Five Quarters of the Orange (26 page)

“You mean the magazines and stuff?”

“That’s right. And about the old man at the café. Gustave. The one who drowned.” His face looked grim and drawn. He turned my face to look at his, coming very close. I could smell cigarette smoke on his collar and on his breath. “Listen,
Backfisch
. This is important.
You mustn’t tell them anything
. You’ve never seen me. You weren’t at La Rép the night of the dance. You don’t even know my name. All right?”

I nodded.

“Don’t forget,” insisted Tomas. “You don’t know anything. You’ve never spoken to me. Tell the others.”

I nodded again, and he seemed to relax a little.

“Something else too.” His voice had lost its harshness, becoming almost caressing. It made me feel soft inside, like warm caramel. I looked at him expectantly.

“I can’t come here again,” he said gently. “Not for a while, anyway. It’s getting too dangerous. I only just managed to get away with it last time.”

I was silent for a moment. “We could meet at the cinema instead,” I suggested shyly. “Like we used to do. Or in the woods—”

Tomas shook his head impatiently. “Aren’t you listening?” he snapped. “We can’t meet at all. Not anywhere.”

Cold prickled over my skin like snowflakes. My mind was a surging black cloud.

“For how long?” I whispered at last.

“A long time.” I could feel his impatience. “Maybe forever.”

I flinched and began to shake. The prickling had turned to a hot stinging sensation, like rolling in nettles. He took my face in his hands.

“Look, Framboise,” he said slowly. “I’m sorry. I know you—” he broke off then, suddenly. “I know it’s hard.” He grinned, a fierce but somehow rueful grin, like a wild animal trying to mimic friendliness.

“I brought you some things,” he said at last. “Magazines, coffee.” Again that tight, cheery grin. “Chewing gum. Chocolate. Books.”

I looked at him in silence. My heart felt like a lump of cold clay.

“Just hide them, won’t you?” His eyes were bright, the eyes of a child sharing a delightful secret. “And don’t tell anyone about us. Not anyone at all.”

He turned to the bush from which he had sprung and pulled out a parcel tied up with string.

“Open it,” he urged.

I stared at him dully.

“Go on.” His voice was tight with enforced cheer. “It’s yours.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Ah,
Backfisch
, come
on
…” He reached out to put his arm around me, but I pushed him away.

“
I said I don’t want it!
” It was my mother’s voice again, screamy and sharp, and suddenly I hated him for bringing it out of me. “
I don’t want it, don’t want it, don’t want it!
”

He grinned at me helplessly. “Ah, come on,” he repeated. “Don’t be like that. I only—”

“We could run away,” I said abruptly. “I know lots of places in the
woods. We could run away and no one would ever know where to find us. We could eat rabbits and things…mushrooms…berries…” My face was burning. My throat felt sore and parched. “We’d be safe,” I insisted. “No one would know….” But I could see from his face that it was useless.

I can’t,” he said with finality.

I could feel tears welling up in my eyes.

“Can’t you even s-stay for a while?” I sounded like Paul now, humble and stupid, but I couldn’t help it. Part of me would have liked to let him go in icy, prideful silence, without a word, but the words stumbled out of my mouth unbidden.

“Please? You could have a cigarette, or a swim, or we c-could go fishing—”

Tomas shook his head.

I felt something inside me begin to collapse with slow inevitability. In the distance I heard a sudden clanking of metal against metal.

“Just a few minutes?
Please?”
How I hated the sound of my voice then, that stupid, hurt pleading. “I’ll show you my new traps. I’ll show you my pike pot.”

His silence was damning, patient as the grave. I could feel our time slipping from me, inexorably. Again I heard the distant clanking of metal against metal, the sound of a dog with a tin can tied to its tail, and suddenly I recognized that sound. A wave of desperate joy submerged me.

“
Please! It’s important!
” High and childish now and with the hope of salvation, closer to tears than ever, heat spilling from my eyelids and clogging my throat. “I’ll tell if you don’t stay, I’ll tell, I’ll tell, I’ll—”

He nodded once, impatiently.

“Five minutes. Not a minute more. All right?”

My tears stopped. “All right.”

F
ive minutes. I knew what I had to do. It was our last chance—my last chance—but my heart, beating like a hammer, filled my desperate mind with a wild music. He’d given me five minutes. Elation filled me as I dragged him by the hand toward the big sandbank where I had laid my last trap. The prayer that filled my mind as I ran from the village was a yammering, deafening imperative now—
only you only you oh Tomas please oh please please please
—my heart beating so hard that it threatened to burst my eardrums.

“Where are we going?” His voice was calm, amused, almost disinterested.

“I want to show you something,” I gasped, pulling harder at his hand. “Something important. Come
on!
”

I could hear the tin cans I had tied to the oil drum rattling. There was something in the trap, I told myself with a sudden shiver of excitement. Something
big
. The tins bobbed furiously on the water, rattling the drum. Below, the two crates secured together with chicken wire rocked and churned under the surface.

It had to be. It just
had
to be.

