Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

converted olive mill in the village of Lourmarin, was empty. As a result, the manageress upgraded the modest room we’d reserved to the best suite, on the top floor, with a balcony overlooking the château and the fields beyond.

In the morning she had plenty of time to talk to us about the charms of the region as we sipped our café au lait. But her rich vein of local knowledge ended abruptly when we asked her about St. Martin de la Brasque. Placing another log on the fire, she paused, raised an eyebrow and curled her lip, converting her face into a bouquet of rococo squiggles. “Phut,” she said. If the British have a stiff upper lip, the French definitely have at least one extra facial muscle to facilitate these magnificent sneers. “I know nothing about it. Rien.”

The only map in our possession that gave us any hint of St. Martin’s location was the one on a tourist postcard that Janine had sent me years ago showing the Vaucluse region. Vaucluse means “the closed valley.” Janine lived somewhere between the Grand Lubéron mountains and the Durance River. On the postcard she had underlined the town of Pertuis, and on the back she had written that St. Martin was “près de cette ville.”

As we finished our coffee, the manageress made some phone calls. She returned with the news that St. Martin was in fact only five villages east of Lourmarin. “But it is nothing,” she reported. “It’s a town of truck drivers, vineyard workers and people who work in eggs.”

“Eggs? They have poultry farms?”

“No—Eggs—it’s the big town south of here.”

Aix. Aix-en-Provence. St. Martin was a village of laborers and commuters.

As Tony and I drove up the mountainside past the patchwork of vineyards, I imagined Janine’s father working his meticulous way through the vines, knowing from experience where to prune, where to let be. It was he I thought we would find in St. Martin, if we ever found St. Martin. I hoped he would be able to tell me news of his daughter, my bright young pen pal from so many years ago. Janine herself, I imagined, would be long gone from these little villages; pursuing a career in nearby Marseilles, Montpellier, Lyon or maybe even Paris.

Finally St. Martin announced itself with a modest sign and an avenue of speckled plane trees. In a minute or two it disannounced itself with a duplicate sign, slashed through by a black bar. Now I understood why, when I wrote to Janine, I didn’t need to give a street address—her name and the name of the village were all the direction my letters required.

We turned the car around and drove back through the village, more slowly. Many of the old sepia-stuccoed houses had gray, concrete block additions. Some had been torn down and replaced with boxy new structures. Apart from the handsome row of trees, St. Martin felt no obligation to be picturesque. We parked in the square. It was still lunchtime, and the town’s few streets were silent. The faint snow had turned to a misty, Londonesque drizzle. A lone old man and his black and white dog ambled slowly down the street.

We left the car and wandered to the bar-tabac, into that familiar warm French fug of fresh-ground coffee and strong tobacco. The walls were decorated with the important business of village life: the standings of the Martinoise boule players and the latest news from the Société des Chasseurs. Inside, the sole customer stood hunched over a pinball machine called Star Flipp, emblazoned with an icon of Marilyn Monroe. Like the rest of France, the machine appeared to be en grève. The youth thumped it petulantly, but no bells rang.

We ordered a coffee and asked the barmaid if she knew the family of my pen pal. “Oui,” she said. “Bien sûr.”

“You know Janine?” I asked.

“Mais oui, elle habit …” and she rattled off directions to a house on the town’s edge.

Even after my experiences in Israel, I almost fell off my bar stool in shock. After twenty-five years, Janine was still there, right where I left her. The barmaid said Janine had married a builder and managed his business from her house. “If you want to find her at home, now would be a good time,” she said. “Soon she will have to go to pick up her boys from school.”

We drained our bitter coffees and headed for the eastern edge of town. In a few minutes, following the barmaid’s directions, we had arrived at the foot of a steep hill dotted with newish, modest-scale villas. On the unfinished balcony of one of them a builder was at work. But by the time I got out of the car and climbed up to the house he had vanished. I walked on to the next villa and knocked on the door.

A young man answered.

“Excuse me,” I said in French, “I’m looking for Janine.”

“Oui,” he said. He turned back into the house and raised his voice to call the name. A petite woman in a big sweater and leggings appeared at the door. Her dark hair was cropped in a shapely bob that emphasized her soft brown eyes.

As I introduced myself, I opened my hand and showed her one of the letters she’d sent me, the elegant writing on the pretty pale blue stationery. She stared at me and then at the letters. Her hand fluttered to her brow.

“But it is twenty years—no—more,” she said in French.

Still, she remembered me well. I had been her only pen friend. She explained that I had knocked, by chance, on her mother’s door. Her house was nearby, but she was spending the day with her mother, who was ill. She seemed anxious to talk, so we made a rendezvous for the following day.

Janine’s parents’ house in the village had long since been demolished, its cramped, medieval rooms too small and irregular for modern taste. Her entire family lived now in new villas on the hillside, all