‘Mila did that to you?’
‘Listen, I promised Mila I wouldn’t say anything. Please don’t talk to her about it. If the bond of trust between us was broken, I think she’d be even more disturbed. Do you see?’
‘Ah.’
‘She’s a bit jealous of her brother. That’s completely normal. Leave me to deal with it, okay? You’ll see, everything will be fine.’
‘Yeah. Maybe. But honestly, I don’t understand.’
‘You shouldn’t try to understand everything. Children are just like adults. There’s nothing to understand.’
How gloomy she looked, Louise, when Myriam told her that they were going to the mountains for a week to stay with Paul’s parents! Myriam thinks about it again now, and she shivers. A storm flickered behind Louise’s dark glare. That evening the nanny left without saying goodbye to the children. Like a ghost, monstrously discreet, she banged the door shut behind her and Mila and Adam said: ‘Mama, Louise has disappeared.’
A few days later, on the eve of their departure, Sylvie came to fetch them. Louise had not been prepared for this. The cheerful, eccentric grandmother shouted as she came into the apartment. She threw her bag on the floor and rolled in the bed with the children, promising them a week of parties, games and gluttony. When she turned away, Myriam laughed at her mother-in-law’s tomfoolery. Standing in the kitchen, Louise watched them. The nanny was deathly pale and her eyes, encircled by dark rings, looked sunken. She seemed to be mumbling something. Myriam moved towards her but Louise crouched down to fasten a suitcase. Later Myriam told herself that she must have been imagining things.
Myriam tries to calm herself. She has no reason to feel guilty. She doesn’t owe her nanny anything. And yet, without being able to explain it, she has the feeling that she is tearing the children away from Louise, refusing her something. Punishing her.
Perhaps Louise was upset at being informed so late, not having time to organise her holidays. Or maybe she’s just annoyed that the children are spending time with Sylvie, whom she doesn’t like at all. When Myriam complains about her mother-in-law, the nanny tends to lose her temper. She takes Myriam’s side with excessive zeal, accusing Sylvie of being mad, hysterical, of being a bad influence on the children. She encourages her boss not to let it happen; or, worse, to distance the grandmother from the poor children. In those moments, Myriam feels simultaneously supported and slightly uneasy.
*
As he is about to start the car, Paul takes off the watch from his left wrist.
‘Can you put this in your bag, please?’ he asks Myriam.
He bought this watch two months ago, paying for it with the money received from a contract with a famous singer. It’s a second-hand Rolex that a friend found for him at a very reasonable price. Paul agonised before acquiring it. He really wanted it – he thought it was perfect – but he felt slightly ashamed of this fetishism, this frivolous desire. The first time he wore it, the watch seemed both beautiful and enormous. He found it too heavy, too flashy. He kept pulling down the sleeve of his jacket to conceal it. But very soon he got used to this weight at the end of his left arm. Really, this piece of jewellery – the first he’d ever possessed – was fairly discreet. And anyway, he had a right to treat himself. He hadn’t stolen it from anyone.
‘Why are you taking off your watch?’ Myriam asks him, knowing how fond of it he is. ‘Has it stopped working?’
‘No, it works fine. But you know my mother. She wouldn’t understand. And I don’t feel like spending the whole evening being told off for that.’
*
It is early evening when they arrive. The house is freezing, and half of its rooms are still being renovated. The kitchen ceiling looks like it’s about to collapse and there are bare electrical wires in the bathroom. Myriam hates this place. She is fearful for the children. She follows them all over the house, eyes full of panic, hands ready to stop them from falling. She prowls. She interrupts their games. ‘Mila, come and put another jumper on.’ ‘Adam’s breathing strangely, don’t you think?’
One morning, she wakes up numb. She breathes on Adam’s frozen hands. She worries about Mila’s paleness and forces her to keep her hat on in the house. Sylvie prefers not to say anything. She would like to give the children the wildness and whimsy that they are forbidden. There are no rules with her. She doesn’t shower them with foolish gifts, like parents trying to compensate for their absences. She doesn’t pay attention to the words she uses and she is constantly reprimanded for this by Paul and Myriam.
