Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé (6 page)

All in good humour, I know that; and yet there was something in his manner that seemed defiant, combative. His followers started to echo him, and before I knew it, almost overnight, Les Marauds had become hostile territory.

So – when did things begin to change? Hard to know for certain. Like looking in the mirror one day and seeing the first signs of old age: the wrinkles around the eyes; the way the skin around the jaw seems to slip out of alignment. There were a few new arrivals; friction within the community – nothing, when you looked at them, to justify my growing unease. But it must have been enough,
père
. Like the turning seasons, Les Marauds changed its colours, somehow. More of the girls began to wear black, with
hijab
scarves (so like a nun’s wimple) completely hiding their hair and neck. The coffee mornings tailed off. Caro Clairmont had fallen out with one of her regular visitors, and after that the rest of them came less often, if at all. Saïd Mahjoubi extended his gym at the end of the Boulevard P’tit Baghdad – it wasn’t a complicated affair, just a big, bare room with some weights, a spa pool and some running machines – and it became a meeting-place for all the young men of Les Marauds.

That was over five years ago. Since then, the community has grown. There have been more new arrivals – mostly relatives from abroad, coming to join their families. Last year, old Mahjoubi’s granddaughter Sonia married a man called Karim Bencharki, who came to live in Lansquenet with his widowed sister and her child. Saïd Mahjoubi admired Karim, who was twelve years older than Sonia and had managed a business in Algiers, selling clothes and textiles. I was rather less certain. I had known Sonia since she was a child – not well, but we’d often spoken. She and her sister, Alyssa, had been bright, outgoing girls, who even played football with Luc Clairmont and his friends at weekends. Married, Sonia changed; wore nothing but black; abandoned her plans to study. I saw her a couple of weeks ago, shopping at the market; she was veiled from head to foot, but there was no doubt that it was she.

The husband was with her, and the sister-in-law; standing between them, she still looked like a child.

I know what you are about to say. The community of Les Marauds is not my responsibility. Mohammed Mahjoubi is their
imam
– they look to him for guidance. But I couldn’t help thinking about that girl. How much she had changed since she first arrived. Her younger sister had stayed the same – though the football games were a thing of the past – and it troubled me to see Sonia looking so very different.

But by then I had troubles of my own. There had been complaints from some of my parishioners about the tone of my sermons, which were felt to be old-fashioned and dull. Louis Acheron had taken offence at my treatment of his son (I had grabbed the Acheron boy, then sixteen, by the ear, before making him scrub the whitewashed wall of the gym that he had so recently adorned with a smiley face and a swastika) and since then, all the family had borne something of a grudge against me.

Acheron, an accountant, was on several of Caro’s committees, and had worked with Georges Clairmont on a number of occasions. The families were friendly; their sons were very much of an age. Between them, they persuaded the Bishop that my old-fashioned attitudes were causing friction within the community. They even managed to suggest that I had some kind of a feud against old Mahjoubi and his mosque.

The Clairmonts and the Acherons started to attend Mass in Florient, where a new, young priest, Père Henri Lemaître, was proving increasingly popular. Very soon it became clear to me that Caro, who had once been one of my most devoted followers, had become a convert to Père Henri’s charm, and was furtively but strenuously campaigning to have me replaced.

And then, one day six months ago, as I took my morning walk through Les Marauds, I noticed something irregular. Old Mahjoubi’s mosque had somehow acquired a minaret.

Of course, this is not the custom in France. To build such a thing would have been considered needlessly provocative. But the old tannery had a chimney; a square brick chimney twenty feet high and maybe six feet in diameter. This chimney, like the rest of the building, had been freshly whitewashed and newly adorned with a silver crescent moon that gleamed in the early sunlight. And now I could hear an eerie sound amplified by the open flue; a voice half-singing in Arabic the
Azaan
, the traditional call to prayer.

