Five Quarters of the Orange (11 page)

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.

She stayed that way for thirty seconds or so, staring at nothing with the face of a slow pupil trying to remember Pythagoras’s theo
rem 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.”

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?”

“Of course not. Don’t be silly.”

“Then what?”

But Cassis was no longer listening to me. Instead his eyes were on the newspaper stand by the church opposite, where a black-haired boy of about his own age was watching us insistently. The boy made an impatient gesture in our direction.

Cassis paid for our drinks and stood up. “Come on,” he said.

Reinette and I followed him. Cassis seemed on friendly terms with the other boy—I supposed he knew him from school. I caught a few words about holiday work, and a snort of low, nervous laughter. Then I saw him slip a folded piece of paper into Cassis’s hand.

“See you later,” said Cassis, moving casually away.

The note was from Hauer.

Only Hauer and Leibniz spoke good French, Cassis explained as we took turns reading the note. The others—Heinemann and Schwartz—knew only basic French, but Leibniz especially might have been a Frenchman himself, someone from Alsace-Lorraine perhaps, with the guttural dialect of the region. For some reason I sensed that this pleased Cassis, as if passing information to an almost-Frenchman were somehow less reprehensible.

Reinette touched the paper with her fingertips. Her face was flushed with excitement. “What time is it now?” she said. “Will we be late?”

Cassis shook his head. “Not with the bikes,” he said, trying for a laconic tone. “Let’s see what they’ve got for us.”

As we retrieved the bikes from their usual place in the alley, I noticed that Reinette took a compact from her pocket and quickly checked her reflection. She frowned; snaking the gold lipstick from the pocket of her dress she retouched her lips in scarlet, smiled, retouched, smiled again. The compact closed. I was not entirely surprised. It was clear to me from the first trip that she had something on
her mind besides moving-picture shows. The care with which she dressed, the attention she gave to her hair, the lipstick and the perfume…. All this must be for the benefit of
someone
. To tell the truth I was not especially interested. I was used to Reine and her ways. At twelve she already looked sixteen. With her hair curled in that sophisticated style and her lips reddened, she might have been older. I had already seen the looks she got from people in the village. Paul Hourias grew tongue-tied and bashful when she was around. Even Jean-Benet Darius, who was an old man of nearly forty, and Guguste Ramondin or Raphaël at the café…. Boys looked at her; I knew that. And she noticed them—from her first day at the
collège
she had been full of tales about the boys she met there. One week it might be Justin, who had such wonderful eyes, or Raymond, who made the whole class laugh, or Pierre-André, who could play chess, or Guillaume, whose parents moved from Paris last year…. Thinking back I could even remember when those tales stopped. It must have been about the same time the German garrison moved in.

I gave an inward shrug of indifference. There was certainly a mystery of some kind, I told myself, but Reinette’s secrets rarely intrigued me.

Hauer was standing guard at the gate. I could see him better in daylight; a broad-faced German with an almost expressionless face. In a low voice he told us, “Upriver—about ten minutes,” speaking from the corner of his mouth, then waved at us in mock impatience, as if to send us packing. We got on our bikes again without giving him a second glance, even Reinette, which led me to think that Hauer could not be the object of her infatuation.

Less than ten minutes later we caught sight of Leibniz. At first I thought he was out of uniform, but then I simply saw that he had removed his jacket and boots and was dangling his feet over the parapet beneath which the sly brown Loire was rushing. He greeted us with a cheery wave and beckoned for us to join him. We dragged the bikes down the banking so that they would not be visible from the
road, then came to sit beside him. He looked younger than I remembered, almost as young as Cassis, though he moved with a careless assurance that my brother would never have, however much he tried to achieve it.

Cassis and Reinette stared at him in silence, like children at the zoo watching some dangerous animal. Reinette was scarlet. Leibniz seemed unimpressed by our scrutiny and lit a cigarette, grinning.

“The widow Petit…” he said at last through a mouthful of smoke. “Very good.” He chuckled. “Parachute silk and a thousand other things, she was a real black market free-for-all.” He gave me a wink. “Good work,
Backfisch
.”

The others looked at me in surprise, but said nothing. I remained silent, torn between pleasure and anxiety at his approving words.

“I’ve had some luck this week,” continued Leibniz in the same tone. “Chewing gum, chocolate and”—he reached into his pocket and brought out a package—“this.”

