Angelina's Children by Alice Ferney

Author:Alice Ferney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912242009
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Published: 2017-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Esther came on Wednesday at the usual time. A damp mist had descended on the silent caravans. Without human movement and the sound of voices, the ugliness of this corner of the earth could not be concealed. Esther looked around for the children. She thought they must be hiding, and started looking for them. She called. “Carla! Sandro! Michael! Cooee! I’m here! Come out from where you’re hiding!” Where could they all be? she wondered. She knocked on the caravan doors, and there was no reply. The lorries were in their usual places. The fire had not been lit.

She settled down in her car. She wasn’t worried, despite this unusual absence. She had brought some new books, and she leafed through them while she waited. Some days she was filled with energy, and today she was looking forward to reading and explaining things, wanting to talk in the way one does when one feels more acutely than usual the intensity of life, and (always wrongly) that one can somehow convey it. She waited.

“There was a dark forest of pines standing on either side of the frozen river.” The children were going to love this story. She read haphazardly, enjoying herself. “The men trudged without speaking through the huge frozen land. The silence was broken only by the cries of their pursuers, who, invisible, were following their tracks.” There was a secret at the heart of these words. You had only to read to hear and see it, with nothing but paper between your hands. There were images and sounds within the words, embodying one’s fears and nourishing one’s heart. She didn’t stop reading. “He was filled with a great fear, the fear of the unknown. He crouched down at the entrance to the cave and gazed out at the world.” Esther looked up.

Then she saw the black procession approaching from a distance. The men were supporting the women, whose faces and heads were covered with mantillas. Weighed down by sorrow, they seemed hardly bigger than the children, who walked beside their mothers without shouting or jumping around. Nobody needed to tell them to behave. Only Anita was thinking of her brother’s body shut up in the box. Just inside was his face and his body, his round tummy sticking out of his trousers and the curly hair she used to pull when he wriggled too much in bed. The idea was unbelievable – that he should be so close, shut in. She could no longer see him. What did he look like now? (She had heard the adults talking. “It goes very quickly,” they had said. She didn’t understand what they meant.) Why can’t we keep him with us? she wondered. She felt bad thinking that she hadn’t always been nice to him. When he came over the middle of the bed, she used to kick him. She cried thinking about that. While the priest had been talking, Michael had gone off to play with the handles of the coffin.

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