It was a dangerous game. The root loops always occurred at the fastest parts of the river, where the banks were steeply eroded by the water’s passage. Snakes lived in the hollows under the roots, and if the bank collapsed it was possible to remain trapped under the fallen soil. The way under was virtually invisible, and you had to grope underneath the rootlets for the way out. It was always a possibility that someone might get caught, jammed in place by the savage current until he or she drowned, but this, of course, was the game’s beauty and its appeal.
I was very good at it. Reine seldom played-she was driven frequently to hysterics as we competed to impress-but Cassis could never refuse a challenge. He was still stronger than I was, but I had the advantage of the slighter build and the more supple spine. I was an eel, and the more Cassis bragged and postured, the stiffer he grew. I don’t remember ever losing.
The only chance I had of seeing Tomas alone was if both Cassis and Reine misbehaved at school. If this happened, they would be kept back on Thursday after the rest had left, sitting at their little desks in the detention hall, conjugating verbs or writing lines. It occurred rarely as a rule, but this was a difficult time for everyone. The school was still occupied. Teachers were scarce, and classes might run to fifty or sixty pupils at once. Patiences were worn thin; any little thing might do it. A word spoken out of turn, a bad test result, a playground fight, a forgotten lesson. I prayed for it to happen.
The day it did was unique. I remember it as clearly as some dreams, a memory more colored and more defined than the rest, a perfect transparency among the blurry and uncertain events of that summer. For a single day everything turned in perfect synchronicity, and for the first time since I could remember I felt a kind of tranquillity, a peace with myself and with my world, a feeling that, if I chose, I could make this perfect day last forever. It is a feeling I have never quite regained, though I thought I felt something a little like it on each of the days my daughters were born, and perhaps again once or twice with Hervé or when a dish I was cooking turned out just exactly right; but this was the real thing, the elixir, the never-to-be-forgotten.
Mother had been ill the evening before. Not my doing, this time-the orange bag was useless, having been heated up so often in the past month that the peel was blackened and charred, its smell barely perceptible. No, this was just one of her usual bad spells, and after a while she took her pills and went to bed, leaving me to my own devices. I awoke early and took off to the river before Cassis and Reine were awake. It was one of those red-gold early October days, the air crisp and tart and heady as applejack, and even at dawn the sky was the clear, purplish blue that only the finest of autumn days brings. There are maybe three such days in a year. I sang as I lifted my traps, and my voice bounced off the misty banks of the Loire like a challenge. It was the mushroom season, so after I had brought my catch back to the farm and cleaned it out, I took some bread and cheese for breakfast and set out into the woods to hunt for mushrooms. I was always good at that. Still am, to tell the truth, but in those days I had a nose like a truffle pig’s. I could smell those mushrooms out, the gray chanterelle and the orange, with its apricot scent, the bolet and the petit rose and the edible puffball and the brown-cap and the blue-cap. Mother always told us to take our mushrooms to the pharmacy to ensure we had not gathered anything poisonous, but I never made a mistake. I knew the meaty scent of the bolet and the dry, earthy smell of the brown-cap mushroom. I knew their haunts and their breeding grounds. I was a patient collector.
It was noon when I returned to the house, and Cassis and Reinette should have returned from school, but as yet there was no sign of either of them. I cleaned the mushrooms and put them in a jar of olive oil to marinate with some thyme and rosemary. I could hear Mother’s deep, druggy breathing from behind her bedroom door.
Twelve thirty came and went. They should have been back by now. Tomas usually came by two at the latest. I began to feel a tiny spike of excitement pricking at my belly. I went into our bedroom and looked at myself in Reinette’s mirror. My hair had begun to grow out, but was still short as a boy’s at the back. I put on my straw hat, though it was long past high summer, and thought I looked better.
