Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина

Though he was older than Reine-Claude and almost the same age as Cassis, he seemed younger, less sophisticated. He was inarticulate when they were there, smiling in agonized embarrassment when they talked about school. Paul could barely read, and his writing was the stilted, painful printing of a much younger child. He liked stories, though, and I would read to him from Cassis’s magazines when he came to the Lookout Post. We used to sit on the platform, he whittling at a piece of wood with his small knife while I read The Mummy’s Tomb or The Martian Invasion, half a loaf of bread on the board between us, from which we would occasionally cut a slice.

Sometimes he brought a piece of rillettes wrapped in a sheet of waxed paper, or half a camembert. To our little feast, I would add a pocketful of strawberries or one of the goat’s cheeses rolled in ash that my mother called petits cendrеs. From the Post I could see all my nets and traps, which I checked every hour, resetting them as necessary and removing the small fry.

“What’ll you wish for when you catch her?”

By now he believed implicitly that I would catch the old pike, and he spoke with a kind of reluctant awe.

I considered.

“Dunno.” I took a bite of bread and rillettes. “There’s no point making plans till I’ve caught it. That might take time.”

It was time I was willing to take. Three weeks into June and my enthusiasm had not faltered. Quite the opposite. Even the indifference of Cassis and Reine-Claude only served to increase my stubbornness.

Old Mother was a talisman in my mind, a slinking black talisman that, if I could only reach it, might put right everything which was skewed.

I’d show them. The day I caught Old Mother they’d all look at me in amazement. Cassis, Reine-and to see that look in my mother’s face, to make her see me, perhaps to clench her fists in rage… Or to smile with peculiar sweetness and open her arms…

But here my fantasy stopped; I dared not imagine further.

“‘Sides,” I said with studied languor. “I don’t believe in wishes. I told you that already.”

Paul looked cynical.

“If you don’t believe in wishes,” he pointed out, “then what’re you doing it for at all?”

I shook my head.

“Dunno,” I said at last. “Just for something to do, I expect.”

He laughed.

“That’s you, Boise,” he said between gusts of laughter. “That’s you all over, that is.