Transcription
Sha, by Joanne Harris
Chapter 1
February 11th, Shrove Tuesday. We came on the wind of the carnival, a warm wind for February. Laden with the hot, greasy scents of frying pancakes and sausages, and powdery sweet waffles cooked on the hot plate right there by the roadside, with the confetti swirling down collars and cuffs and rolling in the gutters like an idiot antidote to winter. There's a febrile excitement in the crowds that line the narrow Main Street, necks craning to catch sight of the crepe-covered shrove with its trailing ribbons and paper rosettes. Anuk watches, eyes wide, a yellow balloon in one hand and a toy trumpet in the other. From between a shopping basket and a sad brown dog, we’ve seen carnivals before, she and I. A procession of 250 of the decorated shrove in Paris, like GL Marty gr 180 in New York, two dozen marching bands in Vienna, clowns on stilts, the giants with their lulling papier-mâché heads, drum majorettes with baton spinning and sparkling. But at six, the world retains a special luster.
A wooden cart, hastily decorated with gilt and clay and scenes from fairy tales: a dragon’s head on a shield, Rapunzel in a woolen wig, a mermaid with a cellophane tail, a gingerbread house all icing and gilded cardboard, a witch in the doorway waggling extravagant green fingernails at a group of silent children. At six, it is possible to perceive subtleties that a year later are already out of reach, behind the papier-mâché, the icing, the plastic. She can still see the real witch, the real magic. She looks up at me, her eyes, which are the blue-green of Earth seen from a great height, shining. “Are we staying? Are we staying here?” I have to remind her to speak French. But “Are we? Are we?” She clings to my sleeve. Her hair is a cotton-candy tangle in the wind. I consider: it’s as good a place as any.
Lanet Suan. Two hundred souls at most; no more than a blip on the fast road between Tulle and Beaulieu. Blink, and it’s gone. One Main Street, a double row of dun-colored, half-timbered houses leaning secretively together; a few laterals running parallel, like the tines of a bent fork; a church aggressively whitewashed; a square of little shops; farms scattered across the watchful land; orchards, vineyards, strips of earth enclosed and regimented according to the strict apartheid of country farming: here apples, there kiwis, melons on beneath their black plastic shells; vines looking blighted and dead in the thin February sun, but awaiting triumphant resurrection by March. Behind that, the tiny, small tributary of the Garonne fingers its way across the marshy pasture. And the people—they look much like all the others we’ve known. A little pale perhaps, in the unaccustomed sunlight, a little drab. Head scarves and berets are the color of the hair underneath: brown, black, or grey. Faces are lined like last summer’s apples; eyes pushed into wrinkled flesh like marbles into old dough. A few children, flying colors of red and lime green and yellow, seem like a different race.
As the shrove advances ponderously along the street, behind the old tractor that pulls it, a large woman with a square, unhappy face clutches a tartan coat about her shoulders. She shouts something in the half-comprehensible local dialect. On the wagon, a squat Santa Claus, out of season, among the fairies and sirens and goblins, hurls sweets at the crowd with barely restrained aggression. A small-featured, elderly man, wearing a felt hat rather than the round beret more common to the region, picks up the sad brown dog from between my legs with a look of polite apology. I see his thin, graceful fingers moving in the dog’s fur. The dog whines. The master’s expression becomes complex with love, concern, guilt. No one looks at us. We might as well be invisible. Our clothing marks us as strangers, transients. They’re polite, so polite; no one stares at us. The woman, her long hair tucked into the collar of her orange coat, a long silk scarf fluttering at her throat; the child in yellow wellingtons and sky-blue mac: their coloring marks them; their clothes are exotic; their faces are—they too pale, or too dark? Their hair marks them—other, foreign, indefinably strange. The people of Lanet Suan have learned the art of observation without eye contact. I feel their gaze like a breath on the nape of my neck, strangely without hostility, but cold nevertheless. We are a curiosity to them, a part of the carnival, a whiff on the outlands.
I feel their eyes upon us as I turn to buy a galette from the vendor. The paper is hot and greasy; the dark wheat pancake crispy at the edges, but thick and good in the centre. I break off a piece and give it to Anuk, wiping melted butter from her chin. The vendor is a plump, balding man with thick glasses, his face slick with the steam from the hot plate. He winks at her with one eye. He takes in every detail, knowing there will be questions later. On holiday, Madame. Village etiquette allows him to ask, behind his tradesman’s indifference. I see a real hunger. Knowledge is currency here, with the Aén and Monan so close. Tourists are a rarity. For a while, from Paris, then—it must be our clothes. In the garish land, the people are drab. Color is a luxury; it wears badly. The bright blossoms of the roadside are weeds, invasive, useless. No, no, not Paris.
