Following the Summer Read Online Free PDF

surprised at her, at what seemed to awaken in her when he evoked the memory, so remote from those of his childhood in Odensk, to which she listened abstractedly.
    Ervant preferred Marie bright-eyed and a trifle cold, the woman who had made him realize at once that his flight could end with her.
    For after Vienna the only possibility was America, a final farewell to old stones, to homesick immigrants, to misery always close at hand, and dusty shops that recreated an ancestral life. On the other continent there had been no place for him; he had joined a group of midwestern prospectors heading up to Canada, a frontier abolished for the progress of mining, then gone on with some who were on their way east, following a fault already exploited and developed, where the French-speaking Klondike was dying away. The houses weren’t even thirty years old, the girls even younger, and everything was hard like the quartz that the rocks still yielded, pure, among the fallen rocks in lands ruthlessly stripped of their forests.
    From the radio poured western songs like those of his first America, the cars were red or turquoise, with aggressive fins, the two movie houses served up war or horror, in English. He liked it all and cared little about the other face of this country, one he could never comprehend because Marie had withdrawn from it. Here, it was the other colonization, that of churches and the land, which had grown insipid almost before the church steeples were erected. She talked of it with quiet arrogance, a hint of contempt in her laughter.
    At the town limits where the paved roads ended, the houses gave way as they did everywhere to burnt-out areas. They went there together sometimes in the late afternoon, because they’d found a seat carved from a long bare rock, smooth and round, which offered a view of most of the town as if it had been absorbed into the distant sound of the mine. Near them, the tennis court was deserted, behind a still-new convent. Marie said little about herself except to declare that her way of escaping was always through books, and that it was easy. She described other scenarios for him, the stories of girls who were trapped.
    There was Berthe who lived not far away, near Lac Edouard, which was no lake but the open sewer of a still-remote part of the town. People there were poor, the frame houses never lost their grey and their dust. Alone, she never went there, but when the nuns took their classes to confession, it was the shortcut to the church. Lined up in twos, identical teachers at the front and back, deformed by mantle and cowl, they grew bolder. The cold pinched them under woollen coats that were always too light, and they learned how to laugh at the first forbidden touches, gloved hands joined in coat pockets. Once caught they were separated, the fiat closing over this additional sin.
    Berthe walked alone, at the back. Already recruited. They had enlisted her for their organ first, then for their devotions: drunk on incense, or to assume her guilt, eldest daughter of a drunk. The following year she would join them, veils to claw at her skin, brown soap and sour refectories. They had convinced her that ugliness lay behind her grim glasses and bushy eyebrows.
    One warm spring day, when the smell around Lac Edouard was already turning rancid, the girls had laughed at the poor children, at the children of the poor who stood on their galleries, eyes filled with pain, a wheezing in their voices that echoed their mothers’ cries. It was the last time before summer holidays and Berthe had stayed behind, hadn’t come to confession, hadn’t reappeared the next day or the next year. Marie thought she had died.
    There was Madeleine, who lived next to the convent but didn’t want it known, who was the first to arrive, the last to leave after the evening study period. A family whose children — no one knew how many — ran around with the dogs and pigs, near the stream that cleaned