The Book of Pearl

by Timothee de Fombelle

  He’d come and sit next to her while she peeled the potatoes or filleted some fish. She never let him help, but just looked at him with a knowing expression full of nudges and winks. He would keep both his hands under the table like a good boy.

  “Did you go for a walk?”

  He would nod.

  “That’s nice. And you didn’t feel like taking her to the cinema?”

  “No.”

  Madame Pearl knew that going to the cinema usually helped move things along.

  “Do you chat together?”

  “A bit.”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  He’d nod some more.

  “There’s that other girl from the café who passed by the shop. What was her name again?”

  “Adrienne.”

  “Ah, will you listen to that: Aaaaaadrienne…”

  She started laughing.

  “I can see why they’re falling like flies. What is that accent of yours? One day you’ll tell me, won’t you, my dark horse?”

  Sometimes, by accident, Madame Pearl would hear him speak in his language. It made her tremble all night long.

  For there were days of fever, too. Days when the boy was unrecognizable. He would turn his room upside down and roar at the window, then thrash against Jacques Pearl, who’d try to block him as he hurtled down the stairs before disappearing for three or four days at a time. Madame Pearl called these his “frenzies”.

  They were violent, his frenzies. All the walls of the building would shudder, right down to the cellar.

  He was like a soul possessed, railing at the sky and sinking his nails into his pillow. He spoke of getting away from there, of escaping this world. In a whirlwind of feathers, he would utter sentences in his language that sounded like groans of agony, or like the howl of a wolf trapped in a snare. He would open the wardrobes and pound at the back of them with a chair leg, as if he wanted to reach the other side. He spoke of forgotten paths, of passages. When his cries had faded into the night, Madame Pearl would stay behind to sweep up the shattered plates on the kitchen floor. She would hand out mountains of sweets to the neighbours to beg their forgiveness, before opening up the shop.

  A few days later, they would come down at dawn to discover the boy moulding strips of marshmallow in the back room, where the scent of violet filled the air.

  “All well, our young friend?”

  He’d lift his head in greeting, and his eyes would appear to have found a modicum of peace for the next few weeks. No one knew where he went during those episodes. But his meek presence, hard-working hands and far-reaching expression meant that people didn’t dwell on his frenzies for long.

  Every year, on Christmas Eve, Maison Pearl opened its doors to the children. They came galloping down the street like marauding barbarians, straight from school with their satchels in tow. They stopped at the door, gasping for breath, smoothing their hair as they gazed through the window. Then they would enter, one by one, taking care not to barge, their angelic faces and streaming noses buried in their scarves. The older girls, no longer eligible for this ritual, would hold hands with the younger ones to play down their age. The good children tried to behave even better, remembering to say, “Good morning” and “Merry Christmas”. Even the naughty ones, their caps bunched up in their hands, were mesmerised by the orderliness, the golden glow of the light, the copper containers and the sense of walking through a cloud of icing sugar. They would tug at their shorts to hide their knees that were muddy from games of marbles in the dirt.

  Each of them received a marshmallow that had been wrapped up in specially printed red-and-white paper.

  On Christmas Eve, the children were allowed ahead of the throng of customers in the shop. Once they’d been served, they dawdled a bit, too happy to leave. Each step was in slow motion. Not a single one of them, however, would dare queue up a second time – that would risk being condemned to “seven years”. This was the threat that Monsieur Pearl would issue each and every time: seven years without Christmas marshmallows if you were caught cheating. When you’re only six or eight, seven years seems a lifetime.

  But back in that winter of 1938, as Paris’s Jewish quarter teemed with small businesses and artisanal shops, it was better to possess no power of imagination. Who could bear to contemplate the fates of those young faces seven years later, when the war would be over and they would be entitled to their mashmallows once again?

  As soon as the crowd had dispersed and the iron shutter had been half-lowered, the boy sent Monsieur and Madame Pearl upstairs.

  “I’ll close up. You go and sleep.”

  Jacques Pearl didn’t put up much resistance. He could see how tired his wife was, and he was so rattled from the day’s events that he himself could barely stand.

  That very morning, two gendarmes had arrived from the police station amid the rush of customers and children. Pearl had shown them into the back room.

  They had come in search of a certain Joshua Pearl, whom they accused of failing to report for military service. Pearl let them speak, his jaw clenched, before telling them that his son had never been that sort of boy, and that he would have been first in line to serve his country.

  “The first, you hear me?” he said, before adding, “If he hadn’t died five years ago.”

  Pearl would have maintained his wounded dignity had it not been for one of the gendarmes, who buried his nose in his report and asked, “Are you sure about that?”

  And so the father was forced to recall the shape of his son’s body, draped in a sheet in the sitting room. The look on Jacques Pearl’s face told the gendarmes that they’d be well advised to leave.

  It was now eight o’clock in the evening, and Jacques Pearl’s heart still hadn’t recovered its normal rhythm. The confectioner took his wife’s arm and turned to the young man.