Allahu Akhbar, Allahu Akhbar—

French law clearly states that any call to prayer must be made from
inside
the building in question, and without any form of amplification. In the case of the old tannery, a ladder had been fixed inside the chimney, so that the
muezzin
, the crier, could take advantage of the building’s natural acoustics. Thus I could see old Mahjoubi had obeyed the
letter
of the law, but surely, I thought, this must have been a deliberate challenge. The role of
muezzin
was taken on mostly by Mahjoubi’s son Saïd, and nowadays this call to prayer echoes all over Les Marauds. We hear it five times a day,
père
, floating to us over the river, and sometimes I find myself (God forgive me) ringing the church bells morning and night especially loudly to compete.

And then, at about the same time, that woman moved into the shop. Karim Bencharki’s sister and her child, a girl of eleven or twelve. They were no trouble, and yet at once trouble seemed to follow them. Nothing you could identify. No incidents, no arguments. I called on them, to introduce myself and to offer support if they needed it. The woman barely even spoke. Eyes lowered, head bowed, veiled from head to foot in black – I understood that my help was neither welcome, nor needed. I left her alone. She had made it clear that she wanted no contact with such as me.

But I always took care to greet her whenever we happened to cross in the street, though she never even nodded to me, or acknowledged my greeting in any way. As for the child, I rarely saw her. A little snippet of a thing, big eyes under her headscarf. I tried to speak to her once or twice. Like her mother, she never replied.

And so I watched from across the square, just as I had eight years ago, when Vianne Rocher moved into town. I expected to find at least a clue as to the woman’s activities.

Why had she moved from her brother’s house? Why had she chosen to live apart from the community in Les Marauds?

But the woman in black gave nothing away. There were no deliveries of goods; no tradesmen; no workmen; no family. She did have a number of visitors – all of them women, all
Maghrébines
, all of them with children. The mothers never stayed long, but the children – all girls – often stayed for the day, sometimes over a dozen of them. I didn’t recognize most of the girls, or even their mothers, dressed as they were, and it took me some time to realize that she was opening a school.

French schools – at least, the public ones – work on a strictly secular basis. No religious bias, no prayers, no symbols of faith of any kind. Girls like Sonia and Alyssa Mahjoubi had always managed to deal with this. But some of the other girls had not; and I was conscious that Zahra Al-Djerba, for instance, had never attended secondary school, but remained at home to help her mother. Our tiny village primary school had found a way to accommodate. But in the larger towns, like Agen, the problem of the headscarf remained. And now it seemed that Les Marauds had found itself a solution.

Most of the schoolgirls were dressed alike, in black, with scarves to cover their hair; little widows before their time, faces shyly averted. The
hijab
scarves, though mostly black, are all subtly different in style; some knotted, some pinned, some artfully draped, some wrapped around elaborate chignons, some demure as nuns’ coifs.

The girls never talked to me, of course, but some of them occasionally shot curious glances at the church, with its whitewashed walls and its tall steeple and the statue of the Virgin teetering over the main door, and it strikes me how seldom we see them here now, on our side of the river. Within three months of its opening, I had counted fifteen
Maghrébine
girls, aged from ten to sixteen years old, coming to school in a single group; talking and giggling behind their hands as they crossed the bridge into Lansquenet.

But by then Les Marauds was teeming with life – a hundred and fifty people or more, Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Berbers – which, I suppose, is nothing to someone used to Paris or Marseille, but which, in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, counts as half a village.

Why here? In our neighbouring villages there are no ethnic communities. Perhaps the presence of the mosque; perhaps the little school; perhaps the fact that a whole street was available for development. In any case, in less than eight years our new arrivals have multiplied like dandelions in spring, and in doing so have turned Les Marauds from a single colourful page to an entire foreign chapter.

