‘As you will see, dear Simone, the only moral of this tale, or of any other, is that in real life, as opposed to fiction, nothing is what it seems . . .’
‘Promise me one thing, Lazarus.’
‘If it’s in my power to do so . . .’
‘Promise me that, if I listen to your story, you’ll let me leave this place with my children. I swear I won’t go to the authorities. I’ll just take my family and abandon the village for ever. You’ll never hear from me again.’
The mask was silent for a few seconds.
‘Is that what you want?’
Simone nodded, holding back her tears.
‘You disappoint me, Simone, I thought we were friends. Good friends.’
‘Please . . .’
The masked man clenched his fists.
‘All right. If you want to be reunited with your children, you shall be. In due course . . .’
‘Do you remember your mother, Madame Sauvelle? Children always keep a special place in their hearts for the woman who gave life to them, or so the fairy tales would have us believe. It’s like a spark of light that never goes out, they say. I do believe that. In fact, I’ve spent most of my life trying to put out that light. But it’s not easy. And I hope that, before you condemn me, you’ll be kind enough to hear me out. I’ll be brief.
‘I was born in Paris on the night of 26 December 1882, in an old house on one of the most miserable streets in Les Gobelins. A gloomy, unhealthy place to live if ever there was one. That is where my mother, with the help of her neighbour Nicole, gave birth to a little baby. It was such a cold winter that apparently a few minutes went by before I started to cry the way all babies do. So, for a moment, my mother was convinced that I had been stillborn. When she realised that it was not so, the poor wretch took this to be a miracle and decided – she regarded herself as devout to the point of holiness – to christen me Lazarus.
‘I recall the years of my childhood as a succession of endless fighting in the streets and my mother’s long illnesses. One of my earliest memories is sitting on Nicole’s knees and listening to the kind woman tell me that my mother was very ill, that she could not respond to my cries and that I must be a good boy and go and play with the other children. The other children she was referring to were a group of ragged kids who went around stealing from dawn to dusk and who, by the age of seven, had learned that in our district survival meant becoming either a criminal or a civil servant. I don’t need to tell you which of the alternatives they favoured.
‘In those days, the only glimmer of hope was provided by a mysterious character who haunted our dreams. To us, his name, Daniel Hoffmann, was synonymous with our fantasies – so much so that many of the children doubted his existence. Legend had it that Hoffmann wandered through the streets of Paris, wearing different disguises, assuming different identities, and providing poor children with toys which he had made in his factory. Every child in Paris had heard of him and they all dreamed that one day they would be the lucky one.
‘Hoffmann was a master of magic and imagination. Only one thing could overcome his power to intrigue: age. As children grew older and their spirit lost its ability to imagine and invent, the name of Daniel Hoffmann eventually faded from their minds; until one day, when they were adults, it no longer meant a thing to them, even when they heard the name uttered by their own children . . .
‘Daniel Hoffmann was the greatest toy manufacturer that ever lived. He owned a large factory in Les Gobelins. It was like an enormous cathedral rising from the squalor of that ghostly quarter. From its centre soared a tower, sharp as a needle, piercing the clouds. Its bells marked dawn and dusk ever
y day, and the echo of those bells could be heard all over Paris, beckoning. All the children in the city knew that building, but the truly amazing thing was that adults were incapable of seeing it. Age had blinded them and they were convinced that the site was occupied by a vast swamp, a wasteland at the heart of the poorest area of Paris.
‘Nobody had ever set eyes on the real Daniel Hoffmann. People said that the toymaker lived in a room at the top of the tower and hardly ever left it, except when he ventured out into the streets at nightfall, in disguise, handing out toys to the city’s dispossessed. In exchange he asked for one thing only: the children’s hearts, their promise of eternal love and obedience. In our area, any child would have surrendered his heart without giving it a second thought. But not every child heard the call. Rumour had it that he used hundreds of different disguises to conceal his identity. Some even swore that Daniel Hoffmann never wore the same outfit twice. He was everywhere and nowhere. A watcher in the shadows.
