The Orange Grove

by Larry Tremblay

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  © 2013, Text by Larry Tremblay

  © 2015, English translation by Sheila Fischman

  First published in French as L’orangeraie by Éditions Alto, Canada, 2013.

  First published in English by Biblioasis, Canada, 2015.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300,

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

  (800) 520-6455

  www.milkweed.org

  Published 2016 by Milkweed Editions

  Cover design by Gretchen Achilles

  Cover photo by Jose-Luis Saez Martinez / EyeEm / Getty Images

  Author photo by Bernard Préfontaine

  161718192054321

  First US Edition

  Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit www.milkweed.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tremblay, Larry, 1954- author. | Fischman, Sheila, translator.

  The orange grove: a novel / Larry Tremblay; translated from the French by Sheila Fischman.

  Other titles: Orangeraie. English

  Description: First edition. | Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015050417 (print) | LCCN 2015050908 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571319340 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Twin brothers—Fiction. | War—Psychological aspects—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Political. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Family Life.

  Classification: LCC PQ3919.2.T7187 O7313 2016 (print) | LCC PQ3919.2.T7187 (ebook) | DDC 843/.914--dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050417

  Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. The Orange Grove was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.

  For Joan

  CONTENTS

  AMED

  AZIZ

  SONY

  AMED

  If Amed cried, Aziz cried too. If Aziz laughed, Amed laughed too. People would make fun of them, saying: “Later on they’ll marry each other.”

  Their grandmother’s name was Shahina. With her bad eyes she always confused them. She would call them her two drops of water in the desert. “Stop holding hands,” she would say, “I feel as if I’m seeing double.” Or, “Some day, there won’t be any more drops, there will be water, that’s all.” She could have said: “One day there will be blood. That’s all.”

  Amed and Aziz found their grandparents in the ruins of their house. Their grandmother’s skull had been smashed in by a beam. Their grandfather was lying in his bedroom, his body shredded by the bomb that had come from the side of the mountain where every night the sun disappeared.

  It had still been night when the bomb fell. But Shahina had already been up. Her body was found in the kitchen.

  “What was she doing in the kitchen in the middle of the night?” asked Amed.

  “We’ll never know. Maybe she was baking a cake in secret,” his mother replied.

  “Why in secret?” asked Aziz.

  “Maybe for a surprise,” Tamara suggested to her two sons, sweeping the air with her hand as if brushing away a fly.

  Their grandmother used to talk to herself. In fact, she had liked to talk to everything around her. The boys had seen her ask questions of the flowers in the garden, argue with the stream that ran between their houses. She could spend hours bent over the water, whispering to it. Zahed had been ashamed to see his mother behave in this way. He had rebuked her for setting a bad example for her grandsons. “You act like a lunatic,” he’d yelled. Shahina had bowed her head and closed her eyes, in silence.

  One day Amed had told his grandmother:

  “There’s a voice in my head. It talks to itself. I can’t make it be quiet, it says strange things. As if someone else were hidden inside me, someone bigger than me.”

  “Tell me, Amed, tell me the strange things it says to you.”

  “I can’t tell you because I forget them right away.”

  That had been a lie. He did not forget them.

  Aziz had been to the big city once. His father, Zahed, rented a car. Hired a chauffeur. They left at dawn. Aziz watched the new landscape file past the car window. Thought the space the car sliced through was beautiful. Thought the trees disappearing from sight beautiful. Thought the cows, horns smeared with red, beautiful, calm as big stones on the burning ground. The road was shaken by joy and anger. Aziz was writhing in pain. And smiling. His gaze drowned the landscape with tears. And the landscape was like the image of a country.

  Zahed had said to his wife:

  “I’m taking him to the hospital in the big city.”

  “I will pray, Amed will pray” was Tamara’s simple reply.

  When the driver announced they were finally approaching the city, Aziz fainted and saw nothing of the splendors he’d heard about. He regained consciousness lying in a bed. In the room were other beds, with other children in them. He thought he was lying in all those beds. He thought the excessive pain had multiplied his body. He thought he was twisting in pain in all those beds with all those bodies. A doctor was leaning over him. Aziz smelled his spicy perfume. The doctor was smiling at Aziz. Even so, Aziz was afraid of the man.

  “Did you sleep well?”

  Aziz said nothing. The doctor straightened up, his smile faded. He talked to Aziz’s father. Father and doctor exited the big room. Zahed’s fists were clenched. He was breathing heavily.

  A few days later, Aziz was feeling better. They gave him a thick liquid to drink. He took it morning and night. It was pink. He didn’t like the taste, but it relieved his pain. His father came to see him every day. Said he was staying with his cousin Kacir. That was all he said. Zahed looked at Aziz in silence, touched his brow. His hand was as hard as a branch. Once, Aziz woke with a start. His father was looking at him, sitting on a chair. His gaze frightened Aziz.

