The Only Girl in the World

by Maude Julien

  Every now and then, though, we do go out, always together and always in the Peugeot, which otherwise sits in the garage adjacent to the house. These outings are never simple operations, and we are all on edge. The car battery is often flat. It has to be recharged, which is enough to postpone plans or even cancel them. If by some stroke of luck the engine does start, everything has to happen very quickly: I’m already sitting in the front seat and my father has already started pulling out by the time my mother opens the gate; then she quickly swings it shut and hops into the back seat. The big Peugeot races off as if we have some vital mission to accomplish. In actual fact we’re probably going to the market in Hazebrouck to buy chicks for the farmyard.

  During the trip, I make myself as small as possible on the passenger seat. On these rare occasions when we do go out, my father always tells me to sit in the front. I can see my mother fuming at me in the rear-view mirror. Does she know I’d willingly swap places with her? ‘You know that’s the death seat,’ she hisses when she and I are alone, out of my father’s earshot. ‘If he has to brake sharply, you’ll go straight through the windscreen. If there’s an accident, he’ll die and take you along with him. That’s why your father puts you there. But he’s protecting me.’

  I don’t know why she resents me, and I don’t comment. In any event, my mind is too full of the crippling tension that accompanies all our outings. My parents are even more painstaking than usual about keeping a close watch on me. I feel suffocated. Out of the corner of my eye, I snatch glimpses of so many things I’d love to go and look at, but my father sets us a return time that is down to the exact minute. He waits in the car and we do our shopping at breakneck speed with one eye on the clock.

  Our last outing was three months ago now: to Hazebrouck to get a new stock of chicks. On the way back, my father stopped on the main square, and my mother and I nipped into the bookshop. I asked whether I could look at some books. ‘Children’s books are right there,’ the bookseller said kindly.

  ‘Hurry up, your father’s waiting.’ I took a book at random from the Pink Library Collection and another from the Green Library Collection. My mother paid for them hastily and then hid them in her bag. She didn’t have to tell me to keep quiet. My father wants me to read important books. He would definitely have forbidden me from reading this sort of thing, and would have crucified my mother for letting me have them. I was in turmoil all the way back. What if she refused to give them to me when we got home?

  But on that particular day, a miracle happened. As soon as we were alone together, my mother handed me the package from the bookshop without a word. I went and hid the books between my mattress and my bedsprings. That evening I waited till there was no more noise coming from the other rooms and then examined my new treasures, the cardboard binding, the colour picture on the glossy front cover. It was the first time I’d read children’s books. I’d picked them up thinking they were stories about two different libraries. In fact, one was from The Famous Five series, and the other was a Nancy Drew mystery.

  Every evening after my day of lessons, music and manual labour, I’m allowed to read for half an hour in bed. When I’m sure my father’s asleep, I make the most of my mother’s rare act of indulgence and ecstatically plunge into the adventures of my child heroes. In awe, I read them over and over again. Nancy Drew and the Famous Five are my only escape. They open a window onto the dizzying world of life that my father won’t let me explore.

  One day my mother hears me humming a tune I’m learning on the piano, which is enough to send her into a fury. She remembers the two books and tells me to bring them to her. ‘Your behaviour’s been getting worse for a while now. It must be because of these books I was stupid enough to buy you. They’re confiscated.’ I look miserable, like every other time she scolds me. But it doesn’t really matter much. I know my heroes’ stories so well I can dive straight back into them in my imagination.

  Occasionally my mother turns a blind eye to my breaches of discipline. Mostly, though, she’s even stricter than my father. When he’s around I can tell she’s extremely nervous. What she dreads more than anything is looking like a bad, weak or incompetent teacher. Whenever she and I are alone in our classroom on the second floor, she pressures me to get ‘better than excellent’ academic results.