One o’clock. They were an hour late. I imagined them in the detention hall with the sun slanting through the high windows and the smell of floor polish and old books in their nostrils. Cassis would be sullen, Reinette sniffling furtively. I smiled. I took Reinette’s precious lipstick from the hiding place beneath her mattress and smeared some on to my mouth. I looked at myself critically. Then I applied the same color to my eyelids and repeated the procedure. I looked different, I thought approvingly. Almost pretty. Not pretty like Reinette or her actress pictures, but today that didn’t matter. Today Reinette wasn’t there.
At one thirty I made my way to the river and to our usual meeting place. I watched for him from the Lookout Post, half-expecting him not to turn up-such good fortune seemed to belong to another person, not to me at all-and smelling the warm sappy scent of the crisp red leaves from the branches all around. Another week and the Lookout Post would be useless for the next six months, the tree house bare as a house on a hill, but today there was still enough foliage to hide me from view. Delicious tremors went through me, as if someone were playing a delicate bone xylophone just above my pelvis, and my head rang with an indescribable light feeling. Today anything was possible, I told myself giddily. Anything at all.
Twenty minutes later I heard the sound of a motorbike on the road and I leaped from the tree toward the river as quickly as I could. The sensation of giddiness was stronger now so that I felt strangely disoriented, walking on ground that was was barely there. A feeling of power almost as great as my joy cascaded over me. For today, Tomas was my secret, my possession. What we said to each other would be ours alone. What I said to him… He was stopping by the verge, one quick glance behind to see if anyone had seen him, then dragging the bike down into the tamarisks by the long sandbank. I watched, oddly reluctant to show myself now that the moment had come, suddenly shy of our aloneness, our new intimacy. I waited for him to take off his uniform jacket and hide it in the undergrowth. Then he looked around. He was carrying a parcel wrapped with string, and there was a cigarette at the corner of his mouth.
“The others aren’t here.” I tried to make my voice adult to match his gaze, suddenly conscious of the lipstick on my mouth and eyes, wondering whether he would comment. If he laughed, I thought fiercely, if he laughed…But Tomas simply smiled.
“Fine,” he said casually. “Just you and me, then.”
15.
As I said, it was a perfect day. It’s difficult from the distance of fifty-five years to explain the tremulous joy of those few hours; at nine one is so raw that a single word is sometimes enough to draw blood, and I was more sensitive than most, almost expecting him to spoil everything… I never asked myself whether I loved him. It was irrelevant to the moment. Impossible to equate what I felt-that aching, desperate joy-with the language of Reinette’s favorite movies. And yet that was what it was. My own confusion, my loneliness, the strangeness with my mother, the separation from my sister and brother, had formed a kind of hunger, a mouth opening instinctively to any scrap of kindness, even from a German, a cheery extortionist who cared for nothing but keeping his information channels open.
I tell myself now that that was all he wanted. Even so, some part of me denies it. That wasn’t all it was. There was more to it than that. He took pleasure in meeting me, in talking to me. Why else would he have stayed so long? I remember every word, every gesture, every intonation. He talked about his home in Germany, of Bierwurst and Schnitzel, of the Black Forest and the streets of old Hamburg and the Rhineland, of Feuerzangenbohle with a burning orange studded with cloves in a bowl of steaming punch, and Keks and Strüdel and Backenoff and Frikadelle with mustard and the apples which used to grow in his grandfather’s garden before the war, and I talked about Mother and her pills and her strangeness and the orange
bag and the cray pots and the broken clock with the cracked face, and how when I got my wish I would wish for this day to go on forever and ever…
He looked at me then, an oddly adult look passing between us, like some variant of Cassis’s staring-out game. This time I was the first to look away.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered.
“It’s okay,” he told me, and somehow it was. We picked some more mushrooms and some wild thyme-so much more strongly scented than the cultivated, with its tiny purple flowers-and some late strawberries under a stump. As he climbed over a deadfall of birches I touched his back fleetingly-a pretense of steadying myself-and felt the warmth of his skin seared into my palm for hours after that, like a brand. And then we sat by the river and watched the red disk of the sun go behind the trees and for a moment I was sure I saw something, black against the black water, something half visible in the center of a great V of ripples, a mouth, an eye, the oil-slick curve of a rolling flank, a double row of fangs whiskered with ancient fishhooks… Something of awesome, unbelievable proportions that vanished the moment I tried to give it a name, leaving nothing but ripples and a churning of troubled water where it might have been…
I leaped to my feet, heart hammering wildly. “Tomas! Did you see that?”
