by Marie Sizun
Should the child try to hug her mother as she used to, with her arms clinging around her neck, it’s the mother he takes it out on. And in a fairly abrasive tone of voice. The child’s certainly noticed that.
‘Stop babying her!’ he says. ‘She’s too big for you to put up with such childish behaviour.’
If the mother protests, weakly, he gets angry. And the room reverberates with the boom of his fearsome voice, which hurts the child as much as if it were addressed to her – true, it is about her he’s talking.
And what overwhelms the child far more than her fear of her father is the things she’s discovering in her mother: her silence, her weakness, her reticence, her extraordinary resignation, which the child doesn’t yet know to describe as cowardice but which she feels is an offence, serious, unforgivable.
And this is why sometimes, when the mother’s being scolded by her husband, the child isn’t altogether displeased that the mother should be punished indirectly for her betrayal.
The child then slinks slyly off to a corner, under the dining-room table, for example, and gazes blankly into space, waiting for the storm to pass. Her heart beats gently, in a state of fear mixed with something like pleasure.
From the child’s point of view, arguments between her father and her mother have another advantage in that, for a time, they suspend any lovey-dovey behaviour. Because that – those kisses, the way they tenderly put their arms around each other and whisper things she can’t hear – is something the child doesn’t like. Likes less and less.
It is strange for the child to discover disenchantment, jealously. Feelings she couldn’t put a name to, but which hurt inside your stomach, and your heart.
The child can see she’s no longer the object of her mother’s adoration. The loved one is her father. He’s called ‘darling’ now, not her. He’s looked at, as she was before, with that tender, slightly anxious expression, not her. He’s admired. Not her. Not any more.
As for the stories her mother would read to her, sitting her on her lap, and the invented stories she would tell her at night, speaking so softly in her lilting voice, there are no more of those.
The child’s mother has a husband.
When the three of them go out together, the child and her parents, when they go for a walk on a Sunday through the streets in their neighbourhood, and all the way to the Place des Vosges, they make the child walk in front. They follow, with their arms round each other’s waists, a pair of lovers, a few paces behind.
At first she didn’t understand, accustomed when outside to holding her mother’s hand at all times. That was the rule then. It’s different now. In fact it’s the very opposite.
‘Walk ahead, I tell you,’ her father kept saying, when she hesitated. ‘We won’t lose you.’
So she walked along, forging blindly in a straight line, intimidated by her solitude, her awkwardness, her empty hands.
And if she showed signs of slowing down or turning round, her father’s voice was there: ‘Keep going, don’t stop!’
Or perhaps: ‘Left, turn left!’
Left, right, what does that mean? The child has no idea. She really hasn’t been taught anything, her father shouts. Thank goodness he’s there. That’s all going to change.
The mother smiles at her husband.
The child suddenly hates the pair of them. It occurs to her that she’d like to be lost. Or to lose them.
Will you still love me? More than him?
Liar.
And then came the scene, one mealtime, a repetition of so many others, but more violent and, for the child, a confirmation of her abandonment.
The three of them are sitting at the table, the father and mother facing each other and the child in between. The parents are talking calmly. The child is silent. On her plate there’s still a little pile of pasta that she’s eyeing anxiously, whitish twirls; they look disgusting, she doesn’t think she’ll be able to eat them. The father breaks off from the conversation, pins his pale eyes on the child and says simply, ‘I’m waiting.’
Feeling sick at the sight of the pasta, the child doesn’t move.
Then he roars. He thumps the table with his fist. He shouts. He shouts things that have now become routine for the child but, bellowed like this, they terrify her: what he went through, the cold, the hunger, the sickness. He shouts that he’s disgusted by the child’s fussiness. He shouts, and every word reverberates, and the table shudders with every blow thumped out in time to his words.
‘Oh, darling, come on,’ the mother intervenes timidly, sitting motionless on her side of the table.
‘Keep out of this, Li, please. France knows very well what she needs to do. Don’t you, France? And you’re going to do it, aren’t you?’
He’s dropped his voice. But that’s almost worse. The father is now white with anger. His words insidious, demented, incontestable.
The child is quivering with nerves. His voice, his repetitions, his closeness are turning her stomach. She wants to be sick. She wants to cry. But she holds herself back. Making a tremendous effort, she loads her fork once more, puts it into her mouth, almost retching in disgust, and makes herself swallow.
‘Again,’ says the father. ‘You haven’t finished.’
The child looks at him, looks at his strange, stony face, briefly meets those unsettlingly pale eyes, those inflexible eyes. Looking at him feels like drowning.
She makes herself swallow, again and again. Swallowing to the death.
Has she finished? No. With her stomach heaving, she can see there’s still food on her plate.
And this time, when the voice needles her again, metallic, unbearable, it’s too much. The contents of the child’s stomach rise up to her mouth, explode, streaming onto the table, between the plates, onto the clean tablecloth, everywhere.
Unacceptable. Disgusting.
The father stands up, turns to the child, who’s sitting abjectly on her chair, yanks her violently by one arm and slaps her, once on one side of the face, once on the other.
