by Maude Julien
So I’m left alone with the calf, which is chained up by the stables. How long do I have to stay there? I’m a little bit frightened of it, it’s a lot bigger than me. I’m also frightened of failing in my mission. My father told me we’ll know straightaway tomorrow, from the colour of the meat, whether I’ve done it properly. If the meat is pink, it’s ruined; we’ll have to bring in another calf to be killed. I talk to the animal softly and pray its meat won’t be pink. But the more I stroke it, the more my heart goes out to it. I wish time could stand still, and its death could be postponed indefinitely.
I didn’t hear him come over, but the Killer is suddenly standing in front of the animal and in one swift move, he puts the pistol to its forehead. The calf slumps to the ground. It seems to me that its eyes convey the helpless question: ‘Why?’ I sometimes fall too, my foot caught under the inanimate body. The Killer hauls me out, laughing uproariously.
During slaughtering time, I’m overwhelmed by lack of sleep, exhaustion, the stench, and the violence of my emotions. My mother’s nerves are frayed too. From time to time, out of nowhere, we both succumb to convulsive laughter. If, for example, the Killer pulls a ridiculous face or makes some idiotic comment, we find it incredibly hard to regain our composure. We only have to catch each other’s eye to shriek with laughter all over again.
At mealtimes we make superhuman efforts to repress our hilarity. My father finds laughter extremely irritating. He sees it as a waste of energy, proof of a total lack of control. Smiling finds no favour in his eyes either. ‘Do you want to be the village idiot?’ he asks if he catches me gazing up at the sky with a smile on my face. ‘Only halfwits smile. Your face must be serious and expressionless in order to confuse your adversaries. Never reveal anything.’
We escape to the kitchen with the excuse that we’re getting the dessert. Having a guest at the table is one of the rare times that a meal ends with apple tart, made with apples from the garden. Last time the Killer came, there was a mishap. On the way out to the verandah, the tart slipped and landed on a handful of Linda’s hair! My mother and I looked at each other in horror, certain my father was going to rip us to shreds in front of this cretin. Without a word we picked up the tart and went back to the kitchen. My mother scraped it clean with a knife as best she could, before putting it back on the serving dish.
With his first mouthful the Killer almost choked. ‘How strange,’ he said between two coughing fits, ‘it’s like I’ve swallowed a hair.’ While my father, serious as a judge, watched him splutter, my mother and I busied ourselves clearing the table, eyes lowered, making absolutely sure we didn’t catch each other’s eye. Then we hurried out to the kitchen where we could collapse laughing at last. Many long minutes later we’d calmed down enough to look at each other without exploding again. For a moment my mother’s eyes, still intoxicated with mirth, looked into mine. Then, in a flash, we looked away, embarrassed. We weren’t used to that.
Shoots and Roots
Life is made up of two sorts of people, just as there are two types of roots: those that set to work straightaway and bore into the ground wherever they are, not wasting any time, pursuing the task even if they hit pebbles or bricks, and inching slowly down; and those that want to drive into the earth as quickly as possible, and so opt to find the “right” soil first. Sometime later, the first type, the roots, have succeeded in delving deep into the earth while the second, the shoots are still drifting here and there, having failed to find a spot that offers no resistance.
I have to follow the example of those first roots, the ones that triumph with their perseverance. But the thought that someday I’ll be completely buried in the ground terrifies me. I’d much rather be the sort that skips about but never settles. I don’t say this, of course, but my parents seem to have guessed. When I take an interest in something that isn’t a planned part of my schooling—asking to study Spanish or to learn to jump rope, for example—my father admonishes me severely with a ‘shoots and roots!’
After reading The Pied Piper of Hamelin, I wanted to learn to play the pipe. Given how many instruments I have to play, I didn’t think this would be a problem. It earned a ‘Shoots and Roots’ If during a lesson I ask a question about the subject we’re currently studying, like, say, ‘How do Eskimo children live?’ my mother replies, ‘What did your father teach you about shoots and roots?’
