Lullaby

by Leïla Slimani

  *

  Parks, on winter afternoons. The drizzle scatters dead leaves. The icy gravel sticks to the children’s knees. On benches, on narrow paths, you see those people the world doesn’t want any more. They flee cramped apartments, sad living rooms, armchairs sunk with the imprint of boredom and inertia. They prefer to shiver outside, shoulders hunched and arms crossed. At 4 p.m., idle days seem endless. It is now, in the middle of the afternoon, that you notice the wasted time, that you worry about the coming evening. At this hour, you are ashamed of your uselessness.

  Parks, on winter afternoons, are haunted by vagabonds, drifters, tramps, the elderly and unemployed, the sick, the vulnerable. Those who do not work, who produce nothing. Those who do not make money. In spring, of course, the lovers return; clandestine couples find shelter under lime trees, in flowered nooks; tourists photograph statues. But in winter, it’s something else altogether.

  Around the icy slide there are nannies and their army of children. Wrapped up in cumbersome padded jackets, the toddlers run like fat Japanese dolls, noses trickling snot, fingers violet. They breathe out white steam and stare at it, fascinated. In prams, babies held tight under straps contemplate their elder siblings. Perhaps some of them feel melancholic, impatient. They probably can’t wait to be able to get warm by crawling up the wooden climbing frame. They are eager to escape the surveillance of these women who catch them with a sure or rough hand, their voices calm or furious. Women wearing boubous on this freezing winter day.

  There are mothers too, mothers staring into space. Like the one who gave birth recently and now finds herself confined to the world’s edge; who, sitting on this bench, feels the weight of her still flabby belly. She carries her body of pain and secretions, her body that smells of sour milk and blood. This flesh that she drags around with her, which she gives no care or rest. There are smiling, radiant mothers, those extremely rare mothers, gazed at lovingly by all the children. The ones who did not say goodbye this morning, who didn’t leave them in the arms of another. The ones set free by a day off work, who have come here to enjoy it, bringing a strange enthusiasm to this ordinary winter’s day at the park.

  There are some men too, but closer to the benches, closer to the sandpit, closer to the little ones, the women form a solid wall, an impassable barrier. They are suspicious of men who come near, who take an interest in this world of women. They drive away the men who smile at the children, who stare at their plump cheeks and their little legs. The grandmothers deplore this: ‘All those paedophiles around nowadays! That didn’t exist, in my day.’

  *

  Louise does not let Mila out of her sight. The little girl runs from the slide to the swings. She never stops, because she doesn’t want to get cold. Her gloves are soaked and she wipes them on her pink coat. Adam sleeps in his pushchair. Louise has wrapped him up in a blanket and she gently strokes the skin on the back of his neck, between the top of his jumper and the bottom of his woolly hat. The metallic glare of an icy sun makes her squint.

  ‘Want one?’

  A young woman sits next to her, legs apart. She holds out a little jar in which honeyed cakes are stuck together. Louise looks at her. She can’t be more than twenty-five and there is something vulgar about the way she smiles. Her long black hair is dirty and unkempt, but you can tell that she could be pretty. Or attractive, anyway. She has sensual curves, a slightly round belly, thick thighs. She chews her cakes with her mouth open and noisily sucks her honey-covered fingers.

  ‘No, thank you.’ Louise refuses the offer with a wave of her hand.

  ‘Where I come from, we always share our food with strangers. It’s only here that I’ve seen people eating on their own.’ A boy of about four comes over to the young woman and she sticks a sweet in his mouth. The little boy laughs.

  ‘It’s good for you,’ she tells him. ‘But it’s a secret, okay? We won’t tell your mother.’

  The little boy is called Alphonse, and Mila likes playing with him. Louise comes to the park every day and every day she refuses the fatty pastries that Wafa offers her. She tells Mila she mustn’t eat any either, but Wafa doesn’t take offence. The young woman is very chatty and on that bench, her hip pressed against Louise, she tells the nanny her life story. Mostly she talks about men.