  “Thank you for closing up, my boy. When you’re done, there’s a Christmas party at the plasterer’s on Rue de Saintonge. His three daughters passed by yesterday, one after the other, to invite you. Go and enjoy yourself.”

  The Pearls each gave their boy a peck on the forehead before retiring upstairs. They made a point of not celebrating Christmas, as a mark of respect to their own religion.

  So the young man stayed by himself and meticulously cleaned the display cases. After the great invasion, there wasn’t a single marshmallow left in the establishment. Tomorrow would be the one day of the year when Maison Pearl kept its doors closed.

  Slowly he swept the shop floor feeling a warm sense of well-being. The fire in the wood-burner was out but the stove was still giving off some heat. At the foot of the velvet curtain that protected against the draught, he saw something poking out. It was a book, with a slightly scuffed cover.

  He picked it up and wiped it on the curtain.

  It was an illustrated book that a child must have dropped while waiting in line for marshmallows.

  There were no books in the Pearls’ house. Only an enormous dictionary with a lock, which was kept in the glass cabinet in the sitting room, just in case. But there was no other book in sight. Jacques and Esther Pearl read the newspapers every day to keep up with what was happening in the world. And if their dead son did once have a handful of children’s books, they had long since been given away to good causes in the area.

  The boy gazed for a moment at the red and gold cover, not daring to open it. He went to lay the book on the counter.

  There was one more large vat to be rinsed out, which he carried through to the sink in the back room. He turned the tap to fill it up and, as the water was running, made his way back to the counter.

  To keep his hands busy, he put the pencils back in their pot and scratched a small bit of sugar from the metal edge, before pulling the book towards him and opening it.

  He leant forward to read the first line his finger had landed on.

  Reading was a struggle for him, and he was still very slow, but eventually, one by one, the words leapt from the page.


  He looked up in a state of agitation, rushed to turn off the water that was already overflowing, and returned to the book. He found the sentence that he’d read before and started from the beginning. It was still there. And even if he closed his eyes, there it was when he opened them again.

  He carried on. He didn’t understand it all, and yet everything was familiar to him. Every line of this children’s edition wrenched tears from his eyes. What was happening?

  Finally he had found the opening he’d been searching for when he was pounding the backs of the wardrobes. The window onto what he had left behind.

  In almost three years, he had been unable to find a single link between the world into which he’d emerged and the labyrinth of his memories. There was a gulf separating them, and his attempts to traverse such an impassable precipice were feeding his madness. Should he believe what his memory was telling him? He was starting to think that his mind was full of nothing but illusions, a great void that he had populated with wild dreams about his love for a fairy.

  But suddenly these pages before him, written in a language he barely understood, brought a familiar world rising to the surface. They weren’t exactly about him or his past, but he recognized everything. The book spoke of the Kingdoms; of ill-fated princes and magic spells. All of it existed suddenly. His memory was there, printed on the paper.

  He could feel tears rolling down the inside of his shirt collar.

  His prison wall had just been breached. The crack was miniscule, almost invisible. But the rush of warm air billowed into the room and filled him with the hope, however mad, that somewhere there was a doorway, that someday he would return home.

  He had to leave, to explore the world, to find the crossing.

  He switched off the remaining lights and sat motionless for several hours in the glow cast by the streetlamp into Maison Pearl.

  When the plasterer’s three daughters came giggling and pressing their noses against the glass, he stashed the book away and went over to the door. They made signs at him and he let them in.

  “You coming?”

  Fresh from midnight mass, and still smelling of hot candle wax and incense, the girls were wrapped in their prettiest shawls, which hid everything but their eyes and the tops of their cheeks.

  “What are you doing? Are you coming or what?” asked Suzanne, the eldest, who hardly ever spoke.

  And off they set, their wooden heels dancing a foxtrot that rang down the street. He followed behind.

  This was the first and last Christmas evening he ever spent with a real family: roasting chestnuts on the fire, three daughters huddled next to one another on a bench in the sitting room, a father moved to tears at welcoming this boy under his roof, a warmly lit room and a mistress of the house who, like so many others at that very moment across the city and the world over, apologised profusely about the taste of the chicken that was so scrumptious, so golden, so aromatic and so juicy beneath the crispy skin.

  But even then, despite Suzanne’s gaze and Colette’s piercing laughter, the boy was on his feet between courses, heading to the window and parting the curtain slightly to look out on the street.

  He knew already that he had to leave; that he would spend his whole life leaving.

  Three days later, he was alone in the shop when the gendarmes turned up expecting to question Jacques Pearl again. The boy listened to them.

  “He’s not back yet.”

  “Perhaps you’ll be able to give us the information we need.”

  There were three gendarmes. They explained that there was absolutely no trace of Joshua Pearl’s demise on the public record. They feared he was being concealed to avoid military service.

  “With all that’s going on, this is no time to shirk one’s duty.”

  The boy looked around absent-mindedly.

  “Do you understand?”

  No. He didn’t appear to understand.

  “I need to speak to Joshua Pearl’s father,” said the gendarme.

  He motioned to his colleague. This child was not behaving normally.

