Five Quarters of the Orange Read Free

myself humble, apologetic. Some of the old ones viewed me askance, thinking, perhaps, that the farm should have stayed a memorial forever. I wore black and hid my hair beneath a succession of scarves. You see, I was old from the beginning.
    Even so, it took some time for me to be accepted. People were polite but unwelcoming, and because I am not of a naturally social disposition—surly, my mother used to call it—they remained so. I did not go to church. I know how it must have looked, but I could not bring myself to go. Arrogance, perhaps, or the kind of defiance that led my mother to name us after fruit rather than the Church’s saints…. It took the shop to make me a part of the community.
    It began as a shop, though I had always intended to expand later. Three years after my arrival, and Hervé’s money was almost gone. The house was livable now, though the land was still virtually useless: a dozen trees, a vegetable patch, two pygmy goats and some chickens and ducks—clearly it would be some time before I could make a living from the land. I began to make cakes and to sell them—the brioche and pain d’épices of the region as well as some of my mother’s Breton specialties, packets of crêpes dentelle , fruit tarts and packs of sablés , biscuits, nut bread, cinnamon snaps…. At first I sold them from the local bakery, then from the farm itself, adding other items little by little: eggs, goat’s cheeses, fruit liqueurs and wines. With the profits I bought pigs, rabbits, more goats. I used my mother’s old recipes,working most often from memory, but consulting the album from time to time.
    Memory plays such strange games; no one in Les Laveuses seemed even to remember my mother’s cooking. Some of the older people even said what a difference my presence had made; the woman who was here before was a hard-faced sloven. Her house reeked, her children ran barefoot. Good riddance to her, to them. I winced inwardly but said nothing. What could I have said? That she waxed the floorboards every day, made us wear felt over-slippers in the house so that our shoes would not scuff the floor? That her window boxes were always brimming with flowers? That she scrubbed us with the same fierce impartiality with which she scrubbed the steps, Indian-burning our faces with the flannel so that we were sometimes afraid we might bleed?
    She is an evil legend here. There was even a book once. Not more than a pamphlet really. Fifty pages, a few photographs. One of the memorial, one of Saint-Benedict’s, a close-up of the fateful west wall. Only a passing reference to the three of us, not even our names. I was grateful for that. A blurry blown-up photograph of my mother, hair scraped back so fiercely from her face that her eyes looked chinesed, mouth crimped into a tight little line of disapproval. The official photograph of my father, the one from the album, in uniform, looking absurdly young, rifle slung casually over one arm, grinning. Then, almost at the end of the book, the photograph that made me catch my breath like a fish with a hook in its throat. Four young men in German uniforms, arms linked except for the fourth, standing a little to the side, self-consciously, a saxophone in one hand…. The others are also carrying musical instruments—a trumpet, a side drum, a clarinet—and though their names are not given, I know them all. Les Laveuses military ensemble, circa 1942. Far right, Tomas Leibniz .
    It took me some time to understand how they could have found out so many details. Where had they discovered the picture of my mother? As far as I knew there were no pictures of her. Even I hadonly ever seen one, an old wedding photo in the bottom of a bedroom drawer, two people on the steps of Saint-Benedict’s, he wearing a broad-brimmed hat and she loose-haired and with a flower behind one ear…. A different woman, then, smiling stiffly, shyly at the camera, the man beside her standing with one arm protectively around her