Lullaby

by Leïla Slimani

  Myriam is crouched on the floor, going through the drawers, when the telephone rings. In a barely audible voice, Louise makes her excuses. She is so ill that she hasn’t managed to get out of bed. She fell asleep this morning and didn’t hear her phone ringing. At least ten times she repeats, ‘I’m sorry.’ Myriam is caught out by this simple explanation. She feels slightly ashamed not to have even thought of it: a straightforward health problem. As if Louise were infallible, her body immune to fatigue and illness. ‘I understand,’ Myriam replies. ‘Get some rest. We’ll find another solution.’

  Paul and Myriam call friends, colleagues, family. Finally someone gives them the number of a female student who ‘can help out if you’re desperate’, and who, thankfully, agrees to go to their apartment straight away. The girl – a pretty blonde of twenty – does not inspire much confidence in Myriam. After entering the apartment, she slowly takes off her high-heeled ankle boots. Myriam notices that she has a hideous tattoo on her neck. To every recommendation that Myriam makes, she replies ‘Yeah’ without really seeming to understand, as if she just wants to get rid of this nervous, nagging boss. With Mila, who is dozing on the sofa, she overdoes the solicitude, acting like a worried mother when the truth is she is still a child herself.

  But it’s in the evening, when she goes home, that Myriam is overwhelmed. The apartment is in chaos. Toys are scattered all over the living-room floor. The dirty dishes have been tossed in the sink. There are dried-out mashed-carrot stains on the little table. The girl gets to her feet, as relieved as a prisoner freed from her cell. She stuffs the cash in her pocket and runs to the door, mobile in hand. Later Myriam finds a dozen hand-rolled cigarette stubs on the balcony and, on the blue chest of drawers in the children’s bedroom, some chocolate ice cream that has melted, damaging the paintwork.

  For three days Louise has nightmares. She doesn’t sink into sleep but into a sort of perverse lethargy, where her thoughts become scrambled and her unease is intensified. At night she is inhabited by a silent screaming inside her that tears at her guts. Her blouse stuck to her chest, her teeth grinding, she hollows out a furrow in the sofa bed’s mattress. She feels as if her face is being crushed under a boot heel, as if her mouth is full of dirt. Her hips twitch like a tadpole’s tail. She is totally exhausted. She wakes up to drink and go to the toilet, then returns to her nest.

  She emerges from sleep the way you might rise up from the depths after you have swum too far, when you are oxygen-deprived, the water is a black sticky magma, and you are praying that you still have enough air, enough strength to reach the surface and breathe in, greedily, at last.

  In her little notebook with the flower-patterned cover, she noted the term used by a doctor at the Henri-Mondor hospital. ‘Delirious melancholia’. Louise had thought that was beautiful; it seemed to bestow a touch of poetry and escape on her sadness. She wrote it down in her strange handwriting, all twisted, slanting capital letters. On the pages of that little notebook, the words resemble those shaky wooden constructions that Adam builds with blocks purely for the pleasure of watching them collapse.

  For the first time, she thinks about old age. About her body, which is starting to malfunction; about the movements that make her ache deep in her bones. About her growing medical expenses. And then the fear of growing old and sick, bedridden, terminal, in this apartment with its dirty windows. It has become an obsession. She hates this place. She can’t stop thinking about the smell of damp coming from the shower cubicle. She can taste it in her mouth. All the joints, all the cracks are filled with a greenish mould, and no matter how furiously she scrubs at them, they grow back during the night, thicker than ever.

  Hate rises up inside her. A hate that clashes with her servile urges, her childlike optimism. A hate that muddies everything. She is absorbed by a sad, confused dream. Haunted by the feeling that she has seen too much, heard too much of other people’s privacy, a privacy she has never enjoyed herself. She has never had her own bedroom.

  *

  After two nights of anguish, she feels ready to start work again. She has lost weight and her girlish face, pale and gaunt, looks as if it’s been beaten into a narrower shape. She does her hair and make-up. She calms herself with layers of mauve eyeshadow.

  At 7.30 a.m., she opens the front door of the apartment on Rue d’Hauteville. Mila, in her blue pyjamas, runs at the nanny and jumps into her arms. She says: ‘Louise, it’s you! You came back!’

