Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé

by Joanne Harris

  The children sat and waited on the side of the marble trough, which has now been replanted appropriately, with rows of neat French marigolds. I sense the hand of Caroline Clairmont, Armande’s daughter – at least, by blood. I noticed a wisp of something – a weed – underneath the marigolds. I leant forward to pull it up, and recognized the impudent shoot of a baby carrot coming out of the ground. I smiled to myself and left it alone. Armande would have liked that, too.

  When Vianne Rocher had finished at the graveside, she stood up.

  ‘Now perhaps you could tell me,’ she said. ‘What exactly is going on?’

  I sighed. ‘Of course, Mademoiselle Rocher.’

  I led the way to Les Marauds.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sunday, 15th August

  TO UNDERSTAND, YOU really need to see for yourself what I’m talking about. Les Marauds, the slums of Lansquenet, if such an urban thing can be in a village of no more than four hundred souls. Once, it housed the tanneries that were Lansquenet’s main source of income; and the buildings that line the riverbanks were all connected with that industry.

  A tannery stinks and pollutes, and so Les Marauds was always a place apart, downriver from the village itself, existing in its own atmosphere of stench and dirt and poverty. But that was a hundred years ago. Now, of course, the tanneries and the brick-and-wooden houses are mostly converted into little shops and cheap dwellings. The river Tannes is sweet again, and children come here to paddle and play in the place where women used to scrub hides against a series of big, flat rocks worn hollow by decades of back-breaking work.

  It’s the place where the river-rats (political correctness dictates that we cannot call them gypsies any more) like to moor their boats and light their campfires on the bank, and cook pancakes on a griddle and play guitars, and sing, and dance, and sell cheap trinkets to our children, and tattoo their arms in henna, to the dismay of their parents and of Joline Drou, who runs the village school.

  At least, that all used to be true. Now the children stay away, as do most of our villagers. Even the river-rats stay away – I haven’t seen a houseboat arrive since Roux left four years ago. A different kind of atmosphere has settled on Les Marauds now; one that smells of spices and smoke, and sounds like a foreign country—

  Don’t misunderstand me. I do not dislike foreigners. Some do in Lansquenet, but I am not among them. I was quick to welcome the first few immigrant families – those Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans, Pieds-Noirs, all now grouped together under the collective name of Maghrébins – when they moved here from Agen, knowing that a village like ours, a village where people are set in their ways and have little to do with what is happening in the big cities, was likely to feel some resistance to the arrival of a group of folk so different from themselves.

  They first came from Marseille or Toulouse; from the outskirts of cities so ridden with crime that they had escaped to quieter parts, taking their families with them; to Bordeaux, Agen, Nérac, and from there at last to Les Marauds, which the municipalité had designated as an area suitable for redevelopment, and where Georges Clairmont, our local builder, was more than happy to receive them.

  That was almost eight years ago. Vianne Rocher had already moved on. Roux was still here, working on the hulk that would one day become his houseboat; living at the Café des Marauds, for which he paid by taking occasional work – mostly with Georges Clairmont, who knew a good carpenter when he saw one, and who was more than happy to pay less than the minimum wage to a man who never complained, always took cash and who dealt with all kinds of people.

  Les Marauds was very different then. Health and Safety had not yet run mad among our local councillors and those derelict houses could quickly and cheaply be converted into homes and shops. There was already a shop selling fabrics there; another sold mangoes and lentils and yams. There was a café – no alcohol, but mint tea, and glass water-pipes of kif – that fragrant blend of tobacco and marijuana so common in Morocco. There was a market every week, selling strange and exotic fruit and vegetables brought in from the docks at Marseille, and a little bakery, selling flatbread and pancakes and sweet milk rolls and honey pastries and almond briouats.

  In those days, our Maghrébin community numbered only three or four families. All lived on a single street that some of our villagers (in their confusion over geography) came to call Le Boulevard P’tit Baghdad. Not that any of the newcomers had ever even seen Baghdad; most of them were second- or third-generation immigrants whose parents and grandparents had come to France seeking a better way of life. Their dress was varied and colourful; from the djellabas and kaftans so typical of Morocco, to the hooded burnous cloak of the Arabs and Berbers, to modern European dress, usually with the addition of some kind of hat – a prayer cap, a Turkish cap, even a fez – according to their origins.

