by Marie Sizun
They sit the child down in the workshop. They bring her some peculiar biscuits, some milk and honey. They’re kind to her. Very kind. You must come back, says the woman. They don’t have children. The child laughs. She feels comfortable. She wonders whether she would rather stay here for ever. She’s sleepy.
Perhaps she slept. Looking back, she won’t remember. The memory stops with that fantasy about adoption. The bittersweetness of, as she sees it, having left her parents. A feeling of endless time. Of breaking away. A sort of journey.
It’s late when she gets home. It’s already evening. Evening noises in the building. The light somehow softened, soothed. The Armenian tailor takes the child back to her door. He rings the bell for her. The child’s slightly anxious. But the father, who opens the door to them, looking amazed, smiles, not angry at all. Why does he look so happy?
‘Oh, the child!’ he says. ‘Good God! I’d completely forgotten about her… What’s the time, then? I’m sorry… Thank you so much… She didn’t come knocking on your door, did she?’
And before the Armenian has even finished explaining, the father’s talking again.
‘It’s happened, you know,’ he says. ‘The Americans have arrived… The first operations were a success…’
‘Oh,’ the Armenian says simply. ‘I see… I’ll go and tell my wife.’
They shake hands. The father even invites the Armenian in for a drink, but he declines: he still has work to do. Another time, he says. Another time. And withdraws.
The door closes, leaving the father and child together. They’re alone. The mother’s still not home.
The father doesn’t scold the child this evening. He doesn’t criticize her once. He looks at her with a hint of amusement and tenderness in his eye. The child feels that, for the first time since he came home from Germany, he’s actually seeing her. He’s interested in her.
And then that astonishing thing, with her there, sitting on the sofa beside him, and him sort of dreaming, lost in thought, the sudden gesture.
‘What pretty hair you have,’ he says. And, just for a moment, she feels the big hand with the freckles smoothing over her hair in a sort of caress.
Was it that evening, the evening of the landings, which would always be the evening of the Armenians in the child’s mind, or was it a bit later – because surely things didn’t happen that quickly? Anyway, it was at this point in their story that her father took her, awkwardly, onto his lap, just like that, to tell her something. For the first time. Like a normal father. A real father. Like the ones who tell their children stories, in the evening, affectionately, just like that.
It’s a funny old story that the father tells the child, a story about trees and farm workers, about carts, grey skies and snow, a story she didn’t understand at all – a story from Germany, he said. Most likely she was too surprised, too affected by the novelty of what was happening, to pay attention. So odd sitting on those big enemy knees, being close up to the smell of tobacco, mingled with a subtle fragrance of eau de cologne. And she watches that hand she so dreads, the hand that slaps, and she feels it stroking her hair. It is very gentle now, very soft and attentive.
But oddest of all is hearing this other voice her father has, a voice that isn’t scolding, or shouting or being sarcastic. A voice telling a story. A voice talking. A voice talking to her. It’s the voice she’s listening to. Not the words.
It didn’t last very long. Li came home. She went into the kitchen with some provisions and called to her husband. He gently lifted the child onto the floor and got up to go into the kitchen.
Maybe he’d also had enough of having her there, on his lap, the child, all stiff and silent. Maybe she was in his way.
She stayed there, a little dazed, caught up in the surprise of what had happened.
From the grey room with its fading daylight, she could see the light shining from the kitchen, where her mother and father were. But she stayed there, in the darkness, thinking.
One morning, waking in the grey room where they now eat their meals and where the child still has her bed, the child saw that her father was already awake, sitting in the window, apparently writing in the sunlight.
She went over rather fearfully, without making a sound, and he didn’t shoo her away. So she stayed there, standing beside him, watching what he was doing in rapt silence.
He was actually drawing, in pencil. And what he was drawing, what the child saw evolving on the page, was a forest of very tall, dense trees planted close together, growing thickly around a clearing. At the far end of the clearing she could make out a long, low house made of logs.
The child didn’t move, kept watching.
Then her father took a box of watercolours from his bag and put it on the table. He went to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water – the child didn’t move, stayed there, waiting – and put it down next to the box and the drawing, and, apparently unaware of the child, started painting. But she knew he knew she was there. His silence constituted acquiescence. Better: approval. The only sound was the gentle flop-flop of the brush dipped into the water from time to time, and the complicity of the child’s breathing, standing there with her hands in the small of her back, behind her father, occasionally catching her breath, attentive to the developing colours on the trees, the sky, the house and the grass on the ground.
When the watercolour was finished, the father sat back slightly so the child could see better.
‘Do you like it?’ he asked.
The child simply nodded: she did. Then he tore another sheet of white paper from the pad and sat the child down where he’d been sitting. Gave her a pencil.
‘Now it’s your turn. Draw whatever you like.’
Terrified of her power (and to think she’d always been so bold), she draws a shapeless outline on the paper. To her it’s a tree. She says so, very quietly.
