Lullaby

by Leïla Slimani

  She is fond of these photographs, though. She takes hundreds of them and looks at them in melancholy moments. In the metro, between two meetings, sometimes even during a meal, she scrolls through portraits of her children. She also believes it is her duty as a mother to immortalise these instants, to possess the proof of past joys. One day she will be able to show them to Mila or Adam. She will recount her memories and the image will awaken old sensations, details, an atmosphere. She has always been told that children are just an ephemeral happiness, a fleeting vision, a restlessness. An eternal metamorphosis. Round faces that are gradually imbued with seriousness without us even realising. So, every chance she gets, she looks at her children from behind the screen of her iPhone. For her, those small beings are the most beautiful landscape in the world.

  Paul’s friend Thomas invited them to spend the day at his country house. He goes there, alone, to write songs and nurse his alcoholism. Thomas keeps ponies at the bottom of his garden. Picture-book ponies, with short legs and hair as blonde as an American actress. A little stream runs through the vast garden, whose borders even Thomas doesn’t know. The children eat lunch on the grass. The parents drink rosé and in the end Thomas puts the box of wine on the table and helps himself to glass after glass. ‘We’re among friends, aren’t we? Let’s just get stuck in.’

  Thomas has no children, and it doesn’t even cross Paul or Myriam’s mind to bother him with their worries about the nanny, the kids’ education or family holidays. During this beautiful May day, they forget their anxieties. Their preoccupations appear to them as they are: minor everyday concerns, mere vagaries. All they think about now is the future, their plans, their ripening happiness. Myriam is sure that Pascal will ask her to become a partner in September. She will be able to choose her cases, delegate the drudgery to interns. Paul looks at his wife and his children. He thinks to himself that the hardest work is over, that the best is yet to come.

  They spend a glorious day running around and playing. The children ride ponies and feed them apples and carrots. They pull weeds from what Thomas calls the vegetable garden, even though not a single vegetable has ever grown there. Paul grabs a guitar and makes everyone laugh. Then everyone falls silent when Thomas sings and Myriam harmonises. The children stare wide-eyed at these calm adults singing in a language that they don’t understand.

  When it’s time to go home, the children howl in protest. Adam throws himself on the ground and refuses to leave. Mila, who is also exhausted, sobs in Thomas’s arms. Almost as soon as they’re inside the car, the children fall asleep. Myriam and Paul are silent. They watch the fields of rapeseed lying stunned in the fawn sunset that paints the motorway rest areas, the industrial zones, the grey wind turbines with a touch of poetry.

  *

  The motorway is blocked by an accident and Paul, who has a particular hatred of traffic jams, decides to take the next exit and return to Paris on a B-road. ‘I just have to follow the GPS.’ They rush down long dark streets lined with ugly bourgeois houses, their shutters closed. Myriam nods off. The leaves of trees shine under the streetlights like thousands of black diamonds. Occasionally she opens her eyes, anxious that Paul, too, might have slipped into a dream. He reassures her and she falls back asleep.

  She is woken by the blare of car horns. Eyes half-closed, her brain still fogged by sleep and too much rosé, she does not at first recognise the avenue where they are stuck in traffic. ‘Where are we?’ she asks Paul, who doesn’t reply, who has no idea, and who is busy trying to understand what is blocking them. Myriam turns her head to the side. And she would have fallen back asleep had she not seen – there, on the opposite pavement – the familiar figure of Louise.

  ‘Look,’ she tells Paul, pointing. But Paul is concentrated on the traffic jam. He is thinking about how to get out of it, perhaps by making a U-turn. He is at a crossroads where the cars, coming from all directions, are no longer moving. Scooters wind between the cars; pedestrians brush past the bonnets. The traffic lights change from red to green in a few seconds. No one moves.

  ‘Look over there. I think it’s Louise.’