  Wafa reminds her of a big cat, not too subtle but very resourceful. She doesn’t have her official papers yet, but doesn’t seem worried about it. She arrived in France thanks to an old man to whom she used to give massages in a seedy hotel in Casablanca. The man became fond of her hands, so soft, then of her mouth and of her buttocks and, finally, of her entire body, which she offered him, following both her instinct and her mother’s advice. The old man brought her to Paris, where he lived in a shabby apartment and received welfare. ‘He was scared that I’d get pregnant and his children pressured him into kicking me out. But the old man, he wanted me to stay.’

  Faced with Louise’s silence, Wafa talks as if she’s confessing to a priest or the police. She tells the nanny the details of a life that will never be recorded. After leaving the old man’s apartment, she was recruited by a woman who signed her up for dating sites aimed at young Muslim women who were illegal immigrants. One evening a man arranged to meet her in a local McDonald’s. The man thought she was beautiful. He made advances. He even tried to rape her. She managed to calm him down. They started talking money. Youssef agreed to marry her for twenty thousand euros. ‘That’s cheap for getting your French papers,’ he explained.

  She found this job – a godsend – with a French–American couple. They treat her well, even if they’re very demanding. They rented her a bedsit just around the corner from where they live. ‘They pay my rent, but in exchange I can never say no to them.’

  ‘I adore this kid!’ she says, staring greedily at Alphonse. Louise and Wafa fall silent. An icy wind sweeps through the park and they know that they will soon have to leave. ‘Poor little boy. Look at him, he can hardly move cos I’ve wrapped him up so warm. If he catches a cold, his mother will kill me.’

  Wafa sometimes feels afraid that she will grow old in one of these parks. That she’ll feel her knees crack on these old frozen benches, that she won’t be strong enough to lift up a child any more. Alphonse will grow up. Soon he won’t set foot in a park on a winter afternoon. He’ll follow the sun. He’ll go on holiday. Perhaps one day he’ll sleep in one of the rooms of the Grand Hotel, where she used to massage men. This boy she raised will be serviced by one of her sisters or her cousins, on the terrace with its yellow and blue tiles.

  ‘You see? Everything turns around and upside down. His childhood and my old age. My youth and his life as a man. Fate is vicious as a reptile. It always ends up pushing us to the wrong side of the handrail.’

  The rain starts to fall. Time to leave.

  For Paul and Myriam, the winter flies past. During those few weeks, they see very little of each other. They meet in bed, one joining the other in sleep. Their feet touch under the sheets; one kisses the other’s neck and laughs at hearing the other mumble like an animal disturbed in its sleep. They call each other during the day, leave messages. Myriam writes loving Post-it notes that she sticks to the bathroom mirror. In the middle of the night, Paul sends her videos of his rehearsals.

  Life has become a succession of tasks, commitments to honour, appointments to keep. Myriam and Paul are snowed under with work. They like to repeat this as if their exhaustion was a portent of success. Their life is full to bursting; there’s hardly even time for sleep, never mind thinking. They rush from one place to another, change shoes in taxis, have drinks with people who are important for their careers. The two of them have become the heads of a booming business, a business with clear objectives, an income stream, expenses.

  All over the apartment, there are lists that Myriam has written – on a paper napkin, on a Post-it, on the last page of a book. She spends her time looking for them. She is afraid to throw them away as if this might make her lose track of all the tasks she
has to accomplish. She has kept some really old ones and, rereading them, she feels a nostalgia that is only intensified when she can no longer remember to what those obscure notes refer.

  Chemist

  Tell Mila Nils’s story

  Reservations for Greece

  Call M.

  Reread all my notes

  Go back to that shop. Buy the dress?

  Reread Maupassant

  Get him a surprise?