The shrove is almost at the end of the street. A small band—two fifes, two trumpets and a trombone, and a side drum—follows it, playing a thin, unidentifiable march. A dozen children scamper in its wake, picking up the unclaimed sweep. Some are in costume. I see Little Red Riding Hood and a shaggy person who might be the wolf, squabbling companionably over possession of a handful of streamers. A black figure brings up the rear. At first, I take him for part of the parade—the plague doctor, maybe—but as he approaches, I recognize the old-fashioned soutane of the country priest. He’s in his thirties, though from a distance his stance makes him seem older. He turns toward me, and I see that he too is a stranger, with the high cheekbones and pale eyes of the north, and long pianist’s fingers resting on the silver cross that hangs from his neck. Perhaps this is what gives him the right to stare at me—this alienness—but I see no welcome in his cold, light eyes, only the measuring, feline look of one who is uncertain of his territory. I smile at him. He looks away, startled, beckons the two children toward him. A gesture indicates the litter that now lines the road. Reluctantly, the pair begin to clear it, scooping up spent streamers and candy wrappers in their arms and into a nearby bin. I catch the priest staring at me again as I turn away—a look that in another man might have been of appraisal. There is no police station at Lanet Suan; therefore, no crime. I try to be like Anuk, to see beneath the disguise, to the truth, but for now everything is blurred.
“Are we staying? Are we, Mum?” She tugs at my arm insistently. “I like it here. I like it here. Are we staying?” I catch her up into my arms and kiss the top of her head. She smells of smoke and frying pancakes and warm bedclothes on a winter’s morning. “Why not? It’s as good a place as any. Yes, of course,” I tell her, my mouth in her hair. “Of course we are.” Not quite a lie this time. It may even be true.
The carnival is gone. Once a year, the village flares into transient brightness, but even now the warmth is faded, the crowd dispersed. The vendors pack up their hot plates and awnings; the children discard their costumes and party favors. A slight air of embarrassment prevails, of abashment at this excess of noise and colour. Like rain in midsummer, it evaporates, runs into the cracked earth and through the parched stones, leaving barely a trace. Two hours later, Lanet Suan is invisible once more, like an enchanted village that appears only once every year. But for the carnival, we should have missed it altogether. We have gas, but as yet no electricity. On our first night, I made pancakes for Anuk by candlelight. We ate them by the fireside, using an old magazine for plates, as none of our things can be delivered until tomorrow. The shop was originally a bakery and still carries the baker’s wheat sheaf carved above the narrow doorway, but the floor is thick with a flowery dust, and we picked our way across a drift of junk mail as we came in. The lease seems ridiculously cheap, accustomed as we are to city prices. Even so, I caught the sharp glance of suspicion from the woman at the agency as I counted out the banknotes on the lease document. I am—vion—the signature a hieroglyph that might mean anything.
By the light of candle, we explored our new territory: the old oven, still surprisingly good beneath the grease and soot; the pine-panelled walls; the blackened earth and tiles. Anuk found the old awning folded away in a back room, and we dragged it out; spiders scattered from under the faded canvas. Our living area is above the shop: two rooms and a bathroom; ridiculously tiny balcony; terracotta planter with dead geraniums. Anuk made a face when she saw it. “It’s so dark, Malo.” She sounded odd, uncertain in the face of so much dereliction. “And it smells so sad.” She’s right. The smell is like daylight trapped for years until it is gone—sour and rancid, of mouse droppings and the ghosts of things unremembered and unmourned. It echoes like a cave; the small heat of our presence only serving to accentuate every shadow. Paint and sunlight and soapy water will rid it of the grime, but the sadness is another matter—the forlorn residence of a house where no one has laughed for years. Anuk’s face looked pale and large-eyed in the candlelight; her hand tightened in mine. “Do we have to sleep here?”
“Pon doesn’t like it. He’s afraid.” I smiled and kissed her solemn, golden cheek. “Pon is going to help us.” We lit a candle for every room—gold and red and white and orange. I prefer to make my own incense, but in a crisis the bought sticks were good enough for our purposes: lavender and cedar and lemongrass. We each held a candle; Anuk blowing her toy trumpet; Anuk rattling a metal spoon and an old saucepan. And for ten minutes we stamped around every room, shouting and singing at the top of our voices: “Out! Out! Out!” until the walls shook and the outraged ghosts fled, leaving in their wake a faint scent of scorching and a good deal of fallen plaster. Look behind the cracked and blackened paintwork, behind the sadness of things abandoned, and begin to see faint outlines, like the after-image of a sparkler held in the hand: here a wall a-dazzle with golden paint; there an armchair, a little shabby, but coloured a triumphant orange; the old awning suddenly glowing as half-hidden colours slide out from beneath the layers of grime. “Out! Out! Out!” Anuk and Pontou stamped and sang, and the faint images seemed to grow brighter: a red stool beside the vinyl counter; a string of bells against the front door. Of course, I know it’s only a game, glamour to comfort a frightened child. There will have to be work done, hard work, before any of this becomes real. And yet, for the moment, it’s enough to know that the house welcomes us, as we welcome it. Rock salt and bread by the doorstep to placate any resident guides; sandalwood on our pillow to sweeten our dreams. Later, Anuk told me Pontou wasn’t frightened anymore. So that was all right. We slept together in our clothes on the flowery mattress in the bedroom, with all the candles burning. And when we awoke, it was morning.