To annoy her daughter-in-law, she compares the children to ‘little birds fallen out of their nest’. She likes to feel sorry for them having to live in a city, having to put up with rudeness and pollution. She would like to widen the horizons of these children doomed to become sensible, middle-class people, at once servile and authoritarian. Doomed to be cowards.
*
Sylvie bites her tongue. She does her best not to broach the subject of the children’s education. A few months before this, the two women had argued violently. The kind of argument that time does not erase, its words still echoing inside them for a long time afterwards whenever they see each other. Everyone had been drinking. Way too much. Myriam, feeling sentimental, had sought a compassionate ear from Sylvie. She complained about never seeing the children, about suffering from this frantic existence where no one ever gave her an easy ride. But Sylvie did not console her. She did not put her hand on Myriam’s shoulder. On the contrary, she launched an all-out attack on her daughter-in-law. Her knives, apparently, were well sharpened, ready to be used when the occasion presented itself. Sylvie reproached her for devoting too much time to her job, despite the fact that she herself had worked all the way through Paul’s childhood and had always boasted about her independence. She called her irresponsible and selfish. She counted on her fingers the number of work trips that Myriam had made even while Adam was ill and Paul was finishing the recording of an album. It was her fault, Sylvie said, if her children had become unbearable, tyrannical, capricious. Her fault and also the fault of Louise, that phoney nanny, that fake mother on whom Myriam depended, out of complacency, out of cowardice. Myriam started crying. Paul, stunned, did not say a word, and Sylvie waved her arms in the air as she shouted: ‘Go ahead and cry! Look at her. She cries and we’re supposed to feel sorry for her because she’s incapable of hearing the truth.’
Every time that Myriam sees Sylvie, the memory of that evening oppresses her. That night, she felt as if she were being assaulted, thrown to the ground and stabbed repeatedly with a dagger. Myriam lay there, her guts slashed open, in front of her husband. She didn’t have the strength to defend herself against those accusations, which she knew were partly true but which she considered as her lot and that of many other women. Not for an instant was there even a hint of clemency or gentleness. Not a single piece of advice was offered from mother to mother, from woman to woman.
*
Over breakfast, Myriam stares fixedly at her telephone. She tries desperately to check her emails, but the service is too slow and she gets so furious that she wants to throw her phone at the wall. Hysterical, she threatens Paul that she will go back to Paris. Sylvie raises her eyebrows, visibly exasperated. She had always hoped that her son would find a different kind of woman, more outdoorsy, more whimsical. A girl who loved nature, hiking in the mountains; a girl who wouldn’t complain about the discomforts of this charming house.
For a long time Sylvie used to ramble on, always telling the same stories about her youth, her past political commitments, her revolutionary comrades. With age, she learned to tone this down. Essentially, she realised that no one cared about her nebulous theories on this world of sell-outs, this world of arrant morons addicted to electronic screens and slaughtered animals. When she was their age, her only dream was of revolution. ‘We were a bit naive, though,’ suggests Dominique, her husband, who is saddened to see her unhappy. ‘Naive? Maybe, but we weren’t as stupid as them.’ She knows th
at her husband doesn’t understand her ideals, which are mocked by everyone. He listens kindly as she unloads her disappointments and anxieties. She laments what her son has become – ‘He was such a carefree little boy, you remember?’ – a man trapped under his wife’s thumb, a slave to her lust for money and her vanity. For a long time, she believed that a revolution led by both sexes would give birth to a very different world, where her grandchildren would grow up. A world where there would be time to live. ‘Darling, you’re naive,’ Dominique tells her. ‘Women are capitalists, just like men.’
Myriam paces around the kitchen, phone in hand. To soothe the tension, Dominique suggests they go for a walk. Myriam, calming down, wraps up her children in three layers of jumpers, scarves and gloves. Outside in the snow, Mila and Adam run around, ecstatic. Sylvie has brought two old sledges, which belonged to Paul and his brother Patrick when they were children. Myriam makes an effort not to worry and she watches, breath held, as the little ones speed down a slope.