  In his mother’s arms, Adam struggles. He has heard Louise’s voice, he has recognised her smell of talc, the light sound of her footsteps on the wooden floor. With his little hands, he pushes himself away from his mother’s chest. Smiling, Myriam hands her child into Louise’s loving arms.

  In Myriam’s refrigerator, there are boxes. Very small boxes, piled neatly on top of one another. There are bowls, covered in aluminium foil. On the plastic shelves are little slices of lemon, a stale cucumber end, a quarter of an onion whose smell pervades the kitchen as soon as you open the fridge door. A piece of cheese with nothing but the rind remaining. In the boxes Myriam finds a few peas that are no longer round or bright green. Three bits of ravioli. A spoonful of broth. A shred of turkey that wouldn’t feed a sparrow, but which Louise carefully kept anyway.

  Paul and Myriam joke about this. This mania of Louise’s, this phobia of throwing away food, makes them laugh at first. The nanny scrapes out the last morsels from jam jars; she makes the children lick out their pots of yoghurt. Her employers find this ludicrous and touching.

  Paul makes fun of Myriam when she takes out the bin bags in the middle of the night because they contain leftover food or a toy of Mila’s that they can’t be bothered to fix. ‘You’re scared of being told off by Louise – admit it!’ he laughs, following her into the stairwell.

  They find it amusing to watch Louise study, with great concentration, the junk mail from local shops that is delivered to their letterbox and which they are used to throwing away without a thought. The nanny collects coupons and proudly presents them to Myriam, who is ashamed to find this behaviour idiotic. In fact, Myriam uses Louise as an example when she lectures her husband and children. ‘Louise is right. It’s bad to waste food. There are children who have nothing to eat.’

  But after a few months, Louise’s obsession becomes the subject of tension. Myriam complains about the nanny’s inflexible attitude, her paranoia. ‘Let her search through our rubbish if she wants! I don’t have to justify myself to her,’ she tells Paul, who is convinced that they have to free themselves from Louise’s power. Myriam stands firm. She refuses to let Louise give the children food that is past its expiration date. ‘Yes, even if it’s only one day past. That’s it, end of discussion.’

  *

  One evening, not long after Louise has returned to work following her illness, Myriam comes home late. The apartment is in total darkness and Louise is waiting at the door, wearing her coat and holding her handbag. She mumbles goodbye and rushes downstairs. Myriam is too tired to think about this or feel troubled by it.

  Louise is sulking? Oh, who cares!

  She could collapse on the sofa and fall asleep fully dressed, with her shoes still on. But she moves towards the kitchen, to get herself a glass of wine. She feels like sitting in the living room for a moment, drinking some very cold white wine, smoking a cigarette and relaxing. If she wasn’t afraid that she would wake the children, she might even take a bath.

  She enters the kitchen and turns on the light. The room looks even cleaner than usual. There’s a strong smell of soap in the air. The fridge door has been cleaned. Nothing has been left on the countertop. The extractor hood over the cooker is free of grease stains, and the handles on the cupboard doors have been sponged off. As for the window facing her, it is spotlessly, dazzlingly clean.

  Myriam is about to open the fridge when she sees it. There, in the middle of the little table where the children and their nanny eat. A chicken carcass sits on a plate. A glistening carcass, without the smallest sc
rap of flesh hanging from its bones, not the faintest trace of meat. It looks as if it’s been gnawed clean by a vulture or a stubborn, meticulous insect. Some kind of repulsive animal, anyway.

  She stares at the brown skeleton, its round spine, its sharp bones, its smooth vertebrae. Is thighs have been torn off, but its twisted little wings are still there, the joints distended, close to breaking point. The shiny, yellowish cartilage resembles dried pus. Through the holes, between the small bones, Myriam sees the empty insides of the thorax, dark and bloodless. No meat remains, no organs, nothing on this skeleton that could rot, and yet it seems to Myriam that it is a putrescent carcass, a vile corpse that is festering and decaying before her eyes, here in the kitchen.

