Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé (5 page)

CHAPTER NINE

Sunday, 15th August

I SUPPOSE I’LL
have to explain myself. I thought I might avoid it. But if she is staying in Lansquenet – and everything points to the fact that she is – then she will hear it eventually. Our gossips pull no punches. For some strange reason she seems to believe that she and I can somehow be friends. I may as well tell her the truth before she gets too used to the idea.

This was my thought as I followed her to the cemetery, pausing every few minutes as she and the children stopped to pick a handful of roadside flowers – weeds, for the most part – dandelions; ragwort; daisies; poppies; a stray anemone from the verge; a fistful of rosemary from someone’s garden, pushing its shoots through a drystone wall.

Of course, Vianne Rocher
likes
weeds. And the children – the young one especially – lent themselves to the game with glee, so that by the time we reached the place, she had a whole armful of flowers and herbs tied together with bindweed and a straggle of wild strawberry—

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s – colourful.’

She laughed. ‘You mean inappropriate.’

Disorderly, colourful, inappropriate, wrong in every sense of the word – and yet with a curious appeal – a perfect description of Vianne Rocher
, I thought, but did not say aloud. My eloquence – such as it is – is strictly limited to the page.

Instead I said, ‘Armande would like it.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think she would.’

Armande Voizin’s is a family plot. Her parents and grandparents are there, and the husband who died forty years ago. There is a black marble urn at the foot of the grave – an urn she always greatly disliked, and a trough in which she would often slyly plant parsley, carrots, potatoes or other vegetables in defiance of the conventions of grief.

It is very like her now to persuade her friend to bring weeds – Vianne Rocher had told me all about the letter she received from Luc Clairmont, and the note inside from Armande Voizin. Again, it is very like Armande to interfere – from beyond the grave! – to trouble my peace of mind in this way with memories of what once was. She says there is chocolate in Paradise. A blasphemous, inappropriate thought, and yet some hidden part of me hopes to God that she is right.

The children sat and waited on the side of the marble trough, which has now been replanted appropriately, with rows of neat French marigolds. I sense the hand of Caroline Clairmont, Armande’s daughter – at least, by blood. I noticed a wisp of something – a weed – underneath the marigolds. I leant forward to pull it up, and recognized the impudent shoot of a baby carrot coming out of the ground. I smiled to myself and left it alone. Armande would have liked that, too.

When Vianne Rocher had finished at the graveside, she stood up.

‘Now perhaps you could tell me,’ she said. ‘What exactly is going on?’

I sighed. ‘Of course, Mademoiselle Rocher.’

I led the way to Les Marauds.

CHAPTER TEN

Sunday, 15th August

TO UNDERSTAND, YOU
really need to see for yourself what I’m talking about. Les Marauds, the slums of Lansquenet, if such an urban thing can be in a village of no more than four hundred souls. Once, it housed the tanneries that were Lansquenet’s main source of income; and the buildings that line the riverbanks were all connected with that industry.

A tannery stinks and pollutes, and so Les Marauds was always a place apart, downriver from the village itself, existing in its own atmosphere of stench and dirt and poverty. But that was a hundred years ago. Now, of course, the tanneries and the brick-and-wooden houses are mostly converted into little shops and cheap dwellings. The river Tannes is sweet again, and children come here to paddle and play in the place where women used to scrub hides against a series of big, flat rocks worn hollow by decades of back-breaking work.

It’s the place where the river-rats (political correctness dictates that we cannot call them gypsies any more) like to moor their boats and light their campfires on the bank, and cook pancakes on a griddle and play guitars, and sing, and dance, and sell cheap trinkets to our children, and tattoo their arms in henna, to the dismay of their parents and of Joline Drou, who runs the village school.

At least, that all
used
to be true. Now the children stay away, as do most of our villagers. Even the river-rats stay away – I haven’t seen a houseboat arrive since Roux left four years ago. A different kind of atmosphere has settled on Les Marauds now; one that smells of spices and smoke, and sounds like a foreign country—

Don’t misunderstand me. I do not dislike foreigners. Some do in Lansquenet, but I am not among them. I was quick to welcome the first few immigrant families – those Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans,
Pieds-Noirs
, all now grouped together under the collective name of
Maghrébins
– when they moved here from Agen, knowing that a village like ours, a village where people are set in their ways and have little to do with what is happening in the big cities, was likely to feel some resistance to the arrival of a group of folk so different from themselves.