  They were all of them Muslims, of course; they spoke Arabic and Berber among themselves; they went to the big mosque in Bordeaux and fasted during Ramadan. They looked to one man as leader and imam – this was Mohammed Mahjoubi, a widower of seventy who lived with his eldest son, Saïd, his wife, Samira, her mother and their teenage girls, Sonia and Alyssa.

  Mohammed Mahjoubi was a simple man with a long white beard and a roguish eye, who could often be seen on his porch by the Tannes, reading, eating salted plums and spitting the stones into the river. His son Saïd ran a little gym, while his daughter-in-law looked after the house and cared for her aged mother. His granddaughters straddled two worlds, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved tunic at school but more traditional dress at home, their long hair bound with coloured scarves.

  In those early days, the place was alive with colour. It was in the market; the shops; the displays of food and rolls of silk. The Boulevard des Marauds was grandly named, but small, a single-track road through the slums of Lansquenet, its cobbles and paving stones looted by generations of river-gypsies, left to fall into disrepair by a series of local councillors who felt that their budget was better employed serving our community.

  The Maghrébins didn’t seem to mind. Many of them had already come from city slums and half-derelict flats. They drove battered old cars with no brakes or insurance; they didn’t care about the state of the road. At first, their young people mixed with ours; the boys played football in the market square; the girls made friends with ours at school. A group of their old women learnt to play pétanque – and grew alarmingly good at it, beating our regulars several times. They were not quite a part of Lansquenet, but they were not outsiders either, and many of us felt that they contributed something to our village – a breath of other places, a scent of other cultures, a taste of the exotic – that was absent from all the other bastides along the Garonne and the Tannes.

  Some people remained wary of the foreigners – Louis Acheron, among others – but most of us were happy enough to see Les Marauds gain a new lease of life. Georges Clairmont was among the best pleased – he was paid a good fee by the council, who subsidized the redevelopment project, and managed to make further profit by cutting every corner he could – the newcomers never noticed if he used pine instead of oak, or slapped three coats of whitewash on a wall instead of five. His wife, Caro, was happy enough to accept the extra income, and turned a blind eye to the shocking state of the road. And the Maghrébins were friendly at first; I remember Joséphine Muscat bringing piles of sweet pastries from the place at the top end of the boulevard – the owner was Mehdi al-Djerba, born and bred in old Marseille, with a Midi accent you could cut with a knife – to serve to the patrons of her café. I also recall how she tried to repay them with the gift of a few dozen bottles of wine; how crestfallen she was to learn that none of the newcomers touched alcohol. (Later we found out that wasn’t quite true; Mehdi al-Djerba has the odd drop, for strictly medicinal purposes, and one or two of the younger men used to sneak into the Café des Marauds when they thought folk weren’t paying attention.) So, instead of wine, Joséphine brought planters filled with geraniums for them to put on their w
indowsills, so that all that summer the cobbled streets of Les Marauds were accented in scarlet. I remember the football matches between our boys and the Maghrébins, and how sometimes the fathers would come out to watch, each to their own side of the square, and solemnly shake hands at the end of the game. I even remember Caro Clairmont holding coffee mornings for the mothers and their children, all in the name of entente cordiale, as if she were a social worker from Paris instead of a little housewife from the provinces …

  I say all this to prove to you, père, that these people were not unwelcome. I know that in the past I have been guilty of intolerance, and I have tried to make amends. When Jean-Pierre Acheron defaced the wall of Saïd Mahjoubi’s gym, I was the one who intervened and made him scrub the graffiti off. When Joline Drou refused to teach Zahra Al-Djerba unless she removed her headscarf, I was the one who pointed out that a one-room primary school in Lansquenet is not a lycée in Paris – Joline herself wears a little gold cross, which, if we are to adhere strictly to the rules, should also be left at the schoolyard gate.

