Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина

10

This was where the day’s chores began. Buckets of water were brought from the well into the kitchen for cooking and washing. We had no hot water-no running water, in fact, except for the hand pump by the well, a few yards from kitchen door. Electricity was slow to come to Les Laveuses, and when bottled gas became too scarce we cooked on a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. The oven was outside, a large old-fashioned charcoal oven the shape of a sugarloaf, and beside it was the well. When we needed water that was where we had to get it, one of us pumping while another held the bucket. There was a wooden lid on the well, closed and padlocked since long before my birth, to prevent accidents. When Mother was not watching we washed under the pump, dousing ourselves with cold water. When she was around we had to use basins of water warmed in copper pans on the stove, as well as gritty coal-tar soap that abraded our skin like pumice, leaving a scum of gray froth on the surface of the water.

That Sunday, we knew Mother would not make an appearance until later. We had all heard her during the night, moaning to herself, turning and rolling on the old bed she had shared with my father, sometimes standing up and walking to and fro in the room, opening the windows for air, the shutters slamming back against the sides of the house and making the floor shake. I lay awake listening for a long time as she moved, paced, sighed, argued with herself in her percussive whisper. At about midnight I fell asleep, but awoke, an hour or so later, to hear her still awake.

It sounds callous now, but all I felt was triumph. There was no guilt at what I had done, no pity for her suffering. I didn’t understand it then, had no idea of what a torment insomnia can be. That the little bag of orange peel inside her pillow could have provoked such a reaction seemed almost impossible. The more she tossed and sighed on her pillow, the stronger the scent must have become, warmed by the feverish nape of her neck. The stronger the scent, the greater her anxiety. The headache must come soon, she thought. Somehow the anticipation of pain can be even more troubling, more of a misery than the pain itself. The anxiety that was a permanent crease in her forehead nibbled at her mind like a rat in a box, killing sleep. Her nose told her there were oranges, but her mind said it was impossible – how could there be oranges, for God’s sake? – and yet the scent of orange, bitter and yellow as old age, sweated from every dark mote of that room.

She rose at three and lit a lamp to write in her album. I can’t know for sure that it was then – she never wrote dates – and yet I know.

Worse now than it’s ever been, she writes. The script is tiny, a column of ants scrawled across the page in violet ink. I lie in bed amp; wonder whether I’ll ever sleep again. Whatever happens can’t ever be worse than this. Even going insane might be a relief. And a little later, under a recipe for vanilla-potato pie, she writes, Like the clock, I am divided. At three in the morning, anything is possible.

After that she got up to take her morphine pills. She kept them in the bathroom cabinet, next to my dead father’s shaving things. I heard the door open, the tired squeak of her sweating feet against the polished boards. The bottle rattled, and I heard the clink of a cup as she poured water from the jug. I suppose that six hours’ insomnia might well have finally provoked one of her headaches. In any case she was out like a light when, some time later, I got up.

Reinette and Cassis were still asleep, and the light that bled from beneath the thick blackout curtain was greenish and pale. It might have been five o’clock. There was no timepiece in our bedroom. I sat up in bed, felt for my clothes in the dark, dressed quickly. I knew every corner of the little room. I could hear Cassis and Reine breathing – he with shallower, almost wheezing breaths – and very quietly I stepped past their beds. There was a great deal to do before I awoke them.

First I listened at the door of my mother’s room. Silence. I knew she had taken her pills, and the chance was that she would be sleeping heavily, but I could not run the risk of being caught. Very gently I turned the doorknob. A board beneath my bare foot popped with a sound like a firecracker. I stopped mid-gesture, listening for her breathing, for any change in its rhythms. There were none. I pushed the door. One shutter had been left slightly open, and the room was light. My mother was lying across the bed. She had kicked off the covers during the night, and one pillow had fallen to the floor. The other was half covered by her outflung arm, and her head was hanging uncomfortably at an angle, her hair brushing the floorboards. I noticed with no surprise that the pillow in which I had concealed the muslin bag was the one upon which she was resting. I knelt beside her. Her breathing was thick and slow. Beneath her bruise-colored eyelids the pupils moved erratically. Slowly I worked my fingers into the pillowcase beneath her.

It was easy. My fingers worked at the knot in the center of the pillow, coaxing it back toward the slit in the lining. I touched the bag, drew it closer with my fingernails, finally pulling it from its hiding place and safe into the palm of my hand. My mother never stirred. Only her eyes ticked and skittered under the darkened flesh, as if constantly following something bright and elusive. Her mouth was half open, and a thread of drool had crawled down her cheek to the mattress. On an impulse I put the sachet beneath her nostrils, crushing it to release the scent, and she whimpered in her sleep, turning her head away from the scent and frowning. I put the orange sachet into my pocket again.

Then I began in earnest. A final glance behind me at my mother, as if she might be a dangerous animal feigning sleep. Then I moved to the mantelpiece. There was a clock there, a heavy piece with a round dial under a gilt and glass dome. It looked strange above the bare little black grate, too ornate for my mother’s room, but she had inherited it from her mother, and it was one of her most prized possessions. I lifted the glass dome and carefully turned the clock’s hands back. Five hours. Six. I replaced the dome.

Then I rearranged the ornaments on the mantelpiece-a framed photograph of my father, another of a woman I knew to be my grandmother, a pottery vase of dried flowers, a dish containing three hairpins and a single sugared almond from Cassis’s christening. I turned the photographs against the wall. I placed the vase on the floor. I took the hairpins from the dish and put them in the pocket of my mother’s discarded apron. Then I picked up her clothes and draped them artistically around the room. One clog balancing on the lamp shade. The other on the window ledge. Her dress hanging neatly on a hanger behind the door, but her apron spread out on the boards like a picnic tablecloth. Finally I opened her wardrobe and positioned the door so that the mirror inside it would reflect the bed from where she was lying. The first thing she would see as she awoke was herself.

I did none of this from any real sense of mischief. My intention was not to hurt but to disorient, to fool her into thinking that her imagined attack had been real and that she herself had, unknowingly, moved the objects, arranged the clothes, changed the clock. I knew from my father that she sometimes did things and lost track of doing them, that in the extremity of her pain and confusion her vision was troubled, her thoughts more so. The clock on the kitchen wall might suddenly appear bisected, one half clearly visible and the other suddenly not there, nothing but the bare wall behind it, or a wineglass might seem to change place on its own, to shift slyly from one side of the plate to the other. Or a face, a human face – mine, my father’s, Raphaël’s at the café – half the features would be suddenly sheared away as if by some terrible surgery, or half of the page of a cookbook removed even as she read, the remaining letters dancing incomprehensibly before her.

Of course I didn’t know all that then. I learned most of this from the album, from her scribbled notes, some frantic, almost despairing – at three in the morning, anything seems possible – others almost clinical in their detachment, noting symptoms with cool scientific curiosity. Like the clock, I am divided.