Lullaby

by Leïla Slimani

  While the children run around on the gravel, while they dig in the sandpit (the rats that lived there having recently been exterminated by the local authorities), the women turn the park into a cross between a recruitment office, a union headquarters, a claims centre and a classified-ads listing. Here there is talk of job offers and disputes between employers and employees. The women come to complain to Lydie, the self-proclaimed president, a tall woman in her fifties from the Ivory Coast who wears fake-fur coats and has thin red-pencil eyebrows.

  At 6 p.m., groups of youths invade the park. The nannies know them. They’re from the Rue de Dunkerque, from the Gare du Nord. The nannies know that these youths leave broken crack pipes by the edge of the playground, that they piss in flowerbeds, go looking for fights. Seeing them, the nannies quickly pick up children’s coats and toy diggers covered in sand, they hang their handbags from the handles of the prams, and they leave.

  The procession goes through the park’s gates and the women go their separate ways: some walk up towards Montmartre or Notre-Dame-de-Lorette; others, like Louise and Lydie, head down towards the Grands Boulevards. They walk side by side. Louise holds hands with Mila and Adam. When the pavement is narrow, she lets Lydie walk ahead of them, bent over her pram with a baby asleep inside it.

  ‘A young pregnant woman came by yesterday. She’s going to have twins in August,’ Lydie tells her.

  Everyone knows that some mothers – the most sensible and conscientious ones – come here nanny-shopping, the way people used to go down to the docks or to the end of an alley to find a maid or a warehouseman. The mothers prowl around the benches, observing the nannies, examining the faces of the children when they go running to the thighs of these women, who brusquely blow their nose or console them after a fall. Sometimes the mothers ask questions. They investigate.

  ‘She lives on Rue des Martyrs and she’s due at the end of August. She’s looking for someone, so I thought of you,’ Lydie concludes.

  Louise looks up at her with her doll-like eyes. She hears Lydie’s voice, as if from far away; the sound echoes inside her head but the words are a blur and she doesn’t grasp their meaning. She leans down, takes Adam in her arms and puts her hand under Mila’s armpit. Lydie raises her voice; she repeats something. She thinks that perhaps Louise didn’t hear her, that she’s distracted, her mind wholly occupied by the children.

  ‘So what do you think? Shall I give her your number?’

  Louise does not reply. She gathers speed and pushes past, brutal, silent. She cuts in front of Lydie and as she makes her escape, she knocks over the pram with a sudden gesture, waking the baby, which starts to scream.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ shouts the nanny as all her shopping falls into the gutter. Louise is already far away. In the street, people gather around Lydie. They pick up mandarins that have rolled along the pavement; they throw the soaked baguette in a dustbin. They worry about the baby, who is fine, thankfully.

  Lydie will recount this incredible story several times, and each time she will swear: ‘No, it wasn’t an accident. She knocked over the pram on purpose.’

  Her obsession with the child spins endlessly in her mind. She thinks of nothing else. This baby, which she will love madly, is the solution to all her problems. Once it’s on its way, it will shut up the harpies in the park, it will drive away her horrible landlord. It will protect Louise’s place in her kingdom. She feels sure that Paul and Myriam don’t have enough time to themselves. That Mila and Adam are an obstacle to the baby’s arrival. It’s the children’s fault if their parents are never alone together. Paul and Myriam are exhausted by their tantrums; Adam wakes up too often in the night, cutting short their lovemaking. If the children weren’t constantly under their feet – whining, demanding cuddles – Paul and Myriam would be able to forge ahead and make a child for Louise. Her desire for that baby is fanatical, violent, blindly possessive. She wants it in a way she has rarely wanted anything: so badly it hurts, to the point where she is capable of choking, burning, destroying anything that comes between her and the satisfaction of her desire.

  One evening, Louise waits impatiently for Myriam. When her boss finally opens the door, Louise practically jumps on her, eyes ablaze. She is holding Mila by the hand. The nanny appears tense, concentrated. She looks as if she’s making a great effort to contain herself, not to hop up and down or yell something. She has been thinking about this moment all day long. Her plan seems perfect to her, and now all she needs is for Myriam to agree, to let her do it, and to fall into Paul’s arms.