  In short, you may find it hard to believe, but I respected the newcomers. I am not the kind of man who finds it easy to make friends, but I had nothing against the little community of Les Marauds – in fact, I thought that in some ways our own people could learn a few lessons from them. The Maghrébins were polite, discreet; they did not cause a disturbance. They were respectful to their parents, affectionate with their children; devout and modest in their ways. Any problem in the community – a family quarrel, a petty crime, an accident, a bereavement – was addressed by Mohammed Mahjoubi, whose status among the Maghrébins was that of priest and doctor and mayor and lawyer and social worker all rolled into one. His methods were not always conventional – there were some (Caro Clairmont among them) who believed him to be too old and too eccentric to be an efficient leader. But mostly, there was real affection for old Mahjoubi in the village. His word was law in Les Marauds, and no one questioned his authority.

  Then came the first new development. Ever since his arrival, old Mahjoubi had been talking about converting one of the old buildings in Les Marauds into a mosque. As far as I understood it, the plan was too expensive to make sense, even if a suitable building were to be made available. The big mosque in Bordeaux wasn’t really so far away, besides which the entire population of Les Marauds still amounted to no more than a handful of families – maybe forty people or so.

  The plans caused some discussion. There was opposition from across the river, with strenuous protests from staunchly Catholic families like the Acherons and the Drous. The thought of a mosque, not five minutes’ walk away from our own church, seemed like a direct attack to them, a slap in the face of Saint-Jérôme, perhaps in the face of God Himself—

  Old Mahjoubi asked me to intervene. I was, perhaps, less than sympathetic. I did not support the mosque idea, not because I was anti-mosque, but because it all seemed unnecessary—

  But Mahjoubi refused to admit defeat. He, with the help of his son Saïd, adopted one of the old tanneries, and eventually, with funds from the Muslim community, and after much to-ing and fro-ing with the local authorities, with the help of Georges Clairmont (of course) and some volunteers from Les Marauds, what had been a derelict building right at the end of the boulevard became the village mosque instead, and the centre of the community.

  Understand me, père, when I say that I have nothing against a mosque. Certainly, there were features which (as I had to point out) contravened local planning regulations. But these were very minor, and I only mentioned them in passing, to avoid unpleasantness later.

  Certainly, the result was modest enough. A bland old yellow-brick building with very little on the outside to indicate that it was a place of worship. Inside, a rather beautiful space, with a tiled floor and pale walls stencilled in gold. As a priest, I try to be sensitive to the beliefs of others, and I made a real effort to convey to the community of Les Marauds how much I admired their handiwork, and to make myself available if ever anyone needed help.

  Even so, a shift had occurred. Somehow, during our interchange, old Mahjoubi had become defiant. He had always been a stubborn old man, and possessed of a curious levity that sometimes made it hard to know whether or not he was joking. His son Saïd was of a much more serious bent, and I sometimes wondered if it would not be better for the whole of Les Marauds if the father were to step down and leave the decision-making to his son.

  Perhaps old Mahjoubi sensed this. In any case, his attitude seemed to have developed an edge. If ever I came to Les Marauds (which I still do, every day, out of a sense of duty), Mahjoubi never missed a chance to make some kind of comment. These were always good-natured, I am sure, but others may not have understood.

  ‘Here comes Monsieur le Curé,’ he would say in his thickly accented voice. ‘Did you run out of sinners on your side of the river? Or are you here to join us at last? Have you learnt to smoke kif? Or is your incense heady enough?’

  All in good humour, I know that; and yet there was something in his manner that seemed defiant, combative. His followers started to echo him, and before I knew it, almost overnight, Les Marauds had become hostile territory.

