by Marie Sizun
‘Only five more stops,’ her mother whispers. She’s holding the Printemps box on her lap, and the child notices that her hands are shaking.
And now all of a sudden the lights have gone out and, with a lurch that piles the standing passengers into each other, the train stops abruptly. A long screech, then nothing. They’re in total darkness. Engine off.
At first there’s a heavy silence, then exclamations came from every direction in the dark; eventually there’s a hubbub of voices in every direction. Someone’s shouting that there must be bombing overhead. Someone else mentions a strike.
‘Oh, God,’ mutters the mother, ‘and we’re already so late!’
A voice comes through a loudspeaker, asking the passengers to stay calm.
A woman screams that she wants to get off.
The mother drops the box to the floor and takes the child on her lap.
The child, just for a moment, is filled with irrational hope: there in the dark, as she huddles against her mother, she thinks something extraordinary is happening and that it might spare her from going to see her father.
But then a ghostly conductor appears with a lamp in his hand: ladies and gentlemen, it’s just a power cut. The passengers will have to get to the next station on foot, walking over the ballast, along the tunnel.
Everyone’s shouting. People lunge for the doors in the half-dark.
The child will always remember that precise moment, that stampede for the doors, how strange it was climbing down from the carriage onto the ballast, such a long way down, it seemed to her, in the dark tunnel: people help her mother get down with her box, while she, the child, is carried and handed to her mother.
The memory stops there. With that extraordinary hope, quickly shattered, that nothing’s happening. That she could avoid the father. And then this descent in the dark.
Of walking over the stones she has no recollection at all, nor of reaching the next stop, emerging from the Métro station, seeing daylight again, nor the long trek through the streets all the way to the hospital – because it turns out that they do have to go there. Too tired, too emotional perhaps. Did her mother carry her, in one arm, with the box in the other?
The child reduced to such a helplessly little child again.
It is probably late, too late perhaps, when they reach the hospital. He must be so desperate to see us, says the mother, hurry up, and now the child is trotting along, clinging to her mother while she, the mother, still clutches the Printemps box, which is also looking pretty tired. The mother is rather flushed, her hair slightly awry, the child’s shoes no longer shine.
They are directed to a room on an upper floor, at the end of a corridor with doors to other rooms, where the child glimpses rows of beds and men’s faces. Rows and rows of beds and faces. It could just as easily be here, this one, now, but it’s never this one. There are still more. The father could be in any one of these rooms, he could be any one of these men. The father could be anybody.
At last they really are there, this is the right room, the one with the right number over it, the one where they should find the right father.
All nerves, the mother and child step hand in hand into the large white room filled with the harsh light of tall parallel windows to the right and left towering over two rows of beds, lots of beds, so many beds, the full length of the room. And on every bed a man, sitting or lying, awake or asleep, young or old, it depends, they come in every variety here. Which one’s her father? This one or that one? The child will soon know. And now she’s the one dragging her mother, who’s become peculiarly heavy. The child thinks she’ll be able to identify him without any help, all by herself. As she walks past these men in their beds, she stares at them like an inspector: it’s not this fat man sitting here, stooped, slightly balding, playing cards with a neighbour, not the neighbour either, such an old man; nor this tall, thin man with dishevelled black hair, reading his newspaper; or this one who’s so ill all he can do is lie there with his eyes closed like a corpse; could it be this young man smiling up into her eyes?
But her mother has stopped beside a bed in the other row, a bed that, in her speculations about possible fathers, the child didn’t notice: in it is a very thin man with a gaunt face, not very old, but not young either; he’s sitting up in bed looking at them with a peculiar smile, a slightly nervous smile. The child eventually recognizes the face from the photographs. There. It’s him. It’s her father. And yet it’s someone else.
The child is out of her depths in this mystery.
She’s being spoken to. She doesn’t hear. Curiously, she’s the one the stranger speaks to first, his words disconcertingly formal. But what it is he’s saying, she doesn’t grasp. The words, the voice, the tone are not things she knows. Not things she recognizes. Too unfamiliar.
‘Good afternoon, young lady… Hello, France!’ says the man who is her father, while, to the child’s horror, one of his hands pulls the mother close to him, quite simply brings her to him, sits her down on the edge of the bed, right beside him, puts an arm round her, without speaking to her, and the mother lets her head drop onto that shoulder without speaking either, and she buries her face in it, and the child sees that her eyes are full of tears. But it’s all happening so quickly now that the child can’t see or understand everything. Just details.
‘You’re very pretty, Miss France,’ the man goes on, hugging his wife to him, but still keeping his words for the child standing beside the bed, the child who doesn’t know what to do and looks down at her socks, now grey with dust.
Is it the mismatch between what he’s doing and what he’s saying, what he’s doing addressed to the mother and what he’s saying addressed to her, the daughter? Unsettled, the child stays silent, her head still obstinately lowered.
