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

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They only went occasionally to the river to swim, Reine-Claude entering the water gingerly, and only in the deeper, clearer parts where snakes were unlikely to venture. I sought their attention, making extravagant dives from the bank and swimming underwater for such long stretches that Reine-Claude would scream that I was drowned. Even so I felt them slipping from me little by little, and loneliness overwhelmed me.

Only Paul stayed loyal during this time. Though he was older than Reine-Claude and almost the same age as Cassis, he seemed younger, less sophisticated. He was inarticulate when they were there, smiling in agonized embarrassment when they talked about school. Paul could barely read, and his writing was the stilted, painful printing of a much younger child. He liked stories, though, and I would read to him from Cassis’s magazines when he came to the Lookout Post. We used to sit on the platform, he whittling at a piece of wood with his small knife while I read The Mummy’s Tomb or The Martian Invasion, half a loaf of bread on the board between us, from which we would occasionally cut a slice. Sometimes he brought a piece of rillettes wrapped in a sheet of waxed paper, or half a camembert. To our little feast, I would add a pocketful of strawberries or one of the goat’s cheeses rolled in ash that my mother called petits cendrés. From the Post I could see all my nets and traps, which I checked every hour, resetting them as necessary and removing the small fry.