Dedication and Prologue
To Cindy Harris
“If you’re a good girl, you may go to school in September,” promises father.
I try. I try very hard.
In the morning, I leap out of bed. I wash conscientiously, even behind the ears, where nobody can see. I clean my teeth from up-to-down, as I have been taught. I get dressed all by myself, like a grown-up person.
I brush my hair until every single one stands at attention: I become a model little girl.
Summer has never been as long: long and rainy.
It’s the summer when wheat, under the balmy rain, grows bushy sprouts like weeds; the summer when earthworms parade around the porch of our kitchen. It’s the summer when young mice have to save their lives swimming away from they inundated nests.
And it’s also the summer when I become a school-girl.
I wake up in the morning.
Rain is swaying on the windows; it has fun day and night, and never has to go to bed.
With a harsh, metallic sound, it slides along the tiles on the roof and crushes vehemently down into the gutter, going “glug-glug”.
The little devils, dozing behind our chimney, are startled out of their sleep.
Rain is a plague. It rots the fruit on the trees; it blackens the wheat which dreamt of becoming golden.
The forest behind our house is steaming. Firs fling icy raindrops at my shivering neck.
Every day, before dawn, mother wakes me up. She chucks me out of my warm, cosy bed, makes me put on clumsy gumboots and a heavy raincoat. And off we go, to hunt slimy mushrooms.
Humidity attacks me: it blocks my nose, it makes me sneeze. I am soaking wet and gloomy.
It’s pitch-dark. We stop at the edge of the forest waiting for dawn when the trees will detach themselves from the menacing mass of the forest, when a hint of light will separate the branches stuck close together.
I’d rather stay at home and read, cuddled in a dry, smooth leather armchair; go down to the kitchen and watch grandmother preparing our lunch; accompany the maid to do shopping in the village under her red and white checked umbrella. Yet I am with my mother in the woods.
She is not an unkind mother; just unable to conceive that her little daughter could hate what she loves most.
I loathe the forest - the mud, the sticky humidity of the spongy earth.
The gumboots scratch my feet, the raincoat crushes my shoulders. If that’s all there is to Nature, thank you very much. I have seen enough! It disgusts me and I do not want to have anything to do with this brutal and hostile world.
The mushrooms mock me. Their shady little eyes under hitch-up hats observe me with the spiteful grins of wicked teasers.
Mother is fiddling with the moss. Under her experienced fingers mushrooms turn up their polished heads and give her a welcoming smile.
Delicately, mother pulls them out and puts them tenderly into a wicker basket. Her face is beaming. Hunting mushrooms is part of her simple, rustic happiness.
I love my mother. For nothing in the world would I sadden her, spoil her fun, point out my absolute lack of interest for all the mushrooms in the world. Not to my mother, not to her, who never shows off with her adult’s superiority!
I am kneeling down by her, trying to imitate her: not a single mushroom comes up to my aloof fingers.
To let me share her treasure, mother asks me to gather her mushrooms. This is an act of utmost generosity and I pay her back, accompanying her, without grumbling, on her forest expeditions.
Mother is a decent person.
Looked down on by my grandfather, for whom a woman has none other than a domestic avail, neglected by my grandmother who preferred her son, who, as a man, deserved her respect, mother has got used to slip through the world without asking for its attention leading the existence of a tiny, timid creature content to be allowed to live and be pleased with a sunbeam to warm her, with a drop of water to appease her thirst.
Without raising an objection, she married my father. My grandfather, who was financially ruined at that time, chose him for his wealth and his promising future among a long line of other suitors, - my mother was a striking beauty.
Mother put on patiently with my father’s love, and discharged her obligations to him by giving him two children. She has never let anybody come close to her or her private life to be disrupted more than was necessary.
She doesn’t love us.
She doesn’t hate us.
She tolerates us with a rare generosity.
Thus everyone lives a strictly-private life: grandfather with his culture; grandmother with her culinary art, her slushy love-stories, her dulcified music, and her romantic dreams; father with his stock-exchange and his adoration for his wife; mother with her little pleasures; my sister with her starched nurse, and I with my books.
Father looks after our financial security and the servants after our comfort.
