One night when Joshua was away from Paris, burglars tried to rob Maison Pearl; but they didn’t find a single coin in the shop. All the money from the cash register had been spent by Joshua on a mule that was now laden with cases: he was making his way across the mountains by the Italian border. After finding the key to the apartment on the shop counter, the burglars headed upstairs, but they weren’t able to push the door open, and eventually they gave up.
When Joshua came home, he discovered the key lying on the stairway carpet. The door was blocked, but he managed to climb up the wall and enter the apartment by breaking a windowpane.
He parted the curtains and saw that all the suitcases had been pushed up against the door, making it impossible to open.
How had his rescuer escaped? For someone had clearly moved two or three hundred suitcases across the room to save the collection. This didn’t surprise Joshua. He had become aware of such fortuitous interventions over the years. But not even this special protection would be enough to save Maison Pearl from ruin.
28
BLOOD AND RUIN
The first sign came in the middle of summer in 1959.
Joshua Pearl was in the shop, listening to the sounds of the city. It was in rare moments like this that he was able to imagine not leaving, choosing our world instead, forgetting Oliå. That time of the afternoon, between two and three o’clock, made him perilously fond of his exile.
When he switched off the electric light, the sun would reflect off the wall across the street, setting the brass fittings ablaze. In days gone by, Jacques Pearl called this the “hallowed hour”. The coolness from the basement would creep up the iron stairs; not a sound, apart from the occasional word escaping from a window, or a muffled laugh, or birds chirruping on a balcony. Sometimes, though not often at this hour, a customer might push open the door. Pearl would smile at the visitor and return to his dreamlike state.
It could be a young woman, saying something along the lines of, “I left the children asleep upstairs. I know I shouldn’t, but I’m feeling peckish.”
Pearl would make a broad gesture with his arms as if to say, Please don’t apologize, help yourself.
She would let her gaze linger on the marshmallows behind the glass, and Pearl would leave her to it.
For once, he wouldn’t be thinking about the suitcases weighing heavily on the wooden floor above his head. He’d watch the woman in front of him who lived in the same world as he did, this world he had found a little drab at first, but which he had now grown fond of. He had become accustomed to its bland nature, its little faults, its dullness; he had even started to see magic in it.
The customer might click her tongue softly to make up for her hesitation, holding her hand to her mouth perhaps, or chewing her lip as she leant forward for a better view.
“They’re all so tempting…”
Pearl would smile again and make the same calm and accommodating gesture as before.
He’d reflect on how the two of them were the same age, around thirty-eight or thirty-nine, and he’d wonder for a moment whether he shouldn’t just immerse himself in the imperfections of this world, instead of constantly coming up against a glass wall; why not settle down and have children that he too could leave sleeping while he popped out to the shops?
Finally the lady would swoop on the vanilla marshmallow, and he’d prepare the large sheets of tissue paper. At the last minute, she would take a second marshmallow for her husband.
“The same one, yes, the white one.”
Two translucent strips of marshmallow would be laid on the white paper, their flecks of vanilla visible on the inside. She would pay and then leave. Silence would return. But it wouldn’t last for long, since in a few minutes another customer would come in. And Iliån would think of Oliå again.
It happened in this hallowed hour at the start of the afternoon.
A woman entered the shop carrying a large suitcase. Pearl immediately recognized her as one of the contraband smugglers he’d bought several objects from. But he had never given his name or address to any of his contacts.
Pearl looked at her coldly, as she examined the shop. She was twenty-five years old, went by the name of Carmen and had a reputation for being a hard-nosed haggler.
“I wasn’t sure how to find you,” she explained. “Last time, though, I saw Maison Pearl on the tissue paper when you were wrapping up the package. So here I am.”
Both of them knew that they were breaching the usual code of practice. She put her suitcase down on the floor.
“I think this might be of interest to you,” she said.
“There are rules,” Pearl replied.
“This one has a peculiar story behind it.”
“That doesn’t change anything.”
“I read that a man had been fished out of a canal in Bruges after a masked ball. Drowned. There was a photograph of his costume in the newspaper. The police were unable to identify him.”
Pearl didn’t trust this woman. He could tell that there was no glimmer of the story world in her: that glint he was always glad to notice in the other smugglers he worked with, even the most sinister ones.
There were perhaps no more than twenty of them in the world. Some were wanted by every police force on every continent. Their number included dangerous lunatics and enlightened beings alike, but all of them shared a single goal: to draw closer to a mystery. Carmen, for her part, was only there for business, nothing more. She would have smuggled cream cheese if there was enough money to be made from it.
“I picked up the clothes from the morgue. No one claimed the body.”
Pearl ushered her and her suitcase into the backroom. She continued to glance around as though expecting to discover, framed and up on the wall, the treasures he had previously bought from her at such expense.
Setting the case down on the draining board next to the sink, Pearl proceeded to open it. There under a black cloth was a leather tunic, some gaiters and a broken bow: all the equipment of the archers from the Kingdoms.