‘But let’s get back to my mother. The illness Nicole was referring to is still a mystery to me. I imagine that some people, like some toys, are born defective – which I suppose makes us all broken toys, don’t you think? The truth is that, as time went by, my mother’s illness led to her gradually losing her mental faculties, which, to be honest, had never really amounted to much to begin with. But when the body is wounded, it doesn’t take long for the mind to follow suit.
‘That is how I learned to grow up with loneliness as my only companion, dreaming that one day Daniel Hoffmann would come to my rescue. I remember that every night, before going to bed, I would ask my guardian angel to take me to him. Every night. And that is also how, probably inspired by the legend, I started to build my own toys.
‘I used scraps I found in rubbish dumps across the district. I built my own train, and a three-storey castle. This was followed by a cardboard dragon and, later, a flying machine, long before aeroplanes had become a common sight in the skies. But my favourite toy was Gabriel. Gabriel was an angel. A wondrous angel I built with my own hands to protect me from the dark and the dangers fate might throw at me. I built it using the wreckage of an ironing machine and other pieces of scrap I found in an abandoned textile mill two blocks away from where we lived. But the life of Gabriel, my guardian angel, was short.
‘The day my mother discovered my collection of toys was a death sentence for Gabriel. She dragged me down to the cellar of our building. She started muttering, looking around her as if there might be something lurking in the shadows, and told me that someone had been whispering to her in her dreams. My dear mother was one of those people who would never listen to anybody around her, but heard plenty of voices inside her head. One of those voices had informed her that toys – all toys – were the invention of Lucifer himself. She was always one to see the devil in the details – especially in other people. In her new-found wisdom she had decided that, through toys, the devil planned to steal the soul of every child in the world. That very night, Gabriel and all my other toys ended up in the building’s furnace.
‘My mother insisted that we should destroy them together, make sure they turned to ashes and thus I could return to the path of righteousness. Otherwise, the shadow of my accursed soul would come and get me. Every lapse in my behaviour, every error, every disobedient act, would leave a mark on my shadow. She told me that my shadow was a reflection of how wicked and inconsiderate I was, and that it followed me wherever I went. I was only seven at the time. Sometimes I wished that her threat would come true and I could embrace that shadow. At least that way I’d be free of her.’
‘You’re insane . . .’ whispered Simone.
The man in the mask laughed.
‘Wait. It gets better. Soon after this baptism of fire, my dear mother’s illness took a turn for the worse. She would shut me up in the basement because she said the shadow wouldn’t be able to find me there. At first, during these long spells I hardly dared breathe, fearing the sound of my breath might draw the shadow’s attention and that this evil reflection of my corrupt soul would then carry me straight to hell. I realise all this must sound quite comical to you, or perhaps just sad, Madame Sauvelle, but for that young child it was a serious business indeed.
‘I don’t want to bore you with the sordid details. I’ll just add that, during one of these purifying episodes, my mother finally lost what few, if any, marbles she had left and I ended up being trapped for a whole week in the darkness. You’ve already read the story in the cutting, I imagine: it was the kind of thing the press love to splash across their front pages. Bad news, especially if it’s full of lurid details, is wonderful at persuading people to part with their money and remind them of how good they are, for evil is always on the other side of the fence, isn’t it? You’ll be wondering what a child does when he’s locked up for seven days and seven nights in a dark basement waiting for the devil to come and claim his soul.
‘First of all, you must understand that when humans are deprived of light, we lose all sense of time after a while. Hours turn into minutes or seconds, even weeks. Our perception of time is closely related to light. During that week something truly astonishing happened to me. A miracle. My second miracle, if you like, after those blank minutes that occurred after my birth.
‘My prayers were answered. All those nights praying in silence had not been in vain. Call it luck, or fate, but Daniel Hoffmann finally came to me. To me. Of all the children in Paris, I was the chosen one. I still remember the timid rapping on the trapdoor that led to the street. I couldn’t reach it, but I was able to reply to the voice that spoke to me from outside; the most marvellous, kindest voice I had ever heard. A voice that dispelled the darkness and melted away the fear of a frightened little boy, like sun melting ice. And do you know something? Daniel Hoffmann called me by my name.