The Book of Pearl

  “Please, mademoiselle,” he said, as Oliå flew past him, clinging to her bobbins.

  “Mademoiselle!”

  Back upstairs, Iliån was looking in their direction.

  Oliå pushed open the door and disappeared into the cold.

  She never set foot in the department store again, nor did she dare venture close to Maison Pearl. She dedicated more time to looking after the elderly Latin teacher; she also swept the floor of a barbershop for a few months, and worked in a greengrocer’s. In fact, she was so rushed off her feet it wasn’t until the following autumn that she discovered Iliån had left for the war.

  One morning, Madame Pearl saw a young girl enter the shop.

  “I came for the advertisement,” she said.

  “Which advertisement would that be, my dear?”

  “The advertisement for work.”

  “There wasn’t any advertisement.”

  “So there isn’t any work?”

  Esther couldn’t deny that there was plenty: her husband had been making deliveries since dawn, and the pair of them had worked all through the night.

  “I don’t need money,” Oliå said. “I want to learn.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Léa.”

  Madame Pearl advised her to come back the following day. In the evening, she spoke to her husband, who wasn’t at all convinced, but Esther asked him to let the girl have a trial before he made any decision.

  “Oh, and tell me if you notice anything,” she added.

  By the end of the next day, Léa had landed the job. She accepted a small wartime salary, and Madame Pearl was very happy with her. At closing time, when she could hear the young girl scrubbing the floor in the backroom, she spoke to her husband in hushed tones.

  “So? See what I was talking about?”

  “The accent,” Pearl replied without a moment’s hesitation.

  Léa had exactly the same accent as their boy.

  For a long time, almost two years, there was no news of the soldier. Then they received the letter. Those two pages all the way from Germany stirred up the memories at Maison Pearl. Oliå was happy for them to read the words ten times over, with Jacques Pearl apologizing all the while for going on about the boy so much.

  “One day you’ll understand, mademoiselle,” he said.

  But she understood already, and out in the street, when she was delivering a box of marshmallows, Oliå would repeat the name of Joshua – the new name of her love.

  She agreed to pose for the photograph they were planning on sending to the prisoner. The Pearls wanted to show him that business was good and that the shop was doing well. Oliå smiled in front of the pharmacist’s camera, but in the photograph there were only her dainty footprints in the snow: she had known for a long time that she left no trace in any photograph.

  For that very reason, no counterfeiter had ever managed to provide her with forged identity papers, although it wasn’t for lack of trying. Which is why her name didn’t feature on a single list, not even the one detailing the men, women and children who were arrested in the summer of 1942.

  On the day of the round-up, Oliå arrived late at the shop for the first time ever: the Latin teacher had just died of old age in her bed.

  Maison Pearl was deserted, except for the marshmallows waiting beneath their layer of muslin. She closed the iron shutter.

  Oliå hid herself away for months in the Pearls’ apartment. She knew that if Joshua was alive, he would return to this place; and so that was where she needed to be.

  One night in November, she was woken by the sound of loud knocking. She immediately turned off the lights. It was him. Oliå spent several agonising seconds sitting on the floor with her back against the locked door, painfully aware of his presence behind her.

  She was tempted to fling open the door, just for the split second they’d enjoy together. Perhaps she’d even have time to touch his skin. But then she imagined Iliån’s overwhelming sense of loneliness the moment after she disappeared.

  Oliå didn’t hear him leave; she assumed she must have lost him once again. But he returned a little later in the evening. She had pulled the key out of the lock so that he could come in. This time, Joshua wasn’t alone: he was with Suzanne. Oliå had just enough time to hide behind the curtain.

  He set off, taking one of her blue slippers with him. She decided to follow him, settling in the same village in Provence, where she would play guardian angel. Oliå placed herself at Captain Alexandre’s service so that she could keep an eye on her prince. Alexandre was delighted to have such a brilliant operator by his side, and she even dealt with his housework and laundry.

  By staying close to the leader, Oliå traced the same path as Iliån: she came to understand what he already understood. Spells can be undone, but this requires tokens of proof. On the last day of the war, she gave Joshua the first token, untying from her wrist the only object of his that she’d been able to keep – the slingshot – and leaving it on the table at the Pilon farm.

  For ten years, her hope was renewed. Back in Paris, she kept a close watch on Joshua Pearl’s double life, looking on as he prepared for his return to the Kingdoms. She could see that each journey was born of his love for her, and she awaited each and every reappearance in the same way that a wife might. But whenever he returned from his journeys, all she could do was pace the city, keeping her distance from the shop and waiting patiently.

  Oliå passed the time. She started reading, and learnt to play the piano. She sat in universities and schools, listening in on the lectures and lessons. She worked for a printer, a goldsmith and a milliner… Everyone was astonished that a girl of fifteen could be so well versed in pre-war fashion. She studied Latin and Greek, and sat as a model for a painter who was fascinated by her. Paintings alone were able to capture her beauty, which could never be photographed.

