LITMIR.BIZ

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smiled, an unpleasantly adult smile.

      “I know we’re not supposed to have anything to do with the Boches. But you can’t avoid people all the time,” she said in a superior tone. “I mean, you see them at the gate, or going into Angers to the pictures…”

      This was aprivilege I greatly envied Reine-Claude and Cassis-that on Thursdays they were allowed to cycle into the town center to the cinema or the café-and I pulled a face.

      “Get on with it,” I said.

      “I am,” complained Reinette. “God, Boise, you’re so impatient…” She touched her hair. “As I was saying, you’re bound to see Germans some of the time. And they’re not all bad.” That smile again. “Some of them can be quite nice. Nicer than old Toupet, anyway.”

      I shrugged indifferently.

      “So one of them gave you the lipstick,” I said with scorn.

      Such a fuss over so little, I thought to myself. It was just like Reinette to get so excited about nothing at all.

      “We told them-well, we just mentioned to one of them-about Toupet and his radio,” she said. For some reason she was flushed, her cheeks bright as peonies. “He gave us the lipstick, and some cigarettes for Cassis, and… well, all kinds of things.” She was speaking rapidly now, unstoppably, her eyes bright. “And later Yvonne Cressonnet said that she saw them come to old Toupet’s room, and they took the radio away, and he went with them, and now instead of Latin we have an extra geography lesson with Madame Lambert, and no one knows what’s happened to him!”

      She leveled her gaze at me. I remember her eyes were almost gold, the color of boiling sugar syrup as it begins to turn.

      I shrugged. “I don’t suppose anything happened,” I said reasonably. “I mean, they wouldn’t send an old man like that to the front just for having a radio.”

      “No. Course they wouldn’t.” Her reply was too hasty. “Besides, he shouldn’t have had it in the first place, should he?”

      I agreed he shouldn’t. It was against the rules. A teacher should have known that. Reine looked at the lipstick, turning it gently, lovingly in her hand.

      “You won’t tell, then?” She stroked my arm gently. “You won’t, will you, Boise?”

      I pulled away, rubbing my arm automatically where she had touched me. I never did like being petted.

      “Do you and Cassis see these Germans often?” I questioned.

      She shrugged. “Sometimes.”

      “D’you tell them anything else?”

      “No.” She spoke too quickly. “We just talk. Look, Boise, you won’t tell anyone, will you?”

      I smiled. “Well, I might not. Not if you do something for me.”

      She looked at me narrowly.

      “What do you mean?”

      “I’d like to go into Angers sometimes, with you and Cassis,” I said slyly. “To the pictures, and the café, and stuff…”

      I paused for effect and she glared at me from eyes as bright and narrow as knives.

      “Or,” I continued in a falsely holy tone, “I might tell Mother that you’ve been talking to the people who killed our father. Talking to them and spying for them. Enemies of France. See what she says to that.”

      Reinette looked agitated.

      “Boise, you promised!”

      I shook my head solemnly.

      “That doesn’t count. It’s my patriotic duty.”

      I must have sounded convincing. Reinette turned pale. And yet the words themselves meant nothing to me. I felt no real hostility to the Germans. Even when I told myself that they had killed my father, that the man who did it might even be there, actually there in Angers, an hour’s cycle ride down the road, drinking Gros-Plant in some bar-tabac and smoking a Gauloise. The image was clear in my mind, and yet it had little potency. Perhaps because my father’s face was already blurring in my memory. Perhaps in the same way that children rarely get involved in the quarrels of adults, and that adults rarely understand the sudden hostilities that erupt for no comprehensible reason between children. My voice was prim and disapproving, but what I really wanted had nothing to do with our father, France or the war. I wanted to be involved again, to be treated as an adult, a bearer of secrets. And I wanted to go to the cinema, to see Laurel and Hardy or Bela Lugosi or Humphrey Bogart, to sit in the flickering dark with Cassis on one side and Reine-Claude on the other, maybe with a cone of chips in one hand or a strip of licorice…

      Reinette shook her head. “You’re crazy,” she said at last. “You know Mother would never let you go into town on your own. You’re too young. Besides-”

      “I wouldn’t be on my own. You or Cassis could take me on the back of your bike,”

      I continued stubbornly. She rode my mother’s bike. Cassis took Father’s bike to school with him, an awkward black gantrylike thing. It was too far to walk, and without the bikes they would have had to board at the collège, as many country children did.

      “Term’s nearly over. We could all go into Angers together. See a film. Have a look round.”

      My sister looked mulish.

      “She’ll want us to stay home and work on the farm,” she said. “You’ll see. She never wants anyone to have any fun.”

      “The number of times she’s been smelling oranges recently,” I told her practically, “I don’t suppose it will matter. We could sneak off. The way she is, she’ll never even know.”

      It was easy. Reine was always easy to move. Her passivity was an adult thing, her sly, sweet nature hiding a kind of laziness, almost of indifference. She faced me now, throwing her last weak excuse at me like a handful of sand.

      “You’re crazy!”

      In those days everything I did was crazy to Reine. Crazy for swimming underwater, for teetering at the top of the Lookout Post on one leg, for answering back, for eating green figs or sour apples.

      I shook my head.

      “It’ll be easy,” I told her firmly. “You can count on me.”

      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.

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