  One of the first things she had to teach me was how to read and write. I remember how exasperated she was by my slow progress. I made mistakes when my father asked me to read a page out loud. I could see her out of the corner of my eye, her face darkening with shame and anger. Writing was even worse. Why did I have to learn to write with a quill and an inkwell? She oversaw every upstroke and downstroke of my letters, and flew into a rage at the tiniest smudge. She would tear the page out and give me another one to write on. I was still so young; I didn’t know how to stop the tears from flowing. The ink on the page would soon be soaked, which made her even more hysterical. My hands were completely black by the end of those writing lessons.

  My mother thinks of me as a shifty creature, a bottomless pit of ill will. Just as I clearly spatter ink on my pages deliberately, I also deliberately chip the glass top on the big dining-room table. I deliberately miss a step or tear the skin on my hands when I’m weeding the grounds. Or fall, or scratch myself. I’m a ‘cheat’ and a ‘faker’. I’m always trying to draw attention to myself.

  While I was learning to read and write, I also learned to ride a bike. I had a child’s bike with training wheels at the back. ‘We’re taking those off now,’ my mother told me one day. My father was behind us, watching the scene in silence. My mother made me get onto my suddenly unstable bicycle, took hold of me with both hands and—whoosh—launched me down the sloping driveway. When I fell, I scraped my leg on the gravel. I burst into tears of pain and humiliation. But when I saw those two impassive faces watching me, my sobbing stopped. Without a word, my mother put me back on the bike and kept launching me as many times as it took for me to learn to balance on my own.

  My scrapes were treated on the spot, my mother holding my knee firmly while my father poured surgical spirit straight onto my smarting wounds. Crying and moaning were forbidden. I had to ‘grit my teeth’.

  I learned to swim the same way. Of course, going to the local swimming pool was out of the question. The summer I was four, my father had a pool built ‘especially for me’ at the end of the garden. It was not a pretty pool with blue water, but rather a long thin strip enclosed by concrete walls. The water was dark and freezing cold, and I couldn’t see the bottom.

  As with the bike, my first lesson was simple and quick: my mother threw me into the water. I struggled and screamed and swallowed a lot of water. Just as I was about to plummet to the bottom, she dived in and fished me back out. And we started again. I wailed once more and cried and choked. My mother dragged me out again. ‘You’ll be punished for that stupid snivel-ling,’ she said before pushing me unceremoniously back into the pool. My body struggled to avoid drowning while my spirit coiled up a little tighter inside me with every dunk.

  ‘A strong person doesn’t cry,’ my father insisted, as he watched the performance out of range of the splashing. ‘You need to know how to swim. It’s vital in case you fall from a bridge or if you need to escape.’ I gradually learned how to keep my head above water. And over time I’ve even become a good swimmer, but I hate the water, just as I hate that pool where I still have to train.

  To show I’m not ‘chicken’, I now have to jump straight into the icy water without any fuss. It knocks the breath out of me every time. But my father insists I not miss a single opportunity to ‘strengthen my powers of endurance’.

  Cap Gris Nez

  Some friends of my father’s, a couple, Ginette and François, have come to spend a few days with us. I really like François; he is a small friendly man, almost completely bald and always even-tempered. He talks to me kindly, is funny and loves to laugh. There are plans for a rare outing: we are going to Cap Gris Nez, a cape that looks across
to the English coast. ‘Oh, it’s going to be such fun!’ says François, and I find his enthusiasm contagious. With him along, I am sure it will be much more enjoyable than an outing to the Hazebrouck market. The decision was made so easily. Maybe there will be other outings now. I feel as light as a butterfly.

  But as soon as we reach the coast my father gives me a new exercise to ‘toughen me up’: he insists I go and lean over the cliff edge. No, no, no, I don’t want to, I can’t! I am now quite good at hiding my fear, but this time it’s just impossible. I am so paralyzed with terror I cannot take a single step. Exasperated, my father gets my mother and Ginette to help catch me. They forcibly drag me to the lip of the precipice and hold me there with my head hanging over the edge. I contort in horror. With my eyes tight shut, I can feel the drop sucking me downwards. I feel sick with vertigo.