  But nothing lasts in this world. After a few years, people became suspicious of her childish face and her unchanging complexion. The milliner started asking questions. The professors and teachers summoned her to their offices.

  “Something’s not right,” said the painter, catching up with her in the street below his studio. “Please, tell me what’s going on.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied.

  “Mademoiselle, I’m begging you…”

  She escaped, running elsewhere, uprooting herself once again. Only Joshua would be able to make all this stop one day.

  So she started roaming the area near the shop, and would pay the occasional visit to the apartment when he was away. One night, she even defended the place against thieves by pushing all the cases up behind the door.

  In the end though, she lost him.

  The first thing Oliå saw was that the lights in Maison Pearl were off. Nosy onlookers were gazing in at the broken glass and debris in the shop. She stepped inside. Some of the neighbours were being questioned: nobody knew what had happened. One of them mentioned something about women of easy virtue frequenting the backroom of the shop.

  “Not that I knew anything about his personal life,” the man said, with a discretion that didn’t ring true.

  “He must have amassed quite a fortune,” a lady added.

  The police officers walked around indifferently, knocking away bits of plasterwork with their truncheons.

  Oliå tiptoed upstairs and found the apartment empty. The archers had ripped up the parquet floor and hacked at the walls in the quest for hidden compartments.

  Oliå spent several years searching for him, but in the end she gave up.

  She became a dancer, starting from scratch every four years: a young star who lit up the stage for a few seasons, before making her debut again somewhere else. Oliå travelled the world calling herself Rebecca, Salomé, Naomi, Jeanne, Céleste and Claire-Marie.

  As I re-read these lines, I realize I could never have imagined myself writing them: words that detail the life of a fairy. Nothing could have prepare
d me for such familiarity with one of these extraordinary beings.

  I always used to put fairies in the same basket as all those other creatures endlessly recycled from the grand bazaar of the magical and the marvellous.

  Each of our imaginations is unique and impossible to replicate, or so it seems to me; they are like personal storerooms, or intimate sanctuaries. So it is that – in all of our minds – there are strange creatures, enchanted forests and miniature worlds. What I had never accepted was the idea of fairies or elves moving from inside one head to inside another. Why should we play host to creatures invented by other people?

  But stories change us. And there are some encounters that flip us onto our backs like tortoises, forcing us to wake up and listen.

  She knew that she would track him down in the end. When it did happen it was completely by chance, thanks to an old dancer in Milan who mentioned that he’d just struck lucky: having picked up a pair of ballet pumps in a second-hand shop and sold them for a fortune to a strange buyer with stormy grey eyes.

  Oliå caught up with Pearl as he was preparing to return to France. By following him, she eventually arrived at the house by the river. She waded into the water and spotted him on the bank, his three dogs circling around him.

  She settled down not far from there, and made her living from gathering willow and weaving baskets, just as she had done back in the days when she was a fairy.

  Pearl’s dogs never sniffed out her presence, and she made the most of this by haunting the grass and reeds by the water’s edge. Often she would moor her boat by a washhouse a little further downstream, and bathe amongst the water lilies.

  It was here, on the wooden planks of this washhouse, that one autumn morning she saw a fourteen-year-old boy taking photographs of frogs.

  Me.

  30

  THE FIRST BOOK OF PEARL

  Staring at the washhouse again, twenty-five years later, I thought back to the photograph I had taken that day: the girl standing on her boat, pushing a long pole to propel the vessel laden with branches, and allowing herself to be photographed with an ease that suited me. Her lack of self-consciousness had been startling.

  Now the washhouse was half-demolished, and the same went for Joshua Pearl’s house downriver, together with most of my memories. The sole witness was an old man with a luminous quality, and he was almost certainly buried in the grave alongside the house.

  But then there was the box, which had bizarrely appeared on the doormat the previous day. I’d left it behind in Paris, hidden in the cupboard that used to serve as our darkroom. The box – and only the box – could shed some light on all of this: why had I let myself be separated from it?

  That evening, back in my mother’s apartment, I dug it out from under the winter coats. Everything was still there. I shook the canisters gently against my ear, to check the rolls of films were still inside.

  Then I headed back to join my family for the rest of our holiday, the box weighing heavy on my back. They gave me a warm welcome, without any reproaches or big displays of emotion. The world had carried on without me. Why expect flags and parades and processions, as if returning triumphantly from battle, when no one could possibly know what I’d just experienced?

  Sometimes, in the middle of a meal, I would get up and check that the box was still there, under the washbasin in the bathroom.

  There was just one shop in the nearest town that developed old films, and the owner appeared tickled by the small relics I brought in.

  “Grandma passed away, has she?” he enquired, immediately assuming that I’d found the films stashed in the furniture of a dead relative. I informed him I was the one who’d taken the photos, and that I was very much alive. I chuckled to prove my point.

  “I only used four of the films. But take all seven, because I’m not sure which are which.”

  Pushing my luck, I also took out the two Super 8 cartridges from my bag.

  He held them at arm’s length, as if they were pieces of debris from a meteorite, then handed them straight back, no explanation needed.

