Seven Houses in France by Bernardo Atxaga

Author:Bernardo Atxaga
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781409028260
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XIII

AS SOON AS they had crossed over to the opposite bank, Donatien and the four askaris set off in the direction of the larger mugini, following a path that neither the undergrowth nor the trees had managed to erase completely. They had barely gone two hundred yards when the shrill cry of a monkey broke the silence and a flock of birds took noisy flight. The four askaris were immediately on the alert.

‘Who is it?’ asked Donatien.

The four askaris raised their rifles. Donatien stood behind them. Again they heard noises, this time the sound of voices.

‘Je crois que ce sont des enfants,’ said one askari, lowering his rifle slightly: ‘I think they’re children.’ They all listened hard and agreed that he was right. They were light, young voices.

Out of the undergrowth emerged three girls of eight or nine and a very tall girl of about fifteen, so light-skinned that she didn’t appear to come from that part of Africa. They were speaking gaily, as if telling each other amusing stories. The tall girl stopped abruptly, and the younger girls walked on, immersed in their conversation.

Donatien opened his eyes very wide. The tall, light-skinned girl was wearing earrings. Green earrings. They looked like emeralds. He raised his rifle and fired.

The tall girl screamed, and a monkey echoed her scream. All four girls broke into a run and vanished into the dense vegetation. Donatien roared, his throat almost bursting:

‘Get that girl!’

He plunged into the jungle, along with the other men. A few yards ahead of him, the girl’s head appeared above the bushes, and on that head was an ear and in that ear glittered an emerald. Donatien fired again.

The head bobbing above the bushes suddenly veered into a darker part of the jungle, and Donatien followed. Sometimes he would lose sight of her for a few seconds, then he would catch the green glint of an emerald, sometimes once, sometimes twice, and would quicken his pace, ducking now and then to avoid the lianas. The tall girl was a good runner, much faster than him. He cursed himself for being such a bad marksman. If he had even a fraction of Chrysostome’s skill, those earrings would now be in his pocket.

The glints of green grew more numerous, as if he had before him twenty heads and forty earrings, and he slowed his pace. The signs continued to multiply. Soon there were fifty heads and a hundred earrings, and a moment later, a hundred heads and two hundred earrings.

He came to a complete halt, breathing hard. Before him lay thousands of glittering green lights. They were not emerald earrings, however, but the tiny round leaves of a plant. Some distance away, a monkey shrieked. He looked around him and couldn’t recognise the trees. They weren’t mahogany trees or teak, they weren’t draped in long lianas like the rubber trees from which they extracted the sap. He was lost.

He called out to the askaris, but the only answer came from the monkeys. He raised his rifle to fire again, because he still had ten cartridges, but stopped.

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