And now her father’s the one standing behind her, but so tall he has to lean over the child to take her right hand in his and alter – only slightly – the contours of her tree. She lets him guide her, doesn’t even think of protesting, because the warmth of that great hand around hers is so wonderful (but oh, how she shrieked if her mother ever took it upon herself to correct her drawings). Then, still holding the little hand, he makes her pick up the brush, makes her load it with water, takes her left hand and guides it with his to show her how to squeeze off the excess water with two fingers, then he swirls the brush round a small pot of green paint and, with both their hands, puts a touch of green on the leaves of their tree.
Swooning with tenderness, the child surrenders to the instructions given by his big hands.
‘You see, it’s not that difficult!’ her father says eventually, flourishing their joint work: a feather duster of green, which the child finds magnificent.
She takes it to her room. Stows it with her precious things.
Where’s her mother? She’s still asleep. Didn’t see. Doesn’t know.
That afternoon the father goes out alone. Comes back with a small parcel in his hand. Calls the child.
‘Here, this is for you,’ he says simply.
The child tears clumsily at the wrapping, in a delicious state of anticipation.
Inside is a tiny box of watercolours: six round blocks of colour and a brush.
‘Now,’ the father tells her, ‘you can work next to me in the mornings.’
The child notices that her mother, who’s sitting nearby, has looked up and is watching the scene in silence, unsmiling.
So the child looks away, discreetly.
A strange incident which really surprised the child.
It’s Sunday, her grandmother’s there. The two women are cooking lunch in the kitchen. The radio is on. A journalist is talking once again about the Normandy landings.
The father comes in to listen. The child follows him. She listens too, to be like the others. And the word suddenly strikes her for the first time. One word. That word.
‘In Normandy?’ she
asks. ‘Where we went, me and Mummy and Granny?’
A silence. An extraordinary silence.
The grandmother is first to react.
‘In Normandy! As if you’ve ever been to Normandy!’
The child is about to answer back, to press the point. But she notices her mother, very pale, watching her in the most extraordinary way, as if she’s talking to her with her eyes, as if she’s screaming at her to be quiet, to stop right there.
‘Normandy!’ her grandmother says again. ‘I ask you! Nonsense! The child talks complete nonsense!’
And the mother adds in a blank voice, ‘Maybe she’s getting confused with when we went to Ermenonville?’
The conversation trails off. The father hasn’t even looked up. He’s listening to the radio.
He just gestures to the child to be quiet. A very gentle gesture, very kind, drawing her close to him with his big hand.
How things are changing now, and how quickly it’s happening.
The father has an errand to run in town today. As he heads out he announces that, because it’s a nice day today, he might as well take the child with him. The mother is a little surprised, but says nothing.
The child is hastily put into her pretty dress, the one from that first day, from the hospital, and she leaves with her father. Alone with her father. It’s the first time. The image of her mother, on the doorstep, watching them go.
Out on the street he doesn’t tell the child to walk ahead of him: he takes her hand.
The child doesn’t talk, intimidated. He doesn’t talk either. But the child, who’s watching him, can tell he isn’t angry, in fact he looks almost cheerful, an expression she’s never seen on his face before.
They take the Métro, the father and the child, the father and his daughter, whose hand he holds in the crowds. There are a lot of people in their carriage, but the father finds two seats, sits the child opposite him as if she were a grown-up. The child doesn’t know what to make of it. The father takes an old Métro ticket from his pocket.
‘Look,’ he says.
He folds the ticket lengthways, tears away a bit from near the top-left-hand corner, a bit from near both bottom corners. Then, with a pen, he draws an eye here, some whiskers there, and suddenly the ticket’s turned into a dog, one of those funny little short-legged dogs that look like sausages.
‘It’s a sausage dog,’ says the father. ‘Dackel in German. There was one on the farm where I worked.’
The child listens. Doesn’t dare ask any questions. Not yet.
‘Make another one,’ she asks simply.
The father does. The child laughs.
She will hold those two paper dogs carefully in her hand for the whole outing. And once they’re back at home, she’ll stow them with her precious things, her personal treasures, strange pictures, old toys.
Later, as an adult, she’ll never see a dachshund without recalling this scene. And she’ll never forget that German name either. Dackel.
Is it because it’s summer? Is it because everyone’s saying the war really is going to end and the Germans are going to be driven out of Paris? There’s something in the air, in the streets, and even sometimes in their apartment, despite the arguments between her father and her mother, a kind of lightness; the child can feel it, she experiences it as a huge relief, a sort of happiness that doesn’t yet have a name. The father still frequently gets angry but, interestingly, it’s not actually so much with the child now as with his wife. With her, the child, the father’s hardly ever angry any more. At least, he doesn’t shout any more. It’s as if he’s found a new voice with her. A voice just for her. The child can tell. She’s proud of it.
How long is it since the child hugged her mother? Not only has she stopped reaching to put her arms around her neck and cover her with kisses, as she used to, but when her mother tries to catch her on the hop, grab her when she’s running past, the child ducks away, races off laughing, doesn’t want to be touched any more.
