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

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It sounded like her. Her voice in his, clear and sharp as glass. She must have been angry with him, in one of her rages. It was rare that she struck any of us, but God!.. her tongue.

Cassis grimaced.

“It was the way she said it too,” he told me softly. “So cold and dry. With that curious look in her eyes, as if it was a kind of test. As if she was waiting to see what I’d do next.”

“And what did you do?”

He shrugged.

“I cried, of course. I was only nine.”

Of course he would, I told myself. That was always his way. Too sensitive beneath his wildness. He used to run away from home regularly, sleeping out in the woods or in the tree house, knowing that Mother would not whip him. Secretly she encouraged his misbehavior, because it looked like defiance. It looked like strength. Me, I’d have spat in her face.

“Tell me, Cassis”-the idea came to me in a rush and I was suddenly almost out of breath with excitement-“Did Mother-do you ever remember if she spoke Italian? Or Portuguese? Some foreign language…”