Perhaps because of my secret preference for those flighty shoots, or my inappropriate curiosity, or what is surely an overly strong yearning to go and see the world beyond the fence, we have completely stopped going on outings and it’s been months now since anyone has mentioned a trip to the market in Hazebrouck or anywhere else. When my father summons me, he keeps reiterating his parable of the roots. He must think me too much of a scatterbrain.
Sometimes he orders me to stare at the old clock on the mantelpiece in the dining room. ‘Now you listen to me, Maude: you’re going to watch that clock and not think about anything else, and you’ll keep doing it until I tell you to stop.’ My father so likes these glass-domed clocks with golden pendulums that he bought a whole batch of them. They have pride of place in at least seven or eight rooms in the house. Of course, he has no idea that I loathe them. I see them as enemies. I’m frightened of them, but at the same time I’m contemptuous of them, with their stupid mechanism, their fake gilding, their endless ‘I swing this way, then I swing that way, nip to the left, nip to the right’ and the ridiculous pride they take in living under glass…
On the way up to lessons this morning my mother announces out of the blue, ‘As of this evening, you’re changing bedrooms. You’re seven now, you’re old enough. Your father has decided.’ I wonder why he’s reached this decision. I suspect it’s not so much to put me further away from my mother as to limit any opportunities for distraction. My room looks out over the street and, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, has no shutters. Has he realized that I slip my head under the red velvet curtain every evening and secretly watch the wonderful life of the people across the street? I observe them wandering casually from room to room, chatting, watching TV. Sometimes they open a tin of cookies and snack from it. I’m amazed to think you can eat like that, without being at the table, without asking permission. And this is with all the lights on, as if they had no idea about marksmen lying in wait.
I start shaking apprehensively as bedtime draws near. I don’t know where I’ll end up tonight. All the rooms frighten me. The one I’m least afraid of is the guest bedroom. It’s intimidatingly big, but at least one of its windows opens onto the street, onto cars, passers-by, life. I desperately hope I’ll be given that room.
In the evening my parents tell me to gather up my things. It doesn’t take long, I have just one pair of pyjamas, a toothbrush, a thick cardigan, two pairs of socks and four pairs of underwear. I follow them along the landing. We walk past the guest bedroom. We go beyond the door to my father’s vast room and stop at the next one. ‘This is where you’ll be from now on. So I can hear everything you do. Now close that shutter,’ my father says. Before leaving, he explains that he has to lock my door, ‘in case burglars break into the house, so they don’t come and attack you.’
I’m left alone, unsettled by the strange smell of this unfamiliar room. I’m so sad and so cold, far from the glow of streetlights and sounds from outside. There’s nothing now to come between me and my night-time terrors.
By changing bedrooms I’ve moved into a new phase of life. I now have to respect my schedule to the minute. Every morning we synchronize our watches, ‘exactly as bombers and terrorists do’, explains my father because, like them, our success depends on precision. My father, who is extremely punctual, gave me an adult’s watch when I turned five and expected me to know how to tell the time.
Ever since I was little I’ve had to respect a tight schedule. Recently my mother has taken to timing my trips to the bathroom; as soon as I go beyond three minutes she comes knocking at the door. ‘Is this going to take much longer? Come out
right away!’ Now it’s the whole day—from the wake-up call at six o’clock to bedtime at eleven-thirty—that has to be regulated like clockwork. The day has to follow a detailed program devised by my parents and written out in a large exercise book, which I’m not allowed to read. My mother reads it to me, often in my father’s presence.
If there are any changes, such as when my music teacher moves a lesson to the following day or there’s some special project in the garden, she writes them in the book. I’m informed of these changes at mealtimes. Every day of my life is laid out in that book, from Monday morning to Sunday evening, summer and winter alike, with no exceptions. The time I wake up or go to bed can change if we have to assist the Killer, or during the ‘holidays’. But even these variations obey immutable rules.