He snapped the suitcase shut as if he’d just seen a poisoned dart heading his way. Carmen was looking intently at his face, trying to gauge his reaction.
“I won’t buy it.”
Pearl uttered these words without betraying his fear, but he was well aware that the archer would not have entered this world without good reason.
“Go away, please.”
If the archer had died, others would come in search of Pearl – and Carmen might already have been spotted.
“Leave me be,” he murmured. “I’m not buying anything else.”
She sighed and sat down on a chair.
“I’ve travelled far; they told me you’d take all of it. I’m disappointed.”
“They lied to you. I’ve stopped. I make marshmallows now.”
“Shame,” she said.
She made a show of settling in for the long haul, adopting a defiant expression as she sat back in her chair and loosened her collar. Realizing the danger she represented, Pearl took a wad of notes from a drawer and placed them in front of her; she started counting them. It was four o’clock, and the first customers of the afternoon could be heard entering the shop. Children whispered in front of the marshmallows as they waited.
When she’d finished counting, Carmen looked as if she might be about to push her luck, but the stormy grey of Pearl’s eyes made her think twice.
“Never come back here again,” he said.
She stood up without even glancing at the suitcase, which she left on the draining board, and walked straight into the shop. Suzanne and her children, togther with three others customers saw her appear behind the counter brandishing the wad of notes. Pearl looked very pale, and Suzanne went bright red. She watched Carmen step into the street and wave faintly at Pearl through the window.
He didn’t wave back. He had a premonition that this was the end.
For a month after that, Pearl stopped travelling. He didn’t have the strength to get rid
of Carmen’s suitcase. At night, when the shop was closed, he would stay inside. He’d bought dozens of maps of France, and used to pore over them, making notes in every square of the grid. He was already planning his escape.
But one day in September, a temptation came along that he couldn’t resist. He’d heard that an object, something that had eluded him several times in the past, would be on sale at a cattle market just outside Paris. It was a thimble made of gold alloy, with, engraved around the outside, a spiral of letters too small to read but said to tell the story that had made the thimble famous.
One Sunday, at four o’clock in the morning, Pearl arrived at the marketplace. The hall was filled with the sound of lowing. Cattle dealers were busy presenting their beasts that had been herded between various barriers. In a corner, a few figures were elbowing their way towards a short man who had cleared a tiny island in the sea of livestock.
The dealer, a Spaniard, greeted Pearl with a nod but didn’t look him in the eye. As he brushed down the rump of one of his beasts, he explained through gritted teeth that he was waiting for two buyers before starting the sale; he would give them another five minutes. Pearl immediately stepped away.
But the latecomers never arrived.
At the appointed time, the dealer nonetheless erected a trestle table, and half a dozen people converged around it as though he were about to perform a three-card trick. Pearl had spotted all of them. They came from at least three continents. The Spaniard had displayed the thimble in its red box. Meetings like this never lasted more than two or three minutes. Just as the dealer was about to announce a price, a man appeared in their midst with sweat pouring off his face. The cattle pressed them in from all sides.
“Falta Carmen?” the dealer asked, recognizing the man immediately and wondering why he was alone. He had been supposed to arrive with Carmen but, for now, he could barely speak.
“Se murió Carmen,” the man gasped.
In the time it took to say “Carmen’s dead”, five of the buyers had already evaporated into the hall.
“Dead?” Pearl asked, drawing closer.
“During the night. She was with me on the train,” said the man, pulling a bloodstained arrow from his jacket.
Pearl turned on his heel and sprinted through the mass of animals. Outside in the darkness, he could just distinguish the farmers’ vehicles parked in the yard. He noticed a small Citroën cattle truck, which seemed to be the most manageable of all the enormous lorries before him. Pearl climbed in, found the key under the seat, and started the engine. He hadn’t driven since his years serving with the maquis in Provence. He checked his rear-view mirror, but no one was following him.
At quarter to five in the morning, Pearl re-entered Paris by the Porte d’Orléans. He feared the worst: Carmen knew too much about him. Right from the start, he suspected they would target the woman who had shown too much interest in the corpse in Bruges. She was bound to have said anything to try to save her own skin.
He parked the cattle truck fifty metres from the shop. The morning light had yet to reach the foot of the buildings, and the street was deserted. How could it be that his enemies had still not arrived?
Pearl walked into the shop. No one. He strained his ears for the sound of footsteps above him.
In the space of two hours, he emptied the place. Having moved the truck to below the apartment, he proceeded to throw the suitcases from the window into the back. Eventually he started up the engine and disappeared, unaware that at that very moment, three shadows were picking their way past the chimneys and gutters from the direction of Rue du Faubourg du Temple; three archers leaping noiselessly across the rooftops.
The following day, the police found the shop completely ransacked. The mirrors had been shattered and the display cabinets gutted. Sugar and glass crunched beneath their boots. Upstairs in the apartment, every block of the parquet floor had been ripped out. Not a single piece of furniture was left in any of the rooms.
