Evil spirits, get thee hence. Yes, I could do it so easily. A house reflects its occupants; and this one recognizes me. How easily it could take us back; how easily could the past be reclaimed.
Bat-bat.
The house is restless. It twitches and stirs. Floorboards creak; doors slam; broken windows whisper. And now, upstairs, on the second floor, from the crow’s-nest where Anouk once had her room, the sound of footsteps on bare wood.
That was no ghost. I called: ‘Who’s there?’
There was a silence, and then a face appeared at the top of the ladder that led to Anouk’s little attic room. A small brown face edged in black; dark eyes wide and anxious.
‘Did I frighten you?’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think there’d be anyone home. I used to live here, long ago, before you and your mother moved in. I used to run a chocolate shop. Maybe you’ve heard the story.’
The child did not move. Under the hijab, she looked about twelve.
‘You must be Du’a,’ I told her. ‘I’m Vianne. Is your mother here?’
She shook her head.
‘That used to be my daughter’s room. Does it still have the little round window, like a porthole, in the roof? She used to look through it at night and pretend she was on a pirate ship.’
Du’a nodded cautiously. Behind her, a soft, scuffling noise. Maya’s face appeared alongside hers, sweet as a chocolate button.
‘It’s Vianne!’ said Maya. ‘Come on up! We thought it was Du’a’s memti.’
I looked at Du’a. ‘May I?’ I said.
Du’a still looked hesitant.
‘It’s all right,’ said Maya. ‘She knows how to keep a secret. She’s been looking after Alyssa for ages, and she hasn’t told anyone. Come on up, Vianne, and see!’
I climbed up the ladder through the trapdoor. It still smelt of smoke, but now I could see that the damage here was minimal. The room has not changed much since Anouk was here; a few shelves of books, a little bed, a desk with a computer, some toys, a couple of posters on the walls of singers that I did not recognize. And, sitting on cushions on the floor, three more children – Pilou among them – and a cardboard box from which came a series of scuffling, whining sounds.
‘Why, hello, everyone,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t expecting a party.’
Pilou grinned. ‘Meet Du’a,’ he said. ‘Maya you already know, of course. And these two –’ he made an inclusive gesture – ‘are Karine and François.’ The two children looked at me cautiously. François, the elder, looked about twelve. Karine was maybe Maya’s age. Both were in jeans and T-shirts. I guessed that they were siblings.
‘What’s going on up here?’ I said.
‘Desperate goings-on,’ said Pilou. ‘Piracy. Contraband—’
‘Stop it, Pilou,’ said Du’a. Her voice was soft, but authoritative. She looked at me. ‘He sometimes gets carried away,’ she said.
I looked inside the cardboard box. Two black-and-white puppies looked back. They must have been about five weeks old. Plump, snub-nosed and playful, they were climbing over each other in their eagerness to get out of the box, making happy snarling sounds.
‘I see.’ I picked up a puppy, which promptly bit my finger.
‘It’s OK. He does that,’ said Pilou. ‘I’m going to call him Biter.’
‘Who do they belong to?’ I said.
‘No one. Us,’ said Maya, at once.
‘So this was your secret?’ I smiled at her. ‘I have to say, you’ve kept it well.’ I saw that Du’a looked anxious, and said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s safe with me.’
She gave me a look of suspicion. Under the black hijab, her face was small and sharp and angular. Her eyes were very striking, ringed with concentric circles of gold.
‘Monsieur Acheron was going to drown them,’ she said. ‘François and Karine brought them here. That was just before the fire. Since then, we’ve been looking after them here. Luc knows, because he’s been working here. But no one else does. Except you now.’
‘They’re so cute,’ said Maya. ‘And no one lives here any more, so no one cares whether the angels can get into the house or not.’
‘Angels?’ I said.
‘It’s in the Qur’an. My Omi says if there’s a dog in the house, then the angels can’t come in.’
‘You mean the cat can’t come in,’ said Pilou.
‘It’s not a cat,’ said Maya. ‘It’s angels.’
‘You mentioned Monsieur Acheron.’ I looked at François and Karine. ‘Would that be Louis Acheron?’