  ‘I’d like to take the children to eat at a restaurant. That way, you’ll be able to have a nice dinner with your husband.’

  Myriam puts her handbag on the chair. Louise watches her; she moves closer, stands next to her. Myriam can feel the nanny’s breath on her; her presence makes it impossible for Myriam to think. Louise is like a child whose eyes are saying ‘So?’, whose entire body is stiff with impatience, exaltation.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. We haven’t planned anything. Maybe another time.’ Myriam takes off her jacket and starts walking to her bedroom. But Mila holds her back. The child enters the scene, following the nanny’s script to perfection. In a sweet voice, she begs: ‘Mama, please. We want to go to a restaurant with Louise.’

  At last Myriam gives in. She insists on paying for their meal and begins to rummage in her handbag for cash, but Louise stops her. ‘Don’t. Please. Tonight, I want to take them out.’

  Inside her pocket, against her thigh, Louise holds a banknote, which she caresses sometimes with her fingertips. They walk to the restaurant. She spotted this little bistro a while ago; its customers are mostly students, who come here to drink its three-euro beer. But tonight the bistro is practically empty. The owner, a Chinese man, sits behind the bar, in the neon light. He wears a garishly patterned red shirt and he is chatting with a woman who sits in front of a glass of beer, socks rolled up over her fat ankles. Out on the terrace, two men are smoking.

  Louise pushes Mila inside the restaurant. The air is thick with the smell of stale tobacco, meat stew and sweat, and it makes the little girl want to throw up. Mila is very disappointed. She sits down and looks around the empty room, her eyes searching the dirty shelves with pots of ketchup and mustard on them. This is not what she had been imagining. She expected to see pretty ladies; she thought there would be noise, music, lovers. Instead of which, she slumps over the greasy table and stares at the television screen above the bar.

  Louise, with Adam in her lap, says she doesn’t want to eat. ‘I’ll choose for you, okay?’ Without giving Mila time to reply, she orders sausages and chips. ‘They’ll share it,’ she explains. The Chinese man barely responds. He takes the menu from her hands.

  Louise also orders a glass of wine, which she sips very slowly. She tries to make conversation with Mila. She has brought some pencils and sheets of paper, which she puts on the table. But Mila has no desire to draw. She’s not very hungry either and hardly touches her meal. Adam has gone back inside his pushchair. He rubs his eyes with his little fists.

  Louise looks through the window. She looks at her watch, at the street, at the bar where the owner leans his elbows. She bites her nails, smiles, then her eyes turn vague, absent. She would like to find something for her hands to do, focus her mind on one single idea, but her thoughts are like broken glass, her soul weighed down by rocks. Several times, she passes her folded hand over the table, as if to sweep away invisible crumbs or smooth the cold surface. A jumble of unrelated images fills her head; visions that flash past ever faster, connecting memories to regrets, faces to unfulfilled fantasies. The smell of plastic in the hospital courtyard where they took her for walks. The sound of Stéphanie’s laughter, at once blaring and muffled, like the noise a hyena makes. The faces of forgotten children; the softness of hair, stroked with her fingertips; the chalky taste of an apple turnover that had dried out at the bottom of a bag, but that she’d eaten anyway. She hears Bertrand Alizard’s voic
e, his lying voice, which mingles with other voices, the voices of all those who gave her instructions, advice, orders; the surprisingly gentle voice of that female bailiff whose name, she remembers, was Isabelle.

  Louise smiles at Mila. She wants to console her. She can tell that the little girl is on the verge of tears. She recognises that feeling, that weight on the chest, that discomfort at being there. She also knows that Mila is restraining herself, that she has self-control, bourgeois manners, that she is capable of a thoughtfulness beyond her age. Louise orders another glass of wine. While she drinks, she watches Mila stare at the television screen, and she can make out, very clearly, her mother’s features beneath the mask of childhood. Those innocent, little-girl gestures are the bud containing the woman’s edginess, the boss’s severity.