  He asked me to settle the bill in advance, because sometimes he ended up with unwanted photos.

  “I can hardly display them in my living room, now can I?”

  The printing process would take an eternity. The films had to be transferred to some faraway photo lab, and would then be posted back to the shop. The man said he would ring me when they were ready. In the meantime, after searching online, I’d sent the two Super 8 cartridges to an address in Germany. They promised to return them within five weeks.

  Both sets of deadlines felt inhuman. Koala bears give birth after five weeks; and in half that time, it’s possible to circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon. What were the developers going to do with my images for five whole weeks? Lose them a hundred times?

  To make matters worse, the shop didn’t call me back. I was convinced they’d misplaced the films and weren’t sure how to break the news to me. Eventually I paid them another visit, only to be told that everything was in order and that perhaps I might like to try exercising some patience.

  Two days later, while I was slicing aubergines in the kitchen, a message came through on my phone: the photos were ready for me to pick up. I nearly chopped off my finger.

  I was back in the shop within the hour, and the lady behind the counter duly produced the package.

  “Would you like to check them here?”

  “No thanks.”

  She gave me the price.

  “I already settled up with your male colleague, the other day.”

  She examined the package and the bill.

  “You paid for four films.”

  “Yes.”

  “But there are seven. They developed all seven.”

  “All seven?”

  “Would you like to check?”

  “No, thank you.”

  My brain was in overdrive as I held out the money with trembling hands: Pearl must have used the camera and the last rolls of film in my absence.

  I didn’t head straight back to my family, but stopped the car in the hills and walked a while until I found a suitable spot. I thought back to all the important letters that I’d received in my life, and how I liked to take my time choosing where to read them, as if the landscape could alter the content.

  By chance, the first two packages were in the right order.

  The first film showed my family, with my brothers, my little sister and even the gutters on our apartment. They were meant to be “arty” photographs, with a whimsical composition, but the blurriness was only partly intentional. You didn’t need to be an expert in photography to spot how bad they were, but the context made them touching: memories that had incubated inside a plastic egg for twenty-five years, suddenly seeing the light of day…

  The three last photos in the wallet had been taken on the train on my way to the photography course. They were brilliantly blurry.

  The second film captured the first two days of my adventure, starting with a few hens, a close-up portrait of a chick that looked like it was grinning, and a leek placed on a table next to a carrot. I had been under orders to find my subject. I’d tried this and that, nearly settling on a contrived scene involving my bicycle high up in a tree.

  But most of the ensuing photos were of the water and the river. Some made me regret giving up on the idea of a career in photography at around the age of fifteen and a half. Then, when I saw the first frogs appear, I felt a lump in my throat. We were approaching the apparition.

  I lifted the flap of the third wallet, before quickly closing it again. I had just seen a dead dog. I knew I wasn’t mistaken: the image I had glimpsed was of a big black dog lying on its back, with a bloodstain on its fur. I trembled as I put the wallet down. This wasn’t my third film.

  My heart was racing in the same way it had on those rare occasions when I’d been confronted with a snake: I had the same sensation of everything inside me collapsing. I stared at the closed wallets
for several minutes.

  In the end, I picked one up – not the right one – and it triggered an altogether different emotion. Relief.

  This package was my victory. It contained all the photographs I’d taken in Pearl’s absence. The house at daybreak; the crayfish on the pontoon; and, above all, those suitcases crammed with treasure. I found myself back there, with the treasure spread out in front of me, wrapped in white tissue paper, and yet I was entirely unaware that for Pearl these represented tokens from the Kingdoms. Selfishly, I only saw the proof of my own history. I had been in that house. I had met that man. That was all I wanted to know.

  Perhaps I should have stopped there. But I picked up the fourth wallet, which dated back to a few days earlier. In front of me was the last photo of a frog on the washhouse and, in the background, a boat approaching. I flicked through the images one by one: the bundles of branches; the pole planted in the water lilies; the grey sky reflected in the waterlogged bottom of the boat…

  It was all there, except for her. If the girl had disappeared, then the snake had slithered back under my feet. Where had my muse gone? No memory was so deeply etched into my mind. I could recall every second of what should have been captured in these photographs. I could picture the angle of her knee beneath the fabric of her dress; the way her hand had framed the wooden pole; the green trousers she wore on the last day; and the flower in her hair too. Except that there was no flower, or dress, or trousers – just an empty river.

  I wanted to find a satisfactory reason, perhaps a chemical or meteorological explanation. It had rained heavily during those final days. Had the negatives been damaged by the bad weather? I blamed the photo lab as well: the process had taken too long… They must have done something underhand with my photographs… Perhaps they were playing a mean trick on me?

  I stood up and let out the same cry as years earlier when I was lost in the woods. A cry of defiance that railed against the world. Afterwards, sitting back down with the last three films, I began with the images of the dead dog: one of Pearl’s handsome hounds, lying on its back in the thick grass. I took my time, examining the rest of the photographs, until I reached the final one. There were exactly one hundred of them.