Шоколад / Chocolat

It was still warm from her hand, releasing an unmistakable scent of primary school, of secrets whispered, of poster paint and newsprint and half-forgotten friends.

Six inches long, a stick figure painstakingly rendered, eyes and mouth scratched on with a pin, red thread wound about the waist and something – twigs or dried grass – stuck into the scalp to suggest shaggy brown hair.

There was a letter scratched into the Plasticine-boy’s body, just above the heart; a neat capital J.

Beneath it and just close enough to overlap, a letter A.

I replaced the figure softly on the pillow beside her head and left, putting out the light. Some time before dawn she crept into bed with me as she often had when she was a child, and through soft layers of sleep I heard her whisper,

“It’s all right, Maman. I’ll never leave you.” She smelt of salt and baby soap, her hug fierce and warm in the enclosing dark. I rocked her, rocked myself, in sweetness, hugged us both in relief so intense that it was almost pain.

“I love you, Maman. I’ll always love you for ever. Don’t cry.”

I wasn’t crying. I never cry.

I slept poorly inside a kaleidoscope of dreams; awoke at dawn with Anouk’s arm across my face and a dreadful, panicky urge to run, to take Anouk and keep on running. How can we live here, how could we have been foolish enough to think he wouldn’t find us even here? The Black Man has many faces, all of them unforgiving, hard and strangely envious.

Run, Vianne. Run, Anouk. Forget your small sweet dream and run.

But not this time. We have run too far already, Anouk and I, Mother and I, too far from ourselves.

This is one dream I mean to cling to.

9

Wednesday, February 19

This is our rest day. school is closed and, while Anouk plays by Les Marauds, I will receive deliveries and work on this week’s batch of items.

This is an art I can enjoy. There is a kind of sorcery in all cooking: in the choosing of ingredients, the process of mixing, grating, melting, infusing and flavouring, the recipes taken from ancient books, the traditional utensils – the pestle and mortar with which my mother made her incense turned to a more homely purpose, her spices and aromatics, giving up their subtleties to a baser, more sensual magic.