Five Quarters of the Orange (28 page)

N
ext it was the water. The well water was always sweet and clean, except when the weather had been exceptionally dry. That week it began to run brownish, like peat, and it had an odd taste to it, something bitter and burnt-tasting, as if dead leaves had been raked into the cylinder. We ignored it for a day or two, but it only seemed to get worse. Even Mother, whose bad spell was finally coming to an end, noticed it.

“Perhaps something’s got into the water,” she suggested.

We stared at her with our customary blankness.

“I’ll have to go and look,” she decided.

We waited for discovery with an outward display of stoicism.

“She can’t prove anything,” said Cassis desperately. “She can’t
know
.”

Reine whimpered. “She will, she will,” she whined. “She’ll find everything and she’ll know—”

Cassis bit his fist savagely, as if to stop himself from screaming. “Why didn’t you tell us there was coffee in the parcel?” he moaned. “Didn’t you
think?”

I shrugged. Alone of all of us, I remained serene.

Discovery never came. Mother came back from the well with a bucketful of dead leaves and proclaimed the water clear.

“It’s probably sediment from the river swells,” she said, almost cheerily. “When the level drops, it will run clear again. You’ll see.”

She locked the well’s wooden lid again, and took to carrying the key at her belt. We had no opportunity to check it again.

“The parcel must have sunk to the bottom,” decided Cassis at last. “It was heavy, wasn’t it? She won’t even be able to see it unless the well runs dry.” We all knew there was little chance of that. And by next summer, the parcel’s contents would be reduced to mush at the bottom of the well.

“We’re safe,” said Cassis.

T
he writing is neat and close-written in the strange hieroglyphics she uses when she wants her words to remain secret. I can almost hear her voice as she speaks, the slightly nasal intonation, the matter-of-factness of the terrible conclusion.

The words are illegible at this point, as if terror has taken over the pen and sent it skating across the page in a desperate scrawl, but she takes control again almost immediately.

More of the mad scrawl.

The words are legible but shaking, forced into control by a mighty effort of will.

She breaks off here—a neat recipe in red ink for rabbit casserole separates this from the final paragraph, which is written in a different color and a different style, as if she has thought about this at length.

I can’t begin to imagine what she must have felt. Fear, remorse, despair—and the terror that at last she was going insane, that the bad spells had opened a nightmare door from her dreams into the real world, threatening everything she loved…. But her tenacity cut through it all. This stubbornness I inherited from her, the instinct to hold, to hold on to what was hers if it killed her.

No, I never realized what she was going through. I had my own nightmares. But even so I had begun to hear the rumors in the village, rumors that grew ever louder and more menacing and that Mother, as always, failed to deny or even to notice. The graffiti on the henhouse had begun a trickle of ill will and suspicion that now, after the executions at the church, began to flow more freely. People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you, and Les Laveuses was no exception. Chrétien and Mirielle Dupré, shocked into brief silence at the death of their two boys, turned upon each other, she shrewish and vicious, he boorish,
glaring at one another over the pews in church—she with a new bruise over one eye—with something close to hate. Old Gaudin turned in upon himself like a turtle getting ready for hibernation. Isabelle Ramondin, always a spiteful tongue at the best of times, became milky and false, looking at folk from her huge blue-black eyes, her soft chin trembling tearily. I suspect maybe she started it. Or maybe it was Claude Petit, who had never had much of a good word to say for his sister while she was alive, but who now seemed the picture of fraternal grief. Or Martin Truriand, who would inherit all his father’s business now that his brother was dead…. Seems like death always brings out the rats from the woodwork in any place, and in Les Laveuses the rats were envy and hypocrisy and false piety and greed. Within three days it seemed that everyone was looking askance at everyone else, people gathered in twos and threes to talk in whispers and fell silent as you approached, people broke into unexplained tears one minute and knocked out their friends’ teeth the next, and little by little even I realized that the hushed conversations, the sideways glances, the muttered imprecations all happened most often when we were around, when we went to the post office to collect the mail or to the Hourias farm to fetch milk or to the hardware shop for a box of masonry nails. Every time, the same looks. The same whispers. Once, it was a stone flung at my mother from behind a milking shed. Another time, clods of earth thrown at our door after curfew. Women turned away without greeting us. More graffiti, this time on our walls:

NAZI WHORE
, one read. Another, on the side of the goat shack, read,
OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS DIED FOR YOU
.

But Mother treated it all with indifferent contempt. She bought her milk from Crécy when the Hourias farm ran dry and posted her letters in Angers. No one spoke directly to her, but when Francine Crespin spat at her feet one Sunday morning on the way back from church Mother spat back, right in Francine’s face, with remarkable speed and accuracy.

As for us, we were ignored. Paul still spoke to us occasionally, though not when anyone else was there to see. Adults seemed not to notice us, but from time to time someone like crazy Denise Lelac might give us an apple or a piece of cake to stuff in our pockets, murmuring in her cracked old voice, “Take it, take it, for God’s sake, it’s a pity you children should be caught up in such a business,” before hurrying on her way, her black skirts dragging in the sour yellow dust and her shopping basket clutched tightly in her bony fingers.