  A little girl was in the bed next to that of Aziz. Her name was Naliffa. She told Aziz that her heart had not grown properly in her chest.

  “My heart grew upside down, you know, it’s pointed the wrong way.”

  She said that to all the other children sleeping in the big hospital room. Naliffa talked to everybody. One night, Aziz screamed in his sleep. Naliffa was frightened. At daybreak, she told him what she’d seen.

  “Your eyes went white like balls of dough, you stood up on your bed, and you waved your arms. I thought you were trying to scare me. I called to you. But your mind was no longer in your head. It had disappeared I don’t know where. The nurses came. They put a screen around your bed.”

  “I had a nightmare.”
r />   “Why are there nightmares? Do you know?”

  “I don’t know, Naliffa. Mama often says, ‘God only knows.’”

  “Mama says the same thing: ‘God only knows.’ She also says, ‘It’s been that way since the dawn of time.’ The dawn of time, Mama told me, is the first night of the world. It was so dark that the first ray of sunlight that broke through the night howled in pain.”

  “More likely it was the night that howled as it was being pierced.”

  “Maybe,” said Naliffa, “maybe.”

  A few days later, Zahed asked Aziz about the little girl who had been in the next bed. Aziz replied that her mother had come to get her because she was cured. His father lowered his head. He said nothing. After a long while, he raised his head again. He still didn’t say anything. Then he bent over his son. He placed a kiss on his brow. It was the first time he’d done that. Aziz had tears in his eyes. His father murmured, “Tomorrow, we’re going home too.”

  Aziz left with his father and the same driver. He watched the road fly past in the rearview mirror. His father was creating a strange silence, smoking in the car. He had brought dates and a cake. Before arriving at the house, Aziz asked his father if he was all better.

  “You won’t go back to the hospital again! Our prayers have been answered.”

  Zahed placed his big hand on his son’s head. Aziz was happy. Three days later the bomb from the other side of the mountain split the night and killed his grandparents.

  On the day Zahed and Aziz came back from the big city, Tamara received a letter from her sister, Dalimah. She had gone to America some years earlier for an internship in data processing. She had been selected from a hundred candidates, quite an achievement. But she’d never come back. Dalimah wrote regularly to her sister even though Tamara rarely replied. In the letters she described her life. There was no war over there, that was what made her so happy. And so daring. She offered to send money but Tamara curtly refused her help.

  In her letter, Dalimah announced that she was pregnant. Her first child. She asked Tamara to come over with the twins. She would find a way to bring them to America. She let it be understood that Tamara should abandon Zahed. Leave him alone with his war and his groves of orange trees.

  “How she’s changed in a few years!”

  There were days when Tamara hated her sister. She was mad at her: how could she expect Tamara to leave her husband? She wouldn’t leave Zahed. No. And she would fight too, even if Dalimah wrote that their war was pointless, that there would only be losers.

  Zahed had stopped asking for news about her long ago. For him, Dalimah was dead. He wouldn’t even touch her letters. “I don’t want to be soiled,” he would say, disgusted. Dalimah’s husband was an engineer. Dalimah never mentioned him in her letters. She knew that in her family’s eyes he was a hypocrite and a coward. Like the bomb, he’d come from the other side of the mountain. He was an enemy. He’d fled to America. To gain acceptance there he had recounted horrors and lies about their people. That was what Tamara and Zahed believed. Had Dalimah not found anything better to do when she arrived there than to marry an enemy? How could she? “It was God who put him in my way,” she had written to them one day. “She’s an idiot,” thought Tamara. “America has clouded her judgment. What is she waiting for? For us all to be slaughtered by her husband’s friends? What did she think when she married him? That she was going to contribute to the peace process? Basically, she has always been selfish. Why bother telling her about our hardships? Who knows? Her husband might be thrilled.”

  Later, in a brief reply to her sister, Tamara said nothing about Aziz having been in the hospital. Or about the bomb that had just killed her parents-in-law.

  Men pulled up in a jeep. Amed and Aziz caught sight of a cloud of dust on the road that ran close to their house. The family was in the orange grove. That was where Zahed had wanted to bury his parents. He had just thrown in the last spadeful of earth. His forehead and arms were wet with sweat. Tamara was crying and biting the inside of her cheek. The jeep stopped on the side of the road. Three men emerged from it. The tallest held a machine gun. They did not head for the orange grove immediately. They lit cigarettes. Amed dropped his brother’s hand and went to the road. He wanted to hear what the three men were saying. He couldn’t. They were speaking too quietly. The youngest of the three finally took a few steps towards him. Amed recognized Halim. He’d grown a lot.

  “Remember me? I’m Halim. I met you at the village school. When there still was a school.” Halim started to laugh.

  “Yes, I remember you, you were the only one of the grown-ups who talked to my brother and me. Your beard’s grown.”