The neighbours, who insisted they hadn’t heard a thing, told the police that none of this came as a surprise: they had never really kept company with the man in question. As if to prove their point, they mentioned that he received women in the backroom of his shop; women who emerged waving banknotes in their hands. The police officers listened to these testimonies as the debris was cleared. There was one girl who ventured inside and wandered around the ruins, but everyone else looked in from the street.
A long way off to the west, a cattle truck was driving down small country lanes bordered by blackberry hedges.
29
THE LIFE OF OLIÅ
At least she would grow old like him: that’s what she had wanted to believe.
She could only look at him, while he would never be able to see her; yet they would grow old together, and one day they would die together in the same world. That was her consolation. But after a few years, whenever she caught her reflection in a mirror, she realized that even this comfort had been denied her.
Taåg had lied. She had renounced her fairy powers, yet he had secretly restored her eternal youth, as a way of keeping her in check. In doing so, Taåg hoped his grave error towards the king might be reversible. Although he had sent Oliå far away to save his own skin, he had made it possible for her to be recalled one day, unchanged from the morning of her fifteenth birthday.
Her first months in our world were the most painful. On arriving in Paris, she moved into a building on the opposite bank of the Seine, for fear of crossing paths with Iliån. In the evenings, she looked after an old lady, a former Latin teacher who gave her a room and taught her French. She found a job in the haberdashery section of one of the city’s famous department stores by telling them that she was older than she really was. In truth, her beauty was an instant substitute for any application form or identity papers – and this was despite all her best efforts to make herself ugly. Back in those days, around 1937, she wore second-hand clothes she found at a charity stall run by nuns. Up in her bedroom, she’d taken a pair of kitchen scissors to her head, resulting in a hairstyle so terrible it should have been illegal. But two weeks later all her fellow shop assistants at Bon Marché had adopted the same look.
Oliå took the name Solange. On occasion, she would venture close to Maison Pearl, but she never went in, choosing instead to slip surreptitiously past the shop window. Each time she glimpsed him inside, her heart would skip a beat; a mixture of fear and pure elation. She would run off and seek refuge in a café, where she’d ask for a glass of water and huddle at the end of the counter to catch her breath.
“You seem upset, mademoiselle,” the waiter would say, and she would feel relieved that someone had spoken to her: at least it meant she was still there, that she hadn’t dissolved into thin air.
“I feel better, the water helped, thank you.”
There were times when someone would walk into the café with a marshmallow from Maison Pearl. One day a lady even offered her a taste, which she gladly accepted. It was wonderful. She wiped away her tears as they mingled with the icing sugar on her lips. She didn’t have the courage to ask whether a young man had wrapped up the marshmallow.
“You ought to go along there yourself, it’s just next door.”
“I’m not hungry enough today. But yes, I’m sure I will go one day. May I keep the wrapping paper?”
Oliå also roamed the neighbourhood in the evenings, when she was able to hide in the shadows. She would stare at the lights in the shop, and watch Madame Pearl pass by the apartment window upstairs. One night, she saw Iliån walking along the pavement with a girl who was laughing. She wanted to hurl herself into Iliån’s arms so that she could disappear forever.
She quit her job abruptly a few days before Christmas in 1938. The department store had been a hive of activity that morning, with shop assistants flitting between the different sections.
“Fourth floor for flannel offcuts.”
As the haberdashery customers descended on the ribbons and samples, Oliå wa
s as busy as a worker bee.
“Mademoiselle, please look after this lady who would like some fancy braid.”
She rushed around the centre of this battlefield, tidying the trouser buttons in the trouser button drawer, and the brace clips in the brace clip box. When at around eleven o’clock she was asked to take some bobbins up to the women’s clothing department on the top floor, she leapt at the chance of a moment’s escape.
“Now?” she asked.
“If you would be so kind, Mademoiselle Solange.”
She passed the lace counter and took one of the two criss-cross stairways that rose up beneath the dome. With her hand gripping the rail, she gazed upwards so as not to miss any of the marvellous colours filtering through the stained-glass panels above. When she looked down, there he was, almost level with her on the opposite stairway, headed for the ground floor.
He hadn’t seen her. She turned and clasped the bag of bobbins, but on reaching the top, she couldn’t help stealing a glance back towards him: Iliån had come to a halt at the bottom of his flight of stairs, too. Oliå seized the opportunity presented by a woman walking between them to perform an about-turn and disappear into some hanging dresses. A few moments later, from the safety of a fitting room, she watched him moving through the throng of customers. He had come back upstairs to the floor where she was hiding: he was looking for her. Oliå buried her face in her hands, breathing in the scent of the leather slingshot that never left her wrist. She waited for him to disappear before darting back to the stairway and tearing down it.
When she reached the bottom, she looked up to see him on the third floor, leaning over the handrail and scanning the crowd. She covered her face with the bag of bobbins, fearing she might dissolve into thin air at any second.
Near the entrance, a doorman noticed her acting suspiciously, and stepped in her way.