They first came from Marseille or Toulouse; from the outskirts of cities so ridden with crime that they had escaped to quieter parts, taking their families with them; to Bordeaux, Agen, Nérac, and from there at last to Les Marauds, which the
municipalité
had designated as an area suitable for redevelopment, and where Georges Clairmont, our local builder, was more than happy to receive them.

That was almost eight years ago. Vianne Rocher had already moved on. Roux was still here, working on the hulk that would one day become his houseboat; living at the Café des Marauds, for which he paid by taking occasional work – mostly with Georges Clairmont, who knew a good carpenter when he saw one, and who was more than happy to pay less than the minimum wage to a man who never complained, always took cash and who dealt with all kinds of people.

Les Marauds was very different then. Health and Safety had not yet run mad among our local councillors and those derelict houses could quickly and cheaply be converted into homes and shops. There was already a shop selling fabrics there; another sold mangoes and lentils and yams. There was a café – no alcohol, but mint tea, and glass water-pipes of
kif
– that fragrant blend of tobacco and marijuana so common in Morocco. There was a market every week, selling strange and exotic fruit and vegetables brought in from the docks at Marseille, and a little bakery, selling flatbread and pancakes and sweet milk rolls and honey pastries and almond
briouats
.

In those days, our
Maghrébin
community numbered only three or four families. All lived on a single street that some of our villagers (in their confusion over geography) came to call
Le Boulevard P’tit Baghdad
. Not that any of the newcomers had ever even
seen
Baghdad; most of them were second- or third-generation immigrants whose parents and grandparents had come to France seeking a better way of life. Their dress was varied and colourful; from the
djellaba
s and kaftans so typical of Morocco, to the hooded
burnous
cloak of the Arabs and Berbers, to modern European dress, usually with the addition of some kind of hat – a prayer cap, a Turkish cap, even a fez – according to their origins.

They were all of them Muslims, of course; they spoke Arabic and Berber among themselves; they went to the big mosque in Bordeaux and fasted during Ramadan. They looked to one man as leader and
imam
– this was Mohammed Mahjoubi, a widower of seventy who lived with his eldest son, Saïd, his wife, Samira, her mother and their teenage girls, Sonia and Alyssa.

Mohammed Mahjoubi was a simple man with a long white beard and a roguish eye, who could often be seen on his porch by the Tannes, reading, eating salted plums and spitting the stones into the river. His son Saïd ran a little gym, while his daughter-in-law looked after the house and cared for her aged mother. His granddaughters straddled two worlds, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved tunic at school but more traditional dress at home, their long hair bound with coloured scarves.

In those early days, the place was alive with colour. It was in the market; the shops; the displays of food and rolls of silk. The Boulevard des Marauds was grandly named, but small, a single-track road through the slums of Lansquenet, its cobbles and paving stones looted by generations of river-gypsies, left to fall into disrepair by a series of local councillors who felt that their budget was better employed serving our community.

The
Maghrébins
didn’t seem to mind. Many of them had already come from city slums and half-derelict flats. They drove battered old cars with no brakes or insurance; they didn’t care about the state of the road. At first, their young people mixed with ours; the boys played football in the market square; the girls made friends with ours at school. A group of their old women learnt to play
pétanque
– and grew alarmingly good at it, beating our regulars several times. They were not quite a part of Lansquenet, but they were not outsiders either, and many of us felt that they contributed something to our village – a breath of other places, a scent of other cultures, a taste of the exotic – that was absent from all the other
bastides
along the Garonne and the Tannes.

Some people remained wary of the foreigners – Louis Acheron, among others – but most of us were happy enough to see Les Marauds gain a new lease of life. Georges Clairmont was among the best pleased – he was paid a good fee by the council, who subsidized the redevelopment project, and managed to make further profit by cutting every corner he could – the newcomers never noticed if he used pine instead of oak, or slapped three coats of whitewash on a wall instead of five. His wife, Caro, was happy enough to accept the extra income, and turned a blind eye to the shocking state of the road. And the
Maghrébins
were friendly at first; I remember Joséphine Muscat bringing piles of sweet pastries from the place at the top end of the boulevard – the owner was Mehdi al-Djerba, born and bred in old Marseille, with a Midi accent you could cut with a knife – to serve to the patrons of her café. I also recall how she tried to repay them with the gift of a few dozen bottles of wine; how crestfallen she was to learn that
none
of the newcomers touched alcohol. (Later we found out that wasn’t quite true; Mehdi al-Djerba has the odd drop, for strictly medicinal purposes, and one or two of the younger men used to sneak into the Café des Marauds when they thought folk weren’t paying attention.) So, instead of wine, Joséphine brought planters filled with geraniums for them to put on their windowsills, so that all that summer the cobbled streets of Les Marauds were accented in scarlet. I remember the football matches between our boys and the
Maghrébins
, and how sometimes the fathers would come out to watch, each to their own side of the square, and solemnly shake hands at the end of the game. I even remember Caro Clairmont holding coffee mornings for the mothers and their children, all in the name of
entente cordiale
, as if she were a social worker from Paris instead of a little housewife from the provinces …