Another major change: I now have to take responsibility for waking the household, which means I have to get up before everyone else. I do have an old alarm clock, but I’m not allowed to use it; I have to be able to wake by sheer force of will. Sometimes when the working day has gone on longer than usual, I secretly wind up the alarm clock and stuff it under my blankets in the hope of muffling its ringing. But it’s a pointless precaution. I’m so terrified of being caught red-handed that I might as well have swallowed an alarm clock: my eyes snap open just before the appointed time. Every morning I breathe a sigh of relief to think I’ve avoided failure, humiliation and punishment.
The Schedule
Having woken at six, I have to be dressed and ready in ten minutes. I now have a key to unlock my door and go and wake my mother at six-ten precisely. My father emphasizes the point ‘When I say six-ten, I don’t mean six-oh-nine or six-eleven.’ I wait in my room until the minute hand is on nine, then go and stand in the corridor. At the exact second the hand hits ten, I knock on her door.
Next I go downstairs to have my breakfast in the kitchen, in the space of ten minutes, standing so as not to waste time. I reheat the coffee that was prepared the day before, and pour some condensed milk into my drinking bowl. I don’t like the smell of this milk but I have to drink it ‘to build me up’, like the two spoonfuls of sugar I have to add to the coffee. I take the piece of hardened bread that was deliberately left out for me the night before. From time to time I furtively dunk it in my coffee. I know this is strictly forbidden, but sometimes I have such bad toothaches that I risk violating this rule, all the while on the alert for footsteps.
Sometimes my mother comes downstairs without a sound and hides in the pantry to watch me. When I was little I would jump out of my skin at suddenly finding her standing motionless behind me. She would stare at me in silence, then give the beginnings of a wan smile as if to say, ‘I’m watching you, you won’t get away from me.’ I wouldn’t be able to swallow, feeling guilty of some terrible crime, but what exactly?
I now know the noises in the house so well that I can make out the tiniest sound. I can tell when she’s tiptoeing downstairs, and when she’s stationed herself behind the pantry door. I don’t look around. I can hear she’s holding her breath, and I too breathe as little as possible. I am exemplary: eating standing up, then rinsing out my bowl. Afterwards I hear her leave again, and this is soon confirmed by the creak of a particular stair.
At six-twenty I go to the dining room if it’s winter, the verandah if it’s summer, for half an hour of solfège. While I sol-fa aloud, I use a baton to beat out the time on a wooden box my father had made, so that my mother can monitor my work while she gets on with things in the kitchen.
At six-fifty I go into the garden for twenty minutes of brisk walking, with strict instructions to wear very few clothes. In winter it’s very cold and completely dark. The light from the kitchen courtyard is my only bearing. With just a flashlight I have to head over to the aviary and the greenhouse, the part of the grounds that can’t be seen from outside the estate. My father insists I never take the same route twice. ‘As you do it every day, you must absolutely vary the circuit, otherwise someone who has climbed over the wall would know where to hide to kidnap you.’
I’m very cold but happy to be going to this part of the garden. Linda follows me in the dark, I can feel her behind me. I daren’t talk to her for fear of attracting ‘people lying in wait’. We go to see Arthur in the stable, I stroke him quietly and bury my face in his mane. The smell of him warms my frozen bones.
In springtime, when the mornings get lighter, I have to stop by the henhouse and collect the eggs. Sometimes I also have to go to the duck shed. I hate this. I know that muskrats hide in there overnight. With my stomach knotted in fear, I rummage through the straw looking for duck eggs. Sometimes it’s beyond me, so I claim there weren’t any eggs that day. Maybe the rats ate them?
Then I go up to the classroom alone for forty minutes to revise the work my mother will test me on during the day. At seven-fifty I go downstairs to find Linda and put her in her kennel. I have to do it quickly before the crucial event: waking my father. At precisely seven-fifty-eight I join my mother in her bedroom, and every day she says the same ritual sentence: ‘Now go and wake Monsieur Didier and see if he’s in a good mood.’ We both know it has nothing to do with his mood. In fact, I have to go and check whether he’s still alive, because every evening before going to bed my father announces with grim innuendo, ‘I don’t know whether I’ll still be here in the morning.’