This
turned out to be a handkerchief, lace edged, which he handed to Reinette. My sister blushed scarlet with confusion.

Then he turned to me. “And what about you,
Backfisch
, what is it
you
want?” He grinned. “Lipstick? Face cream? Silk stockings? No, that’s more your sister’s line. Doll? Teddy bear?” He was mocking me gently, his eyes bright and filled with silvery reflections.

Now was the time to admit that my mention of Madame Petit had been nothing but a careless slip of the tongue. But Cassis was still looking at me with that expression of astonishment; Leibniz was smiling; and a gleam of an idea had come into my head.

I did not hesitate. “Fishing tackle,” I said at once. “Proper good fishing tackle.” I paused and fixed him with an insolent look, staring him straight in the eyes. “And an orange.”

W
e met him again, in the same place, a week later. Cassis gave him a rumor about late-night gambling at Le Chat Rouget and a few words he’d overheard from Curé Traquet outside the cemetery about a secret cache of church silver.

But Leibniz seemed preoccupied.

“I had to keep this from the others,” he told me. “They might not have liked me giving it to you.” From under the army jacket lying carelessly on the riverbank he drew out a narrow green-canvas bag about a meter long that made a small rattling sound as he pushed it toward me. “It’s for you,” he said as I hesitated. “Go on.”

In the bag was a fishing rod. Not a new one, but even I could see that it was a fine piece, dark bamboo worn almost black with age and a gleaming metal reel that spun beneath my fingers just as neatly as if it were on ball bearings. I gave a long, slow sigh of amazement.

“Is it…mine?” I asked, not daring quite to believe it.

Leibniz laughed, a bright, uncomplicated sound. “Of course,” he said. “We fishermen have to stick together, don’t we?”

I touched the rod with tentative, eager fingers. The reel felt cool and slightly oily to the touch, as if had been packed in grease.

“But you’ll have to keep it safe, eh,
Backfisch?
” he told me. “No going telling your parents and friends. You do know how to keep a secret, don’t you?”

I nodded. “Of course.”

He smiled. His eyes were a clear, dark gray. “Get that pike you were telling me about, eh?”

I nodded again, and he laughed. “Believe me, with
that
rod you could catch a
U-Boot
.”

I looked at him critically for a moment, just to see how much he was teasing me. Clearly he was amused, but it was a kind mockery,
I decided, and he had kept his side of the bargain. Only one thing troubled me.

“Madame Petit…” I began hesitantly. “Nothing very bad will happen to her, will it?”

Leibniz dragged on his cigarette, then flicked the stub into the water.

“I shouldn’t think so,” he said carelessly. “Not if she minds her mouth.” He gave me a sudden sharp look, which included Cassis and Reinette. “And you, all three of you. You keep all this to yourselves, all right?”

We nodded.

“Oh, one more thing for you.” He put his hand into his pocket. “You’ll have to share, I’m afraid. I could only find one.” And he held out an orange.

He was charming, you see. We were all charmed—Cassis less so than Reine and I, perhaps because he was the eldest and understood more about the dangers we were running—Reinette rosy-cheeked and shy and I…. Well, perhaps it was I most of all. It began with the fishing rod, but there were a dozen other things, his accent, the lazy ways he had, the careless look of him and his laughter…. Oh, he was a real charmer all right, not like Cassis’s son Yannick tried to be, with his brash ways and his weaselly eyes. No, Tomas Leibniz had a natural way with him, even for a lonely child with a headful of nonsense.

It was nothing I could put my finger on. Reine might have said that it was the way he looked at you without saying anything, or the way his eyes changed color—sometimes gray-green, sometimes brown-gray, like the river—or how he walked with his cap tilted back on his head and his hands in his pockets, like a boy playing truant from school…. Cassis might have said that it was his
reckless
quality—the way he could swim the Loire at its widest point or hang upside down from the Lookout Post just as if he were a boy of fourteen, with a boy’s contempt for danger. He knew all about Les Laveuses before he even set foot there; he was a country lad from the
Black Forest, and he was full of anecdotes about his family, his sisters, his brother, his plans. He was always making plans. There were days when everything he said seemed to begin with the same words—
when I’m rich and the war is over
…. Oh, there was no end to what he’d do. He was the first adult we had ever met who still
thought
like a boy, planned like a boy, and maybe in the end that was what attracted us to him. He was one of us, that was all. He played by our rules.

