Carnival Read Online Free Page B

completely so as to give the local boys their money’s worth. My look was free since I took in the cash for her. Six pfennigs, one from each of them.’
    At times, even such as this, it was best to wait and say nothing.
    â€˜ Oncle Ernst was a big man, Hermann. Not quite as tall as yourself but as strong as an ox. Gentle, though, but thorough. Rigorously so.’
    â€˜I’m waiting, aren’t I?’
    â€˜ Ah, bon . Guess who was forced to strip off for free and stand in front of all the girls and women of the village yet … yet afterward, no one said a thing of it. There was not one whisper­ or giggle. Hedda and I lived in mortal fear and remorse for days—it was as if we had been banished, but ever since then, except for that last war and this one, she and I have corresponded.’
    The truth at last, but a bond, if not of distant kinship and forbidden commerce, of shared guilt, shame and trial.
    â€˜ Grand-maman said that they had won me over and that I was a terrible disappointment to her. She had hoped I would come back hating them, and didn’t even acknowledge that I had finally learned the language.’
    Louis was always answering for the sins of his boyhood.
    â€˜Just remember Sainte Odilia, Hermann, then you’ll realize how long such things can linger. In 700 A.D. she prophesied that evil would come via the Antichrist from the Danube.’
    A tale worthy of the troubadours. Born blind, rejected by her father, Alsace’s patron saint had been hidden away until baptized when a beautiful maid. Miraculously she had gained her sight and her vocation, had kept her virginity, and become a nun and then abbess of the convent she had founded. One day, in her old age when a passerby, and not a blind one, had said he was thirsty, she had touched the stone at her feet with her cane and produced a spring to which, yearly since, the blind had flocked to bathe in hope of gaining their sight!
    â€˜You shouldn’t pay that legend much credence, Louis.’
    â€˜I don’t. I just see the evidence of it all around me.’
    The stove was cylindrical and of fluted white ceramic tile bound by gleaming straps of brass. Hands held to it, they waited in the colonel’s office. Finally Hermann could no longer stand their being left alone. ‘He likes to make his fish sweat before frying! He’s pissed off because we’re late and will never believe it wasn’t my fault!’
    They had been ushered past the duty desk, had been quickly led through the warren of narrow corridors, up sets of creaking staircases, down others and up again at turns, all eyes taking time out in the various offices to not only watch their progress but see what Paris had sent.
    Diamond-leaded casement windows filled much of the oriel behind the Empire desk that looked oddly out of place. Frantically Hermann tried to roll a cigarette. Mégot -scavenged tobacco showered, messing the Aubusson under foot and littering the black sheet-iron beneath the stove.
    â€˜Let me.’
    â€˜ Verdammt! Can’t you just be patient?’
    Was it all coming back to him? wondered St-Cyr. The agony of never knowing what verdict the court of inquiry would render? The distinct possibility of the firing squad—he’d never given a hint of being so troubled!
    The chair behind the desk was not Empire or anything so fine. It was simply a plain, bare, mismatched wooden thing, high- and straight-backed, a railed affair without armrests. A man, then, this colonel of Hermann’s, who favoured his back, but did he, in his contemplative moments, gaze off to the northwest beyond the Cathedral to the Église des Dominicains whose exquisite stained glass would have been taken down in 1939 and crated to rest in security, as had the rose window of the Notre-Dame and others? Did he know that the building of that church had begun in the thirteenth century and had continued through the fourteenth, fifteenth and