NOT SO LONG AGO

7

They jumped from their stool.

“Hey!” said the driver. “Wait there. I know your father, okay. He sells me fish. And I know you too, both of you. I’ve seen you before. I had to warn him, do you understand? Be smart, children. Stay here.”

Adam began to snivel. Oddly enough, the pain that sometimes sprang up between his ribs, only at certain moments, came back to haunt him. Roland felt his nerves tighten like piano strings. Behind the counter, he noticed a bathroom door and close by, what appeared to be a storeroom. He had already worked in a business like this two summers earlier. Ready to bet that there was a service door for deliveries, he rushed into the passageway.

The attendant tried to make a blockade, but Roland shoved him and the man went whirling onto the dirty floor. Adam and Erma, paralyzed by fear, didn’t move.

“Quick, we’re going!”

Roland shouted again. Erma jumped. She glanced, dazed, around her and grabbed Adam by the hand. As she slipped past her friend, she took care to deliver a little kick to the attendant’s groin. Roland and his companions entered the storeroom. On the sides, two shelves supported bottles, a few cans, and dishes. At the moment when Adam and Erma’s father, accompanied by the so-called Hollis, burst into the station, he touched the handle of the exit door, praying that it would not be locked. He heard: “They are in the back, in the storeroom.”

Adam grabbed one of the shelves and asked the others for help. They tipped it across the passage. Then they left the trap running like crazy. Behind the establishment, wrecks of old pre-war vehicles were rusting peacefully, out of sight of customers. They crawled between two shrubs and found themselves on an embankment. In front of them stretched a large forest. The only way out.

“Not over there,” Adam said.

Erma and Roland looked at him for a brief moment.

“Yes. We can only lose them in the forest.”

“No. Exactly, they expect us to go straight there. Come, we have to go to the other side.”

And without waiting for an answer, Adam turned around. Any second now, their father and his friend would come out of the storeroom. Worse: if they couldn’t clear the path blocked by the overturned shelf, they would just go through the entrance to the service station and confront the runaways.

Roland urged him, but Adam didn’t listen anymore. Instinctively, he hunched his shoulders. He walked along the back wall of the shop and took to his left, immediately followed by Roland and Erma who had no choice but to follow him. The girl only thought of finding Scram. As they turned to find themselves on the side of the station, they heard the service door fly open.

“Adam,” whispered Roland, containing his rage, “I’m going to kill you...”

“Follow me. You can kill me later.”

The youngest of the team reached the entrance, near the window which looked out to the truck. Scram met them, wagging its tail. Adam stood on tiptoes and peered inside the shop.

“It’s good, the man who brought us here and the attendant or something is with Hollis and Dad.”

He sped up again, but rather than follow his sister and her friend, he made a slight detour to the man in the baseball cap’s vehicle.

“He’ll take the keys so that he doesn’t follow us. Smart...” said Erma.

“Erma, do you really think he left the keys in the ignition?”

But Adam went to the back of the truck. He climbed onto the rear tire and grabbed the three bags they had left there when they entered the shop, lured by the prospect of quenching their thirst.

“And without our bags,” Adam chuckled, “what would we have done, huh?”

Roland and Erma looked at each other. A small smile appeared on their frightened faces, temporarily driving away the fear that had sneaked into them.

“Well done, Bambino. Well, with a little luck they are heading into the forest in the other direction. We’ve got to go.”

In front of them: the road. On the other side of it: a fence at least 7 feet high, erected there to prevent deer from wandering onto the road.

The fugitives stepped onto the tarmac and ran as fast as they could. Scram whirled around them, barking. For the children, running like this, in the open, was even more nerve-wracking than dragging themselves miserably through the endless woods, but they had no choice.

The sound of an engine was heard. Erma dared to turn. When she saw her father’s battered old Peugeot 202, she shrieked. For the first time, her nerve abandoned her and the anguish truly consumed her. Panic crept through every pore of her skin. She felt the hairs bristling on her forearms. Horror music beat rhythmically on her temples.

“There!” Roland shouted, pointing to a hole in the fence.

He swerved to the left and bent down to slip into the gap. He hooked the top of his trousers on a link but didn’t hesitate to tear his clothes to get free. The dog followed him.

The brakes of the Peugeot screeched as Erma entered the opening of the fence. Once on the other side, when she straightened up, she turned and found herself face to face with her father, only separated from him by the fence, paralyzed.

Her father was calm. He wasn’t agitated by those tics that made him tremble when he had drunk too much. His eyes were shooting daggers piercing the girl’s will. Behind her, the dog was barking. Roland begged her to follow them. By the time the two adults got through the hole, they had the chance to get a little ahead and Roland didn’t want to spoil this advantage.

“What are you doing here, Erma?” asked her father.

...

“Answer me. What do you think you’re doing here, with your brother and the other little i***t?”

...

“I recognized him, with his jagged ear, him. It’s the thug who fights a lot. You want to become a w***e, is that it, Erma?”

