“If I had contacts with the black market,” I said with a passable show of skepticism, “I’d make sure I got better stuff than a few old papers.”
Cassis looked stung. “I can get anything I want,” he said quickly. “Comics, smokes, books, real coffee…chocolate-” He broke off with a scornful laugh. “You can’t even get the money for a rotten cinema ticket!” he said.
“No?” Smiling, I took the purse from out of my apron pocket. I jingled it a little, so that he could hear the coins inside. His eyes widened as he recognized the purse.
“You little thief!” he breathed at last. “You rotten, bitching little thief!”
I looked at him, but said nothing.
“How did you get that?”
“Swum out and got it,” I answered defiantly. “Anyway, it wasn’t stealing. The treasure belonged to all of us.”
But Cassis was hardly listening. “You bitching, thieving…” he said again. Clearly he was disturbed that anyone other than he should obtain anything by guile.
“I don’t see that it’s any different from you and your black market,” I said calmly. “It’s all the same game, isn’t it?” I let this sink in before I continued. “And you’re just upset because I’m better at it than you.”
Cassis glared at me. “It isn’t anything like the same thing,” he said at last.
I kept my expression disbelieving. It was always so easy to make Cassis give himself away. Just like his son, all those years later. Neither of them ever understood anything about guile. Cassis was red-faced, almost shouting now, his conspiratorial tone forgotten. “I could get you anything you liked. Proper fishing tackle for your stupid pike,” he hissed savagely. “Chewing gum, shoes, silk stockings, silk underwear if you wanted-” I laughed aloud at that. Brought up as we had been, the idea of silk underwear was ludicrous. Enraged, Cassis grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me.
“You stop that!” His voice cracked with fury. “I got friends! I know people! I could get-you-anything-you-wanted!”
You see how easy it was to take him off balance. Cassis was spoiled in his way, too used to being the great older brother, the man of the house, the first to go to school, the tallest, the strongest, the wisest. His occasional bouts of wildness-his escapades into the woods, his daredevilry on the Loire, his small thefts from market stalls and shops in Angers-were uncontrolled, almost hysterical. He took no enjoyment from them. It was as if he needed to prove something to both of us, or to himself.
I could tell I perplexed him. His thumbs were digging so deeply into my arms that they would make great ripe blackberry marks on my skin the next day, but I did not show any sign of it. Instead I just looked at him steadily and tried to stare him out.
“We’ve got friends, Reine and me,” he said in a lower voice, almost reasonable now, his thumbs still gouging into my arms. “Powerful friends. Where do you think she got that stupid lipstick? Or the perfume? Or that stuff she puts on her face at night? Where d’you think we got all that from? And how d’you think we earned it?”
He let go of my arms then with an expression of mingled pride and consternation, and I realized that he was slick with fear.
13.
I don’t remember very much about the film. Circonstances Atténuantes, with Arletty and Michel Simon, an old film that Cassis and Reine had already seen. Reine at least was untroubled by the fact; she stared at the screen the whole time, rapt. I found the story unlikely, too removed from my realities. Besides, my mind was on other things. Twice the film in the projector broke; the second time the houselights went on and the audience roared disapproval. A harassed-looking man in a dinner jacket shouted for silence. A group of Germans in a corner, feet resting on the seats in front of them, began slow-clapping. Suddenly Reine, who had come out of her trance to complain irritably about the interruption, gave a squeak of excitement.
“Cassis!” She leaned over me and I could smell a sweetish chemical scent in her hair. “Cassis, he’s here!”
“Shh!” hissed Cassis furiously. “Don’t look back!” Reine and Cassis sat facing the front of the auditorium for a moment, expressionless as dummies. Then he spoke, from the corner of his mouth, like someone whispering in church.
“Who?”
Reinette flicked a glance at the Germans from the corner of her eye.
“Back there,” she replied in the same fashion. “Some others I don’t know.” Around us the crowd stamped and yelled. Cassis ventured a quick look.
“I’ll wait till the lights go down,” he said.