At eight o’clock I knock on my father’s door with a shaking hand. For a few interminable seconds I worry that I’ve committed yet another terrible wrongdoing, that some awful disaster is about to unfold and it will be entirely my fault. Then at last I hear him call: ‘Come in.’ For the next forty minutes I wait on my father. I don’t turn on the light straightaway so as not to hurt his eyes. I open the double drapes, switch on the small light in his bathroom and only then the lamp by his bed.
While he gets up and sits on the edge of the bed, I fetch the chamber pot. It’s no ordinary pot, but a bowl made of glass so he can check for traces of white in his urine, a sign of excess albumen. I stand in front of him so he can urinate into the pot. Every morning I feel increasingly nauseous as the bowl gradually warms in my hands. I don’t want to see, so I close my eyes, but I can’t block my nose. I totter as I carry the pot away and empty it into the toilet on the same floor.
My mother comes into the bedroom with a tray. We prop up the pillows behind my father, who is sitting back up in bed, and we stand and watch as he drinks coffee with cream and eats buttered bread.
When he has finished, we dress him. He is sixty-two years old and not an invalid; he could do it himself. But he stands there passively, allowing us to handle him as we put on his pants and cardigan. I have the ‘privilege’ of putting on his socks and shoes.
While my father goes down to get comfortable in the dining room, my mother and I go up to the second floor. It is eight-forty and the morning lesson will go on for just over two hours, until eleven. Then I have to go back down for an hour of German with my father, during which my mother makes lunch.
I dread even more the lessons with my father than those with my mother. He doesn’t really know German. His method consists of having me stand before him reciting sentences he has told me to learn by heart, without giving any indication of how to pronounce them. I also have to read out loud from works by Schiller and Goethe or from the libretto of Mozart’s Magic Flute. I make countless mistakes for which he roars at me and issues punishments.
At noon we sit at the table. Lunch lasts fifteen minutes.
From twelve-fifteen until my father goes to bed at 10 p.m., the time is divided into a precisely ordered sequence of duties: schoolwork, music, sports, tending the animals (hens, ducks, rabbits and budgerigars). There is just one break for supper, which lasts fifteen minutes and is taken at 8 p.m. just after I’ve let Linda out for the night.
At 10 p.m. my mother and I are back in my father’s bedroom for half an hour for his bedtime routine. Then we each withdraw to our own bedroom. I’m allowed an hour to read, a so-called ‘free’ hour. T
he truth is I mostly read books chosen by my father. Lights out is at eleven-thirty. To be absolutely sure I’m sleeping, my mother is instructed to cut off the electricity supply to my bedroom.
The three of us comply with this schedule, which only changes to accommodate the major projects in the garden instigated by my father each summer. During these weeks when, as a lowly labourer, I have to learn the tough but noble craft of bricklaying, my classroom hours are replaced by manual labour.
I sleep for six and a half hours, and work or study for fifteen or sixteen hours. I’m often exhausted, while my mother carries out my father’s instructions without tiring. I hate myself for this lack of endurance. I try to follow her example in the hope that one day I’ll be as strong as she is.
The Hole
Every evening when we go up to bed, my father tells me to lock my door and stresses that I should leave the key in the lock. ‘So that burglars can’t get in by picking the lock,’ he explains.
But there are times when he tells me not to leave the key in the lock. Then I know I’m likely to undergo a ‘test of courage’: the door to my room might burst open in the middle of the night and I will have to head off into the garden alone to learn how to exercise my bravery. Quite often, despite the instruction to take out the key, nothing happens. My father is keen on the element of surprise. I have to learn to confront every ordeal—whether scheduled or unexpected—with unshakeable resolve.
In fact, even though I have been warned, when my father’s hand grips my doorhandle I sit up in bed with a terrible start. I then have thirty seconds—timed with a watch—to get dressed. While my father goes back to his own room to stand by the window, I have to go out alone into the garden steeped in darkness. The test consists of walking around the grounds following a specific route: from the kitchen door to the workshop at the far end of the garden, via the duck pond and the swimming pool, then back through the bushes to the kitchen. At each staging point I have to switch on a light, count to three, then switch it off so my father can follow my progress from his post at the window.
