Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина

The clock on the kitchen wall might suddenly appear bisected, one half clearly visible and the other suddenly not there, nothing but the bare wall behind it, or a wineglass might seem to change place on its own, to shift slyly from one side of the plate to the other. Or a face, a human face – mine, my father’s, Rapha?l’s at the cafе – half the features would be suddenly sheared away as if by some terrible surgery, or half of the page of a cookbook removed even as she read, the remaining letters dancing incomprehensibly before her.

Of course I didn’t know all that then. I learned most of this from the album, from her scribbled notes, some frantic, almost despairing – at three in the morning, anything seems possible – others almost clinical in their detachment, noting symptoms with cool scientific curiosity. Like the clock, I am divided.

11

Reine and Cassis were still asleep when I left, and I guessed I had about half an hour to take care of my business before they awoke. I checked the sky, which was clear and greenish, with a faint yellow stripe on the horizon.

Dawn was maybe ten minutes away. I would have to hurry.

I took a bucket from the kitchen, pulled on my clogs, which were waiting on the doormat, and ran as fast as I could toward the river. I took the shortcut through Hourias’s back field, where summer sunflowers raised hairy, still-green heads at the pale sky. I kept low, invisible beneath the spread of leaves, my bucket clanging against my leg at every step.

It took me less than five minutes to arrive at the Standing Stones.

At five in the morning the Loire is still and sumptuous with mist. The water is beautiful at that time of the day, cool and magically pale, the sandbanks rising like lost continents. The water smells of night, and here and there a spray of new sunlight makes mica shadows on the surface. I took off my shoes and my clothes and surveyed the water critically. It looked deceptively still.

The Treasure Stone was maybe thirty feet from the bank, and the water at its base looked oddly silky at the surface, a sign that a strong current was at work.

I could drown here, I told myself, and no one would even know where to look for me.

But I had no choice. Cassis had issued a challenge. I had to pay my own way. How could I do that, with no pocket money of my own, without using the purse hidden in the treasure chest? Of course, there was a chance he might have removed it.