They’ll break their necks, she thinks, and I’ll cry about it. She constantly tells herself: Louise would understand how I feel.
Paul is enthusiastic. He encourages Mila, who waves at him and says: ‘Look, Papa. Look, I’m sledging!’ They eat lunch at a pleasant inn, a fire crackling in the hearth. They sit near the window, and shafts of dazzling sunlight shine on the children’s pink cheeks. Mila is talkative and she makes the adults laugh with her silliness. Adam, for once, eats heartily.
That evening Myriam and Paul take the exhausted children up to their bedroom. Mila and Adam are calm, their limbs weak, their souls filled with happiness and new discoveries. The parents linger near them. Paul sits on the floor and Myriam on the edge of Mila’s bed. She gently tucks her in, caresses her hair. For the first time in a long time, Myriam and Paul sing a lullaby together. They learned the words to it when Mila was born and they used to sing it to her in a duet when she was a baby. The children’s eyes are closed, but the grown-ups keep singing for the pleasure of accompanying their dreams. So they don’t have to leave them.
Paul doesn’t dare say this to his wife but, that night, he feels relieved. Since coming to his parents’ house, a weight seems to have lifted from his chest. Half-asleep, numb with cold, he thinks about going back to Paris. He imagines his apartment as an aquarium invaded by rotting seaweed, an airless pit where animals with balding fur prowl endlessly, groaning.
Back home, these dark thoughts are quickly forgotten. In the living room, Louise has arranged a bouquet of dahlias. Dinner is ready, the sheets smell clean. After a week in freezing beds, eating chaotic meals at the kitchen table, they are happy to return to their family comforts. It would be impossible, they think, to manage without her. They react like spoiled children, like purring cats.
A few hours after Paul and Myriam’s departure, Louise retraces her footsteps and goes back up Rue d’Hauteville. She enters the Massés’ apartment and opens the shutters that Myriam had closed. She changes all the sheets, empties the cupboards and dusts the shelves. She shakes out the old Berber rugs that Myriam refuses to get rid of, and hoovers the floors.
Her chores accomplished, she sits on the sofa and dozes. She doesn’t leave the apartment all week and spends each day in the living room, with the television on. She never sleeps in Paul and Myriam’s bed. She lives on the sofa. In order not to spend any money, she eats whatever she finds in the fridge and makes a start on the reserves in the pantry; Myriam probably has no idea what’s in there anyway.
Cookery programmes give way to the news, game shows, reality TV shows, a talk show that makes her laugh. She falls asleep in front of a true-crime show called Enquêtes Criminelles. One evening she watches an episode about a man found dead in a house on the outskirts of a small mountain town. The shutters were closed for months, the letterbox was overflowing, and yet no one wondered what had become of the house’s owner. It was only when the neighbourhood was being evacuated that some firemen finally opened the door and discovered the corpse. The body was practically mummified, due to the cold, stale air. Several times the voiceover mentions that it was possible to calculate the date of the man’s death only because of some yoghurts found in the fridge that were several months past their expiration date.
*
One afternoon Louise wakes with a start. She had been in one of those sleeps so heavy that they leave you feeling sad, disorientated, your stomach full of tears. A sleep so deep, so dark, that you see yourself dying, that you wake up soaked with cold sweat, paradoxically exhausted. In a panic, she sits up, slaps her own face. Her head aches so badly that she can hardly open her eyes. She can almost hear the sound of her heart thudding. She looks for her shoes. She slips on the floorboards, weeps with rage. She is late. The children will be waiting for her; the school will call; the nursery will notify Myriam of her absence. How could she have fallen asleep? How could she have been so careless? She has to leave, she has to run, but she can’t find the apartment keys. She looks everywhere and finally spots them by the fireplace. In the stairway, the front door bangs shut behind her. Outside, she has the feeling that everyone is staring at her and she sprints along the streets, out of breath, like a madwoman. She puts her hand on her side; she has a stitch and it’s killing her, but she doesn’t slow down.