  The Chinese man picks up the empty glasses and the half-full plate. He puts the bill – scribbled on a scrap of graph paper – on the table. Louise doesn’t move. She waits for the time to pass, for the sky outside to grow darker; she thinks about Paul and Myriam, enjoying their time alone, about the empty apartment, the meal she left for them on the table. They’ve eaten by now, she imagines, standing up in the kitchen, the way they used to do before the children were born. Paul pours his wife more wine and finishes his own glass. His hand slides over Myriam’s skin and they laugh. That’s the kind of people they are: they laugh with love, with desire, shameless.

  At last Louise stands up. They leave the restaurant. Mila is relieved. Her eyelids are heavy; she wants to go to bed now. In his pushchair, Adam has fallen asleep. Louise straightens his blanket. As soon as night falls, the winter cold returns from its hiding place, sneaking under their clothes.

  Louise holds the little girl’s hand, and for a long time they walk through city streets where all the other children have disappeared. In the Grands Boulevards, they pass theatres and packed cafés. They head down streets that become ever darker and narrower, sometimes emerging into a little square where young people lean against bins, smoking joints.

  Mila does not recognise these streets. A yellow glow illuminates the pavements. To her, these houses, these restaurants seem very far from home and she looks up at Louise with anxious eyes. She waits for a reassuring word. A surprise, perhaps? But Louise just keeps walking and walking, breaking her silence only to mutter: ‘Come on – aren’t you coming?’ The little girl twists her ankles on the cobblestones. Her stomach is racked with anxiety. She feels sure that, if she complained, it would only make things worse. She senses that a tantrum would do no good. In Rue Montmartre, Mila observes the girls smoking outside bars, the girls in high heels, who shout too loud, causing the bar owner to bark at them: ‘Shut up, will you? We’ve got neighbours here.’ Mila is completely lost; she doesn’t know if this is even the same city, if she can see her house from here, if her parents know where she is.

  Abruptly, Louise stops in the middle of a busy street. She glances up, parks the pushchair next to a wall and asks Mila: ‘What flavour do you want?’

  Behind the counter a man waits wearily for the child to make up her mind. Mila is too small to see the trays of ice cream, so she stands on tiptoes and then answers nervously: ‘Strawberry.’

  One hand holding Louise’s, the other gripping her cone, Mila walks back the way they’ve come through the darkness of the night, licking her ice cream, which gives her a terrible headache. She squeezes her eyes shut to make the pain go away, trying to concentrate on the taste of crushed strawberries and the little pieces of fruit that get stuck between her teeth. Inside her empty stomach, the ice cream falls in heavy flakes.

  They take the bus home. Mila asks if she can put the ticket in the machine, as she does whenever they take the bus together. But Louise shushes her. ‘We don’t need a ticket at night. Don’t worry about it.’

  *

  When Louise opens the door of the apartment, Paul is lying on the sofa. He is listening to a record, eyes closed. Mila rushes over to him. She jumps in his arms and buries her frozen face in her father’s neck. Paul pretends to tell her off for coming home so late, going out and having fun at a restaurant, like a big girl. Myriam, he tells them, took a bath and went to bed early. ‘She was exhausted by work. I didn’t even see her.’

  A sudden melancholy chokes Louise. So all that was for nothing. She is cold, her legs ache, she spent the last of her cash, and Myriam didn’t even wait for her husband before she went to sleep.

  She feels alone with the children. Children don’t care about the contours of our world. They can guess at its harshness, its darkness, but they don’t want to know anything more. Louise tells them about it and they turn away. She holds their hands, crouches down so they are at the same level, but already they are looking elsewhere: they’ve seen something. They’ve found a game that gives them an excuse not to hear. They don’t pretend to feel sorry for those less fortunate than them.

  She sits next to Mila. The little girl is squatting on a chair, drawing pictures. She is capable of staying focused on her sheets of paper and her pile of felt-tip pens for nearly an hour. She colours the picture carefully, attentive to the smallest details. Louise likes to sit next to her, to watch as the colours are spread over the paper. She observes, in silence, the blooming of giant flowers in the garden of an orange house where people with long hands and tall, slender bodies sleep on the lawn. Mila leaves no empty spaces. Clouds, flying cars, hot-air balloons fill the densely shimmering sky.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Louise asks.

