by Marie Sizun
She thinks he looks sad and stern. And yet he doesn’t look old. It’s his eyes that worry the child, eyes loaded with unknown thoughts, eyes that have never seen her, the child, eyes that aren’t looking at her either, but are staring past her at something else, someone else. It’s this stranger’s stare that frightens her.
Your father’s coming home. As if she were already subjected to that stare.
In the meantime, the child tries to behave as if nothing has changed. She plays under the dining-room table; you can’t see the picture from there. She runs through the apartment singing at the top of her lungs. She uses any excuse to throw her arms around her mother’s neck and kiss her dementedly.
‘The child’s becoming completely insufferable,’ the grandmother says.
The mother smiles without a word, her pretty, sad smile that seems to understand everything.
The grandmother says the child is badly brought up. In fact the child hasn’t been brought up at all: because, with her mother’s backing, under her mother’s adoring eye, she does almost whatever she wants, says what she wants and eats what she wants when she wants. The child is well aware that the mother and grandmother disagree on the subject; but it’s the mother who decides, who has the last word, and the grandmother can only bow her head with a sigh; the child knows this, listening inquisitively to their conversations, or at least what she understands of them.
As it happens, she abuses this freedom with relative restraint. What does she do? She only draws a little bit on the walls, the grey walls of their small apartment, with her colouring pencils; she fills the pages of the books she finds with mysterious symbols that appeal to her. She likes bringing these dead pages to life. She sings too, very loudly, at any time of day, tunes she has invented, with a warlike feel, particularly if her mother stops paying attention to her, to speak to the grandmother, for example. Then the child makes sure she’s listened to. Demands it.
The child is temperamental, ‘spoilt’, in the grandmother’s words. She refuses to eat things she doesn’t like, particularly the little meals put together by the grandmother using whatever’s available, whatever the war has left them: cod stew, Jerusalem artichokes, semolina in milk.
When the fancy takes her, the child gets down from the table without a word and goes off to play. Which makes her mother laugh.
‘Leave her, just leave her,’ the mother says in reply to the old lady’s protests. ‘If only I’d had such freedom as a child…’
She laughs to see the child so happy, watches her go with adoring eyes.
‘You’re my darling, aren’t you?’ she calls after her. And the child, caressed by her gaze, turns round without uttering a word, agrees with a conspiratorial smile, rapturously happy.
The child doesn’t like her grandmother. Not at all. She doesn’t like that grey hair, that tight bun at the nape of the grandmother’s neck, those eyes which are such a pale blue they look transparent, those cool, drooping white cheeks, that flat chest, that immutable sadness, a sadness which weighs down on her old shoulders and diffuses a veil of gloom and boredom. The child doesn’t like the insipid smell of the old woman. She doesn’t like the hushed, monotonous, sensible voice, which never has any spark, any gusto. She doesn’t like the touch of the permanently icy hands when the grandmother’s making a dress for the child and wants to try it on her (how the child shies away then, how she screams that she’s afraid of the pins). And most of all the child doesn’t like the private conversations her grandmother has with the mother, her own mother, the child’s, her property, and she can’t see how her mother can conceivably be this woman’s daughter. She hates the old woman’s love for her daughter, the demonstrations of affection, kisses, gestures, words. She particularly loathes the name she calls her, that pet name, Li, for Liliane. Sometimes, and this is the worst of it, the grandmother even says, ‘Li, my child.’ She is the child, and no one else, and her mother is Mummy. No other names. The child thinks there’s something odd, inappropriate, about any familiarity between the two women, anything that implies a special connection between them. And specifically, recently, the conversations from which she, the child, is excluded.
But what she especially hates, what she can’t abide, is that her grandmother is a liar. Her grandmother lied to her once, and this the child has never forgotten.
The mother lied too that time. But that doesn’t matter. It’s not the same. The child doesn’t resent her mother for it.
It feels like a long time ago. She can’t really tell any more. It was in the past. They don’t talk about it now. We’re not allowed to talk about it.
It was an event the child didn’t understand. Something very peculiar. That she’s never managed to clarify. She still thinks about it sometimes. She settles under the dining-room table and wonders about it.
She was lied to once. There was something she’d seen with her own eyes, and was told she hadn’t seen. Told she’d dreamed it. That’s what her grandmother and her mother said. They lied. But it mustn’t be mentioned again. It’s completely forbidden. How angry they were, even her mother. They shouted. Forbidden ever to raise the subject again. The only thing forbidden to this child, who usually does as she pleases.
So she thinks about it, all alone, from time to time. Such a strange, muddled memory, but so clear too. You were dreaming, her mother and grandmother said. No, she wasn’t dreaming. She knows it did exist. But it now feels so long ago. It’s true, it is a bit like a dream.
The thing happened during that glorious, unusual trip to Normandy with her mother and grandmother, an almost make-believe trip – When? How long ago? The child doesn’t know, doesn’t yet have a sense of duration, dates, calendars – a trip filled with indistinct images, all the more exquisite for their volatility, a garden in the rain, the red splash of tear-shaped flowers, smells of woodsmoke.