  Paul is happy. His life, for once, seems to be living up to his appetite for it, his insane energy levels, his joie de vivre. The boy who grew up in the great wide open is finally able to spread out. In a few months, his career has changed beyond all recognition, and for the first time in his life he is doing exactly what he wants. He no longer spends his days serving others, obeying and keeping silent, confronted with a hysterical producer, a group of infantile singers. Gone are his days of waiting for artists who turn up six hours late without bothering to warn him. Gone those recording sessions with ageing MOR singers or the ones who need litres of alcohol and dozens of lines before they can play a note. Paul spends his nights at the studio, avid for music, new ideas, hysterical laughter. He doesn’t leave anything to chance, spends hours correcting the sound of a snare drum, a drum arrangement. ‘Louise is there!’ he always tells his wife when she worries about their absences.

  When Myriam first got pregnant he was thrilled, but he told his friends that he didn’t want his life to change. Myriam thought he was right, and she looked at her man – so sporty, so handsome, so independent – with even more admiration. He had promised her he would make sure that their life remained luminous and full of surprises. ‘We’ll travel and we’ll take the kid with us. You’ll become a great lawyer, I’ll produce records by acclaimed artists, and nothing will change.’ They pretended; they tried.

  In the months that followed Mila’s birth, life turned into a rather sad act. Myriam concealed the rings round her eyes and her melancholy. She was afraid of admitting to herself that she was sleepy all the time. Around that period, Paul started asking her: ‘What are you thinking about?’ and each time she felt like crying. They invited friends to their apartment and Myriam had to force herself not to throw them out, not to knock the table over, not to lock herself in her bedroom. Their friends laughed; they raised their glasses and Paul refilled them. They argued and Myriam worried about her daughter being woken. She could have screamed from tiredness.

  After Adam’s birth it was even worse. The night they came home from the maternity ward, Myriam fell asleep in the bedroom, the transparent cradle next to her. Paul couldn’t sleep. It seemed to him that there was a strange smell in the apartment. The same smell as in pet stores, on the docks, where he sometimes took Mila on weekends. A smell of secretion and confinement, of dried piss in a litter tray. That smell sickened him. He got up and took the bins outside. He opened the window. And then he realised that it was Mila who had thrown everything she could find in the toilets, which were now overflowing, spreading that foul wind throughout the apartment.

  *

  During that period Paul felt trapped, overwhelmed by obligations. He became a pale shadow of his usual easy-going, optimistic self, the tall blonde man with the booming laugh who made girls turn to watch him as he passed without him even noticing. He stopped having mad ideas, suggesting weekends in the mountains and trips in the car to eat oysters on the beach. He tempered his enthusiasms. In the months that followed Adam’s birth he started avoiding the apartment. He invented meetings and drank beer, alone, in hiding, in a quarter far from home. His friends had become parents too, and most of them had left Paris for the suburbs, the provinces or warmer lands in the south of Europe. For a few months Paul became childish, irresponsible, ridiculous. He kept secrets and harboured desires of escape. And yet he made no allowances for himself. He knew just how banal his attitude was. All he wanted was not to go home, to be free, to live again. He realised now – too late – that he hadn’t lived very much before this. The clothes of a father seemed at once too big for him and too sad.

  But it was done now, and he couldn’t say that he didn’t want it any more. The children were there – loved, adored, unconditionally – but doubt was insinuating itself everywhere. The children, their smell, their gestures, their desire for him: all of this touched him to a degree that he would never be able to describe. Sometimes he wanted to be a kid too, to put himself in their shoes, to dissolve into childhood. Something was dead and it wasn’t only youth or the feeling of being carefree. He wasn’t useless any more. They needed him and he was going to have to deal with that. By becoming a father, he had acquired principles and certainties, things he had sworn never to have. His generosity had become relative. His passions had grown tepid. His world had shrunk.

  *

  Louise is there now and Paul has started arranging dates with his wife again. One afternoon he sent her a message. ‘Place des Petits-Pères.’ She didn’t reply and he found her silence wonderful. Like a form of politeness; a lover’s silence. His heart was racing when he arrived in the square, slightly early, slightly worried. ‘She’ll come. Of course she’ll come.’ She came and they walked on the docks, like they used to do, before.

