Шоколад / Chocolat

This morning I unmade the window display, the witch, the gingerbread house and all the chocolate animals sitting around watching with glossy expectant faces, and Anouk and her friends shared the pieces between excursions into the rainy backwaters of Les Marauds. Jeannot Drou watched me in the kitchen, a piece of gilded pain d’epices in each hand, eyes shining. Anouk stood behind him, the others behind her, a wall of eyes and whisperings.

“What next?” He has the voice of an older boy, an air of casual bravado and a smear of chocolate across the chin.

I shrugged. “Secret,” I said, stirring creme de cacao into an enamel basin of melted couverture.

“No, really.” He insists. “You ought to make something for Easter. You know. Eggs and stuff: Chocolate hens, rabbits, things like that. Like the shops in Agen.”

I remember them from my childhood; the Paris chocolateries with their baskets of foil-wrapped eggs, shelves of rabbits and hens, bells, marzipan fruits and marrons glaces, amourettes and filigree nests filled with petits fours and caramels and a thousand and one epiphanies of spun-sugar magic-carpet rides more suited to an Arabian harem than the solemnities of the Passion.

“I remember my mother telling me about the Easter chocolates.”

There was never enough money to buy those exquisite things, but I always had my own cornet surprise, a paper cone containing my Easter gifts, coins, paper flowers, hard-boiled eggs painted in bright enamel colours, a box of coloured papier-mache – painted with chickens, bunnies, smiling children amongst the buttercups, the same every year and stored carefully for the next time encasing a tiny packet of chocolate raisins wrapped in Cellophane, each one to be savoured, long and lingeringly, in the lost hours of those strange nights between cities, with the neon glow of hotel signs blink-blinking between the shutters and my mother’s breathing, slow and somehow eternal, in the umbrous silence.

“She used to say that on the eve of Good Friday the bells leave their steeples and church towers in the secret of the night and fly with magical wings to Rome.”

He nods, with that look of half-believing cynicism peculiar to the growing young.