It was right in the middle of this wonderful trip that the peculiar scene appeared, incomprehensible and yet infinitely pleasurable, like every other part of it, this would even be its crowning moment, if they hadn’t told her it never happened and that they didn’t want to hear it mentioned.
It’s like a dream, but it isn’t a dream.
She goes with her grandmother to visit the mother, who, rather surprisingly, is in hospital, in a white room, in a white bed, but she isn’t ill, she’s smiling. They sit the child down next to the bed, on a chair, beside her grandmother, who’s also on a chair. All at once the door opens: in comes a nurse, carrying a snugly swaddled baby, which she hands to the mother; then, noticing the child, the nurse smiles at her, lifts her nimbly over the bed so she has a better view, and tells her to look how pretty her little sister is. They’re going to have a lot of fun together, aren’t they.
Those words. And then the nurse leaves.
Just for a moment the child saw, wrapped in a blanket, the crumpled red face of a sleeping baby.
Astonishment. Momentary rapturous delight.
But after that, nothing. Afterwards, there’s nothing. The child remembers nothing. How her mother behaved, or her grandmother, what they did and said.
Her memories pick up with the journey back to the house in Normandy, the child accompanied only by her grandmother. Her mother stayed in hospital.
‘And the baby?’ the child asks. ‘When’s she coming? When?’
Silence. The child continues obstinately.
‘When’s my little sister coming back with Mummy?’ she keeps saying.
And from the grandmother: ‘What are you talking about? You’ve got things wrong. You don’t have a little sister. The nurse made a mistake. But your mummy’s coming back, she’s coming back. Soon. She’s been a bit ill, that’s all.’
Fury from the child, who ploughs on, incredulous. Protests. Persists. In vain.
When, some time later, the mother returns, alone, without a baby, the child bombards them with questions again, obstinate, sure the grandmother misunderstood, didn’t know, was lying. But now her mother too is telling her she’
s wrong, she dreamed it. The child works herself into a state, stamping her feet with rage and hurt, crying. She knows what she saw, doesn’t she?
Loathing her grandmother, who’s shaking her head inanely.
Towards her mother, the child feels no anger. Just tremendous surprise. The sadness of not being believed. The disappointment of not understanding.
And eventually the child would calm down. Would forget a bit. Would stop asking questions. Besides, she’ll be forbidden to mention the whole episode again.
She does think about it from time to time, though, about this oddity. She doesn’t know. She no longer knows.
The child often dreams, and sometimes believes she’s living something for real. Her dreams can be so beautiful and so powerful. Like the time when she stepped into an astonishing house made of glass, in the middle of a forest. Those colours, that light, those smells… And then she woke up and there was nothing there, no house of glass, no forest, just the grey dining room where she sleeps. And it was this reality that she couldn’t immediately believe.
So when are we living and when are we dreaming?
That’s complicated enough already. But the child suspects that grown-ups confuse things on purpose. As her mother and grandmother did, that fateful day, for some obscure reason.
The child is wary of anything that might bring the women closer. Like these recent confabulations, these whispered words, when they think she, the child, can’t hear. The mysterious looks they exchange.
This very morning, in fact, the grandmother has just arrived and she’s already towing her daughter off towards the window and talking to her in a hushed voice. The mother has that frightened expression the child doesn’t like.
The child, who was sitting thinking under the dining-room table, immediately pops out and comes to prowl around them, and the old woman turns to her irritably and shoos her away.
‘You again, nosy parker! Run along and play. Leave us alone for a minute.’ And as the child doesn’t do as she’s told… ‘Go and play, I said! Oh, honestly. This is all going to change, you’ll see. When your father comes home, you’ll have to toe the line!’
The mother says nothing. Silent, thoughtful, miles away, not even looking at her child, her daughter. Strangeness surrounds the mother completely.
Furious, the child withdraws to the corridor. There on a chair she finds her grandmother’s black overcoat and her handbag. She empties the bag onto the floor. And tramples all over its contents.
What’s going on in this house? What’s making time drag by so slowly all of a sudden? Why are words spoken so quietly and how come noises are so hushed?
In their grey apartment, where the grandmother is gaining a foothold, now coming every day, it feels as if time has stopped. Weighty, crushing the child who was once so light, so free with her mother, so happy alone with her. The child sang and danced and drew and laughed. And her mother laughed along with her.
Now, though, there’s no laughter to be heard.
At the moment the mother and grandmother are conferring, a little way away.
The white faces of worried women. Whisperings. Desultory gestures. Interrupted movements. Waiting. But nothing happens.
The child starts to sing in the silence, but keeps her ears open.
And now, through her singing, she hears perfectly clearly. Those words again. Her father’s coming home. Soon. This week. Straight away?
She behaves as if nothing’s happened. Carries on singing.
The two women have stopped talking. They’re now both gazing at her in silence. For the first time the child thinks they look alike.
Something not unlike fear has come into the room.
Days of this peculiar waiting go by. Nothing happens, but you can feel that everything’s about to change, soon, any minute.
This time they explain to the child more clearly that the war isn’t yet completely over, but that her father, who’s ill, will be coming home, in a special convoy, with other prisoners who are also ill.
