know what wind you blew in on,” said Armande keenly. “I felt it. Mardi Gras, carnival day. Les Marauds was full of carnival people; gypsies, Spaniards, tinkers, pieds-noirs and undesirables. I knew you at once, you and your little girl what are you calling yourselves this time?”
“Vianne Rocher.” I smiled. “And this is Anouk.”
“Anouk,” repeated Armande softly. “And the little grey friend – my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be – what is it? A cat? A squirrel?”
Anouk shook her curly head. “He’s a rabbit,” she said with cheery scorn. “Called Pantoufle.”
“Oh, a rabbit. Of course.” Armande gave me a sly wink. “You see, I know what wind you blew in on. I’ve felt it myself once or twice. I may be old, but no-one can pull the wool over my eyes. No-one at all.”
I nodded.
“Maybe that’s true,” I said. “Come over to La Praline one day; I know everyone’s favourite. I’ll treat you to a big box of yours.”
Armande laughed.
“Oh, I’m not allowed chocolate. Caro and that idiot doctor won’t allow it. Or anything else I might enjoy,” she added wryly. “First smoking, then alcohol, now this… God knows, if I gave up breathing perhaps I might live for ever.” She gave a snort of laughter, but it had a tired sound, and I saw her raise a hand to her chest in a clutching gesture eerily reminiscent of Josephine Muscat. “I’m not blaming them, exactly,” she said. “It’s just their way. Protection – from everything. From life. From death.” She gave a grin which was suddenly very gamine in spite of the wrinkles. “I might call in to see you anyway,” she said. “If only to annoy the cure.”
I pondered her last remark for some time after she disappeared behind the angle of the whitewashed house. Some distance away Anouk was throwing stones onto the mud flats at the riverbank.
The cure. It seemed his name was never far from the lip’s. For a moment I considered Francis Reynaud.
In a place like Lansquenet it sometimes happens that one person – schoolteacher, cafe proprietor, or priest forms the lynchpin of the community. That this single individual is the essential core of the machinery which turns lives, like the central pin of a clock mechanism, sending wheels to turn wheels, hammers to strike, needles to point the hour. If the pin slips or is damaged, the clock stops. Lansquenet is like that clock, needles perpetually frozen at a minute to midnight, wheels and cogs turning uselessly behind the bland blank face. Set a church clock wrong to fool the devil, my mother always told me. But in this case I suspect the devil is not fooled.
Not for a minute.
7
Sunday, February 16
My mother was a witch. at least, that’s what she called herself, falling so many times into the game of believing herself that at the end there was no telling fake from fact. Armande Voizin reminds me of her in some ways; the bright, wicked eyes, the long hair which must have been glossy black in her youth, the- blend of wistfulness and cynicism. From her I learned what shaped me. The art of turning bad luck into good. The forking of the fingers to divert the path of malchance. The sewing of a sachet, brewing of a draught, the conviction that a spider brings good luck before midnight and bad luck after. Most of all she gave me her love of new places, the gypsy wanderlust which took us all over Europe and further; a year in Budapest, another in Prague, six months in Rome, four in Athens, then across the Alps to Monaco, along the coast, Cannes, Marseille, Barcelona… By my eighteenth year I had lost count of the cities in which we had lived, the languages we had spoken. Jobs were as varied; waitressing, interpreting, car repair. Sometimes we escaped from the windows of cheap overnight hotels without paying the bill. We rode trains without tickets, forged work permits, crossed borders illicitly. We were deported countless times. Twice my mother was arrested, but released without charge. Our names changed as we moved, drifting from one regional variant to another; Yanne, Jeanne, Johanne, Giovanna, Anne, Anouchka. Like thieves we were perpetually on the run, converting the unwieldy ballast of life into francs, pounds, kroner, dollars, as we fled where the wind took us.
Don’t think I suffered; life was a fine adventure for those years. We had each other, my mother and I. I never felt the need for a father. My friends were countless. And yet it must have preyed upon her sometimes, the lack of permanence, the need always to contrive. Still we raced faster as the years wore on, staying a month, two at the most, then moving on like fugitives racing the sunset. It took me some years to understand that it was death we fled.
She was forty. It was cancer. She’d known for some time, she told me, but recently… No, there was to be no hospital. No hospital, did I understand? There were months, years left in her and she wanted to see America: New York, the Florida Everglades. We were moving almost every day now, Mother reading the cards at night when she thought I was asleep. We boarded a cruiser from Lisbon, both of us working in the kitchens. Finishing at two or three every morning, we rose at dawn. Every night the cards, slippery to the touch with age and respectful handling, were laid out on the bunk beside her. She whispered their names to herself, sinking deeper every day into the mazy confusion which would eventually claim her altogether.
Ten of Swords, death. Three of Swords, death. Two of Swords, death. The Chariot. Death.
The Chariot turned out to be a New York cab one summer evening as we shopped for groceries in the busy Chinatown streets. It was better than cancer, in any case.
When my daughter was born nine months later I called her after both of us. It seemed appropriate. Her father never knew her – nor am I sure which one he was in the wilting daisy-chain of my brief encounters. It doesn’t matter. I could have peeled an apple at midnight and thrown the rind over my shoulder to know his initial, but I never cared enough to do it. Too much ballast slows us down.
And yet… Since I left New York, haven’t the winds blown less hard, less often? Hasn’t there been a kind of wrench every time we leave a place, a kind of regret? I think there has. Twenty-five years, and at last the spring has begun to grow tired, just as my mother grew tired in the final years. I find myself looking at the sun and wondering what it would be like to see it rise above the same horizon for five – maybe ten, maybe twenty – years: The thought fills me with a strange dizziness, a feeling of fear and longing. And Anouk, my little stranger? I see the brave adventure we lived for so long in a different light now that I am the mother. I see myself as I was, the brown girl with the long uncombed hair, wearing cast-off charity-shop clothing, learning maths the hard way, geography the hard way. How much bread for two francs? How far will a fifty-mark rail ticket take us? – and I do not want it for her. Perhaps this is why we have stayed in France for the last five years. For the first time in my life, I have a bank account. I have a trade.
My mother would have despised all this. And yet perhaps she would have envied me too. Forget yourself if you can, she would have told me. Forget who you are. For as long as you am bear it. But one day, my girl, one day it will catch you. I know.
I opened as usual today. For the morning only – I’11 allow myself a half-day with Anouk this afternoon – but it’s Mass this morning and there will be people in the square. February has reasserted its drab self and now it is raining; a freezing, gritty rain which slicks the paving and colours the sky the shade of old pewter. Anouk reads a book of nursery rhymes behind the counter and keeps an eye on the door for me as I prepare a batch of mendiants in the kitchen. These are my own favourites – thus named because they were sold by beggars and gypsies years ago biscuit-sized discs of dark, milk or white chocolate upon which have been
