It took me more than a year.
I told people I had embarked on a project; one that required a lot of research. I called it The Book of Pearl and the way I described it was so confusing they had no choice but to trust me.
At the beginning, my days all followed the same pattern. I would spread the photographs out on the ground in a square, ten by ten, and would walk around it.
Those one hundred photographs told the tale of an odyssey. They had been taken by Joshua Pearl from the very first day that he’d borrowed my camera. Picking up on the few clues that helped me date some of them, I soon realized that they spanned over twenty years. So he had only taken four or five photos a year.
While I was growing up, while we were getting on with our lives, Pearl had spent his time fleeing different parts of the world. Each image was another chapter that told the story of an epic voyage involving hundreds of suitcases. His nomadic life seemed unreal.
Those suitcases were well travelled. I saw them sliding across snowfields, waiting by the sea, crossing rivers. They were piled up inside stables or beneath tents. In one photograph, the mound of leather, wood and waxed canvas was hidden high in a tree in the corner of a field. And then there were strange images: a few suitcases carried off by the current; others waiting on a barren mountainside beside two donkeys.
As I worked on the project, and the weeks went by, I felt like a character in a fairy tale; except that instead of following a trail of breadcrumbs or pebbles out of the dark woods, I was wandering from one photo to another as I tried to piece together the story.
The two films, which I finally managed to see on an old projector, each lasted three minutes. They hardly showed anything, but they had a profound effect on me. I had filmed the first one on the river, and then in and around the house. The second was taken by Pearl. It showed a dog running through the grass, and a raft piled with suitcases, being pulled through the water by a boat.
The first thing that struck me about my square of one hundred photographs was the dwindling number of suitcases. The journey was marked by loss; so my narrative had to be about the struggle against time and death. Towards the end, in the final photographs, the pile of luggage formed a perfect cube, pulled tight inside a net. There were still two dogs at the beginning, but one by one they disappeared in turn.
The last photograph was of the bow of a boat. Pearl had succeeded in returning to port: that much I could see. His quest was meant to finish where it had begun, in the house by the water’s edge. For a storyteller, coming full circle in this way was ideal. I had even seen Pearl’s grave, close to the house, with my own eyes. The adventurer had returned to die in the place where he had lived.
It was all perfect.
During the winter, I set off in search of various places, in order to conduct my research more thoroughly. In the middle of nowhere, I found the remains of the old Citroën cattle truck that could be seen in the first photos. I tracked down the landscapes, villages and beaches. I was walking in Pearl’s footsteps.
Late one evening, I printed out a ream of paper and set it down on my table. I had finished.
Next to my manuscript were the one hundred photographs. I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. The Book of Pearl was somewhere between a fable and an adventure story. At last, I was ready for someone else to read the pages that had liberated me from my memories, and from the ghost of the girl.
But in the middle of the night, one of the images woke me with a start. It was the second photograph in the first row. I stole quietly out of bed and went to take a look at it on the table, picking up the image that came just after the one with the dead dog.
I called this photo “Farewell to the House”, because it came at the start of the adventure. The house and the pontoon had been photographed from the boat. Inspecting it more closely, I noticed a tiny detail I hadn’t spotted before. There, against the wall, in the long grass, was the grave.
The grave was already there.
So I had got everything wrong from beginning to end; all my hard work was going up in smoke. Either Pearl hadn’t taken any of the photographs himself, or this wasn’t his grave. And a man with no grave might very well be alive.
The day after that sleepless night, I received an anonymous note in the post: a few lines setting the time and place for a meeting three days later. The message ended with a question that was repeated, in small and then capital letters:
What do you think you’re doing?
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
The note was written on white paper from Maison Pearl.
31
AN APPARITION
The house was right in the middle of Venice, although only a few of its windows overlooked a small canal. The address given in the message was for a waterfront entrance, but I was determined to arrive on foot rather than by boat. I knew nothing about this meeting. What if it was a trap, and I needed to make a hasty getaway?
Looking back on it now, the dangers I imagined were far smaller than those that really did hover around me that day; dangers which had been threatening me, without my knowing it, for months.
And so I had naively gone in search of street access to the rear of the yellow house, with the result that I had taken at least ten wrong turns. Venice is described as a labyrinth, but it’s more like two or three labyrinths that have merged with the sole purpose of making you lose your way.
While I was waiting for the appointed hour, I’d already walked past the door once to scope it out. I lingered at the end of the narrow little street, checking my watch. It was Sunday and almost noon. In the distance came the sounds of a motorboat from a wider canal, a cat wailing, ringing bells, and a woman’s heels.