“Daddy…”

“Well, listen to what I’m going to tell you. Listen to me, because if you don’t, you’ll regret it for a long time. You’ll call your damn brother right now. You’re going to come back to this side of the fence and get in the damn car. If you do that, maybe I won’t beat your brains out. But you will obey me now, understood?”

Erma heard the old man grind his teeth. No, he wasn’t calm. In his heart he was boiling with anger, drunk with fury. A volcano. If he restrained himself like this, his madness would be terrible when it poured on them. I thought he would be able to kill us if he caught up with us. Now I don’t think it anymore, I know it.

Cay had clenched fists. He tapped his hip spasmodically, and Erma could almost hear the rhythm of his breathing speeding up. The rasps followed one another, becoming noisier.

“Erma, damn!” shouted the man, sputtering.

The girl stepped forward until her face was in contact with the hot wire fence. Confused, her father drew back.

“I won’t come back, Dad.”

“You what?”

“We’re not coming back. We’re leaving.”

“But, you’re crazy? Do you know what I’m going to do when I catch you?”

“You won’t catch us. You’re not going to hurt us. You’ll never do anything to us again. We’re leaving. Run after us if you want, you bastard.”

Under this insult, Enoch Cay, who had never in his life suffered such an affront, took a step back. Not him. Not him. Nobody could talk to him that way. Once he had been disrespected during the war, and the man was no longer here to testify to what happened to those who lacked respect for Enoch Cay. He leaned his head back, as the wolves did to howl at the moon, and began to roar. A little further on, Hollis, his close companion in charge of performing certain illegal tasks on the port―smuggling of all kinds, and beatings―appeared disturbed by the death cry of his friend.

The father approached the fence. Suddenly, his fist went forward and punched where his daughter’s head was. She anticipated the movement, but not enough to escape unscathed. She felt his knuckles crash against her cheek and was thrown back.

“Erma,” uttered her father, “I swear you’ll pay for this.”

As he leapt, he threw himself on his knees and began to slip through the hole in the fence. He stammered to Hollis an order to follow him. Erma turned and ran, encouraged by Roland and Adam who had a bit of a lead.

Scram led the way. The trees were too scattered for them to escape the eyes of their pursuers. The forest was farther north, so they rushed in the opposite direction. Behind their backs, Cay insulted them heavily, promising the worst violence if he could just get his hands on them.

Serviceberry trees, beeches, ash trees and wild pear trees accompanied the procession of runners, who followed one after the other in a furrow drawn by an invisible and mischievous hand. They would lose too much time going through the few gaps that appeared in the middle of the leafy branches. Besides, the risk was too great that one of them would stumble over a root and fall. The slightest failure and the hunt would come to a sudden end.

So the children ran straight ahead with the energy of despair, the only thing able to give them the strength not to waver.

Enoch Cay, the old man, wasn’t old. At forty-four, he thought he was in sparkling form, despite the alcohol that he slammed down too often and in too large quantities. Tough and educated in the values of the old days, those before the Krauts and the whiny lefties of today, he could not resign himself to the fact that his children were flouting the rules he had imposed; his rules; the only ones that were valid beyond conventions and laws.

In his house, you follow the rules and you don’t mouth off. And the belt-strokes that regularly stung the backs and buttocks of his children were no worse than those he had received at the same age. And he wasn’t dead, quite the opposite. He’d learned respect and he demanded simply that they should show him that. And the beating that a father inflicted on his kids never killed anyone, after all...

At all times, it was that little hooligan who had corrupted them. This third thief, he knew him. He knew who he was and where he came from. Roland—that was his name... The orphan. Another damn kid from Welfare, thought Enoch. If it was up to me, all of them would be in the hole, these hangers...

Enoch was horrified that the children would have dared to disobey him. To disregard his orders was defilement. They would all realize, any moment now, the sacrilege they had committed. Then, they would stop, ashamed would kneel on the hard track that they were all stumbling over at this moment, apologize in tears and beg for forgiveness.

And Enoch would punish them. As a good father, he would punish them since it could not be otherwise, and since any foul should be punished. And he would have a field day. His son, his daughter, and even Roland. They would suffer their fate while pleading, and never again would the idea of disrespecting him come to mind.

Yet the kids didn’t give up. Far from slowing down, they even seemed to find a second wind. In any case, they didn’t slow down. And that plunged him into even greater anger. They had to die, so there it was...

The gap which separated him from his children increased. And the two packets of cigarettes he smoked daily burned his lungs. He sputtered and put his right hand on his abdomen, towards the stomach, where a side stitch had been tormenting him for a minute.

And this damn rib cage that was rising more and more violently... And this damn vision that was tinged with a dark shadow... And that damn Hollis who had already given up...

Enoch stopped running. If he had had a little more wind, he would have flayed the skin off his fists by hitting the f*****g trees of this f*****g forest.

He clasped his knees with his hands, bent forward, and tried to breathe out more slowly. When his heartbeat stopped pounding, he watched the slender figures of the children disappear from his field of view, a long way off, between two hawthorn bushes.

Enoch bit his lower lip. A droplet of blood beaded up, swelled, flowed.

In the staring eyes of the man: rage.