  “We want to talk to your father, Zahed.”

  Amed headed for the orange grove, followed by the three men. His father approached them. Amed saw his mother’s eyes harden. She shouted at him to join her. The men argued with Zahed for a long time. Tamara thought to herself that there was a curse on this day. She watched her husband. Zahed hung his head, looked at the ground. Halim gestured to Amed, who broke away from the arms of his mother, who was holding her two sons against her belly, to join the group of men. Zahed laid his hand on the boy’s head, saying proudly:

  “This is my son Amed.”

  “And the other boy?”

  “Aziz, his twin brother.”

  They stayed till evening. Zahed showed them the ruins of his parents’ house. They all looked up toward the mountain as if they were seeking in the sky the track of the bomb. Tamara made tea. She sent the children to their room. Later, Amed and Aziz watched out the window as the man with the machine gun went back to the jeep and returned a few minutes later, carrying a bag. They thought they heard their mother cry. Then the men left. The sound of the jeep driving away echoed in the night for a long time. Amed hugged his brother tight and finally fell asleep.

  The next day Aziz said:

  “Didn’t you notice? The sounds don’t sound the same and silence seems to be hiding to work on some dirty trick.”

  “You were sick. That’s why you’re imagining things.”

  But Amed knew that his brother was right. From his bedroom window he caught a glimpse of his mother. He called to her. She moved away. Amed thought she was crying. He saw her disappear behind the amaryllis his grandmother had planted the year before. Now they were enormous. Their open blossoms swallowed the light. Amed and Aziz went down to the first floor. Their mother hadn’t fixed the morning meal. Their father hadn’t slept, they could tell by his tired face. He was sitting on the kitchen floor. What was he doing there, alone? It was the first time the boys had seen their father doing that.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No.”

  They were hungry though. Next to their father was a canvas bag.

  “What’s that?” asked Aziz. “Did the men in the jeep forget it?”

  “They didn’t forget it,” said Zahed.

  He gestured to his sons to sit beside him. Then he talked about the man with the machine gun.

  “He’s an important man,” he told his sons. “He comes from the next village. His name is Soulayed. He talked to me with his heart. He insisted on seeing the ruins of your grandparents’ house. He will pray for the salvation of their souls. He’s a pious man. An educated man. When he finished drinking his tea he took my hand.

  “He said to me: ‘How peaceful your house is! I close my eyes and the perfume of the orange trees sweeps over me. Your father, Mounir, worked his whole life on this arid soil. It was the desert here. With God’s help your father worked a miracle. Made oranges grow where there had been only sand and stones. Don’t think that because I come to you with a machine gun, I don’t have the eyes and ears of a poet. I hear and I see that which is just and pleasant. You are a bighearted man. Your house is clean. Everything in its place. Your wife’s tea is delicious. You know what they say, too much sugar, too little sugar: good tea falls between the two. Your wife’s is the golden mean. The stream that runs between your
father’s house and your own is in the very middle too. From the road it’s the first thing one notices, the beauty that’s exactly in the middle. Zahed, your father was known throughout the land. He was a just man. It took a just man to transform this faceless territory into a paradise. The birds are never wrong where paradise is concerned, even when they hide in the shadow of the mountains. They recognize it very quickly. Tell me, Zahed, do you know the names of the birds that are singing right now? Surely not. There are too many and their songs are too elusive. Through the window I can see some with wings that flash a saffron color. Those birds have come from very far away. Just now their vivid colors mingle with those of the orange grove where you have just buried your parents. And their song rings out like a blessing. But can these nameless birds lessen your grief? No. Revenge is the only answer for your grief. Listen carefully, Zahed. In nearby villages other houses have been destroyed. Many people have died because of missiles and bombs. Our enemies want to seize our land. They want our land to build their houses and make their wives pregnant. After invading our villages they will advance to the big city. They will kill our women. Enslave our children. And that will be the end of our country. Our earth will be soiled by their steps, by their spittle. Do you believe that God will allow this sacrilege? Do you believe that, Zahed?’

  “That is what Soulayed said to your father.”

  Amed and Aziz dared not move or speak. Never had their father talked at such length. Zahed stood up. Took a few steps in the room. Amed whispered to his brother: “He’s thinking. When he walks like that it means he’s thinking.”

  After a long moment Zahed opened the bag the men had left behind. Inside was a strange belt which he unrolled. It was so heavy he needed both hands to lift it.

  “Soulayed brought it,” Zahed told his sons. “At first I didn’t realize what he was showing me. Halim put the belt on. That was when I understood that those men were here to see me. Your mother came in. She was bringing more tea. She saw Halim and started to shriek. She spilled the tray. The teapot fell to the floor. A glass broke. I asked your mother to pick it all up and come back with more tea. I apologized to Soulayed. Your mother shouldn’t have shrieked.”