Read Kamchatka for Free Online

orsuspected I was right. My obsession with justice infuriated her, even more so when I raised the stakes and threatened to ask papá to get me a good lawyer.
    At this stage of our game of mother–son ping-pong, we both knew what came next. When I said ‘That’s not fair’, mamá would get angry, then she would snap back with her standard line (‘Life might be beautiful, but it’s not fair’) and that would be the end of the argument. Mamá would have won a Pyrrhic victory, elevating the specific to the universal and thereby diluting it.
    The Midget interrupted to ask where his things were. Although she knew the answer, mamá chose to ask him what he meant.
    â€˜My pyjamas,’ said the Midget. ‘My cup, my Goofy!’
    Mamá glanced over her shoulder, silently pleading with me for help. She was hoping I might limit the devastation caused by the Midget’s inevitable explosion. He couldn’t get to sleep without his toy Goofy.
    I ignored her look and glared at her. ‘Who is this friend we’re visiting anyway? What about school? How I am supposed to catch up? Why do we have to go right now?’ And then my $64,000 question, the question with which I deliberately betrayed her, since I knew it would send the Midget off the deep end, ‘And why can’t we stop by our house, even just to get his Goofy?’
    At some point in the silence that followed, I realized the Citroën had stopped. We were stranded in a huge traffic jam, cars in front, cars behind, cars to either side. But the traffic jam was not the result of a red light or a double-parked car blocking the road. Thirty feet ahead, two police cars were parked across the avenue, creating a funnel though which only one car could pass at a time.
    Mamá lit another cigarette and brought it to her lips, her hands were shaking. In any other circumstances, this intimation that she was on the brink would have made me wary, but I had nothing to lose – or that, at least, is what I thought. What could I possibly have left to lose,I wasn’t allowed to go to Bertuccio’s and I’d been temporarily deprived of my precious possessions, all of which were back at our house?
    I kept on nagging her, the Midget’s voice providing counterpoint. Mamá endured our litany of complaints in suspicious silence as the Citroën inched at walking pace towards the police roadblock, like a grain of sand flowing towards the neck of an hourglass.
    â€˜Why can’t we go an’ pick up my Goofy?’
    â€˜It’s not fair!’
    â€˜I want my Goofy!’
    â€˜How can we go on holiday with just the clothes we’ve got on?’
    â€˜I want my
pyjamas
!’
    â€˜And I want my game of Risk!’
    Mamá stared straight ahead, her knuckles white on the steering wheel of the Citroën. Out of the corner of my eye, I registered the police at the neck of the funnel. Though I was scared of them, and I instinctively hated them (‘federal police, a national disgrace’), right at that moment the person I most hated in the world was mamá.
    It was my thoughtlessness that saved us.
    I imagine that when it came to our turn and the police peered into the car, they saw an olive-skinned woman, her face contorted in pain as she listened to her screaming kids, and thought ‘Poor woman’, and waved us on.
    When the roadblock finally disappeared in the rear-view mirror, mamá reached back to pat us, but I pushed her hand away and the Midget followed my example. I thought this was her pathetic way of trying to ingratiate herself – since she could hardly use the Searing Smile while she was driving – and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of giving in. The only thing I could think about was Bertuccio and his mother’s
milanesas
and Risk and school and the episode of
The Invaders
I was going to miss and the fact that I was being forced to go on a holiday I