I say all this to prove to you,
père
, that these people were
not
unwelcome. I know that in the past I have been guilty of intolerance, and I have tried to make amends. When Jean-Pierre Acheron defaced the wall of Saïd Mahjoubi’s gym, I was the one who intervened and made him scrub the graffiti off. When Joline Drou refused to teach Zahra Al-Djerba unless she removed her headscarf, I was the one who pointed out that a one-room primary school in Lansquenet is
not
a lycée in Paris – Joline herself wears a little gold cross, which, if we are to adhere strictly to the rules, should also be left at the schoolyard gate.

In short, you may find it hard to believe, but I respected the newcomers. I am not the kind of man who finds it easy to make friends, but I had nothing against the little community of Les Marauds – in fact, I thought that in some ways our own people could learn a few lessons from them. The
Maghrébins
were polite, discreet; they did not cause a disturbance. They were respectful to their parents, affectionate with their children; devout and modest in their ways. Any problem in the community – a family quarrel, a petty crime, an accident, a bereavement – was addressed by Mohammed Mahjoubi, whose status among the
Maghrébins
was that of priest and doctor and mayor and lawyer and social worker all rolled into one. His methods were not always conventional – there were some (Caro Clairmont among them) who believed him to be too old and too eccentric to be an efficient leader. But mostly, there was real affection for old Mahjoubi in the village. His word was law in Les Marauds, and no one questioned his authority.

Then came the first new development. Ever since his arrival, old Mahjoubi had been talking about converting one of the old buildings in Les Marauds into a mosque. As far as I understood it, the plan was too expensive to make sense, even if a suitable building were to be made available. The big mosque in Bordeaux wasn’t really so far away, besides which the entire population of Les Marauds still amounted to no more than a handful of families – maybe forty people or so.

The plans caused some discussion. There was opposition from across the river, with strenuous protests from staunchly Catholic families like the Acherons and the Drous. The thought of a mosque, not five minutes’ walk away from our own church, seemed like a direct attack to them, a slap in the face of Saint-Jérôme, perhaps in the face of God Himself—

Old Mahjoubi asked me to intervene. I was, perhaps, less than sympathetic. I did not support the mosque idea, not because I was anti-mosque, but because it all seemed unnecessary—

But Mahjoubi refused to admit defeat. He, with the help of his son Saïd, adopted one of the old tanneries, and eventually, with funds from the Muslim community, and after much to-ing and fro-ing with the local authorities, with the help of Georges Clairmont (of course) and some volunteers from Les Marauds, what had been a derelict building right at the end of the boulevard became the village mosque instead, and the centre of the community.

Understand me,
père
, when I say that I have nothing against a mosque. Certainly, there were features which (as I had to point out) contravened local planning regulations. But these were very minor, and I only mentioned them in passing, to avoid unpleasantness later.

Certainly, the result was modest enough. A bland old yellow-brick building with very little on the outside to indicate that it was a place of worship. Inside, a rather beautiful space, with a tiled floor and pale walls stencilled in gold. As a priest, I try to be sensitive to the beliefs of others, and I made a real effort to convey to the community of Les Marauds how much I admired their handiwork, and to make myself available if ever anyone needed help.

Even so, a shift had occurred. Somehow, during our interchange, old Mahjoubi had become defiant. He had always been a stubborn old man, and possessed of a curious levity that sometimes made it hard to know whether or not he was joking. His son Saïd was of a much more serious bent, and I sometimes wondered if it would not be better for the whole of Les Marauds if the father were to step down and leave the decision-making to his son.

Perhaps old Mahjoubi sensed this. In any case, his attitude seemed to have developed an edge. If ever I came to Les Marauds (which I still do, every day, out of a sense of duty), Mahjoubi never missed a chance to make some kind of comment. These were always good-natured, I am sure, but others may not have understood.

‘Here comes Monsieur le Curé,’ he would say in his thickly accented voice. ‘Did you run out of sinners on your side of the river? Or are you here to join us at last? Have you learnt to smoke
kif
? Or is your incense heady enough?’