The mother lets out a scream. But doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak.
And because the child is now sobbing, gasping helplessly, he opens the door of the apartment and pushes her, choking, onto the landing.
She wails.
‘You can come back in when you’ve calmed down,’ her father bellows, before slamming the door behind her.
With all the noise, doors have opened here and there, and are swiftly closed again. Intimidated and ashamed, the child falls silent and, still convulsed by sobs, she goes and sits sniffling in a quiet corner, on a stair. And she waits, filled with loathing, for someone to be good enough to come and get her.
But, interestingly, it’s towards her mother – passive, submissive and slightly ridiculous – that all her resentment is directed.
One person who’s very happy with the new shape of things is the grandmother. At last a bit of discipline and organization in this house! At last someone’s going to teach the child how to behave! At last her little Li has seen sense! The grandmother is all smiles when she comes, all sweetness towards her returning son-in-law, the head of the family. But she manages to be discreet, the grandmother does, she doesn’t force herself on them too often.
She comes over for lunch on Sundays. Oh, the satisfaction when the child is brought into line! She smiles at her daughter, smiles at her daughter’s husband. Life has gone back to normal. They make a proper family.
Sitting at the table during those long Sunday lunches, the child, who isn’t included in the conversation, is at her leisure to watch them, the three of them, the grandmother, the father and the mother. She watches them surreptitiously, pretending she isn’t, sneakily, the grandmother says.
The grandmother, triumphant, their guest, in pride of place at the head of the table, her eyes bright, her words honeyed, her every move self-assured.
The father, whom the child now knows, she knows him by heart, but he still astonishes her. She knows the blond, almost white
hair cut very short, the very light blue eyes which focus fiercely under the effects of anger, the pale complexion which can flush red or, conversely, go deathly white. She also knows, and dreads, the big hands, which like his arms are smattered with freckles, strong hands resting on either side of his plate when he’s calm, hands the child can’t take her eyes off. She now recognizes, even from a distance, the smell of tobacco that hovers over them.
When everything’s all right, when there’s no reason for irritation, the father looks tenderly at his wife, talks softly to her, thoughtfully to the grandmother, and ignores the child. In the event of a problem, if a storm threatens, if a criticism comes to light, the grandmother invariably and with sugary servility takes her son-in-law’s side, even going so far as to disagree with her darling Li. The child is highly amused by this, when the thunderbolt strike isn’t aimed at her.
As for the mother, whom the child watches out of the corner of her eye, most of the time she sits in silence; she doesn’t seem especially happy. As if she’s trying to behave herself, too. As if she’s working quite hard at it. Perhaps she’s having trouble adapting to the new regulations. Then why does she look at her husband so tenderly? Why the blind acceptance of all his orders? The constant efforts to please him? She even tries to cook, but it always goes wrong. Before, it was the grandmother who cooked. The mother doesn’t know how to do anything, has never taken an interest in household matters. Why, then?
The child knows her mother well enough to realize she’s sad. Her eyes, her smile, the few words she utters, her silences, they’re sad. The child can tell. But it doesn’t have any effect on her. She’s only watching. She even thinks she had it coming, her mother did, if she’s a little unhappy now.
One evening when the child came racing into the kitchen, she caught her sitting on a stool in tears, and the child immediately ran off: as if, on top of everything else, she would ever console her, the liar. And she went and sat in silence in the dining room, not far from the father, who was casually reading his newspaper.
Something’s going on here, something the child can tell is unusual but that she doesn’t understand. She thinks about all this, turns it over in her mind, serious, excluded from the adults’ conversation, her head full of images, memories, questions, amid the boredom of a never-ending Sunday lunch.
During the day, because no one now looks after her and she’s not allowed to make any noise, the child has come up with a game. She takes a tattered doll that she rejected in the old days – she didn’t like dolls in the old days – and sits under the dining-room table, which is still covered with the long tablecloth used at mealtimes: she’ll be left in peace there, she can’t be seen. So she stays there, talking quietly to the tattered doll, commenting on her grievances, going over her resentments. She thinks about everything new in her mother’s behaviour, everything new about her disenchantment. And then the child mulls over things she keeps to herself: memories, old problems, unresolved questions. In her head she tries to establish the boundary between dreams and reality, and explores, yet again, the dishonesty displayed by adults.
Like what happened one morning recently.
The child always wakes early, long before her parents. She got up that morning and, bored but afraid of making a noise, she thought she would look out of the dining-room window to see what was going on in the street. She immediately noticed something through the window, something blue and glittery hanging on the railing: a sort of necklace of blue beads, or rather some beads threaded onto a piece of cord, hanging there, with no clue as to how they got there, out of her reach and wafting slightly in the breeze. Such a beautiful sight for the child, such a surprising gift out of nowhere. Without even thinking, she ran to get her mother, who was still in bed, who had to be begged to come and look, and when the mother finally let herself be led, dragged over to the window, the necklace had disappeared. Nothing. There wasn’t anything there, not on the balcony, not even in the street below. Nothing to be seen. ‘You were dreaming, my darling,’ her mother said. Those words again.