  ‘That?’ Mila puts her finger on a huge, smiling figure, lying on the lawn and covering more than half of the page. ‘That’s Mila.’

  Louise can no longer find any consolation in the children. The stories she tells them get stuck in a rut and Mila points this out to her. The mythical creatures have lost their vivacity, their splendour. Now her characters have forgotten what they are fighting for, and her tales are just descriptions of long, broken, confused wanderings, impoverished princesses, sick dragons; selfish soliloquies that the children don’t understand and of which they soon grow weary. ‘Think of something else,’ Mila begs her, but Louise can’t. She is sinking into her own words as into quicksand.

  Louise doesn’t laugh as much any more. She puts less enthusiasm into their pillow fights and games of ludo. And yet she adores these two children, whom she spends hours observing. It’s enough to make her cry sometimes, the looks they give her when they want her approval or her help. Most of all, she loves the way Adam looks around at her, wanting her to notice his improvements, his joys, to show her that in everything he does there is something that is meant for her, and her alone. She would like to drink in their innocence, their excitement, until she is intoxicated. She would like to see through their eyes when they look at something for the first time, when they understand the logic of a mechanism, expecting it to repeat itself infinitely without ever thinking of the weariness that will one day slow it down.

  All day long Louise leaves the television on. She watches apocalyptic news reports, idiotic shows, games whose rules she doesn’t fully understand. Since the terrorist attacks, Myriam has forbidden her to let the children watch television. But Louise doesn’t care. Mila knows she must not tell her parents what she has seen. That she mustn’t say the words ‘hunt’, ‘terrorist’, ‘killed’. The child watches the news in rapt silence. Then, when she’s had enough, she turns to her brother. They play, they fight. Mila pushes him against the wall and the little boy turns red before retaliating.

  Louise does not look round. She stays where she is, eyes glued to the screen, her body completely immobile. The nanny refuses to go to the park. She doesn’t want to talk to the other women or see the old neighbour, whom she humiliated herself with by offering her services. The children get cranky and pace around the apartment. They beg her: they want to go outside, to play with their friends, to buy a chocolate waffle at the top of the street.

  The children’s cries irritate her; she’s ready to scream too. The children’s nagging whines, thei
r foghorn voices, their ‘why?’s, their selfish desires seem to split her skull. ‘When is tomorrow?’ Mila asks, hundreds of times. Louise can’t sing a song without them begging her to do it again; they want the eternal repetition of everything – stories, games, funny faces – and Louise can’t stand it any more. She has no patience now for their tears, their tantrums, their hysterical excitement. Sometimes she wants to put her fingers round Adam’s neck and squeeze until he faints. She shakes her head to get rid of these thoughts. She manages to stop thinking about it, but a dark and slimy tide has completely submerged her.

  *

  Someone has to die. Someone has to die for us to be happy.

  Morbid refrains echo inside Louise’s head when she walks. Phrases that she didn’t invent – and whose meaning she is not sure she fully grasps – fill her mind. Her heart has grown hard. The years have covered it in a thick, cold rind and she can barely hear it beating. Nothing moves her any more. She has to admit that she no longer knows how to love. All the tenderness has been squeezed from her heart. Her hands have nothing left to caress.

  I’ll be punished for that, she hears herself think. I’ll be punished for not knowing how to love.

  There are photographs of that afternoon. They have not been printed but they exist, somewhere, deep inside an artificial memory. The pictures are mostly of the children. Adam, half-naked, lying in the grass. He is staring absently to the side, with his big blue eyes, his expression almost melancholic despite his tender age. In one of those images, Mila is running down a broad, tree-lined path. She is wearing a white dress with a butterfly design. She is barefoot. In another photo, Paul is carrying Adam on his shoulders and Mila in his arms. Myriam is behind the lens. Her husband’s face is blurred, his smile hidden by one of Adam’s little feet. Myriam laughs too; she doesn’t think to ask them to keep still. To stop wriggling for a moment. ‘Please? I’m trying to take a picture.’