Шоколад / Chocolat

For a moment I almost forgot where?”

“I know.”

I could feel rage pricking at my thumbs.

“You must think I’m stupid to have stayed with him all these years.”

Her voice was dull, her eyes dark and resentful.

“No, I don’t.”

She ignored my reply. “Well I am,” she declared. “Stupid and weak. I don’t love him – can’t remember a time when I ever loved him – but when I think of actually leaving him-” She broke off in confusion. “Actually leaving him,” she repeated in a low, wondering voice. “No. It’s no use.

” She looked up at me again and her face was closed, final. “That’s why I can’t talk to you again,” she told me in calm desperation. “I couldn’t leave you guessing – you deserve better than that. But this is how it has to be.”

“No,” I told her. “It doesn’t.”

“But it does.” She defends herself bitterly, desperately, against the possibility of comfort. “Can’t you see? I’m no good. I steal. I lied to you before. I steal things. I do it all the time!”

Gently: “Yes. I know.

” The clear realization turns quietly between us like a Christmas bauble. “Things can be better,” I told her at last. “Paul-Marie doesn’t rule the world.”

“He might as well,” retorted Josephine mulishly.

I smiled. If that stubbornness of hers could be turned out instead of in, what could she not achieve? I could do it, too. I could feel her thoughts, so close, welcoming me in. It would be so easy to take control… I turned the thought aside impatiently. I had no right to force her to any decision.

“Before, you had no-one to go to,” I said. “Now you do.”

“Do I?”

In her mouth, it was almost an admission of defeat.

I did not reply. Let her answer that for herself.

She looked at me in silence for a while. Her eyes were full of river lights from Les Marauds. Again it struck me, with what small a twist she might become beautiful.

“Goodnight, Josephine.”

I did not turn to look at her, but I know she watched me as I made my way up the hill, and I know she stood watching long after I had rounded the corner and disappeared from sight.

15

Tuesday, February 25

Still more of this interminable rain. It falls like A piece of the sky upended to pour misery onto the aquarium life below. The children, bright plastic ducks in their waterproofs and boots, squawk and waddle across the square, their cries ricocheting off the low clouds. I work in the kitchen with half an eye to the children in the street.