  While I struggle, I catch sight of François’s blue sweater and light-coloured pants a little way off. He pretends to be gazing at the scenery. He has his hands in his pockets and looks uncomfortable. I’m grateful to him for staying away from these grappling hands, against which I am completely powerless. I belong to my parents; I am their thing. There is no space for life inside me or around me. Do I scream? Do I sob? All I know is that they throw me into the back of the car and lock it.

  And I, who dream of nothing more than getting out, now hope with all my might that I will be left locked in there…if the very thought of standing close to a cliff edge puts me into such a hysterical state then I must be too stupid, too cowardly and too much of a disappointment. My mother is right; if it weren’t for them I would be in Bailleul.

  The next day my father rings the bell three times. I’m being summoned. My heart starts racing. I immediately stop reading and go to look at the board in the pantry to see where the ringing is coming from: his bedroom. I climb the stairs full of foreboding, knock on the door and wait for his permission to go in. Then I sit down, careful to adopt the ‘concentration position’: neither too far forward nor too far back. My parents think that anyone who sits against the back of a chair is lazy, and those who sit on the edge are weak. My father runs his closed fist down my spine to check I’m not touching the back of the chair. Then he gives one of the front chair legs a sharp kick. If I’m too close to the edge I’ll fall. Because I’m sitting ‘correctly in the middle’, this doesn’t unbalance me.

  Now he sits facing me and peers right into my eyes. Whatever happens, I mustn’t look away.

  He starts his ‘teaching’: ‘The Third Reich was one of the strongest nations, better even than the Spartans. The nation of the Third Reich will return and it will rule the world. It is superior to all others because of the teaching and training it gives its youth. This education is hard.’ He singles out the word without raising his voice. ‘There is no room for weakness.’ He articulates each word individually. ‘Hard, cruel, strong young people with no fears, unshakeable. That is my lesson. No room for weakness. You need hard physical exercises. Your mind will triumph because it is stronger than your body, and then it will be able to control matter.’

  He falls silent, his eyes still boring into mine. ‘Now go,’ he orders harshly after a while.

  I stand up, making sure I don’t scrape the chair on the floor. Scraping a chair after a teaching is forbidden.

  My unspeakable behaviour at Cap Gris Nez warrants the maximum punishment: except for these teachings, I won’t be spoken to for three weeks. Ginette and François won’t speak to me either. Then, in the following three weeks, I will be spoken to only formally, and with no eye contact. Meanwhile, I myself won’t be allowed to speak for the whole six-week period, except to answer questions, and I too must use the formal form of address and make no eye contact.

  Even under normal circumstances, we talk very little. My father makes no conversation. He gives his ‘teachings’ or issues orders. Whenever he opens his mouth I listen, desperately attentive. I often find I don’t understand a word he’s saying, and start to panic inside. I force myself to keep my eyes on his, but I can feel my mind battering against the confines of my brain like a terrified bird. If I ever find the courage to ask a question during a meal, he roars, ‘Only speak if you have something intelligent to say.’ I don’t understand the concept of ‘intelligent’, so mostly I stay silent. My mother talks about me, though, starting her sentences with ‘she’. Sometimes my name is mentioned and I try to make myself as small as possible, even if what she’s saying isn’t negative, such as: ‘Maude studied the second declension in Latin this morning.’ It feels really strange. There are only two situations when I hear her say my name: when she’s talking about me to my father and when she’s yelling at me.

  It turns out that being banned from speaking is far more horrible than I thought. I feel I’ve been imprisoned in a fortress of silence and it’s growing smaller by the day; I’m no longer allowed to resist, no longer allowed to feel. It’s like I’m disappearing inside myself. The hardest thing is mealtimes. We eat in a deathly hush. I’m so tense it makes me even clumsier: I spill my drink, I clink my cutlery on my plate. My father scowls at me furiously. I find it hard to swallow so I chew endlessly. ‘Only the weak chew for a long time. Swallowing big pieces forces your stomach to work for you, and that builds your character and your strength.’ When he was young he always succeeded in his own personal challenge of downing six hard-boiled eggs in the time it took the clock to strike twelve midday. But as hard as I try, I can’t manage to swallow. ‘That’s enough now,’ my mother screams eventually. ‘Get out! Go and study!’