  Myriam sits up a bit in her seat to get a better look at the face of the woman walking on the other side of the crossroads. She could lower the window and call out to her, but she would feel ridiculous and the nanny probably wouldn’t hear her anyway. Myriam sees the blonde hair, tied up in a bun at the back of her neck; she recognises Louise’s inimitable gait, agile and trembling. The nanny, it seems to her, is walking slowly, staring at the shop windows. Then she moves out of sight, her slender frame concealed by other pedestrians, disappearing behind a group of people who are laughing and waving their arms around. And she reappears on the other side of the zebra crossing, as if in the faded images of an old film, in a Paris rendered unreal by the darkness. Louise looks incongruous, with her eternal Peter Pan collar and her too-long skirt, like a character that has ended up in the wrong story and is doomed to roam endlessly through a foreign world.

  Paul honks the horn furiously and the children are startled awake. He puts his arm through the open window, looks behind him and speeds down a side street, cursing loudly. Myriam wants to calm him down, to tell him that they are not in a rush, that there is no point getting so angry. Nostalgically she continues staring, until the last possible moment, at a chimerical, almost hazy Louise, motionless under a streetlamp, who appears to be waiting for something, at the edge of a frontier that she is about to cross and behind which she will vanish.

  *

  Myriam sinks into her seat. She looks ahead again, troubled, as if she had just seen a memory, a very old acquaintance, a childhood sweetheart. She wonders where Louise is going, if it was really her, what she was doing there. She would have liked to continue observing her through that window, to watch her live. The fact of having seen her on that pavement, by chance, in a place so far from their usual haunts, makes her desperately curious. For the first time she tries to imagine, in a corporeal sense, everything Louise is when she is not with them.

  Hearing his mother pronounce the nanny’s name, Adam, too, had looked through the window.

  ‘It’s my nanny!’ he shouted, pointing at her, as if unable to understand that she might live elsewhere, alone, that she might walk without pushing a pram or holding a child’s hand. ‘Where is Louise going?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s going home,’ Myriam replied. ‘To her own house.’

  Captain Nina Dorval keeps her eyes open as she lies on her bed in her apartment on Boulevard de Strasbourg. Paris is deserted this rainy August. The night is silent. Tomorrow morning, at 7.30 – the time when Louise used to see the children every day – they will remove the police tape from the apartment on Rue d’Hauteville and they will begin the reconstruction. Nina has informed the investigating judge, the prosecutor, the lawyers. ‘I will play the nanny,’ she said. Nobody dares contradict her. The captain knows this case better than anyone. She was the first to reach the crime scene after the phone call from Rose Grinberg. The music teacher screamed: ‘It’s the nanny! She killed the children.’

  That day, the policewoman parked outside the apartment building. An ambulance had just left. They were taking the little girl to the closest hospital. Already the street was filled with onlookers, fascinated by the screaming of sirens, the urgency of the medics, the paleness of the police officers’ faces. Passers-by pretended to wait for something; they asked questions as they stood in the doorway of the baker’s or under a porch. A man, lifting his arm above the crowd, took a photograph of the building’s entrance. Nina Dorval had him removed.

  In the stairwell the captain walked past the medics who were evacuating the mother. The accused was still upstairs, unconscious. In her hand she held a small white ceramic knife. ‘Take her through the back door,’ Nina ordered.

  She entered the apartment. She assigned each person a role. She watched the forensics experts working in their baggy white overalls. In the bathroom she took off her gloves and leaned over the bathtub. S
he began by dipping her fingertips into the cold, murky water, tracing ripples, setting the water in motion. A pirate ship was taken by the waves. She couldn’t make up her mind to remove her hand; something was drawing her into the depths. She submerged her arm up to her elbow and then up to her shoulder, and that was how the forensics officer found her: crouching down, sleeve soaked. He asked her to leave; he was going to make an inspection.

  Nina Dorval wandered around the apartment, Dictaphone pressed to her lips. She described the premises, the smell of soap and blood, the noise of the television and the name of the programme that was on. No detail was omitted: the open glass door of the washing machine, with a crumpled shirt hanging out of it; the full sink; the children’s clothes strewn across the floor. On the table were two pink plastic plates containing the dried-out remains of lunch. The police photographer took a picture of the pasta shells and the pieces of ham. Later, when she knew more about Louise, when she’d heard all the stories about the obsessively tidy nanny, Nina Dorval was surprised by the disorder of the apartment.