‘I’m delighted to meet you…’ the unfamiliar voice goes on, with the same affectation of formality, the same earnest kindliness.
‘Come on, my darling,’ the mother says through her tears – yes, she’s really crying properly now – ‘give your daddy a kiss, then!’
The child doesn’t move.
The man leans towards her and kisses her. Looks at her. The child feels awkward at the touch of him. His eyes on her. She’s still made of stone. But he’s already sitting back up.
‘You’re not very talkative, young lady. So, you see, because I’m of no interest to you, I’m going to pay a bit more attention to another pretty lady,’ he says with a smile.
And now he’s kissing the child’s mother, on the mouth this time, slowly, and, surprised and embarrassed, the child looks away.
‘Why don’t you sit her on the bed?’ the husband says to his wife.
The child is put on the bed, perched at the foot, a little way away from the couple.
‘Give her my box of pipes,’ he says next, indicating something on the bedside table, ‘to keep her busy…’
The mother hands the child a small painted wooden box.
Sitting motionless, the child focuses all her attention on the lid, which is decorated with a colourful picture of a horseman on a galloping white steed. She can see nothing except this image now, shuts herself away in mindlessly contemplating it, far removed from these two people kissing and talking in hushed tones so close by. On and on go their hushed tones. Their gazing.
Inside the child’s head, in her body, something turns to ice.
*
How long will this performance last? The child now feels as if time, which went by so swiftly earlier, has stopped, as if she’s been here for hours, sitting on the end of this bed. She’s been forgotten. They don’t see her. She’s disappeared. She’s not in this world.
She opens the box she’s been lent. The acrid smell of tobacco, violently unfamiliar to the child. Inside are two small pipes, one made of wood; the other has a white porcelain bowl with decorative painting. A little picture in colour: against a wooded background, huntsmen in strange clothes.
Paralysed in a sort of torpor, the child longs on
ly to be delivered, for them to leave.
Apparently the man who is her father won’t be coming home with them today. He needs to rest a little longer.
Of the journey home alone with her mother, the child will remember nothing.
No memories either of the days immediately after that first meeting. A black hole. An absence. As if none of it existed. As if, after that hospital visit, she abstained from looking, thinking or even feeling, or as if she had forgotten to do these things. Just got through this time, slept through this time, an interlude.
What did the mother and child say to each other over those last few days spent alone? What questions did the child ponder, what thoughts did she churn over? There’s no knowing.
‘The child’s going soft in the head,’ concluded the grandmother when the child failed to respond to a request she’d made for the third time.
The child is dreaming. It’s as if she’s asleep on her feet.
One day – it may have been one evening – the father eventually came home. For real this time. He came home to the apartment, all on his own, by surprise, sooner than expected. The doctors must have thought he was better.
The child was looking at some pictures when she heard the doorbell ring. Her mother, who went to open the door, let out a scream. When the child came to see what was going on, she found her parents in each other’s arms. The thin man and her mother. They hadn’t moved from the landing. Then the child was noticed, standing beside them, in silence. The husband stepped away from his wife for a moment to take the child in his arms and kiss her. He picked her up and kissed her. What he said, no one remembers, but it was nice. He didn’t say ‘young lady’ this time. Didn’t use that urbane tone of voice. And then he put the child down again and turned back to the mother.
The child was put to bed earlier than usual that evening.
When she woke the next morning, she’d sort of forgotten. She wanted to go and see her mother as usual, but when she opened the door to her bedroom, she remembered things: there in the double bed, still fast asleep, were two people, her mother and someone else. Her father.
The child closed the door again.
So. He was there. She had a father.
A very strange thing for the child, having a father. A father who’s there. At home. All the time. Morning, noon and night. He’s all you can hear now. And that smell’s everywhere, the peculiar smell of that wooden box from the first day, the smell of tobacco, and of the pipe he smokes from the moment he wakes up, champing at it the whole time, making his mouth slope slightly to one side.
The child watches him surreptitiously. And the more she studies him, the more surprising she finds him. He no longer looks anything like the photograph which still has pride of place on the sideboard, the picture of the young man who looks so sad and gentle, ‘your little daddy’, as her mother used to say. You’d think it wasn’t the same person, and yet, if you look closely, he’s recognizable. But it feels almost as if he’s become the father of the sad boy in the photo.
There he is, sitting on the sofa in the dining room, drawing on his pipe with a funny little sucking noise, watching everything with his cold blue eyes, eyes as serious as the words he uses.
There he is, so thin, with his great big legs, and his great big hands with their odd covering of freckles, and the pallor of his long bony face. He does nothing. He stays there, smoking, motionless. He watches. He watches everything. He sees everything.
When he talks it’s impossible to tell whether he’s angry or joking. His words are always rather knowing, but never the same: gentle one minute, abrupt the next, tender with the mother one minute, formal with the child the next. And then suddenly aggressive. Brutal. Violent.
