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. 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. It was early in the season, and though the strawberries had been good, there was little else ready. We supplemented our income by selling jam, sugared with last year’s autumn beets, before the season really began.
Angers was busy on market day. Carts crammed axle to axle in the main street, bicycles pulling wicker baskets, a small open-topped wagon laden with churns of milk, a woman carrying a tray of loaves on her head, stalls piled high with greenhouse tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini, onions, potatoes. Here a stall sold wool or pottery; there wine, milk, preserves, cutlery, fruit, secondhand books, bread, fish, flowers. We settled early. There was a fountain beside the church where the horses could drink, and it was shady. My job was to wrap the food and hand it to the customers while my mother took the money. Her memory and speed of calculation were phenomenal. She could add a list of prices in her head without ever having to write them down, and she never hesitated over change. Notes in one side, coins in the other, she kept the money in the pockets of her smock, then the surplus went into an old biscuit tin she kept under the tarpaulin. I remember it stilclass="underline" pink, with a pattern of roses around the rim. I remember the coins and notes as they slid against the metal-my mother didn’t believe in banks. She kept our savings in a box under the cellar floor, along with the more valuable of her bottles.
That first market day we sold all the eggs and all the cheeses within an hour of arrival. People were aware of the soldiers standing at the intersection, guns crooked casually into the elbow, faces bored and indifferent. My mother caught me staring at the gray uniforms and snapped me sharply to attention.
“Stop that gawking, girl.”
Even when they came through the crowd we had to ignore them, though I could feel my mother’s restraining hand on my arm. A tremor went through her as he stopped in front of our stall, but her face remained impassive. A stocky man with a round, red face, a man who might have been a butcher or a wine merchant in another life. His blue eyes shone gleefully.
“Ach, welche schöne Erdbeeren.” His voice was jovial, slightly beery, the voice of a lazy man on holiday. He took a strawberry between plump fingers and popped it into his mouth. “Schmeckt gut, ja?” He laughed, not unkindly. His cheeks bulged. “Wu-n-der-schön gut!” He pantomimed rapture, rolling his eyes comically at me. In spite of myself I smiled.
My mother gave my arm a warning squeeze. I could feel nervous heat burning from her fingers. I looked at the German once more, trying to understand the source of her tension. He looked no more intimidating than the men who came to the village sometimes-less so, in fact, with his peaked cap and his single pistol in its holster at his side. I smiled again, more in defiance of my mother than for any other reason.
“Gut, ja,” I repeated, and nodded. The German laughed again, took another strawberry and made his way back through the crowd, his black uniform oddly funereal among the bright patchwork of the market.
Later my mother tried to explain. All uniforms were dangerous, she told me, but the black ones above all. The black ones weren’t just the army. They were the army’s police. Even the other Germans were afraid of them. They could do anything. It didn’t matter that I was only nine years old. Put a foot wrong and I could be shot, shot, did I understand? Her face was stony, but her voice trembled and she kept putting one hand to her temple in a strange helpless gesture, as if one of her headaches were on the way. I barely listened to her warning. It was my first face-to-face encounter with the enemy. Thinking it over later from the top of the Lookout Post, the man I had seen seemed oddly innocuous, rather disappointing. I had expected something more impressive.
The market finished at twelve. We had sold out everything else before that, but we stayed to do a little shopping of our own and for the spoiled goods that my mother was sometimes given by the other stallholders. Overripe fruit, scraps of meat, damaged vegetables that would not last another day. My mother sent me to the grocer’s stall while she bought a piece of discarded parachute silk from under the counter of Madame Petit’s sewing shop, tucking it carefully into her apron pocket. Fabrics of any kind were hard to come by, and we were all wearing hand-me-downs. My own dress was made from the pieces of two others, with a gray bodice and a blue linen skirt. The parachute, Mother told me, had been found in a field just outside Courlé, and would make Reinette a new blouse.