Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина - стр. 20

Sometimes Paul Hourias came with us on what Cassis called our “hunting trips,” though he was never fully initiated into our secrets. I liked Paul. His father, Jean-Marc, sold bait on the Angers road and his mother took in mending to make ends meet. He was an only child of parents old enough to be his grandparents, and much of his time was spent keeping out of their way. He lived as I longed to live; in summer he spent whole nights out in the woods without arousing any concern from his family. He knew where to find mushrooms on the forest floor and to make whistles out of willow twigs. His hands were deft and clever, but he was often awkward and slow in speech, and when adults were near he stuttered. Though he was close to Cassis’s age, he did not go to school, but helped instead on his uncle’s farm, milking the cows and bringing them to and from the pasture. He was patient with me too, more so than Cassis, never making fun of my ignorance or scorning me because I was small. Of course, he’s old now. But I sometimes think that of the four of us, he is the one who has aged the least.

It was already, in early June, promising to be a hot summer and the Loire was low and surly with quicksand and landslides. There were snakes too, more than usual, flat-headed brown adders that lurked in the cool mud in the shallows. Jeannette Gaudin was bitten by one of these as she paddled one dry afternoon, and they buried her a week later in Saint-Benedict’s churchyard, beneath a little plaster cross and an angel. Beloved Daughter…1934–1942. I was a year older than she was.

Suddenly I felt as if a gulf had opened beneath me, a hot, deep hole like a giant mouth. If Jeannette could die, then so could I. So could anyone. Cassis looked down from the height of his fourteen years in some scorn: “You expect people to die in wartime, stupid. Children too. People die all the time.”

I tried to explain and found that I could not. Soldiers dying – even my own father – that was one thing. Even civilians killed in bombing, though there had been little enough of that in Les Laveuses. But this was different. My nightmares worsened. I spent hours watching the river with my fishing net, catching the evil brown snakes in the shallows, smashing their flat clever heads with a stone and nailing their bodies to the exposed roots at the riverbank. A week of this and there were twenty or more drooping lankly from the roots, and the stink – fishy and oddly sweet, like something bad fermented – was overwhelming. Cassis and Reinette were still at school – they both went to the collège in Angers – and it was Paul who found me with a clothespin on my nose to keep out the stench, doggedly stirring the muddy soup of the verge with my net.

He was wearing shorts and sandals, and held his dog, Malabar, on a leash made of string.

I gave him a look of indifference and turned back to the water. Paul sat down next to me. Malabar flopped onto the path, panting. I ignored them both. At last Paul spoke.

“Wh-what’s wrong?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. I’m just fishing, that’s all.”

Another silence.

“For’s-snakes.” His voice was carefully uninflected.

I nodded, rather defiantly.

“So?”

“So nothing.” He patted Malabar’s head. “You can do what you like.”