It’s surprising. It’s frightening. Sometimes very frightening.
The father is still ill, apparently. It will be a long time before he can go back to work with the insurance company that employed him before the war. The mother whispers in the child’s ear that she must be very good, because of daddy’s nerves, she must be careful. What that means, the child will fairly soon come to understand.
The first time her father flew into a rage, she was terrified. Now she knows, but she’s still very frightened every time it happens.
The father has sudden, terrible, unpredictable tempers. Lots of things make him angry, big things too complicated for the child – she catches words at random, the war, the camps, the Stalags, the French, the Germans, Pétain, the collaborators, the black market – and others she understands better, more familiar, relating to what’s going on here, at home, his home, the father’s.
Because this apartment, the mother’s and the child’s home, is his, apparently. And he may well be happy to be reunited with the wife he loves, but he’s not at all satisfied with how his household is run, with the mess in the apartment, or more particularly with the terrible way she’s been brought up, her, the child. A disaster, he says. He didn’t like the graffiti on the walls at all, the father didn’t. Li, my darling, how could you put up with it? And even in books! The father can’t get over it. And the wailing, the stupid singing? It’s unbelievable, says the father. Is she abnormal? And her table manners! And her fussy eating, inconceivable in wartime, unacceptable! Do you understand how it feels for me, my darling, coming back to this after four years in captivity? This? She’s spoilt, the child is, completely spoilt.
The child listens, knows perfectly well he’s talking about her, doesn’t fully understand what she’s supposed to have done wrong, but feels uncomfortable. Particularly as the father switches very quickly from the relative gentleness of restrained criticism to fury, firestorms. He shouts and bellows.
My darling, for her part, looks at the floor, contrite, mumbling goodness knows what, meek, almost ashamed. She capitulates, submits, going over to the enemy. All of a sudden the mother no longer champions the child, her child. She’s no longer her accomplice, laughing about the grandmother’s criticism. The mother is siding with this angry man. Siding with her husband.
*
Everything’s different now, the child can certainly see that. He’s in charge now. The father. Another life is beginning, with new rules.
So there are some very simple things that now can’t happen. Writing on the walls, for example, or in books. Or singing. The first time the child launched, not thinking, into one of her old warrior-like chants, the father appeared from nowhere, yelling that she was splitting his head open, implying she should be quiet. Terrified, the mother intervened, took the child to one side, talking in hushed tones about the father’s migraines, his illness, explaining, begging, with the oddest expression on her face. The child is quiet now. She’s amazed, but she’s quiet.
She doesn’t understand what’s going on. Can’t grasp what they want her to do. What her father wants. She only knows she isn’t as she ought to be. That she’s a hindrance. A nuisance. Yes, she’s a nuisance. And that really is the most difficult thing to accept for someone whose mother used to call her ‘my beloved’.
The child can see that, whatever the situation, she’s now annoying. She can feel the disapproval in the way her father looks at her, whatever she does, his irritation, an irritation that, she’s well aware, could suddenly change to fury. Particularly at mealtimes, when he discovers the full extent of her bad manners, her rudeness.
One of the first images from the early days after the father’s homecoming is of the new little family having a meal together. The father is sitting at the table with the two of them, the mother and the child. They now have meals in the dining room, even when the grandmother isn’t there. In fact, the old lady very tactfully comes much less frequently, only on Sundays.
There the father is, always in the same place, opposite the mother, sitting very upright, looking worried. He’s watching. He notices everything. The child now has to stay seated for the entire meal. No question of getting down to play. The father’s face that first time when, halfway through, she tried to slip quietly off her chair! How q
uickly he put her back in her place! But what he really, really insists on is that she eat everything, absolutely everything on her plate, down to the last mouthful. And without a sound. The father can’t bear the sound of chewing. If the child ignores this rule, something terrifying happens. The father goes red, bangs on the table, screams that he was hungry for four whole years, he saw men die, that the very sight of this picky little girl is unbearable, intolerable, scandalous… That her table manners are revolting. That even on the farm, when he was a prisoner… His voice gets extraordinarily loud. He’s bellowing. The mother starts to cry. The child shakes.
In a nutshell, the father feels the same as the grandmother: the child’s been very badly brought up. But it’s not too late. We’ll break her in, he says. He’s going to do just that.
The child may now have a father but, on the other hand, she might as well no longer have a mother. Because as if by magic her mother is reduced to being a docile wife to her husband, his sweetheart, his servant. Perhaps she no longer has time to look after the child. Perhaps she no longer feels like it. Besides, indications have been made that she should limit her displays of affection towards her daughter, she should stop sitting her on her lap as she used to, and stop using any excuse to address her with that idiotic ‘my darling’.
‘Her name’s France!’ the father interjects brusquely whenever this happens.