  She sent Lieutenant Verdier to the Gare du Nord to meet Paul, who was coming back from a business trip. He’ll know how to deal with the situation, she thought. He’s an experienced man; he’ll find the right words; he’ll manage to calm him down. The lieutenant got there very early. He sat sheltered from the draughts of air and watched the trains arrive. He wanted to smoke. Passengers jumped down from a carriage and started running, in clusters. They probably had to catch a connecting train. The lieutenant watched as they passed, this crowd of sweating people: women in high heels, clutching their handbags to their chests; men shouting, ‘Get out of the way!’ Then the London train arrived. Lieutenant Verdier could have walked to the carriage where Paul was sitting but he preferred to stand at the end of the platform. He watched the father of the dead children coming towards him, headphones covering his ears, carrying a little bag. He didn’t move to intercept him. He wanted to give him another few minutes. Another few seconds before abandoning him to an endless night.

  The policeman showed him his badge. He asked Paul to follow him, and at first Paul thought it was a mistake.

  *

  Week after week, Captain Dorval went over the course of events. Despite the silence of the nanny, who did not come out of her coma, despite the corroborating testimonies about this perfect nanny, she told herself she would find the flaw. She swore she would understand what had happened in this warm, secret world of childhood, behind closed doors. She summoned Wafa to police headquarters and questioned her. The young woman couldn’t stop crying; she didn’t manage to articulate a single word and in the end the policewoman lost patience. She told her that she couldn’t care less about her situation: her papers, her work contract, Louise’s promises, Wafa’s naivety. All she wanted to know was whether she had seen Louise that day. Wafa said that she’d gone to the apartment in the morning. She’d rung the doorbell and Louise had half-opened the door. ‘As if she was hiding something.’ But Alphonse had run in. He’d slid between Louise’s legs and he’d joined the children, still in their pyjamas, sitting in front of the television. ‘I tried to persuade her. I told her we could go out for a walk. It was a nice day and the children would get bored in the apartment.’ Louise had refused to listen. ‘She wouldn’t let me in. I called Alphonse, who was very disappointed, and we left.’

  But Louise did not remain in the apartment. Rose Grinberg is categorical on that point: she saw the nanny in the building’s lobby, one hour before her nap. One hour before the murder. Where was Louise coming from? Where had she been? How long had she stayed outside? The police went round the whole neighbourhood, showing people the photograph of Louise. They questioned everyone. Some of them – the liars, the lonely ones who make things up to pass the time – they had to tell to shut up. They went to the park, to the Paradis café. They walked through the covered arcades off Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis and questioned the shopkeepers. And then they found that supermarket CCTV video. The captain must have watched that recording a thousand times. She watched Louise walk calmly down the aisles until she felt sick. She observed her hands – her very small hands – pick up a carton of milk, a packet of biscuits and a bottle of wine. In these images the children run from one aisle to another, ignored by the nanny. Adam knocks some packets off the shelf; he bumps into the knees of a woman pushing a trolley. Mila tries to reach some chocolate eggs. Louise is calm; she doesn’t open her mouth, doesn’t call them. She heads for the till and the children follow her, laughing. They cling to her legs and Adam pulls at her skirt, but Louise pays no attention. Her irritation is betrayed only by a few little signs, spotted by the policewoman: a slight contraction of her lips, a furtive glance downwards. Louise, the captain thinks, looks like one of those duplicitous mothers in a fairy tale, abandoning her children in the darkness of a forest.

  At 4 p.m., Rose Grinberg closed the shutters. Wafa walked to the park and sat on a bench. Hervé finished his shift. It was at this time that Louise headed towards the bathroom. Tomorrow Nina Dorval will have to repeat the same movements: turning on the tap, leaving her hand under the trickle of water to test the temperature, as she used to do for her own sons when they were still little. And she will say: ‘Come on, children. Time to take a bath.’

