Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина - стр. 79

He demonstrated with a rapid movement of the hands, closing imaginary jaws on the invisible victim.

I watched him with wide eyes.

“It keeps away from traps and nets. It knows them by sight. Other fish get greedy, but the old pike just bides its time. It knows to wait. And the bait… it knows that too. Lures don’t work for the old pike. Live bait’s all it will take, and even then only sometimes. Takes a clever man to catch a pike.” He smiled. “You and I could both learn a few lessons from an old pike like that, Backfisch.”

Well, I took him at his word. I met him once a fortnight or even once a week, once or twice alone, more often the three of us. It was usually a Thursday, and we met by the Lookout Post and went into the woods or downriver away from the village, where no one would see us. Often Tomas wore civilian clothing, leaving his uniform hidden so that no one would ask questions. On Mother’s bad days I used the orange bag to keep her to her room while we met Tomas. On all other days I rose at four thirty every morning and fished before the morning’s chores began, taking care to choose the darkest and quietest parts of the Loire. I caught live bait in my cray pots, keeping them alive and trapped until I could use them to bait my new rod. Then I skimmed them across the water, just lightly enough for their pale bellies to touch the surface, raking the current with the living lure. I caught several pike that way, but they were all youngsters, none of them much longer than a hand or a foot. I pinned them to the Standing Stones all the same, with the stinking strips of water snake that had hung there all that summer.

Like the pike, I waited.

It was early September now, and summer was drawing to an end. Still hot, there was a new ripeness in the air, something rich and swollen, a sweet scent of honey decay. The bad August rains had spoiled much of the fruit harvest, and what remained was black with wasps, but we picked it anyway-we could not afford waste, and what could not be sold as fresh fruit might still make jam or liqueur for the winter. My mother supervised the operation, giving us all thick gloves to wear and wooden tongs (once used for picking washing out of the boiling vats at the laundry) to pick up the fallen fruit. I remember the wasps were especially mean that year, perhaps scenting the approach of autumn and their coming deaths, for they stung us repeatedly in spite of our gloves as we flung the half-rotten fruit into the big boiling pans for jam. The jam itself was half wasps at first, and Reine-who loathed insects-was almost hysterical at having to scoop their half-dead bodies from the scummy surface of the red liquid with a slotted spoon, flinging them far onto the path in a spray of plum juice where soon enough their living companions were crawling stickily. Mother had no patience with such behavior. We were not expected to be afraid of such things as wasps, and when Reine screamed and cried at having to pick up the swarming masses of windfall plums, she spoke to her more sharply than usual.

“Don’t be more of a fool than God made you, girl,” she snapped. “Do you think the plums will pick themselves? Or do you expect the rest of us to do it for you?”