After the Rain | Page 7

pea-lights to carry with her.
"You're not from the city," she said.
"You got me," he said. "So tell her you met a wizard."
She thought about what her mother would say to that, especially when that was the answer to the question Where have you been? "I'll tell her I met someone from the city," she said.
"You're a clever girl," he said.
#
One week after her father died, Valentine stopped carrying water.
"There's not enough food," her mother said, over a breakfast of nothing but dried fruit -- the cereal was gone. "If you -- " she swallowed and looked out the window. "If you dig in the trenches, we'll get 150 grams of bread a day."
Valentine looked at Trover. He hadn't had a tantrum in days. He didn't cry or even speak much anymore.
"I'll dig."
She dug.
#
Six months after her father died, Valentine stood in the queue for her bread. It was now the full heat of summer and the clothes the wizard had given her had fallen to bits the way all printer clothes did. She was wearing her father's old trousers, cut off just below the knee, and one of his shirts, with the sleeves and collar cut off. All to let a little of the lazy air in and to let a little of the sluggish sweat out. She was dirty and tired, the way she always was at day's end.
She was also so hungry.
She and her mother didn't talk much anymore, but they didn't have to. Her mother was sometimes away on long missions, and increasingly longer. She was harrying the enemy with the guerilla fighters, and living on pine-cone soup and squirrels from the woods.
Trover stayed over at the creche some nights. A lot of the little ones did. Who had the strength to carry a little boy up the stairs at the end of a day's digging, at the end of three days' hard fighting in the woods?
The bread-rations were handed out in the spot where the cine once stood. She couldn't really remember what it had been like, though she remembered Reeta, the things Reeta had said that had made her leave the shelter, which had probably saved her life. Poor Reeta. Little bitch.
She was so hungry, and the line moved slowly. She had her chit from the boy from the city who oversaw the ditch digging in her part of the ditches. He was only a little older than her but he couldn't dig because his hands had been mutilated when a bomb went off near him. He kept them shoved in his pockets, but she'd seen them and they looked like the knucklebreakers had given them a good seeing-to. Every finger pointed a different direction, except for the ones that were missing altogether. There was also something wrong with him that made him sometimes stop talking in the middle of a sentence and sit down for a moment with his head tilted back.
The chit, though -- the boy always gave her her chit, and the chit could be redeemed for bread. If she left Trover in the creche they would feed him. If Mata didn't come home from the fighting again tonight, the bread would be hers, and the cabbage, too.
#
Eight months after her father died, her mother stayed away in the fighting for three weeks, and Valentine decided that she was dead and started sleeping in her mother's bed. Valentine cried a little at first, but she got used to it. She started to negotiate with one of the women who lived on the floor below to sell her narrow little bed for 800 grams of bread, 40 grams of butter and -- though she didn't really believe in it -- 100 grams of ground beef.
She never found out if the woman downstairs had any ground beef -- where would you get ground beef, anyway? Even the cats and dogs and rats were all gone! For Valentine's mother came home after three weeks and it turned out that she'd been in hospital all that time, having her broken bones mended, something they could still do for some soldiers.
Mata came through the door like an old woman, and Valentine looked up from the table where she'd been patiently feeding silent Trover before collapsing to sleep again. Valentine stood and looked at her and her Mata looked at Valentine, and then her mother hobbled across the room like an old woman and gave Valentine a fierce, hard, long hug.
Valentine found she was crying and also found that silent little Trover had gotten up from the table and was hugging them both. He was tall, she realized dimly, tall enough to reach up and hug her at the waist instead of the knees, and when had that happened?
Her mother ate some of the dinner they'd had, and