Ten minutes later the lights dimmed and the film continued. Cassis wriggled from his seat toward the back of the auditorium. I followed him. On the screen Arletty pranced and eye-fluttered in a tight low-cut dress. The mercury reflection lit our low-bent, running figures, making Cassis’s face a livid mask.
“Go back, you little idiot,” he hissed at me. “I don’t want you with me, getting in the way!”
I shook my head. “I won’t get in the way,” I told him. “Not unless you try to stop me coming with you.”
Cassis made an impatient gesture. He knew I meant what I said. In the dark I could feel him trembling, with excitement or nerves. “Keep down,” he told me at last. “And let me do the talking.”
We finally squatted down at the back of the auditorium, close to where the group of German soldiers made an island among the regular crowd. Several of the men were smoking; we could see dimps of red fire on their flickering faces.
“See him there, at the end?” whispered Cassis. “That’s Hauer. I want to talk to him. You just stay with me and don’t say a word, all right?”
I did not reply. I wasn’t going to promise anything.
Cassis slid into the aisle next to the soldier called Hauer. Looking around curiously I could see that no one was paying us the slightest attention except the German standing behind us, a slight, sharp-faced young man with his uniform cap tilted back at a rakish angle and a cigarette in one hand. Beside me I heard Cassis whispering urgently to Hauer, then the crackle of papers. The sharp-faced German grinned at me and gestured with the cigarette.
Suddenly, with a jolt, I recognized him. It was the soldier from the market, the one who had seen me take the orange.
For a minute I could do nothing but stare at him, transfixed.
The German gestured again. The glow from the cinema screen lit his face, throwing dramatic shadows from his eyes and cheekbones.
I cast a nervous glance at Cassis, but my brother was too deep in conversation with Hauer to notice me. The German was still watching expectantly, a little smile on his lips, standing some distance away from where the others were seated. He held his cigarette with the tip cupped into his palm, and I could see the dark smudge of his bones beneath the glowing flesh. He was in uniform, but his jacket was undone and his head was bare.
For some obscure reason, that reassured me.
“Come here,” said the German softly.
I could not speak. My mouth felt as if it were full of straw. I would have run, but was not sure my legs would carry me. Instead, I put up my chin and moved toward him.
The German grinned and dragged another breath from his cigarette.
“You’re the little orange girl, aren’t you?” he said as I came closer.
I did not reply.
The German seemed unconcerned by my silence. “You’re quick. As quick as I was when I was a boy.” He reached into his pocket and brought out something wrapped in silver paper. “Here. You’ll like it. It’s chocolate.”
I eyed him with suspicion. “I don’t want it,” I said.
The German grinned again. “You like oranges better, do you?” he asked.
I said nothing.
“I remember an orchard by a river,” the German said softly. “Near the village where I grew up. It had the biggest, blackest plums you ever saw. High wall all around. Farm dogs prowling. All through summer, I tried to get at those plums! I tried everything. I could hardly think of anything el
se.”
His voice was pleasant and lightly accented, his eyes bright behind a scrawl of cigarette smoke. I observed him warily, not daring to move, unsure whether or not he was making fun of me.
“Besides, what’s stolen tastes so much better than what you get for free, don’t you think?”
Now I was sure he was mocking me, and my eyes widened indignantly.
The German seemed to see my expression, and laughed, still holding out the chocolate. “Go on, Backfisch, take it. Imagine you’re stealing it from the Boches.”
The square was half melted, and I ate it straightaway. It was real chocolate too-not the whitish, gritty stuff we occasionally bought in Angers. The German watched me eat, amused, as I eyed him with undiminished suspicion, but with growing curiosity.
“Did you get them in the end?” I asked at last, in a voice thick with chocolate. “The plums, I mean?”
The German nodded. “I did, Backfisch. I still remember the taste.”
“And you weren’t caught?”
“That too.” The grin became rueful. “I ate so many that I made myself sick, and so I was found out. I got such a hiding! But I got what I wanted in the end. That’s what matters, isn’t it?”