Tomas looked up at me lazily, a cigarette stub between his teeth. “Floating log,” he told me laconically. “Log in the current. Seen them all the time.”
“It wasn’t!” My voice was high and trembling with excitement. “I saw it, Tomas! It was her, it was her, Old Mother, Old Moth-” With a sudden, lurching burst of speed, I began to run toward the Lookout Post to fetch my fishing rod.
Tomas gave a chuckle. “You’ll never make it,” he said. “Even if it was the old pike, and believe me, Backfisch, no pike ever grows to be that big.”
“It was Old Mother,” I insisted stubbornly. “It was. It was. Three meters long, Paul says, and black as pitch. It couldn’t have been anything else. It was her.”
Tomas smiled.
I met his bright, challenging gaze for a second or two and then dropped it, abashed.
“It was,” I repeated, half under my breath. “It was. I know it was.”
Well, I often wondered about that. Maybe it was just a floating log, as Tomas said. Certainly when I finally caught her Old Mother was nothing like three meters in length, though she was certainly the biggest pike any of us had ever seen. Pikes don’t ever grow as long as that, I tell myself, and what I saw-or thought I saw-on the river that day was easily as big as one of the crocodiles that Johnny Weissmuller used to wrestle with at the Palais-Doré.
But that’s an adult reasoning. In those days there were no such barriers to belief as logic or realism. We saw what we saw, and sometimes if what we saw made adults laugh, who was to say where the truth lay? In my heart I know I saw a monster that day, something as old and cunning as the river itself, something no one could ever catch. She took Jeannette Gaudin. She took Tomas Leibniz. She almost took me.
Part Four
La Mauvaise Réputation
1.
Clean and gut the anchovies and rub inside and out with salt. Fill each one generously with rock salt and branches of salicorne. Place in the barrel with the heads facing upward and cover with salt by layers.
Another affectation. When you opened the barrel they would be there, standing on their tails in the gleaming gray salt, staring in mute fishy appeal. Remove what is needed for the day’s cooking and pack the rest into place with more salt and salicorne. In the darkness of the cellar they look desperate, like drowning children in a well.
Snip off that thought quickly, like the head of a flower.
My mother writes in blue ink, the script neat and slanting. Beneath it she has added something in a more careless hand, but it is in bilini-enverlini, an exotic scrawl in red grease pencil like lipstick: toulini fonini nisllipni.
Out of pills.
She’d had them since the beginning of the war, using them first with care, once a month or less, then more recklessly as that strange summer advanced and she smelt oranges all the time.
She wrote raggedly:
Y. does his best to help. It gives both of us a little relief. He gets the pills from La Rép, from a man Hourias knows there. Other comforts too, I guess. I know better than to ask. He isn’t made of stone, after all. Not like me. I try not to care. It’s pointless. He is discreet. I should be grateful. He looks after me in his way, but it’s useless. We are divided. He lives in the light. The thought of my suffering dismays him. I know this, and still I hate him for being what he is.
Then, later, after my father’s death:
Out of pills. The German says he can get some more, but he doesn’t come. It is a kind of madness. I would sell my children for a night’s sleep.
This last entry, unusually, has a date. That’s how I know. She was jealous with her pills, hiding the bottle away at the bottom of a drawer in her room. Sometimes she would take the bottle out and turn it over. It was brown glass, the label still showing a few barely legible words in German.
Out of pills.
That was the night of the dance, the night of the last orange.
2.
Hey, Backfisch, almost forgot.“ Turning, he threw it carelessly, like a boy pitching a ball, to see if I’d catch. He was like that, pretending to forget, teasing me, risking the prize in the murky Loire if I was slow or clumsy. ”Your favorite.“
I caught it easily, left-handed. Grinned.
