Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина - стр. 28

She leveled her gaze at me. I remember her eyes were almost gold, the color of boiling sugar syrup as it begins to turn.

I shrugged. “I don’t suppose anything happened,” I said reasonably. “I mean, they wouldn’t send an old man like that to the front just for having a radio.”

“No. Course they wouldn’t.” Her reply was too hasty. “Besides, he shouldn’t have had it in the first place, should he?”

I agreed he shouldn’t. It was against the rules. A teacher should have known that. Reine looked at the lipstick, turning it gently, lovingly in her hand.

“You won’t tell, then?” She stroked my arm gently. “You won’t, will you, Boise?”

I pulled away, rubbing my arm automatically where she had touched me. I never did like being petted.

“Do you and Cassis see these Germans often?” I questioned.

She shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“D’you tell them anything else?”

“No.” She spoke too quickly. “We just talk. Look, Boise, you won’t tell anyone, will you?”

I smiled. “Well, I might not. Not if you do something for me.”

She looked at me narrowly.

“What do you mean?”

“I’d like to go into Angers sometimes, with you and Cassis,” I said slyly. “To the pictures, and the café, and stuff…”

I paused for effect and she glared at me from eyes as bright and narrow as knives.

“Or,” I continued in a falsely holy tone, “I might tell Mother that you’ve been talking to the people who killed our father. Talking to them and spying for them. Enemies of France. See what she says to that.”

Reinette looked agitated.

“Boise, you promised!”

I shook my head solemnly.

“That doesn’t count. It’s my patriotic duty.”

I must have sounded convincing. Reinette turned pale. And yet the words themselves meant nothing to me. I felt no real hostility to the Germans. Even when I told myself that they had killed my father, that the man who did it might even be there, actually there in Angers, an hour’s cycle ride down the road, drinking Gros-Plant in some bar-tabac and smoking a Gauloise. The image was clear in my mind, and yet it had little potency. Perhaps because my father’s face was already blurring in my memory. Perhaps in the same way that children rarely get involved in the quarrels of adults, and that adults rarely understand the sudden hostilities that erupt for no comprehensible reason between children. My voice was prim and disapproving, but what I really wanted had nothing to do with our father, France or the war. I wanted to be involved again, to be treated as an adult, a bearer of secrets. And I wanted to go to the cinema, to see Laurel and Hardy or Bela Lugosi or Humphrey Bogart, to sit in the flickering dark with Cassis on one side and Reine-Claude on the other, maybe with a cone of chips in one hand or a strip of licorice…

Reinette shook her head. “You’re crazy,” she said at last. “You know Mother would never let you go into town on your own. You’re too young. Besides-”

“I wouldn’t be on my own. You or Cassis could take me on the back of your bike,”

I continued stubbornly. She rode my mother’s bike. Cassis took Father’s bike to school with him, an awkward black gantrylike thing. It was too far to walk, and without the bikes they would have had to board at the collège, as many country children did.

“Term’s nearly over. We could all go into Angers together. See a film. Have a look round.”