François nodded. ‘He’s our dad. He’d have a fit if he knew we were here. He doesn’t like Maghrébins any more than he likes puppies. Says if they want to live in France, they ought to live the way we do. Says they’re dragging the country down into socio-economic collapse.’
I smiled. ‘Then it’s best you don’t tell him,’ I said. ‘What about your mother, Du’a? Does she know where you are?’
Du’a shook her head. ‘She thinks I’m babysitting Maya.’
‘And your mother, Maya?’
‘She thinks I’m at hers, of course.’ Maya patted the puppy. ‘I like coming here. It’s nice. There are toys. I’m not supposed to have toys.’
‘That’s true,’ said Pilou earnestly. ‘Do you know that their religion says you can’t have plushies, or Barbie dolls, or even action figures?’
‘I have them at home,’ Maya said. ‘My Little Pony and Disney Princess. But here I’m not supposed to. Memti made me leave them behind. Except for this.’ She pulled an object from under her arm. I recognized the same knitted toy that she had been holding when I last saw her; a porridge-coloured thing with ears, which might have been a rabbit. ‘This is Tipo. He’s my friend. My Omi made him for me.’ She frowned. ‘My Uncle Saïd says animal toys are haram. I heard him tell my jiddo.’
‘Can you believe that?’ said Pilou. ‘I mean, why would God care about that kind of thing?’
I said: ‘It’s sometimes hard to understand why other people believe what they do.’
‘But – plushies?’ said Pilou, in disbelief. ‘And music – did you know that’s a sin, too? And dancing, and wine, and sausages—’
‘Sausages?’ echoed François.
‘Well, actually, most kinds of charcuterie,’ corrected Pilou knowledgeably. ‘But you can still eat Haribo. Or at least, the Muslim kind. Which tastes just the same as the regular sort, but you can only get it in special places, like in Bordeaux, at, like, ten Euros a bag or something.’
Pilou and the Lansquenet children exchanged awed looks at the thought of Muslim Haribo.
I turned towards Du’a. ‘Where are you staying now?’
She shrugged. ‘With my uncle and auntie,’ she said.
‘Karim and Sonia?’
She nodded.
‘And do you like your new aunt?’
She made an odd little half-shrug. ‘She’s all right. She doesn’t talk much. I liked Alyssa better.’
I noticed she used the past tense. ‘Liked? You don’t think she’ll come home?’
Again, that little half-shrug. In fact, it is not so much a shrug as a kind of oscillation of the head and shoulders; a gesture as natural as thought; intricate as a dance movement.
I said: ‘Why did Alyssa run away?’
She tilted her head. ‘It was zina, my mother says.’
I wanted to ask what kind of a sin would cause a young girl to take her own life, but for a woman there is only one. Zina, a word that sounds almost as if it might be a name – perhaps a kind of flower, but one that blooms only to sicken, and must be torn up before it spreads. My mother and I did not stay long in Tangier, but it was long enough for me to understand. A single mother and her child were objects of contempt and shame; even now they have few rights; twenty years ago, they had none. As Westerners, my mother and I were something of an exception. Few people actually welcomed us, but we were different enough – and respectful enough of their faith – to slip through the net of their judgement. But w
omen who had abandoned hayaa – that complex word that means both modesty and shame – were given little sympathy. My mother knew several of these unmarried mothers, cast out from their families, unable either to work or to claim social security benefits for children born out of wedlock. She never got to know them well – the gulf that separated us was still too deep for that – but even so, I managed to gather scraps of information. One had been promised marriage by a man who left her when he discovered that she was pregnant. Another had been raped by a group of men who told her as they raped her that she was a whore, who deserved nothing else. My mother cried when she heard the tale – my mother didn’t cry easily, but the girl was only nineteen, and when we met her was working long hours in a fish-canning factory, where she also slept. Her baby – a girl – had died soon after it was born. She had named her Rashillah. My mother never understood how a faith that claimed to teach forgiveness could become such a relentless wall of ice against the poorest and most vulnerable members of the community. We thought we’d seen prejudice in Rome, in Paris, in Berlin, in Prague, but that was nothing compared with Tangier, where disgraced women lined up outside the mosques to beg, while their virtuous sisters ignored them, eyes averted, faces veiled, modest and implacable.