He had killed one Englishman and two Frenchmen so far in the course of the war. He made no secret of it, but the way he told the story you would have sworn he had no choice. It could have been our father, I thought afterward. But even so, I would have forgiven him. I would have forgiven him anything.

Of course, I was guarded at first. We met him three times more, twice alone at the river, once in the cinema with the others, Hauer, Heinemann—squat and red-haired—and slow, fat Schwartz. Twice we sent notes via the boy at the newspaper stand, twice more we received cigarettes, magazines, books, chocolate and a packet of nylon stockings for Reinette. People are less wary of children, as a rule. They guard their tongues less. We gleaned more information that way than you could ever imagine, and we passed it all, on to Hauer, Heinemann, Schwartz and Leibniz. The other soldiers hardly spoke to us. Schwartz, who spoke little French, would sometimes leer at Reinette and whisper at her in guttural, greasy-sounding German. Hauer was stiff and awkward, and Heinemann was full of nervous energy, scratching incessantly at the reddish stubble that seemed an indelible part of his face…. The others made me uneasy.

But not Tomas. Tomas was one of us. He was able to reach us in a way no one else did. It was nothing as obvious as our mother’s indifference or the loss of our father, or even the lack of playmates or the privations of war. We were barely aware of those things ourselves, living as we did in our savage little world of the imagination. We were certainly taken by surprise at how desperately we needed Tomas. Not
for what he brought us, the chocolate and chewing gum and makeup and magazines. We needed someone to tell about our exploits, someone to impress, a fellow conspirator with the energy of youth and the polish of experience, a teller of finer stories than even Cassis could dream of. It didn’t happen overnight, of course. We were wild animals, just as Mother said, and we took some taming. He must have known that from the start, the clever way he set out to take us one by one, making each feel special…. Even now, God help me, I can almost believe it. Even now.

I hid the rod in the treasure chest for safekeeping. I had to be careful when I used it, because everybody in Les Laveuses was apt to mind your business for you if you didn’t mind it yourself, and it wouldn’t take more than a chance comment to alert Mother. Paul knew, of course, but I told him that the rod had belonged to my father, and with the stammer he had, he was never one to gossip. In any case, if he ever suspected anything, he kept it to himself, and I was grateful for that.

July turned hot and sour, with thunderstorms every other day and the sky roiling mad and purple-gray over the river. At the end of the month the Loire burst its banks, washing all my traps and nets away downstream, then spilling down into Hourias’s cornfields, with the corn just yellow-green and three weeks from full ripeness. It rained almost every night that month, and lightning sheeted down like great crackling rolls of silver paper so that Reinette screamed and hid under her bed, and Cassis and I stood at the open window with our mouths open to see if we could catch radio signals on our teeth. Mother had more headaches than ever, and I only used the orange bag—revitalized now with the skin of the orange Tomas had given us—twice that month and into the next. The rest was her own problem, and she often slept badly and woke with a mouth full of barbed wire and not a kind thought in her head. On those days, I thought of Tomas like a starving man thinks of food. I think the others did the same.

The rain was hard on our fruit too. Apples and pears and plums swelled grotesquely then split and rotted right on the trees, and wasps squeezed into the sickly clefts so that the trees were brown with them and buzzing sluggishly. My mother did what she could. She covered some of her favorites with tarpaulins to keep the rain off, but even that was little use. The soil, baked hard and white by the June sun, turned to slush beneath the feet, and the trees stood in pools of water, rotting their exposed roots. Mother piled sawdust and earth around their bases to protect them from the rot, but it was no good. The fruit fell to the ground and made sweetish mud-soup. What could be retrieved we saved and made into green-fruit jam, but we all knew the harvest was spoiled before it even had a chance. Mother stopped talking to us altogether. In those weeks her mouth was perpetually set in a small white line, her eyes holes. The tic that heralded her headaches was almost permanent, and the level of pills in the jar in the bathroom diminished more rapidly than ever.

Market days were especially silent and cheerless. We sold what we could—harvests were bad all through the county, and there wasn’t a farmer along the Loire who hadn’t suffered—but beans, potatoes, carrots, squash, even tomatoes had sickened with the heat and the rain, and there was precious little to sell. Instead we took to selling our winter stocks, the preserves and dried meats and
terrines
and
confits
that Mother had made last time a pig was slaughtered, and because she was desperate, she treated every sale as if it were her last. Some days her look was so black and sour that customers turned tail and fled rather than buy from her, and I was left writhing in embarrassment for her—for us—while she stood stony-faced and unseeing, one finger at her temple like the barrel of a gun.

