Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина

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6

You see from what innocent beginnings it grew. We none of us meant for anyone to be hurt, and yet there is a hard place in the center of me that remembers implacably and with perfect precision. My mother knew the dangers before any of us did. I was sweaty and unstable as dynamite. She knew it, and in her strange way she tried to protect me by keeping me close, even when she would have preferred otherwise. She understood more than I imagined.

Not that I cared-I had a plan of my own, a plan as intricate and carefully laid as my pike traps on the river.

I once thought Paul might have guessed, but if he did, he never spoke a word. Small beginnings, leading to lies, deceit and worse.

It began with a fruit stall, one Saturday market day. July 4 it was, the day after my ninth birthday.

It began with an orange.

7

Until then I had always been judged too young to go into town on market days. My mother would arrive in Angers at nine and set up her little stall by the church.

Quite often Cassis or Reinette would accompany her. I stayed behind at the farm, supposedly to do chores, though I usually spent the time by the river, fishing, or in the woods with Paul.

But that year was different. I was old enough now to make myself useful, she told me in her brusque way. Couldn’t stay a little girl forever. She looked at me once, searchingly. Her eyes were the color of old nettles. Besides-casually, without giving the impression of a favor conferred-I might want to go into Angers later that summer, maybe to the cinema, with my brother and sister…

I guessed then that Reinette must have been at work.

No one else could have persuaded her. But Reinette knew how to cajole her. Hard she might be, but I thought there was a softer look in her eyes when she spoke to Reinette, as if beneath her gruff exterior something was moved. I mumbled something graceless in reply.

“Besides,” continued my mother, “maybe you need a little responsibility. Keep you from running wild.

Teach you something about what matters in life.”

I nodded, trying for some of Reinette’s docility.

I don’t think my mother was fooled. She raised a satirical eyebrow.

“You can help me on the stall,” she said.

And so, for the first time, I accompanied her into town. We rode in the trap together, with our goods packed into boxes beside us and covered with tarpaulin. We had cakes and biscuits in one box, cheeses and eggs in another, fruit in the rest.