‘What’s wrong with him?’
The mother says she doesn’t really know. All she’s received is an official document. No direct news. No letter from the father. Apparently he’s had pneumonia; apparently his nerves aren’t good either. That’s all she knows. The army have told her he’s being sent home urgently. That was all.
‘When’s he coming back?’
‘Soon, my darling, soon.’
‘When?’
The child would find out nothing else today. But she would ask plenty more questions. In vain.
She wanders around her little domain, which has become slightly unfamiliar, draws half-heartedly on her favourite wall, watches what’s going on around her, listens, lurks, alert to anything that might supply an answer to her concerns.
‘Mummy?’
‘What, my darling?’
‘No, nothing…’
How pale she is, her mother, how pretty she is as she studies herself in the mirror now, with that anxious, darting expression, contemplating an eyebrow with a delicate tilt of her head, lifting a lock of hair with one finger.
‘Wait, Mummy, I’ll brush your hair,’ the child says.
She fetches a hairbrush and a comb, makes her mother sit on the edge of the bed, then climbs up behind her and starts untangling her curly hair, slowly, tenderly. Then, abandoning the brush, she dives her little hands voluptuously into that black mane, again and again.
In the end she puts her arms around her mother’s neck, presses her face to the nape and asks very softly, ‘Will you still love me?’
‘You dotty little thing! Of course I’ll still love you!’
‘More than him?’
‘Who do you mean, him?’
The mother’s momentarily forgotten, then understands.
‘You mean your daddy?… But it’s not the same. You’re a little girl…’
‘But even so… Will you love me more than him?’
Why does the mother now look so sad, so tired?
‘If you like, yes. I’ll love you more than him.’
The child is satisfied with this assertion, for now.
At last the evening comes when, as she puts her to bed, the mother kisses her child in a ceremonious way. Looks at her. Says nothing. This time, the child thinks, her heart beating hard, she’s going to tell me. She’s going to tell me now. He’s coming.
And sure enough, that’s what this is about. The mother tells the child that a convoy of prisoners has reached Paris, that her father is in hospital and they’ll go to see him tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.
The child says nothing, gripped by the enormity of this news, however anticipated it was, terrified by the imminence of things. She fiddles agitatedly with her mother’s hand, a limp, passive white hand. She tries with all her might to picture what’s about to happen. She doesn’t hear what her mother’s saying, in her soft voice, leaning over her, like when she tries to get her to sleep, speaking right up close to her. She can’t see her face, her eyes, just her cheeks, the grain of the skin on her cheeks, and those cheeks suddenly look very full to her, odd. She touches them so her fingers can re-establish the soft feel of them, the truth of them.
The mother and child stay like that in silence.
‘Are you pleased, my darling?’ the mother asks eventually. ‘You’re going to see your little daddy tomorrow.’
‘He’s not little,’ the child protests, her words whispered.
‘Yes he is, my darling, it’s an expression, you’ll see how young and kind he is…’
The child grabs her mother by the neck and, still speaking softly, asks whether just this evening she can sleep with her in the big bed where very soon, she knows, someone else will lie.
Granted. The mother takes the child through to her room, the child who will sleep, right through till morning, curled up against her mother.
And now, this morning, this March morning, here they are running, the mother and the child, running towards the Métro station. They�
�re off to see the father. This experience is happening at last. This adventure.
With one hand the mother keeps hold of the child, with the other she’s carrying a big box from Printemps department store, and it keeps bashing against her legs. Inside it there are civilian clothes for her husband, clothes which, till now, were stowed away in the wardrobe, clothes the child has never seen.
She herself, the child, has been dressed very carefully. She’s been put into her prettiest dress, the green velvet one with smocking and a lace collar. An attempt has been made to curl her hair, but it didn’t work. Anyway, she’s wearing shoes of black patent leather and white ankle socks.
As for her mother, she’s looking very pretty, she’s done her make-up beautifully, done her hair beautifully, and she’s dug out her navy-blue jacket and a white blouse. The child preferred the low-cut red dress, but the mother didn’t want that. Nevertheless, the result is lovely, and the child told her mother so, which seemed to please her.
They’re walking as quickly as they can, because they’re now late. Visiting time is eleven o’clock, we’ll never get there, says the mother. Flights of stairs in the Métro station at top speed.
Waiting on the platform with her mother, holding her mother’s hand, the child sees the huge underground train arriving, its carriages following the curve of the tunnel as it draws in to the station. Strangely, this is the detail she will remember from that day, the image of those carriages solemnly cornering behind the leading car. The image of her anguish.
Now, sitting facing one another as they travel towards the unknown, the child and her mother look at each other. They’re emotional, for different reasons, each in her own way, each lost in her own thoughts. Soon the child turns away towards the window and, without seeing it, gazes at the grey walls of the tunnel on which, here and there, the bright colours of an advertising hoarding blaze at her – letters spelling out in yellow and blue Dubo-Dubon-Dubonnet, or the jolly face and bouncy white body of the Michelin Man, a funny figure who used to make her laugh. But today she doesn’t even look at him.
