Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина

Джоанн Харрис

Билингва Bestseller

Для тех, кто хочет быть лучшим!

Оригинальный текст и перевод на страницах одной книги – это эффективный способ усовершенствовать знание английского языка.

От матери в наследство Фрамбуаза получила альбом с кулинарными рецептами – негусто, если учесть, что ее брату Кассису досталась ферма, а старшей сестре Рен-Клод – винный погреб со всем содержимым. Но весь фокус в том, что на полях альбома, рядом с рецептами разных блюд и травяных снадобий, мать записывала свои мысли и признания относительно некоторых событий ее жизни – словом, вела своеобразный дневник. И в этом дневнике Фрамбуаза пытается найти ответы на мрачные загадки прошлого.

«Харрис создала многослойный сюжет, усыпанный восхитительными описаниями французских книг и раскрывающий встряхивающий эффект войны на хрупкое семейное устройство». – Publishers Weekly

«Из ее книг эта – пока самая сильная: острая, с горчинкой…» – Independent

В формате PDF A4 сохранен издательский макет.

Джоанн Харрис

Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина

Copyright © Frogspawn Limited 2001

© И. Тогоева, перевод на русский язык, 2022

© Издание на русском языке, оформление. ООО Издательство «Эксмо», 2022

Joanne Harris

Five Quarters of the Orange

Part One

The inheritance

1

When my mother died she left the farm to my brother, Cassis, the fortune in the wine cellar to my sister, Reine-Claude, and to me, the youngest, her album and a two-liter jar containing a single black Pеrigord truffle, large as a tennis ball, suspended in sunflower oil, that, when uncorked, still releases the rich dank perfume of the forest floor. A fairly unequal distribution of riches, but then Mother was a force of nature, bestowing her favors as she pleased, leaving no insight as to the workings of her peculiar logic.

And as Cassis always said, I was the favorite.

Not that she ever showed it when she was alive. For my mother there was never much time for indulgence, even if she’d been the type. Not with her husband killed in the war, and the farm to run alone. Far from being a comfort to her widowhood, we were a hindrance to her with our noisy games, our fights, our quarrels. If we fell ill she would care for us with reluctant tenderness, as if calculating the cost of our survival, and what love she showed took the most elementary forms: cooking pots to lick, jam pans to scrape, a handful of wild strawberries collected from the straggling border behind the vegetable patch and delivered without a smile in a twist of handkerchief. Cassis would be the man of the family. She showed even less softness toward him than to the rest of us. Reinette was already turning heads before she reached her teens, and my mother was vain enough to feel pride at the attention she received. But I was the extra mouth, no second son to expand the farm, certainly no beauty.

I was always the troublesome one, the discordant one, and after my father died I became sullen and defiant. Skinny and dark like my mother, with her long graceless hands and flat feet, her wide mouth, I must have reminded her too much of herself, for there was often a tightness at her mouth when she looked at me, a kind of stoic appraisal, of fatalism. As if she foresaw that it was I, not Cassis or Reine-Claude, who would carry her memory forward. As if she would have preferred a more fitting vessel.

Perhaps that was why she gave me the album, valueless then except for the thoughts and insights jotted in the margins alongside recipes and newspaper cuttings and herbal cures. Not a diary, precisely. There are almost no dates in the album, no precise order. Pages were inserted into it at random, loose leaves later bound together with small, obsessive stitches, some pages thin as onionskin, others cut from pieces of card trimmed to fit inside the battered leather cover. My mother marked the events of her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of old favorites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparatio