Читать книгу Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина онлайн

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It may seem I’m exaggerating. I’m not. The war is vividly remembered in Les Laveuses. There are people here who still don’t speak to each other. Denise Mouriac and Lucile Dupré, Jean-Marie Bonet and Colin Brassaud. Wasn’t there that business in Angers a few years ago, when an old woman was found locked in a room above a top-floor flat? Her parents had shut her there in 1945, when they found out she’d collaborated with the Germans. She was sixteen. Fifty years later they brought her out, old and mad, when her father finally died.

And what about those old men-eighty, ninety, some of them-locked away for war crimes? Blind old men, sick old men sweetened by dementia, their faces slack and uncomprehending. Impossible to believe that they might once have been young. Impossible to imagine bloody dreams inside those fragile, forgetful skulls. Smash the vessel, the essence evades you. The crime takes on a life-a justification-of its own.

“By a strange coincidence, the owner of Crêpe Framboise, Mme. Françoise Simon, just happens to be related to the owner of Aux Délices Dessanges…”