cloud names I

"She and her friends agreed to give names to the forty-five kinds of clouds in the five different languages they spoke. They spent some time agreeing on the names, repeating them, and then making up words out of the first or second letters of each name, and so on, then doing the same with the names spelled backwards.....

......Right up to the end, Klara told me, the clouds helped them get through the blows, the screams, the lack of privacy-....

......She gave me the list of clouds. One is missing."


Refusal by Soazig Aaron, translated from the French by Barbara Bray, published by Harvill Secker, London, 2007