  She is sure of it: she threw away that chicken this morning. The meat was no longer edible; she didn’t want her children to get ill from eating it. She remembers clearly how she shook the plate over the bin bag and how the creature fell, covered in gelatinous fat. It landed with a wet thud at the bottom of the bin and Myriam said, ‘Ugh.’ That smell, so early in the morning, made her feel sick.

  Myriam moves closer to the creature, but she doesn’t dare touch it. Louise can’t have done this by mistake or out of forgetfulness. And certainly not as a joke. No, the carcass smells of washing liquid and sweet almond. Louise washed it in the sink; she cleaned it and put it there as an act of vengeance, like a baleful totem.

  *

  Later Mila told her mother exactly what happened. She was laughing and jumping around as she explained how Louise had taught them to eat with their fingers. Standing on their chairs, she and Adam had scratched away at the bones. The meat was dry and Louise let them drink big glasses of Fanta as they ate, so they wouldn’t choke. She was very careful not to damage the skeleton and she never took her eyes off the creature. She told them that it was a game and that she would reward them if they followed the rules exactly. And when it was over, they were allowed to eat two acid drops as a special treat.

  Hector Rowier

  It’s been ten years, but Hector Rouvier vividly remembers Louise’s hands. That was what he touched most often, her hands. They smelled like crushed petals and her nails were always varnished. Hector squeezed those hands, held them against him; he felt them on the back of his neck when he watched a film on television. Louise’s hands plunged into hot water and rubbed Hector’s skinny body. They massaged soap bubbles in his hair, slid under his armpits, washed his penis, his belly, his bottom.

  Lying on the bed, face buried in his pillow, he would lift up his pyjama top to let Louise know that he was waiting for her to caress him. She would run her fingernails down his back and his skin would get goosebumps, and he’d shiver, and fall asleep, soothed and slightly ashamed, with a vague understanding of the strange excitation into which Louise’s fingers had sent him.

  On the way to school, Hector would hold very tight to the nanny’s hands. As he got older and his palms grew bigger, he felt increasingly worried that he might crush Louise’s bones, her biscuit-like, porcelain bones. The nanny’s knuckles would crack inside the child’s palm, and sometimes Hector thought that he was the one holding Louise’s hand, helping her to cross the road.

  No, Louise was never harsh. He doesn’t remember ever seeing her get angry. He’s sure of that; she never lifted a hand to him. Despite all the years he spent with her, his memories are vague, blurry. Louise’s face seems distant to him; he isn’t sure he would recognise her today if he happened to pass her in the street. But the feel of her cheek, soft and smooth; the smell of her powder, which she put on every morning and evening; the sensation of her beige tights on his child’s face; the strange way she had of kissing him, sometimes using her teeth, biting him as if to signify the sudden savagery of her love, her desire to completely possess him. Yes, all this he remembers.

  He hasn’t forgotten her culinary talents either. The cakes she would bring with her when she met him at the school gates and the way she would rejoice in the little boy’s gluttony. The taste of her tomato sauce; the way she would pepper the steaks that she hardly cooked at all; her creamy mushroom sauce … these are memories that he often evokes. A mythology linked to his childhood, of the world before frozen meals eaten in front of his computer screen.

  He also remembers – or, rather, he thinks he remembers – that she was infinitely patient with him. With his parents, the ceremony of bedtime often went wrong. Anne Rouvier, his mother, would lose patience when Hector cried, begged her to leave the door open, asked for another story, a glass of water, swore that he’d seen a monster, that he was still hungry.

  ‘I’m the same,’ Louise had confessed to him. ‘I’m afraid of falling asleep too.’ She indulged him when he had nightmares and sometimes she would stroke his temples for hours, her long, rose-scented fingers accompanying him on his journey towards sleep. She had persuaded her boss to leave a light on in the child’s bedroom. ‘There’s no point in terrifying him like that.’

  Yes, her departure had been a wrench. He missed her terribly, and he hated the young woman who replaced her, a student who would pick him up from school, who spoke English to him, who – in his mother’s words – ‘stimulated him intellectually’. He blamed Louise for abandoning him, for not keeping the impassioned promises she had made, for betraying those solemn oaths of everlasting love, after swearing to him that he was the only one and that no one could ever take his place. One day she wasn’t there any more and Hector didn’t dare ask any questions. He wasn’t able to mourn the woman who had left him because, even though he was only eight, he intuitively knew that this particular love was laughable, that people would make fun of him, and that anyone who felt sorry for him would be pretending.