From its hiding place beneath the banking I pulled out the wooden pole that I used to maneuver my heavy traps to the surface. My hands were shaking so badly that at the first try I almost dropped the pole into the water. With the hook secured to the end of the pole I detached the crates from the floater and pushed the big drum away. The crates bucked and pranced.

“It’s too
heavy!
” I screamed.

Tomas was watching me in some bewilderment.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“Oh, please…
please
…” I was heaving at the crates, trying to
drag them up the steep banking. Water ran out of the slatted sides of the boxes. Something large and violent slid and thrashed about inside.

At my side I heard Tomas’s low laugh.

“Oh, you
Backfisch
,” he gasped. “I think you’ve got it at last. That old pike…
Lieber Gott
, but it must be
huge!”

I was hardly listening. My breath rasped my throat like sandpaper. I could feel my bare heels in the mud, sliding helplessly toward the water. The thing in my hands was dragging me in inch by inch.

“I’m not going to lose her!”
I gasped harshly.
“I’m not! I’m not!”
I took one step up the bank, pulling the sodden crates after me. Then another. I could feel the slippery yellow mud beneath my feet, threatening to bring my legs from under me. The pole dug cruelly into my shoulders as I fought for leverage. And at the back of my mind, the rapturous knowledge that
he
was watching, that if only I could drag Old Mother from her hiding place, then my wish…my wish…

One step. Then another. I dug my toes into the clay and dragged myself higher. One more step, my burden getting lighter as water poured from the crates. I could feel the creature inside hurling itself in fury against the sides of the box. One step more.

Then nothing.

I pulled, but the crates did not move. Crying out in frustration, I threw myself as far as I could up the banking, but the crate was stuck fast. A root, perhaps, dangling from the bare bank like the stub of a rotten tooth, or a floating log wedged in the chicken wire. “It’s
stuck!”
I cried desperately. “The damn trap’s stuck on something!”

Tomas gave me a comical look.

“It’s only an old
pike
—” he said, with a hint of impatience.

“Please, Tomas…” I gasped. “If I drop it…she’ll get away…reach down and pull it loose…please…”

“I’m not getting mud on my uniform,” Tomas observed mildly.

He shrugged and took off his jacket and shirt, leaving them neatly on a bush.

My arms trembling with the effort, I held the pole while Tomas investigated the obstruction.

“It’s a clump of roots,” he called to me. “Looks as if one of the slats has come free and got caught in the roots. It’s stuck tight.”

“Can you reach it?” I called.

He shrugged. “I’ll try.” Pulling off his trousers to hang them beside the rest of his uniform. Leaving his boots beside the banking. I saw him shiver as he entered the water—it was deep there—and heard him swear comically.

“I must be crazy,” said Tomas. “It’s freezing in here!” He was standing almost to his shoulders in the sleek brown water. I remember how the Loire parted at that point, the current just hard enough to make little pale frills of foam around his body.

“Can you reach it?” I yelled to him. My arms were filled with burning wires, my head pounding furiously. I could still feel the pike—still half in water—as it flung itself mightily against the sides of the crate.

“It’s down here,” I heard him say. “Just below the surface. I think—” A splashing sound as he ducked momentarily and resurfaced sleekly as an otter. “A little farther down—” I leaned against the pull with all of my weight. My temples burnt and I felt like screaming in pain and frustration. Five seconds…ten seconds…almost passing out now, red-black flowers blooming against my eyelids and the prayer—
please oh please I’ll let you go I swear I swear just please please Tomas only you Tomas only you forever only
—

Then, without warning, the crate released. I skidded up the banking, almost losing my grip on the pole as I did, the freed trap almost bouncing after me. With blurred vision and the taste of metal in my throat I dragged it to safety on the bank, driving splinters of the broken crate under my fingernails and into my already blistered
palms. I tore at the chicken wire, stripping the skin from my hands, certain that the pike had got away…. Something slapped at the side of the box. Slap-slap-slap. I was suddenly reminded of Mother and how she used to scrub us when we wouldn’t get washed, sometimes until we bled. The fierce wet sound of a washcloth against an enamel basin—
Look at that face, Boise, it’s a disgrace! Come here and let me see to that
—

Slap-slap-slap. The sound was weaker now, less persistent, though I knew a fish could live for minutes—even twitching for as long as half an hour after it was caught. Through the slats in the darkness of the crate I could see a huge shape the color of dark oil, and now and again the gleam of its eye, like a single ball bearing rolling at me in a stripe of sunlight. I felt a stab of joy so fierce it felt like dying.