Fury from the child. She can still picture the blue sparkle, the fluid swaying of that string of magic beads. You were dreaming. No, I wasn’t dreaming, I saw it. Yes, you were dreaming. No, Mummy, I wasn’t!
Whatever’s happened to the child? She’s starting to shout now, and soon she’s shrieking, stamping her feet, struggling frantically to get away from her mother, who’s trying to calm her. It’s not so much because of the necklace, but because she isn’t believed. Because she’s being lied to. Because her mother’s lying to her. That’s what it is, that’s exactly what it is, like that other time, that time long ago. The child remembers: it’s just like with the baby. The baby in Normandy. In a flash the whole thing comes back to her. But she doesn’t mention it.
‘Liar,’ she roars simply. ‘Liar!’
‘What’s going on now?’ asks the father from the bedroom, his lie-in interrupted.
‘Nothing,’ the mother calls, ‘nothing, the child just had a dream…’
And she shakes the child by the arm, holding it tightly, as she never has before, ordering her not to say anything, not to say anything. Whatever you do, don’t say anything. As if this business with the necklace made her really angry, was so important. And then, without another word, she went back to join her husband.
The child stayed there, choked with sobs and anger. Her mother had hurt her. Why?
Definitely a liar. Like the grandmother. Just another thing she needed to forget.
With the tattered doll’s silent support, the child hardened her heart.
They say the Americans are coming. They’re going to drive the Germans out. The war will be over.
High time too, says the grandmother, there’s nothing left to eat. The big bag of lentils she’s been storing at her house is almost empty. Luckily she still has the three hens she keeps in her yard on the rue Bezout and whose eggs she brings over.
The father listens to the radio from morning till night, and sometimes to the station the child doesn’t understand at all, the one which is in English one minute and in French the next, but with funny sentences about things like a grandfather’s rabbit, lost carrots and other oddities, the station you’re not allowed to listen to, apparently.
There’s a lot of irritation in the house, and not only on the subject of the Americans. The family’s not working properly, the grandmother’s wrong to be so pleased, the grandmother doesn’t see everything. The child does, though, she’s always sniffing out what’s going on. The child knows nearly everything.
The child’s father and mother argue often, and not always about her. It turns out the mother doesn’t behave exactly as she should either. Not exactly as the father would like.
The child watches, listens. And what she sees is strange. Peculiar scenes. The parents are kissing, for example, and then the father’s voice starts complaining, quietly at first, but then more loudly. Growing angry. Then the mother cries. She goes out. To run some errands. Visit the grandmother on the rue Bezout.
There were angry words this afternoon, in fact. And with that, the mother headed off. She won’t be back till this evening.
The father stays at home, smoking his pipe as he listens to the radio.
As for the child, who’s made scenes of her own this afternoon, she’s being punished. Her father has just put her out on the landing. For what new misdemeanour, she doesn’t know, has already forgotten. But she’s not crying. She’s grown accustomed to these episodes on the landing, to the clatter of the slammed door and the long wait in the blue shadows of the stairwell. All the same, she nurses her grievances, her rebellion, the shame of being seen in this pitiful situation, alone outside a closed door. At first some neighbours come past, ask what she’s doing there, laugh when she says it’s a punishment, walk on. Then nothing. Silence. The blue light. Despite her father’s instructions to the contrary, she eventually sits down on the stairs. She waits. She thinks this has been going on for a very long time. P
erhaps her father will never open the door. Perhaps she’s not wanted any more. Well, good.
She almost wants someone to come past, to talk to her. But there isn’t a sound. You’d think there’s no one left in the building.
But then, as if her wishes have been granted, a door opens at the end of the corridor: where the neighbours they call the Armenians live, a man and a woman who have a sewing workshop in their apartment. The mother doesn’t really like them. She says they’re on the Germans’ side. So she doesn’t talk to them: good morning, good evening, that’s all. What does ‘Armenian’ mean? the child wonders.
There, through that half-open door, the child can see two motionless figures. They seem to be hesitating. Then a woman comes towards her, smiling. She’s smoking, holding a cigarette in her hand. In a slightly husky voice with a funny accent, she gently tells the child she can come in if she’d like to, that she mustn’t stay all alone like this, on the stairs. She doesn’t ask the child why she’s there. Takes her by the hand.
The child’s always been told not to talk to strangers. She also knows she was supposed to stay standing outside her own front door. Her father’s order. But that doesn’t matter now. Her parents don’t matter now. She follows the dark-haired woman with the strange voice. The husband greets them on the doorstep with a silent laugh, shows the child in. What a surprise the place is, comforting, peaceful. The child notices that the man and woman are wearing identical grey overalls, they smile together, look at her in the same calm, attentive way. New, unusual smells around her, of the cigarettes the woman smokes, but also the slightly acrid smell of new fabric, piled up on the roll, of half-finished suits dotted about the place, of sewing-machine oil, and, mingling with all of this, coming from the back of the apartment, there are strong smells of cooking, unfamiliar to the child.