“That’s good,” I agreed. “I like to win.” I paused. “Is that why you didn’t tell anyone about the orange?”
The German shrugged. “Why should I tell anyone? It was none of my business. Besides, the grocer had plenty more. He could spare one.”
I nodded. “He’s got a van,” I said, licking the square of silver paper so that none of the chocolate would be lost.
The German seemed to agree. “Some people want to keep everything they’ve got to themselves,” he said. “That isn’t fair, is it?”
I shook my head. “Like Madame Petit at the sewing shop,” I said. “Charges the earth for a bit of parachute silk she got for free.”
“Precisely.”
It struck me then that perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned Madame Petit, and I shot him a quick glance, but the German seemed hardly to be listening. Instead he was looking at Cassis, still whispering to Hauer at the end of the row of seats. I felt a stab of annoyance that Cassis should interest him more than I did.
“That’s my brother,” I said.
“Is it?” The German looked back at me again, smiling. “You’re quite a family. Are there any more of you, I wonder?”
I shook my head. “I’m the youngest. Framboise.”
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Françoise.”
I grinned. “Framboise,” I corrected.
“Leibniz. Tomas.” He held out his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, I shook it.
14.
So that was how I met Tomas Leibniz. For some reason Reinette was furious with me for talking to him, and sulked all the way through the rest of the film. Hauer had slipped Cassis a packet of Gauloises, and we both crept back to our seats, Cassis smoking one of his cigarettes and myself lost in speculation. Only when the film was finished was I ready to ask questions.
“Those cigarettes,” I said. “Is that what you meant when you said you could get things?”
“Of course.” Cassis was looking pleased with himself, but I still sensed anxiety beneath the surface. He held his cigarette in the palm of his hand, as if in imitation of the Germans, but on him the gesture looked awkward and self-conscious.
“Do you tell them things? Do you?”
“We sometimes…tell them things,” admitted Cassis, smirking.
“What kind of things?”
Cassis shrugged. “It started with that old idiot and his radio,” he said in a low voice. “That was only fair. He shouldn’t have had it anyway, and he shouldn’t have pretended to be so shocked when all we were doing was watching the Germans. Sometimes we leave notes with a delivery man, or at the café. Sometimes the newspaper man gives us stuff they’ve left. Sometimes they bring it.” He tried for nonchalance but I could sense that he was anxious, edgy.
“It’s nothing important,” he continued. “Most of the Boches use the black market themselves anyway, and send stuff home to Germany. You know, stuff they’ve requisitioned. So it doesn’t really matter.”
I considered this. “But the Gestapo-”
“Oh, grow up, Boise!” Suddenly he was angry, as he always was when I put him under pressure. “What do you know about the Gestapo?” He looked around nervously, then lowered his voice again. “Of course we don’t deal with them. This is different. I told you, it’s just business. And anyway, it’s nothing to do with you.”
I faced him, feeling resentful. “Why not? I know things too.” I wished now that I had made more of Madame Petit with the German, that I had told him she was a Jew.
Cassis shook his head scornfully. “You wouldn’t understand.”
We rode home in slightly apprehensive silence, perhaps expecting Mother to have guessed about our unsanctioned trip, but when we got home we found her in unusual spirits. She did not mention the smell of oranges, her sleepless night or the changes I had made in her room, and the meal she prepared was almost a celebration dinner, with carrot and chicory soup, boudin noir with apple and potatoes, black buckwheat pancakes and clafoutis for dessert, heavy and moist with last year’s apples and crusted with brown sugar and cinnamon. We ate in silence as always, but Mother seemed abstracted, quite forgetting to tell me to take my elbows off the table and failing to see my tangled hair and smudged face.
Perhaps the orange had tamed her, I thought.
She made up for it the next day, however, reverting to her usual self again with a vengeance. We avoided her as best we could, doing our chores in haste then retreating to the Lookout Post and the river, where we played halfheartedly.