‘What’s come over you, my darling?’ the mother asks, bewildered.
‘My name’s France,’ the child yelps, running to sit at the table.
The father, having heard the exchange, laughs out loud.
‘Look, she’s more sensible than you are,’ he tells his wife.
The child’s delighted.
Now when the three of them go out, the child and her parents, it’s the father’s hand that the child wants to take. It’s his hand that she holds, not letting go once for the whole walk. He accepts this. It even seems to make him proud.
One time, he showed Li the child’s tiny hand in his, lifting it slightly and opening its delicate fingers in his own palm, and he said, ‘Have you seen what pretty hands my daughter has?’
In the evenings it’s next to her father, sitting on the sofa in that grey room, that the child comes and nestles gently, in silence, like a small pet, a tamed animal, one that’s found its master. While this is going on, Li clears the table, does the washing-up. They’re alone, the father and his child. He reads his paper. She stays next to him, not moving or speaking. She’s thinking. She’s mulling over her ideas, her stories. She’d like to talk to him about them, but she can’t yet. She doesn’t yet know. Later. She’ll do it later, she’s sure of that.
In the hush, there’s the rustle of the newspaper as the father turns the pages and, from the kitchen, the more distant sound of her mother putting things away. The child lets her mind wander. She looks at the big blotched hand holding the newspaper and now finds it beautiful. It looks a bit like a giraffe’s skin, she thinks. The child loves giraffes. In her mind she baptizes her father’s hands giraffe-hands. But she doesn’t dare tell him. That’s silly, he would say.
Sometimes they talk too. He folds up his newspaper. She asks her father to tell her a story. He makes one up. Or he talks about things in Germany. Not sad things. Not about what he went through. Never about what he went through any more. But about what he liked. The forest. The birds. The sounds in the evening. The wind at night. The child listens and listens, full of admiration. She’d like to tell him things too. She has so much to say.
The child feels a helpless trust.
One evening, without thinking, quite spontaneously, she calls her father Daddy for the first time.
All these things inside her head, things she thinks are so clever, the ideas and memories and stories she’s been mulling over such a long time, she’d dearly like to share them. She’d like to give them to her father.
She’s now just waiting for the moment. She knows it will come. That she’ll launch into it.
She looks at her father. She looks at him when they cross the street together. She looks at him when she sits next to him on the sofa. She looks at him when they’re sitting up at the table.
She knows for sure she’ll talk to him.
It’s such glorious weather. Everything seems to have become so easy.
It’s at this point that something happens, something that breaks the child’s heart: her father has to go back to work. He’s so much better now that the doctor pronounces him in good health, physically and mentally, fit for work. He’s gone back to his job at the insurance company, his job from before the war. When life was normal. Why? the child asks him. Because I have to. Where do you think money comes from? It makes the father laugh, how naïve the child is.
She still has no concept of money, of material problems. She doesn’t understand his going away, leaving her like that, not now that he’s her father, his going off all day without her. He seems to be happy, though, he seems glad to be going back to work.
The child is rediscovering the world of before her father. Rediscovering her home as it used to be. But it’s as if everything has changed. Disorientated and bored, she wanders around the apartment, which is suddenly empty, pointless, drifting between the mother she’s no longer interested in, the mother who actually seems listless, indifferent, and the grandmother, who’s now back with a vengeance, who comes to keep her daug
hter company during the day, while her son-in-law’s away. Her grandmother, who’s always busy, feeling important.
Everything’s going back to how it used to be and yet nothing’s the same.
The conversations between the two women have started again, the whispering and silent nodding. But this complicity, which the child used to loathe, now means nothing to her, barely ruffles her. She thinks about her father. She feels his absence. The grandmother’s presence only bothers the child in the sense that she seems to be replacing the father. To have driven him out.
So the child displays her impatience by pulling faces at the old lady, who threatens her exasperatedly: ‘You’ll see, I’ll tell your father.’
The child doesn’t worry about this. She’s no longer afraid of her father. Because he’s her father.
In fact one time, confronted with both women criticizing her, complaining because she’s started singing her old warlike songs again, she’s suddenly inspired to snap, ‘And, anyway, you’re liars.’
She doesn’t really know what makes her say it. Habit. Or perhaps some sort of instinct.
The mother and grandmother stop talking. Look at each other.
The child, who’s now singing again, won’t say any more on the subject. She’s already vanished under the dining-room table. Her refuge.
The child waits for her father. She waits for him the way you can wait as a child, a way you also can later, in love. She knows it will be a long time, but she waits. She knows he’ll be back when evening comes. So she listens out for the sound of the lift, the familiar footsteps on the landing, the rattle of the key in the lock.
And the moment he comes in, even though she knows it annoys her mother, and perhaps him too sometimes – but it doesn’t, she can tell it doesn’t, isn’t she his child now? – she rushes over to him, won’t stop until she has his full attention, has secured his affection, taken possession of his big hands.
