Joanne Harris - Five Quarters of the Orange

Clean and gut the anchovies and rub inside and out with salt. Fill each one generously with rock salt and branches of salicorne. Place in the barrel with the heads facing upward and cover with salt by layers.

Another affectation. When you opened the barrel they would be there, standing on their tails in the gleaming gray salt, staring in mute fishy appeal. Remove what is needed for the day’s cooking and pack the rest into place with more salt and salicorne . In the darkness of the cellar they look desperate, like drowning children in a well.

Snip off that thought quickly, like the head of a flower.

My mother writes in blue ink, the script neat and slanting. Beneath it she has added something in a more careless hand, but it is in bilini-enverlini, an exotic scrawl in red grease pencil like lipstick: toulini fonini nisllipni .

Out of pills.

She’d had them since the beginning of the war, using them first with care, once a month or less, then more recklessly as that strange summer advanced and she smelt oranges all the time.

She wrote raggedly:

Y. does his best to help. It gives both of us a little relief. He gets the pills from La Rép, from a man Hourias knows there. Other comforts too, I guess. I know better than to ask. He isn’t made of stone, after all. Not like me. I try not to care. It’s pointless. He is discreet. I should be grateful. He looks after me in his way, but it’s useless. We are divided. He lives in the light. The thought of my suffering dismays him. I know this, and still I hate him for being what he is.

Then, later, after my father’s death:

Out of pills. The German says he can get some more, but he doesn’t come. It is a kind of madness. I would sell my children for a night’s sleep.

This last entry, unusually, has a date. That’s how I know. She was jealous with her pills, hiding the bottle away at the bottom of a drawer in her room. Sometimes she would take the bottle out and turn it over. It was brown glass, the label still showing a few barely legible words in German.

Out of pills .

That was the night of the dance, the night of the last orange.

Hey, Backfisch , almost forgot.“ Turning, he threw it carelessly, like a boy pitching a ball, to see if I’d catch. He was like that, pretending to forget, teasing me, risking the prize in the murky Loire if I was slow or clumsy. ”Your favorite.“

I caught it easily, left-handed. Grinned.

“Tell the others to come by La Mauvaise Réputation tonight.” Winked, eyes glinting cat-green with mischief. “Might be some fun.”

Of course, Mother would never have let us go out at night. Though the curfew remained largely unenforceable in the remoter villages such as ours, there were other dangers. Night hid more illicit goings-on than we could guess, and by then a number of off-duty Germans had occasionally taken to stopping by at the café for drinks. Apparently they liked to get out of Angers and away from the suspicious eye of the S.S. In the course of our meetings Tomas had mentioned this, and sometimes I heard the sounds of motorbikes on the distant road and thought of him riding home. I saw him clearly in my mind’s eye, hair blown back by the wind, the moonlight shining on his face and the cold white sweep of the Loire. The motorbike riders might have been anyone, of course. But I always thought of Tomas.

Today, however, was different. Emboldened perhaps by our secret time together, anything seemed possible. Slinging his uniform jacket over his shoulders Tomas waved lazily as he drove off, kicking up a cloud of yellow Loire dust beneath his wheels, and suddenly my heart swelled unbearably. Loss flooded through me in a hot-cold wash and I ran after him, tasting his dust, waving my arms for long after his bike vanished down the Angers road, tears beginning to crawl pink channels across my face’s mud mask.

It wasn’t enough.

I’d had my day, my one perfect day, and already my heart was boiling with rage and dissatisfaction. I clocked the sun. Four hours. An impossible time, a whole afternoon, and yet it wasn’t enough, I wanted more. More. The discovery of this new appetite within me made me bite my lips in desperation; the memory of the brief contact between us burnt at my hand like a brand. Several times I lifted my palm to my lips and kissed the burning place his skin had left. I lingered over his words as if they were poetry. I relived every precious moment to myself, with growing disbelief, as on winter mornings I still try to recall the summer. But it is an appetite that no amount of feeding can satisfy. I wanted to see him again, that day, that minute. I had wild thoughts of us running away together, of living in the forest away from people, of myself building him a tree house and eating mushrooms and wild strawberries and chestnuts until the war was over…

Cassis, Reine and Paul found me at the Lookout Post, the orange in one hand, lying on my back and staring into the autumn canopy.

“S-s-said she’d b-be here,” said Paul (he always stammered badly when Reine was there). “S-s-saw her g-oing into the w-woods when I was f-fishing.”

He looked shy and awkward beside Cassis, conscious of his scruffy blue dungarees (cut down from one of his uncle’s overalls) and his bare feet in their wooden clogs. Malabar was with him, tied with a length of green gardening twine. Cassis and Reine wore their school clothes, and Reinette’s hair was tied with a yellow silk ribbon. I always wondered why Paul dressed so shabbily when his mother was a seamstress.

“Are you all right?” Cassis’s voice was sharp with anxiety. “When you didn’t come home, I thought-” He cast a quick dark look at Paul, then one of warning to me. “ You know who hasn’t been here, has he?” he whispered, clearly wishing that Paul would leave.

I nodded. Cassis made a gesture of annoyance. “What did I tell you?” he said in a low, furious voice. “What did I say, never to be alone with-” Another glance at Paul. “Anyway, we’d better be going home now,” he said in a louder voice. “Mother will be starting to get worried, and she’s making a pavé . You’d better hurry up and-”

But Paul was looking at the orange in my hand.

“You g-got another un,” he said in his slow, curious way.

Cassis gave me a look of disgust. Why couldn’t you hide it, stupid? Now we’ll have to share it with him.

I hesitated. Sharing was not in my plan. I needed the orange for tonight. And yet I could see Paul was already curious. Ready to talk.

“I’ll give you some if you don’t tell,” I said at last.

“Where’s it f-from?”

“Swapped it down the market,” I said glibly. “For some sugar and parachute silk. Mother doesn’t know.”

Paul nodded, then looked shyly at Reine. “We could all sh-share it now,” he said tentatively. “I’ve gotta knife.”

“Give it to me,” I said.

“I’ll do it,” said Cassis at once.

“No, it’s mine,” I said. “Let me.”

I was thinking rapidly. Of course I might be able to retrieve some of the orange peel, but I didn’t want Cassis to suspect.

I turned my back on them to divide the orange, slicing carefully to avoid cutting my hand. Cutting quarters would have been easy, slice down the middle, then slice again, but this time I needed to cut an extra piece, large enough for my purpose but too small to be immediately noticeable as missing from the rest, a piece I could slip into my pocket for later… As I sliced it I saw that Tomas’s gift was a Seville blood orange, a sanguine, and for an instant I was transfixed at the red juice dripping from my fingers.