Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина - стр. 54

He had killed one Englishman and two Frenchmen so far in the course of the war. He made no secret of it, but the way he told the story you would have sworn he had no choice. It could have been our father, I thought afterward. But even so, I would have forgiven him. I would have forgiven him anything.

Of course, I was guarded at first. We met him three times more, twice alone at the river, once in the cinema with the others, Hauer, Heinemann-squat and red-haired-and slow, fat Schwartz. Twice we sent notes via the boy at the newspaper stand, twice more we received cigarettes, magazines, books, chocolate and a packet of nylon stockings for Reinette. People are less wary of children, as a rule. They guard their tongues less. We gleaned more information that way than you could ever imagine, and we passed it all, on to Hauer, Heinemann, Schwartz and Leibniz. The other soldiers hardly spoke to us. Schwartz, who spoke little French, would sometimes leer at Reinette and whisper at her in guttural, greasy-sounding German. Hauer was stiff and awkward, and Heinemann was full of nervous energy, scratching incessantly at the reddish stubble that seemed an indelible part of his face… The others made me uneasy.

But not Tomas. Tomas was one of us. He was able to reach us in a way no one else did. It was nothing as obvious as our mother’s indifference or the loss of our father, or even the lack of playmates or the privations of war. We were barely aware of those things ourselves, living as we did in our savage little world of the imagination. We were certainly taken by surprise at how desperately we needed Tomas. Not for what he brought us, the chocolate and chewing gum and makeup and magazines. We needed someone to tell about our exploits, someone to impress, a fellow conspirator with the energy of youth and the polish of experience, a teller of finer stories than even Cassis could dream of. It didn’t happen overnight, of course. We were wild animals, just as Mother said, and we took some taming. He must have known that from the start, the clever way he set out to take us one by one, making each feel special… Even now, God help me, I can almost believe it. Even now.

I hid the rod in the treasure chest for safekeeping. I had to be careful when I used it, because everybody in Les Laveuses was apt to mind your business for you if you didn’t mind it yourself, and it wouldn’t take more than a chance comment to alert Mother. Paul knew, of course, but I told him that the rod had belonged to my father, and with the stammer he had, he was never one to gossip. In any case, if he ever suspected anything, he kept it to himself, and I was grateful for that.

July turned hot and sour, with thunderstorms every other day and the sky roiling mad and purple-gray over the river. At the end of the month the Loire burst its banks, washing all my traps and nets away downstream, then spilling down into Hourias’s cornfields, with the corn just yellow-green and three weeks from full ripeness. It rained almost every night that month, and lightning sheeted down like great crackling rolls of silver paper so that Reinette screamed and hid under her bed, and Cassis and I stood at the open window with our mouths open to see if we could catch radio signals on our teeth. Mother had more headaches than ever, and I only used the orange bag-revitalized now with the skin of the orange Tomas had given us-twice that month and into the next. The rest was her own problem, and she often slept badly and woke with a mouth full of barbed wire and not a kind thought in her head. On those days, I thought of Tomas like a starving man thinks of food. I think the others did the same.