  If I’m not on the brink of suicide, then it’s thanks to a glorious consolation I’ve found to counter the emptiness of this silence: the conversations of animals. Whether I’m hunched over my homework or busy with manual labour, I secretly lend an ear to the constant chatter of birds in the garden. One asks a question, another replies, a third intervenes, then they all chat together. Occasionally a dog calls out in the distance…and then suddenly all the dogs in and around the village join in the general hubbub.

  I try to work out what these heated discussions mean; they start with a private chat, quiet mutterings and every now and then burst into an intense, exuberant racket with all the animals talking at once. Is there a barnyard somewhere keenly greeting a newcomer? Or a stable block celebrating a mare being reunited with her foal? I think of Linda behind her bars. I’m sure she’s listening intently too. But try as I might to strain my ears, I don’t hear her voice in the chorus of dogs. Like me, has she been instructed not to speak?

  When studying Bach’s Two- and Three-part Inventions on the piano, I make an even more exciting discovery: music has conversations of its own. The right hand starts with a phrase, the left responds, the right picks it up again, the left follows. And, as with the animals, the two hands end up playing together. I’m thrilled by these dialogues. I play them over and over, never tiring of them. I gradually add my own improvisations based on the cheeping I can hear from the garden: my right hand reproduces a phrase from a bird’s melody, and my left does a pastiche of another bird’s response. I reproduce their exchange as faithfully as I can, then let my hands run freely over the keyboard, simulating someone dutifully following the score. To disguise my ploy, I pretend to be working on a piece my parents don’t know. They can’t read music so they’re completely taken in.

  Several months after these periods of silence, I still find it hard to get sounds out of my mouth. I stammer and blush, I scramble my words. The worst thing is when, on the way downstairs, my mother warns me quietly, ‘You’d better not make any mistakes, Monsieur Didier is going to test you.’ I’m shaking by the time I get to him. He ends each of his questions with ‘Think carefully before you reply.’ That’s all it takes for my voice to start quavering and descend into pathetic stuttering. When he yells ‘Enunciate when you speak! E-nun-ci-ate!’, all that comes out of my throat is a husky gurgling. Infuriated, my father sends me away: ‘Leave! Come back when you know.’ I withdraw, fighting back my tears. I k
now the answers; I just can’t get them out.

  My parents are convinced I stammer on purpose, to disguise the fact that I haven’t learned my lessons. They are both very annoyed. My mother is frightened she will be held responsible for my poor performance. My father, on the other hand, shudders to think that—despite all his efforts and all the training he puts me through—I’m proving in the long run to be what he hates most in the world: a ‘wet blanket’.

  ‘You listen to me,’ he always says, ‘we’re not like everyone else. We’re not sheep. We belong to the category of strong spirits. You will develop a strong mind like mine. Don’t disappoint me, don’t grow into a weakling like your mother.’ Bending over me from his giant’s height, he says this without taking his eyes off me, emphasizing each syllable, terrifying as an Olympian god. Ever since I’ve learned about Greek mythology, I can see Zeus, the god of thunder and lightning, in my father’s features.

  The Cellar

  It’s the middle of the night. The three of us are going down the stairs into the cellar. I’m wearing a sweater over my pyjamas, but I’m barefoot. I’m not usually allowed to walk about barefoot in case I catch cold. I shiver as I climb down the stairs, afraid of hurting myself on something sharp. In front of me is my father’s imposing silhouette. Behind me, my mother, locking the door. Why is she locking it? I don’t understand what’s going on and start shaking. With every step we go a little deeper into the odour of the cellar, a stench of damp and mould that turns my stomach.

  My father sits me on a chair positioned in the middle of the largest room. I can hear his heavy breathing and I can see the bristly grey stubble that has grown since he shaved yesterday morning. I look around surreptitiously to see whether there are any mice. The coal heap isn’t far away, and there may be rats hiding behind it. I nearly faint at the thought.