  “What about you? Do have your papers?”

  The boy took a long breath. He walked to the front of the counter, pulling off his apron.

  “I am Joshua Pearl.”

  He had seized his chance to escape, like a tramp taking a running leap from an embankment onto the roof of a train without knowing its final destination.

  He picked up his coat, scribbled a few words on a piece of paper by the till, and let himself be led off by the gendarmes.

  Nine months later, in September 1939, war was declared.

  He returned to Paris and went in uniform to kiss the Pearls farewell. He was now a member of the French army’s light cavalry, in the 2nd Spahi Regiment, on his way from Morocco to fight the Germans.

  Jacques and Esther Pearl looked at the boy, framed by marshmallows and as handsome as any toy soldier. They didn’t know that they were seeing him for the last time. Nor did they know that, sewn into each piece of his soldier’s uniform, was the name he had stolen from them and that was now his own: the name of their dead son, Joshua Pearl.

  9

  ONCE UPON A TIME

  As for where Pearl came from, the only thing I’m sure about are these first words, “Once upon a time”.

  The rest of what I write is based on what I’ve learnt since he appeared to me one autumn’s day in front of his wall of suitcases. They amount to all I know of the world he was snatched away from.

  Once upon a time, there was a land ruled over by a king who was very much in love.

  It often happened that the king, while travelling to his most far-flung provinces, would wake in the middle of the night and give orders to saddle his horse. Neither the fastest river nor the loftiest mountain would stop him. He changed horses at coaching inns on the roads winding through the forests. He would gallop for seven days and seven nights straight, just to be by his queen’s side and watch her sleep.

  The queen bore the king’s first son. They named him Iån, after his father, his grandfather and all their other ancestors who had ruled the land for a thousand years. When Iån was seven years old, the queen fell pregnant again and, since that year it was unseasonably hot throughout the land, the king had a summer palace built for his wife in the middle of a lake surrounded by pine forests.

  The building stood on stilts and was as light as the stroke of a quill. It could not have stood in greater contrast to the winter palace, which faced the sea and whose rough-edged towers traced dark, upward shapes that were lost in the clouds.

  The queen lived at the small palace on the lake throughout her pregnancy. Currents of cool air drifted beneath the stilts. Prince Iån played on boats near by and caught trout with his hands. There, the king would spend what little freedom he was afforded by his vast realm and his people. In those days, he would rest his cheek against the queen’s swollen belly and tell stories that thrilled the unborn child, making it quiver with pleasure. For in this land of fairy tales, stories from elsewhere set the rhythm of people’s lives even before their first morning.

  The three palace doctors came on a barge and informed the royal couple that they were expecting a little girl. Prince Iån, his pockets full of frogs, watched this assembly from his own boat. He scorned this child who was threatening to invade his land.

  But there was always a famine, a civil war or a dragon to defeat at the other end of the world. There were glaciers positioned precariously above villages, ogres venturing out from their woods, and wolves. So it was that one day the king kissed his family farewell and left. His horse swam across the lake and took him far away. Before disappearing beyond the trees, he turned to look at the tiny palace made of reeds shimmering in the water. He saw from a distance the silhouette of Iån in his boat, glowering at his departure.

  During those long weeks of absence, the queen became friendly with a young fairy who lived at the source of the lake, and who came to gather wicker from the banks by the summer palace. The queen a
dored this impetuous little fairy. Her name was Oliå. By her own hand she had woven the most beautiful white-wicker crib, which turned green in springtime.

  The day of the birth was approaching. For months, the king hadn’t returned from his voyage. In the beginning, the queen found solace in Oliå’s visits. The fairy would arrive on the shore at nightfall and climb up the stilts with her bare feet, the bottom of her robe and her ankles dripping as though she had walked on water. But one evening, Oliå didn’t come.

  Prince Iån watched his mother pacing up and down the wooden pontoon, staring at the still lake until dark. In the end, Fåra, her old servant, brought her inside to sleep.

  Twelve days later, Oliå still hadn’t reappeared.

  On the evening of the twelfth day, an unbearably hot night, a visitor was announced: it was Iån’s godfather.

  His name was Taåg. He was an old genie from the lowlands, three hundred leagues from the summer palace. Seven years earlier, he had saved the king as he was crossing the swamp on the way home to his wife. The royal steed had sunk in up to its flanks, and the king was at risk of being sucked under with it. This was around the time of Prince Iån’s birth. The king had begged for help from Taåg, who lived nearby and heard his cries. The genie had caused the mud of the swamp to subside.

  Once the horseman had escaped, Taåg released the foul water, and appeared flattered by the king’s gratitude.

  “Will Your Highness remember his servant?”

  A few days later, the king invited him to become godfather to Iån, the child who had just been born.

  The king soon regretted his choice. The queen feared Taåg’s powers and kept him at a distance. But young Prince Iån worshipped his godfather.

  And so it was that the seven-year-old prince was perched on his godfather’s shoulders that twelfth evening when the genie of the marshlands visited the queen.