  She had to ask Paul if Adam and Mila liked water. If they were usually reluctant to get undressed. If they enjoyed splashing around, surrounded by their bath toys. ‘There might have been an argument,’ the captain explained. ‘Do you think they might have been suspicious, or at least surprised, to be taking a bath at four in the afternoon?’ They showed the father the photograph of the murder weapon. An ordinary kitchen knife, but so small that Louise could probably have partly hidden it in her palm. Nina asked him if he recognised it. If it was theirs or if Louise had bought it; if her act was premeditated. ‘Take your time,’ she said. But Paul hadn’t needed time. That knife was the one that Thomas had brought them back from Japan as a gift. A ceramic knife, extremely sharp. Merely touching it to your skin was enough to cut into the flesh. A sushi knife, in return for which Myriam had given him a euro, to ward off bad luck. ‘But we never used it for cooking. Myriam put it in a cupboard, high up. She wanted to keep it out of the children’s reach.’

  After two months investigating this woman, night and day, two months tracing her past, Nina started to believe that she knew Louise better than anyone. She summoned Bertrand Alizard. The man shook as he sat in the chair in her office. Drops of sweat ran over his freckles. He was so afraid of blood, of nasty surprises, that he stayed out in the corridor while the police searched Louise’s studio flat. The drawers were empty, the windows spotless. They didn’t find anything. Nothing but an old photograph of Stéphanie and a few unopened envelopes.

  Nina Dorval plunged her hands into Louise’s rotting soul. She wanted to know everything about her. She thought she could smash down the walls of silence within which the nanny had locked herself. She questioned the Rouvier family, Mr Franck, Mrs Perrin, the doctors at the Henri-Mondor hospital, where Louise had been admitted for mood disorders. She spent hours reading the notebook with the flower-patterned cover and at night she dreamed of those twisted capital letters, those unknown names that Louise had written down with the seriousness of a solitary child. The captain tracked down some neighbours from when Louise lived in the house in Bobigny. She asked questions of the nannies in the park. Nobody seemed able to figure her out. ‘It was hello, goodbye, that was all.’ Nothing to report.

  And then she watched the accused sleep on her white bed. She asked the nurse to leave the room. She wanted to be alone with the ageing doll. The sleeping doll, with thick white bandages on her neck and hands, instead of jewellery. Under the fluorescent lights, the captain stared at the pale eyelids, the grey roots at her temples and the weak throb of a vein beating under her earlobe. She tried to read something in that devastated face, on that dry and wrinkled skin. The captain did not touch the immobile body but she sat down and she spoke to Lou
ise the way you speak to children who are feigning sleep. She said: ‘I know you can hear me.’

  Nina Dorval has experienced it before: reconstructions are sometimes revelatory, like those voodoo ceremonies where the trance state causes a truth to burst up from the pain, where the past is illuminated in a new light. Once you are there, a sort of magic can occur: a detail appears, a contradiction finally makes sense. Tomorrow she will enter the apartment building on Rue d’Hauteville, outside which a few bouquets of flowers and children’s drawings are still fading. She will make her way past the candles and take the lift. The apartment – where nothing has changed since that day in May, where nobody has been to fetch their things or even pick up their papers – will be the scene of this sordid theatre. Nina Dorval will knock three times.

  There, she will let herself be engulfed by a wave of disgust, by a hatred of everything: this apartment, this washing machine, this still-filthy sink, these toys that have escaped their boxes and crawled under the tables to die, the sword pointed at the sky, the dangling ear. She will be Louise, Louise pushing her fingers in her ears to stop the shouting and the crying. Louise who goes back and forth from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the bathroom to the kitchen, from the bin to the tumble dryer, from the bed to the cupboard in the entrance hall, from the balcony to the bathroom. Louise who comes back and then starts again, Louise who bends down and stands on tiptoe. Louise who takes a knife from a cupboard. Louise who drinks a glass of wine, the window open, one foot resting on the little balcony.