“
Old Mother,
” I whispered hoarsely.
“Old Mother. I wish. I wish. Make him stay. Make Tomas stay.”
I whispered it quickly so that Tomas wouldn’t hear what I was saying, and then, when he didn’t come up the riverbank immediately I said it again, in case the old pike hadn’t heard the first time: “
Make Tomas stay. Make him stay forever.
”

Inside the crate, the pike slapped and floundered. I could make out the shape of its mouth now, a sour downturned crescent whiskered with steel from previous attempts at capture, and I was filled with terror at its size, pride at my victory, crazed, engulfing relief…. It was over. The nightmare that had begun with Jeannette and the water snake, the oranges, Mother’s descent into madness…it all ended here on the riverbank, this girl in her muddied skirt and bare feet, her short hair scruffed with mud and her face shining, this box, this fish, this man looking almost a boy without his uniform and with his hair dripping…I looked around impatiently.

“Tomas! Come and look!”

Silence. Only the small sounds of the river plapping against the muddy hollow of the bank. I stood up to look over the edge.

“Tomas!”

But there was no sign of Tomas. Where he had dived down there was an unbroken creamy smoothness the color of
café au lait
with only a few bubbles on the surface.

“Tomas!”

Maybe I should have felt panic. If I’d responded there and then maybe I would have caught him in time, avoided the inevitable somehow…I tell myself this now. But then, still dizzy with my victory, my legs trembling with exertion and fatigue, I could only remember the hundreds of times he and Cassis had played this game, diving deep under the surface of the water and pretending they were drowned, hiding in hollows under the sandbank to resurface red-faced and laughing as Reinette screamed and screamed…. In the box Old Mother slap-slapped imperiously. I took another couple of steps toward the edge.

“Tomas?”

Silence. I stood there for a moment, which seemed like forever. I whispered, “Tomas?”

The Loire hissed silkily beneath my feet. Old Mother’s slapping had grown feeble in the crate. Along the rotten riverbank the long yellow roots reached into the water like witches’ fingers. And I knew.

I had my wish.

When Cassis and Reine found me two hours later I was lying dry-eyed by the river with one hand on Tomas’s boots and the other on a broken packing crate containing the remains of a big fish, which was already beginning to stink.

W
e were still only children. We didn’t know what to do. We were afraid—Cassis perhaps more than the rest of us, because he was older and he understood rather better than we did what would happen if we were linked with Tomas’s death. It was Cassis who dived under and found Tomas under the banking, freeing his ankle from behind the root that had snagged him and pulling his body out. Cassis too who removed the remainder of his clothes and bundled them together, tying them with his belt. He was crying, but there was something hard in him that day, something that we had never seen before. Perhaps he used up his lifetime’s reserve of bravery that day, I thought afterward. Perhaps that was why he fled later into the soft forgetfulness of drink. Reine was useless. She sat on the bank throughout, crying, her face mottled and almost ugly. It was only when Cassis shook her and said she had to promise—to
promise!
—that she showed any reaction, nodding dimly through her tears and sobbing,
Tomas, oh, Tomas!
Perhaps that was why in spite of everything I never really managed to hate Cassis. He stood by me that day, after all, and that was more than anyone else did. Until now, that is.

“You have to understand this.” His boy’s voice, unsteadied by fear, still sounded oddly like an echo of Tomas’s. “If they find out about us, they’ll think
we
killed him. They’ll shoot us.” Reine watched him with huge terrified eyes. I looked over the river, feeling strangely indifferent, strangely unaffected. No one would shoot
me
. I’d caught Old Mother. Cassis slapped me sharply on the arm. He looked sick, but dogged.

“Boise! Are you listening?”

I nodded.

“We have to make it look as if someone else did it,” said Cassis. “The Resistance or someone. If they think he
drowned
…” He paused to glance superstitiously at the river. “If they find out he went
swimming
with us…they might talk to the others, Hauer and the rest…and…” Cassis gave a convulsive swallow. There was no need to say more. We looked at one another.

“We have to make it look like…” He looked at me, almost pleading. “You know. An execution.”

I nodded. “I’ll do it,” I said.

It took us a while to understand how to fire the gun. There was a safety catch. We took it off. The gun was heavy, greasy-smelling. Then came the question of where to shoot. I said the heart, Cassis the head. A single shot should do it, he said, just there at the temple, to make it look like a Resistance job. We tied his hands with string to make it look more authentic. We muffled the sound of the shot with his jacket, but even so the noise—flat and yet with a peculiar resonance that went on and on—seemed to fill the whole world.

My grief had gone deep, too deep for me to feel anything but an enduring numbness. My mind was like the river, smooth and shiny on the surface, filled with cold beneath it. We dragged Tomas to the edge and tipped him into the water. Without his clothes or identity tags, we knew, he would be virtually unidentifiable. By tomorrow, we told ourselves, the current might have rolled him all the way to Angers.

“But what about his clothes?” There was a bluish tinge around Cassis’s mouth, though his voice was still strong. “We can’t risk just tipping them into the river. Someone might find them. And know…”

“We could burn them,” I suggested.

Cassis shook his head. “Too much smoke,” he said shortly. “Besides, you can’t burn the gun, or the belt, or the tags.” I shrugged
disinterestedly. In my mind I saw Tomas roll softly into the water, like a tired child into bed, again and again. Then I had the idea.

“The Morlock hole,” I said.

Cassis nodded.

“All right,” he said.