  He knows how much they need Louise, but he can’t stand her any more. With her doll’s body, her irritating habits, she really gets on his nerves. ‘She’s so perfect, so delicate, that sometimes it sickens me,’ he admitted to Myriam one day. He is horrified by her little-girl figure, that way she has of dissecting every little thing the children do or say. He despises her dubious theories on education and her grandmotherly methods. He ridicules the photographs she has started sending them from her mobile phone, ten times a day, showing the children smiling as they lift up their empty plates, with the caption: ‘I ate it all.’

  Since the incident with the make-up, he talks to her as little as possible. That evening he even thought about firing her. He called Myriam to discuss the idea with her. She was in the office, and she didn’t have time. So he waited until she got home and when his wife came through the door, about 11 p.m., he told her what had happened, the way Louise had looked at him, her icy silence, her arrogance.

  Myriam reasoned with him. She played down the episode. She blamed him for having been too hard on the nanny, for having hurt her feelings. But then, they are always in league against him, like two bears. When it comes to the children, they sometimes treat him with a haughtiness that makes him bristle. They act like mothers, treat him like a child.

  Sylvie, Paul’s mother, made fun of them. ‘You act like the big bosses with your governess. Don’t you think you’re overdoing it?’ Paul became annoyed. His parents had raised him to detest money and power, and to have a slightly mawkish respect for those ‘below’ him. He had always been relaxed in his job, working with people with whom he felt equal. He had always called his boss tu, not vous. He had never given orders. But Louise had turned him into a boss. He hears himself giving his wife despicable advice. ‘Don’t make too many concessions, otherwise she’ll never stop asking for more,’ he says, widening his hands apart.

  In the bath, Myriam is playing with her son. She holds him between her thighs, presses him against her and cuddles him so tightly that Adam ends up struggling and crying. She can’t stop herself kissing him all over his chubby, perfect cherub’s body. She looks at him and feels a gust of hot maternal love blow over her. She thinks that soon she won’t dare to be like this with him, the two of them naked and close together. That it won’t happen any more. And then, faster than seems possible, she will be old and he – this laughing, pampered child – will be a man.

  As she was undressing him, she noticed two strange marks, on his arm and at the top of his back. Two red scars, almost vanished, but where she can still make out what look like tooth marks. She gently kisses these wounds. She holds her son against her. She asks him to forgive her and belatedly consoles him for the sadness he felt at her absence.

  The next morning, Myriam tal
ks to Louise about it. The nanny has just entered the apartment. She hasn’t even had time to take off her coat before Myriam is holding out Adam’s bare little arm towards her. Louise does not appear surprised.

  She raises her eyebrows, hangs up her coat and asks: ‘Has Paul taken Mila to school?’

  ‘Yes, they just left. Louise, did you see? That’s a bite mark, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I know. I put a bit of cream on it to help it heal. It was Mila who bit him.’

  ‘Are you sure? Were you there? Did you see it?’

  ‘Of course I was there. The two of them were playing in the living room while I made dinner. And then I heard Adam screaming. He was sobbing, poor thing, and to start with I couldn’t work out why. Mila bit him through his clothes: that’s why I didn’t know straight away.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Myriam says, kissing Adam’s hairless head. ‘I asked her several times if it was her. I even told her I wouldn’t punish her. She swore to me that she didn’t know where that bite came from.’

  Louise sighs. She lowers her head. She looks as if she’s hesitating.

  ‘I promised not to say anything, and I really don’t like the idea of breaking a promise I made to a child.’

  She takes off her black cardigan, unbuttons her shirt-dress and exposes her shoulder. Myriam leans in close and is unable to hold back a gasp of surprise and disgust. She stares at the brown mark that covers Louise’s shoulder. It’s an old scar, but she can clearly see the shapes of the little teeth that bit into the flesh, lacerating it.