Page 62 of The Strawberry Thief
Friday, March 31
Last night I dreamed about Morgane. Or maybe it was Maman. In my dream I couldn’t tell the difference. Maman-Morgane was wearing red shoes, and had regular feet, like everyone else.
She said: ‘Rosette, I’m moving on. My time here is nearly over. You can follow me if you like, but there’s something you’ll have to do before I can take you with me.’
I looked at her. ‘What do I have to do?’
Maman-Morgane said: ‘Cut off your feet. Use this. It hardly hurts at all.’ And she handed me her tattoo pen. I saw that I was already barefoot. And with the pen, I drew a dotted line around my ankles and wrote the words:CUT HEREon my calf.
‘See?’ said Morgane. ‘Now you’re free.’
‘Free?’ I said. ‘But I wanted to be just like all the others.’ And in my dream I realized that I wasn’t using my shadow-voice, but a voice I’d never heard before. And it sounded so strange and so wonderful that I stopped talking and just looked at her.
‘That’s yourrealvoice,’ said Morgane. ‘The one you lost when you were born. But now you can have it back – as long as you leave your feet behind.’
‘But how will I walk without any feet?’
She laughed, and said: ‘You won’t need to. You’llfly.’
Then I awoke, and it was still dark, and the wind was making a keening sound. And above it, I could hear Maman singing softly in her room:
Vl’à l’bon vent, v’là l’joli vent—
Vl’à l’bon vent, ma mie m’appelle—
It’s an old song she used to sing to me when I was a baby. She sang it to Anouk as well; but I know that with me it was different. She used it to sing us both to sleep, but with me, it was more than a lullaby. It was a story, a magic spell – sometimes even a warning.
It starts with the wind, calling to a lady, thinking about her love. And in the song she calls the windthe good wind, the pretty wind, because she doesn’t want to go, because she has to flatter the wind to keep it under her control. And her love is calling her, and the wind is calling her too, and you know that the wind is stronger than love; stronger, maybe, than anything.
That’s just the chorus. There are verses, too: verses that tell the story, but it’s not a very nice story at all, even though it’s a lullaby. It’s about a girl who keeps three ducks in a little pond by her house. Two are black and one is white. The King’s son, out hunting, aims at a black duck, but shoots the white one by mistake, and as it dies gold falls from its beak, and diamonds from its eyes. Its white feathers blow away on the wind, and three mysterious ladies gather them all to make a bed for the girl and her mother to sleep in forever.
I never liked those verses much. I was sad for the poor white duck, in spite of the gold and diamonds. And the ladies sounded too much like the Kindly Ones, or the Norns, or the Fates, and the feather bed sounded nice at first, but sleeping forever is scary. Sleeping forever sounds like death, or like Sleeping Beauty’s curse. But would the King’s son awaken me? Or would I sleep forever?
Maman used to tell me that it was a song about sacrifice, and how when you give up something you love, you can get something even better. But I don’t think the girl wanted diamonds. All she wanted was for her ducks to be safe and happy.
‘But ducks sometimes fly away,’ Maman said, and that’s when I remembered my dream, and wondered why she was singing that song, all alone in her bedroom.
And so, very quietly, I climbed out of bed and went to the door. My bedroom is up a little ladder, like a crow’s-nest on a boat, and the ladder sometimes creaks a bit, but I’m very good at being quiet. I climbed down very slowly, making sure to keep my weight steady as I moved from rung to rung, and I hardly made any noise.
Maman was still singing, in that very soft voice, like a shadow-voice, that she only uses when she sings that song. Her bedroom door was open a crack. She never closes it all the way. I could see a bar of yellow light reaching across the landing. I put my eye to the crack, and saw some candles burning, and a spiral of sand on the boards, all set out in a circle—
I know what that means. I don’t need the sound of the wind in the trees to tell me. The spiral is the symbol of Ehecatl, the wind god. Is she trying to cause an Accident? Perhaps she felt theHurakan, and she’s trying to flatter it back to sleep. Or perhaps she wants to call it herself – but who can she be calling itfor?
I watched Maman for a long time, but all she did was sit and sing. Not just the chorus, but all the verses too, over and over and over again. Through the crack in the door I could smell candle-wax and incense. Something rich and creamy, like pink cedar or white sandalwood. It made me feel sleepy. I lay on the floor, and listened to the rising wind and the sound of Maman singing.
Outside, the wind was singing too. I could hear it in the wires. Its voice was soft but powerful, purring like a tiger. And then I must have fallen asleep, because I had another dream, this time about the ducks on the pond, and the King’s son, and the feather bed, and the three ladies gathering duck down.
‘Must we sleep forever?’ I said in my new, non-shadow voice.
Maman looked up from her circle and said in a voice that reminded me of Morgane:
‘Sometimes, children fly away. We do what we can to keep them.’
I woke again to find myself back in my own bed, which isn’t made of feathers at all, but of something sensible, with springs, and the crows were shouting;War! War!and chasing each other across the sky.
Maman always tells me that dreams are lessons in disguise. I got up very quietly and picked up my pink satchel. It was pretty early, and Maman was still sleeping. I didn’t want to tell her my dream, because then she’d know I spied on her. I thought perhaps I could ask Morgane what she thought my dream meant. Morgane knows a lot about dreams. She says that stories, and pictures, and dreams are all just part of a river that goes through every world there is, and that everyone dips in from time to time.
But when I went to the tattoo shop, it was shut, and the blinds were drawn, and there was aTO LETsign on the door.