  *

  Hector lowers his head. He stops talking. His mother is sitting on a chair next to him, and she puts her hand on his shoulder. She tells him: ‘You did well, darling.’ But Anne is nervous. Facing the police, she looks guilty. She is trying to find something to confess, some sin she committed long ago, for which they want to punish her. She has always been like this, innocent and paranoid. She has never gone through a security check without sweating. One day, sober and pregnant, she blew into a breathalyser test, convinced that she was about to be arrested.

  The captain, a pretty woman with thick brown hair tied back in a ponytail, is sitting on her desk, facing them. She asks Anne how she came into contact with Louise and the reasons she chose to hire her as her children’s nanny. Anne replies calmly. All she wants is to satisfy the policewoman, to help her with her enquiries, and – most of all – to find out what Louise is accused of.

  Louise was recommended to her by a friend, who spoke very highly of her. And, for that matter, she herself was always satisfied with her nanny. ‘Hector, as you can tell, was very attached to her.’

  The captain smiles at the teenage boy. She goes back behind her desk, opens a file and asks: ‘Do you remember the phone call you got from Mrs Massé? Just over a year ago, in January?’

  ‘Mrs Massé?’

  ‘Yes, try to remember. Louise gave you as a reference and Myriam Massé wanted to know what you thought of her.’

  ‘That’s right, I remember now. I told her that Louise was an exceptional nanny.’

  *

  They have been sitting for more than two hours in this cold, featureless room. The desk is very neat. There are no photographs on it. There are no wanted posters on the wall. Occasionally the captain stops in the middle of a sentence, apologises and leaves the office. Anne and her son see her through the window, talking on her mobile phone, whispering in a colleague’s ear or drinking a coffee. They have no desire to speak to each other, not even to relieve the boredom. Sitting side by side, they avoid each other, pretending that they have forgotten they are not alone. Sometimes they sigh or stand up and walk around a bit. Hector checks his phone. Anne cradles her black leather handbag. They are bored stiff, but they are too polite and too fearful to show any sign of irritation to the policewoman. Exhausted, submissiv
e, they wait to be released.

  The captain prints some documents and hands them to mother and son.

  ‘Sign here and here, please.’

  Anne bends over the sheet of paper and, without looking up, she asks in a hollow voice: ‘What did she do? Louise, I mean. What happened?’

  ‘She is accused of killing two children.’

  There are dark rings around the captain’s eyes. Swollen, purplish bags that give her a solemn look and, oddly, make her even prettier.

  *

  Hector walks out into the street, into the June heat. The girls are beautiful and he wants to grow up, to be free, to be a man. His eighteen years weigh heavily on him; he’d like to leave them behind, like he left his mother at the door of the police station, dazed and numb. He realises that what he first felt earlier, when the policewoman told them, was not shock or surprise but an immense and painful relief. A feeling of jubilation, even. As if he’d always known that some menace had hung over him, a pale, sulphurous, unspeakable menace. A menace that he alone, with his child’s eyes and heart, was capable of perceiving. Fate had decreed that the calamity would strike elsewhere.

  The captain had seemed to understand him. Earlier she had examined his impassive face and she had smiled at him. The way you smile at survivors.

  All night long Myriam thinks about that carcass on the kitchen table. As soon as she shuts her eyes, she imagines the animal’s skeleton, right there, next to her, in her bed.

  She gulped down her wine, one hand on the little table, watching the carcass from the corner of her eye. She was revolted by the idea of touching it. She had the strange feeling that something might happen if she did, that the creature might come back to life and jump at her face, cling to her hair, push her against the wall. She smoked a cigarette by the living-room window and went back into the kitchen. She put on a pair of plastic gloves and threw the skeleton in the bin. She also threw away the plate and the tea towel that had been lying next to it. She hurried downstairs with the black bags and banged the building’s front door behind her when she came back in.