“Tell the others to come by La Mauvaise Réputation tonight.” Winked, eyes glinting cat-green with mischief. “Might be some fun.”
Of course, Mother would never have let us go out at night. Though the curfew remained largely unenforceable in the remoter villages such as ours, there were other dangers. Night hid more illicit goings-on than we could guess, and by then a number of off-duty Germans had occasionally taken to stopping by at the café for drinks. Apparently they liked to get out of Angers and away from the suspicious eye of the S.S. In the course of our meetings Tomas had mentioned this, and sometimes I heard the sounds of motorbikes on the distant road and thought of him riding home. I saw him clearly in my mind’s eye, hair blown back by the wind, the moonlight shining on his face and the cold white sweep of the Loire. The motorbike riders might have been anyone, of course. But I always thought of Tomas.
Today, however, was different. Emboldened perhaps by our secret time together, anything seemed possible. Slinging his uniform jacket over his shoulders Tomas waved lazily as he drove off, kicking up a cloud of yellow Loire dust beneath his wheels, and suddenly my heart swelled unbearably. Loss flooded through me in a hot-cold wash and I ran after him, tasting his dust, waving my arms for long after his bike vanished down the Angers road, tears beginning to crawl pink channels across my face’s mud mask.
It wasn’t enough.
I’d had my day, my one perfect day, and already my heart was boiling with rage and dissatisfaction. I clocked the sun. Four hours. An impossible time, a whole afternoon, and yet it wasn’t enough, I wanted more. More. The discovery of this new appetite within me made me bite my lips in desperation; the memory of the brief contact between us burnt at my hand like a brand. Several times I lifted my palm to my lips and kissed the burning place his skin had left. I lingered over his words as if they were poetry. I relived every precious moment to myself, with growing disbelief, as on winter mornings I still try to recall the summer. But it is an appetite that no amount of feeding can satisfy. I wanted to see him again, that day, that minute. I had wild thoughts of us running away together, of living in the forest away from people, of myself building him a tree house and eating mushrooms and wild strawberries and chestnuts until the war was over…
Cassis, Reine and Paul found me at the Lookout Post, the orange in one hand, lying on my back and staring into the autumn canopy.
“S-s-said she’d b-be here,” said Paul (he always stammered badly when Reine was there). “S-s-saw her g-oing into the w-woo
ds when I was f-fishing.”
He looked shy and awkward beside Cassis, conscious of his scruffy blue dungarees (cut down from one of his uncle’s overalls) and his bare feet in their wooden clogs. Malabar was with him, tied with a length of green gardening twine. Cassis and Reine wore their school clothes, and Reinette’s hair was tied with a yellow silk ribbon. I always wondered why Paul dressed so shabbily when his mother was a seamstress.
“Are you all right?” Cassis’s voice was sharp with anxiety. “When you didn’t come home, I thought-” He cast a quick dark look at Paul, then one of warning to me. “You know who hasn’t been here, has he?” he whispered, clearly wishing that Paul would leave.
I nodded. Cassis made a gesture of annoyance. “What did I tell you?” he said in a low, furious voice. “What did I say, never to be alone with-” Another glance at Paul. “Anyway, we’d better be going home now,” he said in a louder voice. “Mother will be starting to get worried, and she’s making a pavé. You’d better hurry up and-”
But Paul was looking at the orange in my hand.
“You g-got another un,” he said in his slow, curious way.
Cassis gave me a look of disgust. Why couldn’t you hide it, stupid? Now we’ll have to share it with him.
I hesitated. Sharing was not in my plan. I needed the orange for tonight. And yet I could see Paul was already curious. Ready to talk.
“I’ll give you some if you don’t tell,” I said at last.
“Where’s it f-from?”
“Swapped it down the market,” I said glibly. “For some sugar and parachute silk. Mother doesn’t know.”
Paul nodded, then looked shyly at Reine. “We could all sh-share it now,” he said tentatively. “I’ve gotta knife.”
“Give it to me,” I said.
“I’ll do it,” said Cassis at once.
Five Quarters of the Orange Page 17