That was the sin, my mother said, as we slipped through the hot, white streets in the sun, with the souks and the muezzin vying for attention under the clashing, pitiless sky. That was the sin, the averted gaze; that brief, dismissive gesture. We’d seen it so often before, she and I: in Paris, outside Notre-Dame; in Rome, at the gates of the Vatican. Even here in Lansquenet, in the eyes of people like Caro Clairmont, I’ve always recognized that look – that look of sanctified contempt adopted by the righteous.
‘There are worse things than zina,’ I said.
I thought Du’a looked slightly shocked.
‘Does Alyssa have a boyfriend?’
Du’a nodded. ‘She used to,’ she said. ‘She talked to him on the internet. But then her father took the computer away, and so I let her use mine instead. At least, I did until the fire.’
‘Oh. I see.’ An internet friend. Anouk does not have a computer. At home, she spends hours in the internet café on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, talking with her friends – or most often with Jean-Loup, who uses virtual media to compensate for his all-too-frequent trips to hospital. ‘Is this someone she knows in real life? Someone from the village, perhaps?’
Once more, Du’a nodded. ‘Maybe. I think so. She never said.’
‘I see.’ And suddenly I did. It explained everything. The football games in the village square; the coffee mornings with Caro Clairmont that had so suddenly come to an end; Caro’s disillusionment with the Les Marauds community; the coolness that had arisen between the village and the Boulevard P’tit Baghdad.
In Caro’s world, tolerance means reading the right kind of newspaper; occasionally eating couscous and calling oneself a liberal. It does not extend to allowing her son to fall in love with a Maghrébine. And as for Saïd Mahjoubi, to whom people look for spiritual guidance; a man who defines himself by his faith—
I left the children to their game. Children are strangely accepting. Even the Acheron children exist below the radar of parental prejudice. It doesn’t take much to make them forget the differences between them. A cardboard box with puppies inside; a hiding-place in an abandoned house. If only the world were as simple for us. But we have the uncanny knack of focusing on difference; as if excluding others could make our sense of identity stronger. And yet, in all my travels, I have found that people are mostly the same everywhere. Under the veil, the beard, the soutane, it’s always the same machinery. In spite of what my mother believed, there is no magic to what we do. We see because we look beyond the clutter of what others see. The colours of the human heart. The colours of the soul.
It was still raining as I came out. A hard, fat rain, that spackled the ground like firecrackers in the wind. And now I know what I have to do. I think I knew it from the start. From the day I first arrived and saw her standing in the sun, motionless, veiled to the eyes, watching the crowd like a basilisk.
I made a call from my mobile phone. Not to Roux, this time, but to Guy, who supplies my chocolates. This time, my order was modest, just a box or two of couverture chocolate and a few utensils. But as my mother always said, on some days, only magic works. It isn’t a grand kind of magic, no; but it’s all we have, and I need it now.
Then I headed back into the rain in search of Inès Bencharki.
CHAPTER FOUR
Tuesday, 24th August
IN LES MARAUDS the streets were deserted. The Black Autan was out in force. The sky had acquired a sulphurous look, and against it the raindrops were almost black. The few birds that still braved the wind were tumbled like pages of newspaper along the barricade of trees that grow on the riverbank. The air smelt salty, although the sea is over two hours’ drive away, and in spite of the rain and wind it was warm; a vaguely unpleasant, milky warmth, as if something were festering. And from every window, every pair of shutters, came that sensation of being watched; an all-too-familiar feeling, remembered from so many places along the road.
Here, people are wary of strangers, I know. Children are warned against us. The way we dress, our accent, even the kind of food we eat – everything marks us as different; potentially hostile; dangerous. I remember taking Anouk to school when we first arrived in Lansquenet; the way the mothers looked at us, taking in every difference. The brightly coloured clothes; the shop; the child; the absent wedding ring. Now, I almost belong here. Except in Les Marauds, of course, where every centimetre of space is crossed with invisible tripwires; every one a broken rule, an inadvertent transgression.