One week we arrived at the market to find Madame Petit’s shop boarded up. Monsieur Loup, the fishmonger, told me she just packed her things and went one day, giving no reason and leaving no forwarding address.

“Was it the Germans?” I demanded with a slight unease. “I mean, her being a Jew and everything?”

Monsieur Loup gave me a strange look. “Don’t know anything abut that,” he said. “I just know she upped and left one day. I never heard anything about the other thing, and if you’ve any sense you won’t go round telling anyone, either.” His expression was so cool and disapproving that I apologized, abashed, and backed away, almost forgetting my packet of scraps.

My relief that Madame Petit had not been arrested was tempered with an odd feeling of disappointment. For a while I brooded in silence, then I began to make discreet inquiries in Angers and in the village concerning the people about whom we had passed on information. Madame Petit, Monsieur Toupet or Toubon, the barber opposite Le Chat Rouget who received so many parcels, the two men we had heard talking outside the Palais-Doré one Thursday after the film…. Strangely enough, the idea that we might have passed on worthless information—perhaps to the amusement or scorn of Tomas and the others—troubled me more than the possibility of causing harm to any of the people we denounced.

I think Cassis and Reinette already knew the truth. But nine is a different continent from twelve and fourteen. Little by little I came to realize that not a single one of the people we had denounced had been arrested or even questioned, or a single one of the places we had named as suspect raided by the Germans. Even the mysterious disappearance of Monsieur Toubon or Toupet, the bad-tempered Latin teacher, was easily explained.

“Oh, he was called to go to his daughter’s wedding in Rennes,” said Monsieur Doux airily. “No mystery there, little puss. I delivered the invitation myself.”

I fretted about it for almost a month, until the uncertainty was like a barrel of wasps in my head, all buzzing at once. I thought about it when I was out fishing, or laying traps, or playing gunfights with Paul, or digging dens in the woods. I grew thinner. My mother looked at
me critically and announced that I was growing so fast it was affecting my health. She took me to Docteur Lemaître, who prescribed a glass of red wine for me every day, but even this made no difference. I began to imagine people following me, talking about me. I lost my appetite. I imagined that somehow Tomas and the others might be secret members of the Resistance, even now taking steps to eliminate me. Finally I told Cassis about my worries.

We were alone at the Lookout Post. It had been raining again, and Reinette was at home with a head cold. I didn’t set out to tell him everything, but once I had started the words began to spill out of me like grain from a burst sack. There was no stopping them. I had the green bag with my fishing rod in one hand, and in a rage I flung it right out of the tree and into the bushes, where it fell in a tangle of blackberries.

“We’re not
babies!”
I yelled furiously. “Don’t they believe the things we tell them? Why did Tomas give me
this
”—a wild gesture at the distant fishing bag—“if I didn’t earn it?”

Cassis looked at me, bewildered. “Anyone would think you
wanted
someone to get shot,” he said uncomfortably.

“Of course not.” My voice was sullen. “I just thought—”

“You never
thought
at all.” The tone was that of the old, superior Cassis, impatient and rather scornful. “You really think we’d help to get people locked up or shot? That’s what you think we’d do?” He sounded shocked, but underneath I knew he was flattered.

That’s just what I think, I thought. If it suited you, Cassis, I’m sure that’s exactly what you’d do. I shrugged.

“You’re so naïve, Framboise,” said my brother loftily. “You’re really too young to be involved in something like this.”

It was then that I knew that even he hadn’t understood at the start. He was quicker than I was, but at the beginning he hadn’t known. On that first day at the cinema he’d really been
afraid
, sour with sweat and excitement. And later, talking to Tomas…I had seen fear in his eyes. Later, only later, had he understood the truth.

Cassis made a gesture of impatience and turned his gaze away.
“Blackmail!”
he spat furiously into my face, starring me with spittle. “Don’t you get it? That’s all it is! Do you think
they’re
having an easy time with it, back in Germany? Do you think they’re any better off than we are? That
their
children have shoes, or chocolate, or any of that stuff? Don’t you think
they
might sometimes want those things too?”