By the next day everyone was saying that Mirabelle Dartigen had been the Germans’ whore, and that was why her family had been spared retribution. By Tuesday some people had recalled that our father had once expressed sympathy for the Germans. On Wednesday night a group of drunks—La Mauvaise Réputation, had never reopened, and people grow bitter and violent drinking alone—came to yell abuse at our closed shutters and to throw stones. We stayed in our bedroom with the light off, trembling and listening to the half-familiar voices, until Mother went out to break it up. That night they went quietly. The following night they left noisily. Then came Friday.

It was just after supper. It had been gray and dank all day, as if an old blanket had been thrown across the sky, and people were hot and prickly. Night brought little comfort, rolling a whitish mist across the fields so that our farmhouse seemed an island, mist seeping damply under doors and around window frames. We had eaten in silence as had become usual, and with little appetite, though I remember Mother had made an effort to make what we liked best. Bread freshly baked and scattered with poppy seeds, fresh butter from Crécy,
rillettes
, slices of
andouillette
from last year’s pig, hot sizzling pieces of
boudin
in its grease, and black buckwheat pancakes toasted in the pan, as crispy and fragrant as autumn leaves on the plate. Mother, trying hard to be cheerful, served us sweet cider from earthen
bolées
but took none for herself. I remember she smiled constantly and painfully throughout the meal, sometimes
giving a sharp bark of false laughter, though none of us said anything funny.

“I’ve been thinking.” Her voice was bright and metallic. “Thinking we may need a change of air.” We looked indifferently at her. The smell of grease and cider was overpowering.

“I was thinking of going to visit
Tante
Juliette in Pierre-Buffière,” she continued. “You’d like it there. It’s in the mountains, on the Limousin. There are goats and marmots and—”

“There are goats here,” I said in a flat voice.

Mother gave another of those brittle, unhappy laughs. “I should have known you’d have some objection,” she said.

I met her eyes with mine. “You want us to run away,” I said.

For a minute she pretended not to understand.

“I know it sounds like a long way to go,” she said with that forced cheeriness. “But it’s really not that far, and
Tante
Juliette will be so pleased to see us all—”

“You want us to run away because of what people are saying,” I said. “That you’re a Nazi whore.”

Mother flushed. “You shouldn’t listen to gossip,” she said in a sharp voice. “Nothing good ever comes of it.”

“Oh, so it isn’t true, then, is it?” I asked simply to embarrass her. I knew it wasn’t—couldn’t
imagine
it to be true. I’d seen whores before. Whores were pink and plump, soft and pretty, with wide, vapid eyes and painted mouths like Reinette’s cinema actresses. Whores laughed and squealed and wore high-heeled shoes and carried leather handbags. Mother was old, ugly, sour. Even when she laughed, it was ugly.

“Of course not.” Her eyes did not meet mine.

Insistently: “So why are we running away?”

Silence. And in the sudden silence we heard the first harsh murmur of voices outside, and in it the clanking of metal and kicking of feet, even before the first stone hit the shutters. The sound of Les Laveuses in all its petty spite and vengeful anger, people no longer
people now—no Gaudins or Lecozes or Truriands or Duponts or Ramondins—but members of an army. Peering out of the window we saw them gathered outside our gate, twenty, thirty or more of them, mostly men but some women too, some with lamps or torches like a late harvest-procession, some with pocketfuls of stones. As we watched and light from our kitchen spilled out across into the yard, someone turned to the window and threw another stone, which cracked the old wooden frame and sprayed glass into the room. It was Guilherm Ramondin. I could hardly see his face in the flickering reddish light of the torches, but I could feel the weight of his hate even through the glass.

“Bitch!” His voice was hardly recognizable, thickened with something more than drink. “Come out, bitch, before we decide to come in there and get you!” A kind of roar accompanied his words, punctuated by stamping, cheering and a volley of fistfuls of gravel and clods that spattered against our half-closed shutters.

Mother half-opened the broken window and shouted out. “Go home, Guilherm, you fool, before you pass out and someone has to carry you!” Laughter and jeering from the crowd. Guilherm shook the crutch on which he had been leaning.

“Brave talk for a German bitch!” he yelled. His voice sounded rough and beery, though his words were barely slurred. “Who told them about Raphaël, eh? Who told them about La Rép? Was it you, Mirabelle? Did you tell the S.S. that they killed your lover?”

Mother spat out of the window at them. “Brave talk!” Her voice was shrill and high. “You’re one to be talking bravery, Guilherm Ramondin! Brave enough to be standing drunk outside an honest woman’s house, frightening her kids! Brave enough to get sent home in the first week of battle while my husband got killed!”

At this Guilherm gave a roar of fury. Behind him the crowd joined in hoarsely. Another volley of stones and earth hit the window, sending pieces of earth spattering across the kitchen floor.

“You bitch!” They were through the gate now, pushing it up and off its rotten hinges with ease. A dog barked once, twice, then fell quiet with a sudden yelp. “Don’t think we don’t know! Don’t think Raphaël didn’t tell anyone!” His triumphant, hateful voice rang out even above the rest. In the red darkness below the window I could see his eyes as they reflected the firelight like a crazywork of broken glass. “We know you were trading with them, Mirabelle! We know Leibniz was your lover!” From the window Mother hurled a jug of water onto the nearest members of the crowd.