Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина

“Cassis!” She leaned over me and I could smell a sweetish chemical scent in her hair. “Cassis, he’s here!”

“Shh!” hissed Cassis furiously. “Don’t look back!”

Reine and Cassis sat facing the front of the auditorium for a moment, expressionless as dummies. Then he spoke, from the corner of his mouth, like someone whispering in church.

“Who?”

Reinette flicked a glance at the Germans from the corner of her eye.

“Back there,” she replied in the same fashion. “Some others I don’t know.”

Around us the crowd stamped and yelled.

“I’ll wait till the lights go down,” he said.

Ten minutes later the lights dimmed and the film continued. Cassis wriggled from his seat toward the back of the auditorium. I followed him. On the screen Arletty pranced and eye-fluttered in a tight low-cut dress. The mercury reflection lit our low-bent, running figures, making Cassis’s face a livid mask.

“Go back, you little idiot,” he hissed at me. “I don’t want you with me, getting in the way!”

I shook my head.

“I won’t get in the way,” I told him. “Not unless you try to stop me coming with you.”

Cassis made an impatient gesture. He knew I meant what I said. In the dark I could feel him trembling, with excitement or nerves.

“Keep down,” he told me at last. “And let me do the talking.”

We finally squatted down at the back of the auditorium, close to where the group of German soldiers made an island among the regular crowd. Several of the men were smoking; we could see dimps of red fire on their flickering faces.

“See him there, at the end?” whispered Cassis. “That’s Hauer. I want to talk to him. You just stay with me and don’t say a word, all right?”

I did not reply. I wasn’t going to promise anything.

Cassis slid into the aisle next to the soldier called Hauer. Looking around curiously I could see that no one was paying us the slightest attention except the German standing behind us, a slight, sharp-faced young man with his uniform cap tilted back at a rakish angle and a cigarette in one hand.

Suddenly, with a jolt, I recognized him. It was the soldier from the market, the one who had seen me take the orange. For a minute I could do nothing but stare at him, transfixed.

The German gestured again.