Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина - Харрис Джоанн

I watched him go. He did not look back. I watched him as he sauntered down the lane toward the Hourias farm and flicked his cigarette end into the outhouse wall, its glowing tip striking red sparks against the dull Loire stone.

16

I said nothing to Cassis or Reinette about what had occurred between Leibniz and myself. To have spoken of it to them would have robbed it of its potency. Instead I hugged my secret close, turning it over in my mind like a stolen treasure. It gave me a peculiarly adult feeling of power.

I now thought of Cassis’s film magazines and Reinette’s lipstick with a certain contempt. They thought they’d been so clever. But what had they really done? They’d behaved like children telling tales in school. The Germans treated them like children, bribing them with trinkets. Leibniz had not tried to bribe me. He had spoken to me as an equal, with respect.

The Hourias farm had been badly hit. A week’s supply of eggs requisitioned, half the milk, two whole sides of salted pork, seven pounds of butter, a barrel of oil, twenty-four bottles of wine (ill concealed behind a partition in the cellar), plus any number of terrines and preserves. Paul told me about it. I felt a small pang for him-his uncle provided most of the family’s supplies-but promised myself I would share my own food with him whenever I could. Besides, the season was just beginning. Philippe Hourias would make up his losses soon enough. And I had other things on my mind.

The orange bag was still hidden where I had left it. Not under my mattress-though Reinette still insisted upon keeping her original cache for the beauty aids she imagined to be secret. No, my secret place was a great deal more imaginative. I placed the bag in a small screw-top glass jar and sunk it elbow deep in a barrel of salted anchovies that my mother kept in the cellar. A piece of string tied around the lip of the jar would enable me to locate it when needed. Discovery was unlikely, as Mother disliked the pungent scent of the anchovies and usually sent me to fetch any that might be required.

I knew it would work again.

I waited until Wednesday evening. This time I hid the bag in the spill tray under the stove, where the heat would release the vapor the quickest. Sure enough, Mother was soon rubbing her temple as she worked at the stove, snapping sharply at me if I was late in bringing her flour or wood, scolding-mind you don’t chip my good plates, girl! – and sniffing the air with that animal look of confusion and distress. I closed the kitchen door for maximum effect, and the scent of orange invaded the room once again. I hid the bag in her pillow as before-the pieces of orange peel were crisp by then, blackened by the heat of the stove, and I felt sure that this would be the last time I used the orange bag-pushing it into the pillow beneath the striped slip.

Dinner was burnt.

No one dared mention it, though, and my mother fingered the black brittle lace of her charred pancakes and touched her temple over and over until I was sure I would scream. This time she did not ask whether we had brought oranges into the house, though I could tell she wanted to. She just touched and crumbled and fingered and fidgeted, sometimes breaking the silence with a fierce exclamation of rage at some trivial infringement of the house rules.

“Reine-Claude! Bread on the breadboard! I don’t want you getting crumbs on my clean floor!”

Her voice was waspish, exasperated. I cut a slice of bread, deliberately turning the bread over onto the breadboard so that the flat underside was uppermost. For some reason this always enraged Mother, as did my habit of cutting off the crusty piece from either end of the loaf and discarding the middle section.

“Framboise! Turn that bread over!” She touched her head again, fleetingly, as if checking it was still there. “How many times have I told you about-”

Then she froze midsentence, head on one side, mouth open.

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She stayed that way for thirty seconds or so, staring at nothing with the face of a slow pupil trying to remember Pythagoras’s theorem or the rule of the ablative absolute. Her eyes were glassy-green and blank as winter ice. We looked at one another in silence, watching her as the seconds passed. Then she moved again, a brusque and typical gesture of irritation, and began to clear the dishes even though we were only halfway through the meal. No one mentioned that, either.

The next day, as I had predicted, she kept to her bed, and we went to Angers as before. Not to the pictures this time; instead we loitered in the streets, Cassis ostentatiously smoking one of his cigarettes, and settled on the terrasse of a town-center café, Le Chat Rouget. Reinette and I ordered diabolo-menthe, and Cassis began to order pastis, changing meekly to panaché beneath the supercilious gaze of the waiter.

Reine drank carefully, trying not to smear her lipstick. She seemed nervous, head ticking from side to side as if watching out for something.

“Who are we waiting for?” I inquired. “Your Germans?”

Cassis glared at me.

“Tell everyone, won’t you, you idiot!” he snapped. He lowered his voice. “We sometimes meet here,” he explained. “You can pass messages. No one notices. We trade information.”

“What kind of information?”

Cassis made a sound of derision.

“Anything,” he said impatiently. “People with radios. Black market. Traffickers. Resistance.”

He gave this last word a heavy emphasis, lowering his voice still further.

“Resistance,” I repeated.

Try to see what that meant to us. We were children. We had our own rules. The adult world was a distant planet inhabited by aliens. We understood so little of it. Least of all the Resistance, that fabulous quasi-organization. Books and the television made it sound so focused in later years; but I remember none of that. Instead I remember a mad scramble in which rumor chased counter-rumor and drunkards in cafés spoke loudly against the new régime, and people fled to relatives in the country, out of the reach of an invading army already stretched beyond tolerance in the towns. The One Resistance-the Secret Army of popular understanding-was a myth. There were many groups, Communists and Humanists and Socialists and people seeking martyrdom and swaggarts and drunkards and opportunists and saints-all sanctified by time, but in those days nothing like an army, and hardly a secret. Mother spoke of them with scorn. According to her, we’d all be better off if people just kept their heads down.

Even so, Cassis’s whisper awed me. Resistance. It was a word that appealed to my sense of adventure, of drama. It brought images of rival gangs struggling for power, of nighttime escapades, shootings, secret meetings, treasures, dangers braved. In a sense this was still very similar to the games we had played in previous years, Reine, Cassis, Paul and I: the potato guns, passwords, the rituals. The game had broadened a little, that was all. The stakes were higher.

“You don’t know any Resistance,” I said cynically, trying not to sound impressed.

“Not yet, maybe,” said Cassis. “But we could find out. We’ve found out all kinds of things already.”

“It’s all right,” continued Reinette. “We don’t talk about anyone in Les Laveuses. We wouldn’t tell on our neighbors.”

I nodded. That wouldn’t be fair.

“Anyway, in Angers it’s different. Everyone’s doing it here.”

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I considered this.

“I could find things out too.”

“What do you know?” said Cassis scornfully.

I almost told him what I’d said to Leibniz about Madame Petit and the parachute silk, but decided against it. Instead I asked the question that had been troubling me since Cassis had first mentioned their arrangement with the Germans.

“What do they do when you tell them things? Do they shoot people? Do they send them to the front?”