The Blood Oranges Read Online Free PDF

and determined to tell someone that they should tie a rope to the head of a pike—none of it meant anything to the pathetically small group of occupants inside the bus. The driver gripped his wheel, the man and woman were holding the edges of the seats in front of them, only the heads of the three female children and the black dog were visible, but those few faces were cold, expressionless, unusually small, and were, all seven of them, including the dog’s, forced rigidly to the front. As I bent down to get a better look through the windows it occurredto me that driver and passengers did not in fact comprehend that they were afloat precariously in an ancient canal, but rather were expecting some more conventional catastrophe and were still looking ahead toward the as yet invisible landscape of the impending crash. It occurred to me also that beneath the water those six people and the small black animal would be lost, so to speak, in so large and so nearly empty a motorbus.
    And then it sank. Again the crowd gasped, the old man threw down his twigs, Fiona with one round movement of her shoulders tore free of my hand. But of course I was familiar with all the bright severity and wildness of Fiona’s spirit and now was ready for one of her stronger displays of grace and determination. So in my left arm I caught her slender waist exactly as the motorbus went down.
    “Wait a minute,” I whispered, feeling the fight going out of the stomach muscles against my arm, “just wait a minute, Fiona. It’s all right.”
    Then once again the laughing faction of the crowd was laughing, and even while she felt my soothing voice in her ear and the comforting tension of my forearm drawn tight across the central portion of her body, still Fiona must have understood the laughter and forced herself to see what was actually happening to the old bus before our eyes. Because now it sat more firmly than it had ever rested on dirt road or cobbled street, sat immobile with all four wheels solidly positioned on the hard bed of excrement which, down through the centuries, had accumulated like lava in the bottom of the black canal. But windows, roof, luggage strapped to the roof, spare tire, hood—all the upper half ofthe old high-bodied machine rose above the water, would no doubt remain emerging from that motionless water as long as the canal walls stood and there were sudden figures to shout
croak peonie
and tip the contents of stinking buckets into the holes and stone gutters that fed the very smell of time. The waters were not deep (how like these villagers and members of the fire brigade and the old men not to know the depth of their own canal), not deep, yet deep enough to rise well above the wheels, to flood the interior of the bus at least as high as the knees of the still unmoving occupants, with its black weight to anchor the motorbus where it sat forever. In all the village there was no hoist to lift it, no barge to drag it down to the mouth of the canal. But even if they could, would red-eyed peasants ever take the trouble to remove the enormous old motorbus from a canal that had once been choked with the bodies of dead barbarians? I knew they would not.
    “Baby, look! That little girl is waving at me!”
    Then Fiona snatched my face into her two hands, kissed me, wheeled about and waved back at the child, while even above the shouts and clatter of the fire brigade we heard, suddenly, the muffled terror-stricken yelps of the black dog that was now jumping from seat to seat up and down the long water-filled interior of the half-sunken bus. Momentarily out of sight, it reappeared with wet shredded ears and tail, with wet fur slick on its belly and on its short black sturdy legs, had obviously fallen, had been swimming and barking in the fetid water between the seats. And now the woman was attempting to wade to the help of the smaller children who were kneeling, apparently, on the woodenseats, the oldest girl was waving timidly at Fiona,