I had just spent three days in a tailspin. This had involved destroying my manuscript, reading and re-reading my note of summons, purchasing a ticket for Venice (before nearly binning that as well) and lying to everybody. I had re-opened all the wounds I had painstakingly stitched up with the pages I had been writing for months on end. In a few moments, I might actually discover what all this was about.
The doorbell didn’t work when I pressed it, and the door had sunk to lower than head-level. I stared at the rust-coloured mark tracing the outline of the door-frame on the stone. After twenty seconds, I pressed the button again; but this time, in an effort to look more calm and collected, I took a step backwards, thrust my hands into my pockets and swivelled on my heels. Glancing up, I saw a white curtain flap at a window, despite there being no breeze that day. Four small windows were scattered at random across the long vertical façade, and it was out of the top one that the white sail had briefly billowed.
I scanned the other windows, searching for any sign of life. When I looked down again, I discovered that the door was wide open. A half-person stood in the gloom, almost invisible, sliced lengthways by the edge of the door. The inside of the house was pitch black.
As I crossed the threshold, we brushed lightly against one another and I wondered whether this person might be a child. I could feel the first stair underfoot, and my shoulders brushed against the walls of the narrow staircase. Behind me, the patter of bare feet was reassuring. No one was going to chop me into pieces in front of a child.
The stairwell emerged into a room lit up by a window. I could see two chairs, a table, two glasses and a carafe of water. Nothing else. No sign of my mysterious correspondent.
I took in the scene: the frame of light, the small square room, the terracotta tiles, the carafe of water gleaming as in an old painting. I wanted to ask my guide to inform the person who’d summoned me that I’d arrived. But as I turned to speak, I sensed the child passing behind my back, and so I continued my movement until I’d come full circle. And then stopped abruptly.
It was her. She was filling both glasses from the carafe.
It was the girl.
My legs felt as if they were about to give way, and the short distance to the chair suddenly looked unfeasible. But this was only the first wave of shock, for I had
yet to notice her age. She wasn’t a single day or night older than when she had abandoned me.
I was like a cat that had slipped off a roof now; but as I fell through the air, an unstoppable machine had been set in motion inside me. I’d had this feeling before, when I’d opened the wallets of photos for the first time. It was a machine that made the impossible possible, and it was now consuming all my energy as I frantically tried to work out the logic and reason behind this apparition. Spinning through the void, I cared about just one thing: like any cat in the world, I wanted to land on my feet.
And land on them I did, by uttering the only words that made any sense; the only words that could explain almost everything; the only words that could make me feel the ground beneath my feet.
“Please tell your mother I’m here.”
Nothing else could explain such an uncanny resemblance after all these years. The girl in front of me had to be her daughter.
As she listened to my pathetic stammering, she pressed a hand into the back of her chair with a weariness that implied it was her who had got the wrong person. My throat tightened in the presence of such sadness. This time, I recognized her. It really was her. In my head, I was switching worlds.
I ventured a step forward and sat down on one of the chairs. The girl stayed standing behind hers. Slowly, we drank in the sight of one another, only looking away to gasp for air. I needed those seconds to come back down to earth.
Eventually, she sat on the other chair in her wide silk trousers, and slid one of the glasses towards her on the table saying, “You’re no use to me at all.”
I had been through too much by this stage to feel surprised. Instead, I adopted the expression of a child who knew he was in the wrong, and she continued.
“Didn’t you receive the package?”
I nodded, guilty again, but of what I had no idea.
“Well?” she asked. “What are you doing?”
That was the central question: the one that was on my note of summons. The one I still didn’t understand.
“What do you do?” she asked again.
“What do you mean?”
“What is it that you do?”
“I write,” I muttered.
“Sorry?”
“I write.”
I must have looked a sorry sight, but she stared at me without any pity. She stood up to half-close the shutters, which I hadn’t noticed up until that point. Then she sat down again.
“So you haven’t understood anything, then?” she asked softly.
“Nothing at all.” I had to admit, after pretending to mull over the question.
And it was the truth.
She drank her glass of water in one.
“They come in twos and threes. They’re here, the ones who are after him.”
“Who?”
“They’re after me too.”
“Who’s after you?”
She didn’t answer.
“He’s very old. He can’t run away any more.”
“Who?” I repeated, before attempting to answer my own question. “Pearl?”
She nodded and, for the first time, I felt that I was truly on a level with her. Emboldened by this, I asked, “Who are you?”
She poured herself a fresh glass of water, and then she began to talk.
What I’ve written down here is exactly as she told it to me, from the very first word. It’s a story I would never have dared to make up myself. As I listened to the girl, I was thinking back to the pages I had thrown out the day before – the ones that referred to a mad old wanderer – and I realized what had driven me to destroy my story. There were two elements missing: urgency and necessity. Whereas these were at the very heart of her story.
