Читать книгу Suzanne - Anais Barbeau-Lavalette - Страница 25

There is no gas left to fuel the cars.

Achilles attaches his to two horses. They will be his motor.

The idea is not his; it is spreading across the country, ironically called the Bennett buggy, after Canadian prime minister Robert Bedford Bennett, who is one of the people running the country into the ground.

Your father comes home late at night in his Bennett buggy.

You sleep between Monique and Claire. Claire talks in her sleep. A foreign language that sounds like Latin. You shove the end of the sheet in her mouth to shut her up.

Claire is five years old. At age eighteen, she will enter the convent, bound to God for the rest of her life.

The sound of horseshoes downstairs: your father, Achilles, is coming home. The crisis has taken his job. Now he has a make-work job, invented by the government to deal with unemployment, something to keep men from weeping or sleeping at the library. To keep them from overdosing on free time.

Achilles comes home more tired than before. He liked being useful, and make-work jobs change every day but are all in vain.

Today, he picked dandelions. They’re a weed; there are a lot of them, everywhere. Enough to keep the men busy for a few weeks.

Achilles must have uprooted five thousand of them. He roamed the city, eyes peeled, looking for yellow flowers. Enough to make a person go mad. Golden streaks everywhere. Achilles has blisters on his hands. He was paid eight cents for his work. He is not unemployed. He earned a living today.

Achilles liked being a teacher.