Still, there is one house, I know, where I am not a stranger. Perhaps because of the peaches; or perhaps because the al-Djerbas were here when Les Marauds was still part of Lansquenet, and not a population apart.
I made my way to the green door. At my feet, the drains were an orchestra and the gutters spouted exuberantly. My hair was plastered to my face; even through Armande’s old raincoat, my shirt and jeans were wet. I knocked, and seemed to wait a long time before Fatima came to open the door. She was wearing a blue sequinned kaftan and a harried expression. On seeing me, her face assumed a look of concern.
‘Vianne! Are you all right? You must be soaked—’
In seconds, I was in the house, sitting on cushions in front of the fire, while Yasmina ran to fetch towels and Zahra prepared some mint tea. Omi was in the living room, resting on a low couch, and from the kitchen came the smell of something cooking; coconut and cumin seeds and cardamom and rising dough – bread, I guessed, for that evening’s iftar.
Omi gave me her turtle grin. ‘You promised to bring me chocolates.’
I smiled. ‘Of course. I’m awaiting supplies.’
‘Well, hurry. I won’t live for ever.’
‘I’m sure you can hang on for a week.’
Omi laughed. ‘I’ll do my best. And what are you doing, Vianne Rocher, running about in the rain like this?’
I mentioned Inès Bencharki.
‘Khee.’ Omi snapped her toothless jaws. ‘And why do you want to bother with her?’
I drank my tea. ‘She’s interesting.’
‘Interesting, you call it? Yar. I say the woman is trouble.’
‘Why?’
Omi shrugged. ‘It’s her nature. There’s a story about a scorpion that wants to cross a river. She talks a water-buffalo into carrying her across on his back. Halfway across, she stings him. Dying, the buffalo says, “But why? If I die here, then you drown too.” And the scorpion says, “I’m a scorpion. My friend, I thought you knew that.”’
I smiled. I know the story. ‘Are you saying Inès is a scorpion?’
‘I’m saying some people would rather die than give up the chance to sting,’ she said. ‘Believe me, nothing good will come of befriending Inès Bencharki.’
‘But why?’
‘That’s
what the buffalo said.’ Once more, Omi gave an impatient shrug. ‘Some people can’t be helped, Vianne. And sometimes people leave a trail behind them that poisons everyone who crosses it.’
Believe me, Omi, I know that trail. I’ve crossed it myself a few times. Some people leave poison in their wake, even where they try to do good. Sometimes I lie awake at night, wondering whether I am one of them. What has my gift ever really achieved? What have I given to the world? Sweet dreams and illusions; transient joys; promises by the quarter-pound. But my path is littered with failures; with pain and disappointment. Even now, do I really believe that chocolate can change anything?
‘Omi, I need to see her,’ I said.
She looked at me. ‘I suppose you do. Well, wait until your hair dries, at least. And drink some more of this mint tea.’
I did as she said. The tea was good, bright green and smelling of summer. As I sat there, a black cat walked in and draped itself, purring, across my lap.
‘Hazrat likes you,’ said Omi.
I stroked the cat. ‘Is he yours?’
She smiled. ‘A cat belongs to no one,’ she said. ‘He comes and goes, like the Black Autan. But Du’a gave him a name, and now he comes here every day because he knows there is food.’ She pulled out a coconut macaroon from her pocket. ‘Here, Hazi. Your favourite.’
She broke off a piece of the sweetmeat and held it out towards the cat. Hazi extended an elegant paw and snagged the piece of coconut before settling down to eat it with every sign of enjoyment.
Omi finished the macaroon. ‘Hazrat Abu Hurairah was a famous Sahabi. He was known as “the kitten man” because he was very fond of cats. My little Du’a named this cat after him. She says he is a stray, but I think he simply prefers the food here.’
‘Who wouldn’t?’ I said with a smile.
‘Well, my daughter-in-law’s cooking is the best in Les Marauds. Don’t tell her I said that.’