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Zusatztext 45291872 Informationen zum Autor Camille Aubray is an Edward F. Albee Foundation Fellowship winner. A writer-in-residence at the Karolyi Foundation in the South of France! she was a finalist for the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award and the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. She studied writing at the University of London with David Hare! Tom Stoppard! and Fay Weldon; and with her mentor Margaret Atwood at the Humber College School of Creative Writing Workshop in Toronto. Aubray has been a staff writer for the daytime dramas One Life to Live and Capitol! has taught writing at New York University! and has written and produced for ABC News! PBS! and A&E. The author divides her time between Connecticut and the South of France. 1 Ondine at the Café Paradis, Spring 1936 A salty southwestern wind came rushing across the Mediterranean Sea with heraldic ceremony, driving a white-capped tide against the rocks and jostling the fishing boats in the harbor of Juan-les-Pins before sweeping into the backyard of the Café Paradis, where Ondine was busy peeling her vegetables. She’d escaped outdoors with her work on this sunny April morning because the café’s kitchen was already a cauldron. A tiny backyard patio was gracefully shaded by a majestic Aleppo pine tree, and Ondine sat on a low stone wall that rimmed the tree. Wielding a confident knife, she diligently pared and sorted Provence’s springtime treasures—baby carrots, peas and artichokes so tender they could be served raw, topped by thinly sliced lemons sweet enough to eat with their rinds on. She was working briskly and a delicate sheen of sweat made her sensitive to that sudden change in the wind as it rustled significantly through the pine tree’s branches. Because Ondine had been raised to believe in nature’s auspicious signs and warnings, she put down her knife, closed her eyes and lifted her head to greet the breeze as it skimmed across her face with an invigorating whiff of the sea. She seldom got a quiet moment alone like this to think her own thoughts. So when a hazy premonition of a more exciting future somewhere far away began to shape itself in her mind, she struggled to capture it, as if reaching to grasp a firefly before the light disappeared. “Ondine!” her mother shouted from the café’s kitchen. “Where is she? On-dine!” Ondine flinched as she heard her name reverberating against the huddle of pale stone buildings. She glanced up, and saw her mother’s head framed by the window like a portrait of a formidable empress. Even though it was too late for breakfast and too early for the lunch service, there was never a lull in cooking chores to do in order to meet the café’s high standards. Everyone who worked in the Café Paradis knew his role, right down to the striped cat who patrolled for any mouse foolhardy enough to come near the kitchen, and the bulldog who stood guard against tramps skulking about for an easy handout or an unlocked window. As for Ondine, who was seventeen now, her job was to do whatever her mother told her. Madame Belange peered out the kitchen window and finally spied her daughter. “What do you think you’re doing, lounging there in the garden like a pasha?” “I’m just finishing up, Maman!” Ondine called, rising hastily and hoisting her vegetable basket on her hip as she hurried to the kitchen. By now the fortuitous wind had gone off on its inscrutable way without her. In its place came the usual busy odors of kitchen oil and truck fuel and wood-burning from the farmers’ fields. Still, there was definitely a whiff of something special in the air today—her parents had been acting oddly all morning, murmuring to each other in hushed tones. As she drew closer to the open kitchen window, Ondine’s discerning nose picked up the first scents of the day’s luncheon menu: onion-and-black-oli...