There’s no one to help her cross the road. Normally there’s always someone in a fluorescent vest, holding a little sign. Either that young man with bad teeth whom she suspects has just got out of prison, or that tall black woman who knows all the children’s names. There’s no one outside the school either. Louise stands there alone, like an idiot. A bitter taste stings her tongue. She wants to throw up. The children aren’t there. She walks with her head lowered now, in tears. The children are on holiday. She’s alone; she’d forgotten. She hits her own forehead anxiously.
*
Wafa calls her several times a day, ‘just for a chat’. One evening she asks if she can come round to see Louise. Her bosses are away on holiday too and for once she is free to do what she wants. Louise wonders what Wafa wants from her. She finds it hard to believe that anyone could be so desperate for her company. But she is still haunted by her nightmare from the day before and she agrees.
She arranges to meet her friend outside the Massés’ apartment building. In the lobby, Wafa talks loudly about the surprise that she has for Louise, hidden inside the large woven-plastic bag she is carrying. Louise shushes her. She is afraid that someone will hear them. Solemnly she climbs the stairs and opens the door to the apartment. The living room strikes her as heartbreakingly sad and she presses her palms to her eyes. She wants to retrace her steps, to get rid of Wafa, to return to the television which spits out its reassuring swill of images. But Wafa has put her plastic bag on the kitchen countertop and she takes from it some packets of spices, a chicken and one of the glass jars containing her honeyed cakes. ‘I’m going to cook for you, okay?’
For the first time in her life, Louise sits on the sofa and watches someone make her a meal. Even as a child, she doesn’t remember ever seeing anyone do that, just for her, just to make her happy. As a little girl, she used to eat other people’s leftovers. She was given lukewarm soup in the morning, a soup that was reheated day after day until every last drop of it was gone. She had to eat all of it despite the cold fat stuck to the sides of the bowl, despite that taste of sour tomatoes, gnawed bones.
Wafa pours her a vodka mixed with ice-cold apple juice. ‘I like alcohol when it’s sweetened,’ she says, clinking her glass against Louise’s. Wafa is still standing. She picks up the ornaments, looks at the shelves of the bookcase. A photograph catches her eye.
‘Is that you? You’re pretty in that orange dress.’ In the photograph Louise is smiling, her hair loose. She is sitting on a low wall, holding a child in each arm. Myriam insisted on putting that picture in the living room, on one of the shelves. ‘You’re part of the family,’ she told the nanny.
Louise remembers clearly the moment when Paul took that photograph
. Myriam had gone into a ceramics shop and she was struggling to make up her mind. Louise was looking after the children in the street lined with shops. Mila stood on the wall. She was trying to catch a grey cat. That was when Paul said: ‘Louise, kids, look at me. The light’s perfect.’ Mila sat next to Louise and Paul called out: ‘Now, smile!’
*
‘This year,’ Louise says, ‘we’re going back to Greece. There, to Sifnos,’ she adds, pointing at the photograph with her painted fingernail. They haven’t talked about this yet, but Louise is certain that they will return to their island, swim in the clear sea and eat dinner on the port, by candlelight. Myriam makes lists, she explains to Wafa, who sits on the floor, at her friend’s feet. Lists that she leaves in the living room, even in the sheets of their bed, and she wrote on those lists that they will go back there soon. They will go for walks in rocky inlets. They will trap crabs, sea urchins and sea cucumbers that Louise will watch shrinking at the bottom of a bucket. She will swim, further and further out, and this year Adam will join her.
And then, the end of the holiday will draw closer. The day before they return to Paris, they will probably go to that restaurant that Myriam loved so much, where the boss had let the children choose which fish they wanted. There they will drink a bit of wine and Louise will announce her decision not to go back with them. ‘I’m not going to catch the plane tomorrow. I’m going to live here.’ Of course, they will be surprised. They won’t take her seriously. They’ll start laughing, because they’ll have had too much to drink or because they’re feeling ill at ease. And then, faced with the nanny’s resolve, they will start to worry. They will try to talk her round. ‘Come on, Louise, that makes no sense. You can’t stay here. And how will you make a living?’ And then it will be Louise’s turn to laugh.
Lullaby Page 9