  So – when did things begin to change? Hard to know for certain. Like looking in the mirror one day and seeing the first signs of old age: the wrinkles around the eyes; the way the skin around the jaw seems to slip out of alignment. There were a few new arrivals; friction within the community – nothing, when you looked at them, to justify my growing unease. But it must have been enough, père. Like the turning seasons, Les Marauds changed its colours, somehow. More of the girls began to wear black, with hijab scarves (so like a nun’s wimple) completely hiding their hair and neck. The coffee mornings tailed off. Caro Clairmont had fallen out with one of her regular visitors, and after that the rest of them came less often, if at all. Saïd Mahjoubi extended his gym at the end of the Boulevard P’tit Baghdad – it wasn’t a complicated affair, just a big, bare room with some weights, a spa pool and some running machines – and it became a meeting-place for all the young men of Les Marauds.

  That was over five years ago. Since then, the community has grown. There have been more new arrivals – mostly relatives from abroad, coming to join their families. Last year, old Mahjoubi’s granddaughter Sonia married a man called Karim Bencharki, who came to live in Lansquenet with his widowed sister and her child. Saïd Mahjoubi admired Karim, who was twelve years older than Sonia and had managed a business in Algiers, selling clothes and textiles. I was rather less certain. I had known Sonia since she was a child – not well, but we’d often spoken. She and her sister, Alyssa, had been bright, outgoing girls, who even played football with Luc Clairmont and his friends at weekends. Married, Sonia changed; wore nothing but black; abandoned her plans to study. I saw her a couple of weeks ago, shopping at the market; she was veiled from head to foot, but there was no doubt that it was she.

  The husband was with her, and the sister-in-law; standing between them, she still looked like a child.

  I know what you are about to say. The community of Les Marauds is not my responsibility. Mohammed Mahjoubi is their imam – they look to him for guidance. But I couldn’t help thinking about that girl. How much she had changed since she first arrived. Her younger sister had stayed the same – though the football games were a thing of the past – and it troubled me to see Sonia looking so very different.

  But by then I had troubles of my own. There had been complaints from some of my parishioners about the tone of my sermons, which were felt to be old-fashioned and dull. Louis Acheron had taken offence at my treatment of his son (I had grabbed the Acheron boy, then sixteen, by the ear, before making him scrub the whitewashed wall of the gym that he had so recently adorned with a smiley face and a swastika) and since then, all the family had borne something of a grudge against me.

  Acheron, an accountant, was on several of Caro’s committees, and had worked with Georges Clairmont on a number of occasions. The families w
ere friendly; their sons were very much of an age. Between them, they persuaded the Bishop that my old-fashioned attitudes were causing friction within the community. They even managed to suggest that I had some kind of a feud against old Mahjoubi and his mosque.

  The Clairmonts and the Acherons started to attend Mass in Florient, where a new, young priest, Père Henri Lemaître, was proving increasingly popular. Very soon it became clear to me that Caro, who had once been one of my most devoted followers, had become a convert to Père Henri’s charm, and was furtively but strenuously campaigning to have me replaced.

  And then, one day six months ago, as I took my morning walk through Les Marauds, I noticed something irregular. Old Mahjoubi’s mosque had somehow acquired a minaret.

  Of course, this is not the custom in France. To build such a thing would have been considered needlessly provocative. But the old tannery had a chimney; a square brick chimney twenty feet high and maybe six feet in diameter. This chimney, like the rest of the building, had been freshly whitewashed and newly adorned with a silver crescent moon that gleamed in the early sunlight. And now I could hear an eerie sound amplified by the open flue; a voice half-singing in Arabic the Azaan, the traditional call to prayer.

  Allahu Akhbar, Allahu Akhbar—

  French law clearly states that any call to prayer must be made from inside the building in question, and without any form of amplification. In the case of the old tannery, a ladder had been fixed inside the chimney, so that the muezzin, the crier, could take advantage of the building’s natural acoustics. Thus I could see old Mahjoubi had obeyed the letter of the law, but surely, I thought, this must have been a deliberate challenge. The role of muezzin was taken on mostly by Mahjoubi’s son Saïd, and nowadays this call to prayer echoes all over Les Marauds. We hear it five times a day, père, floating to us over the river, and sometimes I find myself (God forgive me) ringing the church bells morning and night especially loudly to compete.