature of a colonel and a politician.

  Until that moment, Pearl had never mentioned his military achievements. There was even a theory that he’d spent time in America, what with that strange, unplaceable accent of his. The display was there for barely a week, before disappearing along with the rumour. Pearl was a hero, and this did nothing to help the case of his detractors. Faced with the ever increasing popularity of Maison Pearl, they needed to turn their scorn elsewhere, and so started to show an interest in the character and lifestyle of the young man himself.

  In this department, there was plenty to gossip about. Joshua Pearl was young, charming and bright-eyed. He had a pleasant manner with customers, visitors and suppliers alike, not to mention the people he met in the street, but there was no escaping the fact that in other ways his behaviour was more than a little odd. By turn, people said he was misanthropic, curmudgeonly, greedy, shifty, antisocial or hypocritical. The girls who had courted him before the war had long since married, though beautiful Suzanne, the plasterer’s daughter, who bore him no grudge, still came to buy heaps of marshmallows every Thursday with her three sons, just so she could see him.

  The neighbours’ gossip had absolutely no effect on business at Maison Pearl. People came for the marshmallows that were so alluring in their white tissue paper, or for the charismatic confectioner, or for the aroma of toasted almonds rising up between the floorboards, or for the air so thick it enveloped the customers as they walked in. No amount of jealousy could ever have destroyed that.