Scene 9

The journey lasted seven hours, during the end of which a large number of floating pile houses and stilt huts came into view. People were sitting on their doorsteps and dangling their legs over the water, smoking cigarettes or dozing.

In the past those stilt houses had been the quintessence of eroticism for Maille – in his imagination he had taken all the young women he desired up, at least once, to his wooden hut above the water, where he had proceeded to inhale the fragrance of their skin – a smell that he had associated ever after with wooden planks and the distinct algae and lime aroma of seawater. He had subsequently forgotten this cocktail of smells – up until the day Odette came into his home as his cook. What he smelled in this woman, without actually being in close proximity with her, was precisely the fragrance that the adolescent Hektor had smelled in his imagination in those stilt huts – or so it seemed to him.

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