Page 74 of The Strawberry Thief
There is an old chair under the counter. Perhaps it was there before Morgane. Rosette pulls it out for me. ‘Sit down. You’ll be more comfortable here than on the floor.’ She’s right, of course. The floor is too hard for me to sit still for long enough. Rosette goes into the front of the shop; comes out with her tattooing kit. Changes the nib on the tattoo pen. Plugs it into the power pack. It makes a tiny droning sound, like the buzz of a leafcutter bee.
‘Are you ready,Maman?’ she says.
Yes. No. Always. Never.
‘It’s all right,Maman. This won’t take long.’
Sixteen years. I close my eyes. I do not ask if it will hurt. Instead I concentrate on the sound; the tiny drone of the leafcutter bee. I think of Anouk at six years old, and of Rosette, and Pantoufle, and Bam. I think of Roux, and the way he smiled, the day I first saw him on the Tannes. I think of my mother’s face before the cancer made its mark on her. My mother was younger than I am now when she died. I have outgrown her. And yet she is still with me, just as my daughters will always be with me, however far they go. Perhaps this is what Rosette means when she tells me she knows what I need.
The needles are almost painless. Even Narcisse’s abandoned old chair I find surprisingly comfortable. Eyes closed, I realize how tired I am; how tired I have been for months, maybe years. I hear the drone of the leafcutter bee, and remember my mother’s stories, stories that started with the words:I know a tale the bees used to tell …
I realize that the humming has stopped. I open my eyes. She has finished. I want to look down at my finished tattoo, but just at that moment a doorbell rings – a doorbell that has already gone, along with its shadowy owner – and someone comes into the front of the shop.
I know those footsteps very well. Light as a fox on the floorboards; red as a fox in the evening light. ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ he says.
‘I thought you were gone.’
He shrugs. ‘Not yet.’
And outside, I hear the sound of the wind, the good north wind, the dancing wind, whispering in my mother’s voice:See, Vianne? Everything returns.
4
Friday, March 31
I walked home by the side of the Tannes, watching the last of the sunset. The lights on the river were starting to burn; the lanterns on the riverboats, the soft lights at the windows. It smelt of woodsmoke, and spices, and oil, and the good smells of cooking from the Boulevard P’tit Baghdad. And yet something is different. It took me some time to understand. And then, suddenly I realized. The scent of smoke on the river no longer seems to trouble me.
So this is absolution,mon père. This is what innocence feels like. After all these years, at last, I have put aside my burden. Rosette Rocher has healed me. She made me look inside myself, and showed me what I needed to see. I am not guilty of lighting the fire. You did that yourself,mon père. You did it in order to own me, to keep me forever by your side. I ought to hate you. And yet I do not. You must have been so unhappy. Maybe you even loved me, in your bitter, twisted way. And I kept you close to me all these years, like a secret too terrible to confess, but now I can let you go at last. You too can be finally free.
I mean to destroy Narcisse’s file. As soon as I get home, I thought, I will burn it in my fireplace. He too deserves absolution, the chance to be remembered kindly. And after all, he was only a child when he committed the deed that has followed him to the grave, shrivelling every relationship, every dream he dared to dream. Narcisse deserves forgiveness too, and under my breath I murmur the prayer of absolution. Someone like the Bishop might balk at my bending the Church’s rules in this way, but our Saviour was a breaker of rules. I like to think He’d understand.
Opening Narcisse’s green file, I realized there was still a page that in my haste, I’d left unread. Folded right at the back of the script, I’d almost missed it completely. Now I unfolded the single sheet, and, in the afterglow of the sun and the lights shining over the river, I read Narcisse’s final words, then closed his confession one last time, and headed for the Café des Marauds. One last toast to old Narcisse. And ifshejoins me – well, we’ll see. One thing at a time, Reynaud.
One summer, when I was still a young man, an ancient biplane landed in one of the fields that I’d left fallow that year. The pilot was selling rides, and already a dozen people were watching and waiting by the gate.
‘Are you the owner?’ the pilot asked, pulling off her flying-helmet. She was a young brown-skinned woman with curly hair and a smile that shone like half the sun.
I said I was.
‘If you let me use your field, I’ll give you a ride for free,’ she said.
I was a little unsure at first. But I’d never been in a plane, although I’d seen enough of them, scratching the sky far overhead. I imagined looking down on the farm, on the village, on my land, and I agreed, if only to have that view to keep forever in my mind.
I’ll admit it, Reynaud: it was a little frightening. But the view was as marvellous as I’d hoped, and the sound of the wind was exhilarating, and if I had believed in God, I might have felt his eye on me as I watched my world unroll below me like a bolt of cloth. There was the farm, and the sunflower fields, and my truck the size of a sugar cube, and the little scatter of people there, faces turned up to the sky.
And then I saw it. My father’s wood: thick by then with twenty years’ growth, but still not fully mature. A half-grown wood of oak trees around that little clearing, which, with my new perspective, I could see made the shape of a heart.
I stared down at the clearing. The heart was unmistakeable; tapered at the base with the strawberry field in the centre; a stand of trees to form the cleft. How long had it taken my father, I thought, to plan the formation, to plant out the trees? How many calculations had he made to create this God’s-eye view? I thought of the years I had been at school; the years I had felt his absence. I remembered the contempt I’d felt at his little hobby. And finally I understood what he’d tried to say to me on the night of my wedding.
‘Love is the thing that only God sees.’
I’d wondered at the time what he meant. My father seldom spoke of love; rarely showed affection. Perhaps that was Tante Anna’s influence, or maybe the few words he’d had were all spent on Naomi. But here it was at last, I saw: the heart-shaped meadow in the wood, a silent testament to grief; a last, enduring promise.
Love is the thing that only God sees. I supposeyou’dsay that’s because he sees into our hearts. Well, if he ever looks in mine, he’ll see no more than I’ve told you. Confession may be good for the soul. But love is even better. Love redeems us even when we think ourselves irredeemable. I never really loved my wife – not in the way that she deserved. My children and I were never close. Perhaps that was my fault, after all. But Mimi – yes, I loved Mimi. And I loved Rosette Rocher, who was so very like her. One day I hope Rosette will see the heart-shaped meadow in the wood, and know that love surrounds her, whether she can see it or not. And you, Reynaud. I hope one day you can feel what only God sees, but which grows from the hearts of people like us: the flawed; the scarred; the broken. I hope you find it one day, Reynaud. Till then, look after Rosette for me. Make sure she knows my story. Tell her to take care of my wood. And keep picking the strawberries.