The hours came and went, with deaths and loves floating on a lake; with wild boars in the snow; with a weasel on the ramparts; and with a pair of banished lovers.
Night was falling. The carafe had to be refilled several times. I stayed there, alone, in the middle of the story when she went for more water. I felt cold while she was away. I strained my ears to catch the patter of her footsteps when she was above me, or the sound of running water and then the tap being turned off.
She always came back.
When she spoke of our encounter on the river, there were long silences between her words. She was watching for my reaction. I could tell she didn’t want to hurt me.
By the time I met him in the house guarded by his dogs, Pearl had been collecting for forty years. And Oliå, having finally tracked him down to his hideout, was coming to the realization that he would never stop. He could never have enough tokens of proof, because he was too afraid of not being believed. And so he continued to amass his treasure, in the knowledge that he wouldn’t be given a second chance.
“He was afraid,” she echoed.
I could picture him again with his nose buried in his ledgers, rearranging his suitcases a thousand times, climbing those ladders.
“And then one morning, at the washhouse, I saw you photographing frogs.”
She smiled gently.
“I promise you, I nearly fell in love.”
I smiled back, tears in my eyes.
“But you were photographing me for nothing.”
She began to laugh.
“Really, for nothing.”
She stopped.
“I saw your camera, though, and I thought that you could take more important photographs. That you could show the tokens of proof.”
I looked away, trying not to feel sad, but with little success.
“I told you I have no special powers…”
She was keeping something back.
“But there is one power I’ll never lose. You don’t need to have been what I was to possess it.”
She was speaking in more of a hush now, barely audible.
“The power to make people sad.”
A long silence followed.
I understood it was her grief that had led me towards Pearl; the same heartbreak had led us both through the woods. I realized too that she had returned to open the suitcases and play at being a small ghost in the house by the river in order to pique my curiosity. It was because of her that I had photographed some of the treasure.
But Pearl had caught me red-handed with my camera, and kept me at a distance for a very long time.
Oliå pronounced the name Iliån by elongating the “a”, as if it were a sigh. She only had to say his name once for me to understand how much she loved him. I could never measure up to that.
When she began to speak again, she told me about the attack. An archer had finally located the house, four years after my stay there. Pearl was away on his travels. An arrow had killed one of the dogs, and the other two hounds had thrown themselves on the man. Oliå arrived too late to save the archer, but before he died she made him speak of the Kingdoms.
The archer had been sent by Iån. Back in their realm, the keeper of the lightship had eventually denounced Taåg, so Iån knew that his brother and Oliå were alive somewhere; and that Iliån was preparing his return.
Their aged father had long since died. And Fåra, the old servant, must have disappeared as well.
Once Iån had done with wreaking havoc and dereliction in the Kingdoms, and bringing his own people to their knees, he proceeded to send his mercenaries even further afield. The first archer arrived in our world on a summer’s evening. He died in an accident in the canals of Bruges, but ever since then there’d been plenty more on the hunt for Iliån. And one of them had been running across the rooftops of Venice for two days now.
Night had fallen and I could no longer see Oliå; I could only hear her feet sliding over the floor beneath her chair. She confided that she always carried the bow she had taken from the first archer.
“What about the grave close to the house?” I wanted to know.
“It was for one of his dogs.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I found you dancing in that place.”
<
br /> “At the fire station? I wasn’t dancing.”
She laughed very softly.
“You fainted.”
I didn’t want to admit that I had probably collapsed after glimpsing her for a split second in the crowd.
“I followed you in order to give you the box.”
“So it was you?”
When she answered, it was in a very different voice.
“Iliån will die soon. You have all the tokens of proof. You must write our story.”
I couldn’t believe my ears: she wanted me to reverse the spell that had been cast over them.
I couldn’t tell her that the person she was addressing was not the same as the fourteen-year-old boy she had known before; and that between then and now I had forfeited everyone’s trust, because I told stories for a living.
Quite simply, nobody would believe me.
“What about you?” I asked.
“My fate is intertwined with his. I shall return with him.”
She told me about those youthful, lifeless bodies, which had been hidden together within the cliff-face, above the lightship. They had been waiting to be awoken for nearly a century. I tried to picture their small tomb in amongst the swallows’ nests.
“Where is Pearl?” I asked.
“Here in Venice.”
“I want to speak to him.”
32
THE ETERNAL PALACE
When Attila and his armies invaded Europe, the refugees that were routed from the torched cities of northern Italy fled to a group of marshes and small sandy islands. There they built huts on top of the wooden stakes they had driven into the muddy terrain. Hidden in this deserted lagoon, they were safe from marauding horsemen and ships raiding the coastline. In time, this place would become Venice.
One and a half thousand years later, Joshua Pearl had washed up in this corner of the world for the same reason.
The Book of Pearl Page 19