Now I watched as Vianne Rocher took in the reality. The narrow streets have changed very little in two hundred years; but as for the rest, everything is different. The first thing to strike a visitor is the scent of incense mixed with that of fragrant smoke and unidentified spices. There are lines of washing hanging out between the balconies; men in long robes and prayer caps sit on their porches, smoking
kif
and drinking tea. There are no women among them. The women most often stay indoors; we rarely see them in the streets, and these days more of them wear black. The children, too, stay separate; the boys play football or swim in the Tannes; the girls help their mothers, look after the younger ones or cluster in giggling groups, to fall silent as soon as I appear. The sense of aloofness is palpable. It was more so today, of course; I imagine that after the fire in the shop, the village gossips have been at work.

Passing the row of little shops that line the Boulevard des Marauds, we found them closed and shuttered. It was seven forty-five; the hot wind had dropped, and a couple of stars were beginning to show. The sky was a darkly luminous blue; with, on the western horizon, a stripe of startling yellow.

And then it began, as I’d known it would. The distant sound of the call to prayer. Distant, but clearly audible in the throat of the old brick tower:
Allahu Akhbar
– God is great.

Yes, of
course
I know what it means. Did you think that because I’m a Catholic I have no knowledge of other faiths? I knew that in a moment the streets would be filled with men going to mosque: the women would mostly stay indoors, preparing for the evening. And as soon as the moon was visible, there would be celebration; traditional foods from the homeland brought in for the occasion; fruits and nuts and dried figs; little deep-fried pastries.

Today is the fifth day of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. It has been a long day. To go without food is one thing, perhaps; but to go without water on a day like today, when the harsh wind sweeps across the land, bleaching everything dry and white—

A woman, followed by a child, crossed the street in front of us. I could not see her averted face; but her black-gloved hands gave her away. It was the woman in black, I knew; the woman from the
chocolaterie
. It was the first time I’d seen her since the fire had gutted the house, and I was glad of the opportunity to check that she was being cared for.

‘
Madame
,’ I said. ‘I hope you’re all right—’

The woman did not even look at me. The face-veil that she always wears left only the narrowest letter-box through which to post my condolences. The child, too, seemed not to hear, and, reaching for her headscarf, tugged it a little closer, as if for added security.

‘If you need any help—’ I went on, but the woman had already passed us by, diving into a side street. By then, the
muezzin
had finished his chant, and the worshippers going to mosque had started to crowd the boulevard.

One of them I recognized, standing at the door of the mosque. It was Saïd Mahjoubi, old Mahjoubi’s eldest son and the owner of the gym. A man in his forties; bearded; robed; wearing a prayer cap on his head. He does not smile often. He was not smiling now. I greeted him with a raised hand.

For a moment he just looked at me. Then he started towards us with a strutting, stiff-legged, nervous walk, like that of a cockerel ready to fight.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said.

I was surprised. ‘I live here.’

‘You live across the river,’ said Saïd. ‘And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay across the river.’ A couple of other men had stopped, hearing Saïd’s raised voice. I heard an exchange in Arabic, an urgent typewriter-clatter of sounds in which not a single word was intelligible to me.

‘I don’t understand,’ I told him.

Saïd shot me a dark look and said something in Arabic. The cluster of men surrounding him telegraphed their approval. He moved a little closer. I could almost smell his rage. Now the voices in Arabic sounded hostile; aggressive. I was suddenly, absurdly convinced that the man was about to strike me.

Vianne took a step towards us. I’d almost forgotten she was there. Anouk was watching cautiously; behind her, Rosette was chasing shadows in a nearby alleyway.

I wanted to tell her to stand aside – the man was angry enough not to care that a woman and her children were near – but her presence seemed to calm Saïd. Without saying anything, or even appearing to touch him, she made a sign with her fingers – some gesture of appeasement – and the man took a wary step backwards, looking suddenly slightly confused.

Had he realized his mistake?

Or did she whisper something?

If she did, I heard nothing. But in any case, the atmosphere, which had been close to violence, was gone. The incident – if there
had
been an incident – was averted.

‘Perhaps we should go,’ I said to Vianne. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought you here.’

She smiled. ‘
Did
you bring me here? Remember, I came to see Armande’s house.’