Rat by Fernanda Eberstadt

Author:Fernanda Eberstadt [Eberstadt, Fernanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59307-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

When they get back from the market, Rat can tell at once that someone has visited their camp. Her and Morgan’s sleeping area smells of dope, and there’s an imprint of somebody’s body on Morgan’s sleeping bag. A pot-smoking Goldilocks.

She goes through to the Great Hall. The Paulines are unloading their booty: salads, fruit, bread. They’ve bought some cheeses and a long string of Catalan sausages to grill for dinner tonight. Some friends from another squat are arriving tonight on their way to an antinuclear demonstration in Marseille.

Dany has picked up his accordion. Morgan has already settled himself in the hammock with a Titeuf comic book he got from a secondhand bookseller.

“Hey Mo,” says Rat. “Looks like Jérôme and Florian have come to find us.”

“Oh yeah?” Morgan doesn’t look up from his comic book.

These days Rat hardly sees Morgan, except at bedtime or in the middle of the night, when he occasionally wakes up from a bad dream. He has attached himself to Yannick and Dany, joining in their chores, gathering firewood, fetching water, watching them dive for mussels and sea urchins. The other day they went into the woods and came back with a basket of wild strawberries. Morgan had on his face what is almost Rat’s favorite of his expressions: lips compressed in a look of utter solemnity, supreme satisfaction at a job well done.

Rat’s happy enough, too, in the day-to-day, but at night she worries. The Paulines aren’t going to stay at the dynamite factory much longer. From what she can make out, none of their living arrangements are intended to last long, and the groups in which they live are constantly mutating, splitting into smaller cells or going off to join larger collectives. When they leave the dynamite factory, Yannick and Dany are planning to help set up another squat in Toulouse. Pauline and Sara are going to join some friends who live on a sheep farm up in the Ariège, and Julie, who is Belgian, is going back to Anvers to get her midwife’s training.

Rat likes Pauline a lot. At first, when Pauline would start talking about how prison was this laboratory where the state tests everything later to be diffused throughout society, or why it’s wrong to recycle your garbage, Rat tended to daydream. Now she’s getting a bit more interested. It’s even occurred to Rat that if London doesn’t work out, she wouldn’t mind living on a sheep farm in the Ariège, although Pauline has made it clear it’s an all-female collective, where even a nine-year-old male might not be welcome.

Rat makes her way down to the beach, followed by Arnaque.

Two figures are standing by the shore. One of them is skipping stones into the water. She breaks into a run, throwing her arms around both boys at the same time, enveloping them in a joint hug.

“You found us!”

Jérôme is looking sour. She can also tell from just one look at him both that her father hasn’t answered her e-mail and that Thierry’s still around.

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