During these summer days at the river Paul came with us, but he sensed that he was no longer a part of us, that he was excluded from the circle we made. I felt sorry for him, even a little guilty, knowing what it was like to be excluded, but could do nothing to prevent it. Paul would have to fight his own battles, as I had fought mine.
Besides, Mother disliked Paul as she disliked the entire Hourias family. In her eyes Paul was an idler, too lazy to go to school, too stupid even to learn to read in the village with the other children. His parents were just as bad-a man who sold bloodworms by the side of the road and a woman who mended other people’s clothes. But my mother was especially vicious about Paul’s uncle. At first I thought this was simply village rivalry. Philippe Hourias owned the biggest farm in Les Laveuses, acres of sunflower fields and potatoes and cabbages and beets, twenty cows, pigs, goats, a tractor at a time when most local people still used hand plows and horses, a proper milking machine… It was jealousy, I told myself, the resentment of the struggling widow against the wealthy widower. Still, it was odd, given that Philippe Hourias had been my father’s oldest friend. They had been boys together, fishing, swimming, sharing secrets. Philippe had carved my father’s name on the war memorial himself, and always laid flowers at its base on Sundays. But Mother never acknowledged him with more than a nod. Never a gregarious soul, after the orange incident she seemed more hostile than ever toward him.
In fact it was only much later that I began to guess at the truth. When I read the album, in fact, more than forty years afterward. That tiny, migraine-inducing script staggering across the bound pages. She wrote:
Hourias knows already. I see him looking at me sometimes. Pity and curiosity, like I was something he ran over in the road. Last night he saw me coming out of La Rép with the things I need to buy there. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he’d guessed. He thinks we should marry, of course. It makes sense to him, widow and widower, marrying their land together. Yannick had no brother to take over when he died. And a woman isn’t expected to run a farm alone.
If she had been a naturally sweet woman, perhaps I might have suspected something sooner. But Mirabelle Dartigen was not a sweet woman. She was rock salt and river mud, her rages as quick and furious and inevitable as summer lightning
. I never sought the cause, merely avoiding the effect as best I could.
15.
There were no more trips to Angers that week, and neither Cassis nor Reinette seemed inclined to speak of our meeting with the Germans. As for myself, I was reluctant to mention my conversation with Leibniz, though I was unable to forget it. It made me feel by turns apprehensive and oddly powerful too.
Cassis was restless, Reinette sullen and discontented, and to add to that it drizzled all week, so that the Loire swelled ominously and the sunflower fields were blue with rain. Seven days had passed since our last visit to Angers. Market day came and went; this time Reinette accompanied Mother to town, leaving Cassis and myself to prowl discontentedly through the dripping orchard. The green plums on the trees made me think of Leibniz, with an odd mixture of curiosity and disquiet. I wondered whether I would ever see him again.
Then, unexpectedly, I did.
Early in the morning of the next market day, it was Cassis’s turn to help with the provisions. Reine was fetching the new cheeses, wrapped in vine leaves, from the coolroom and Mother was collecting eggs from the henhouse. I was just back from the river with the morning catch, a couple of small perches and bleaks that I had chopped for bait and left in a bucket by the window. It was not the Germans’ usual day to call, and as a result it was I who happened to open the front door when they knocked.
There were three of them: two I did not recognize, and Leibniz, very correct now in uniform, standing with a rifle slung into the crook of his arm. His eyes widened a little in surprise when he saw me, then he smiled.
If it had been any other German standing there I might have shut the door in their faces, as Denis Gaudin did when they came to requisition his violin. I would certainly have called Mother. But on this occasion I was unsure; I fidgeted uneasily on the doorstep, wondering what to do.
Leibniz turned to the other two and spoke to them in German. I thought I understood from the gestures that accompanied his words that he intended to search our farm himself while the others moved down the lane toward the Ramondin and Hourias places. One of the other Germans looked at me and said something. The three of them laughed. Then Leibniz nodded and, still smiling, stepped past me into our kitchen.
Five Quarters of the Orange Page 9
