by Marie Sizun
A silent stare from the father. The sign of an impending storm.
The child, who watches everything and sees everything, darts off without a word: she thinks she might have seen the book under a sideboard, it must have fallen off. It’s been lying around there for a few days. And she brings it back triumphantly, hands it to her father, expecting congratulations.
But nothing. The child needn’t have bothered.
The father leafs through the accounts book, finds its virgin pages empty of any annotation.
The child sees her father’s face alter as he flicks through it. He looks at his wife, looks at the child. Starts shouting.
‘Even this child’s more sensible than you! We can give this book of yours to her, she’ll make better use of it!’
And with these words he hurls the book across the room, where it bounces off a wall. Then he takes his jacket and goes out, slamming the door.
Li bursts into tears.
The child rushes over to pick up the accounts book, which is the worse for wear, its spine broken and its pages crumpled. Never mind. She starts leafing through it with some satisfaction. It feels to her as if she’s won it. It belongs to her now, her father said. Armed with a pencil, she starts methodically marking every page with her usual signs.
And yet, couched within her victory is the sadness, the anxiety, at feeling that roughened broken cover with her little fingers.
The child so desperately wants to get the facts straight that an odd idea comes into her head one day. She can see that it’s Li the father’s angry with, it’s because of Li that everything’s going wrong. The child convinces herself she needs to show her father just how well she, the child, his child, understands him. If she wants to be in favour with him.
One evening when they are arguing, without even taking the precaution of shutting themselves away to do their shouting, the child thinks she sees a way. This time she can show clearly which side she’s on.
While they shout and as good as come to blows, the child sneaks into the bedroom. On the dressing table is a boxed set of perfumes – three exquisite bottles – that the father gave to Li shortly after he came home. Prestigious white casing, finely edged with gold lines. The perfumer’s name inscribed in black letters. The child traces its magnificent outline with her finger.
Perfectly obvious the mother no longer deserves it.
The child opens the box, respectfully, reverently. Hesitates a moment. Makes up her mind. Takes the stopper from one of the bottles. Inhales swooningly. Empties the contents into the basin. Repeats the procedure with the other two.
The smell must be so penetrating, with the three perfumes unleashed, that the door opens. Li comes in. Screams. The child’s father appears, understands immediately.
The child watches him and him alone. Ashen, silent, frozen. At last he comes over to her. Still a moment of doubt, of hesitation? But no, he slaps the child, calmly and hard, to the right, then the left, that way he does. Like before. Like when he didn’t love her.
‘Put her straight to bed without any supper,’ he says coldly to his wife.
The child doesn’t shed a single tear. Too stunned. It’s her mother who’s crying, as usual.
Later, in bed, the child hears the door to the landing slam. Her father’s gone out. He’ll be back later.
For a long time the apartment would still have the persistent smell of that evening.
Another evening, an evening when the father and mother had had a particularly vehement row, without even really shouting, but with hard, definitive little sentences, with nasty glowering looks that the child knows well, the father went out alone again.
That was when this surprising thing happened: the mother came to look for the child and sat her on her lap for the first time in a very long time. The child didn’t move, waiting. And the mother talked to her gently, almost calmly, without crying.
‘You know, my darling, your father may leave. Leave for good. He won’t stay with us.’
‘Oh,’ the child said simply.
The mother started kissing her, saying sweet nothings to her, as she used to. The child received her attention passively, her thoughts elsewhere.
Her mother does talk nonsense.
*
And, letting herself down from her mother’s lap, the child went off along the corridor singing very loudly, stamping her feet on the floor, the way she’d seen soldiers do.
In this confusion, though, there would still be Christmas, there would still be that day. The first Christmas the child would spend with her father, and it was to be the only one. But that she didn’t yet know.
No memories in the child’s mind of previous Christmases. Perhaps she was too young. Perhaps also – because of the war, the lack of money, the loneliness and plenty of other factors – the festivities had been more or less skipped.
But this time there is a Christmas.
The child wakes one morning to the surprising smell of the fir tree that’s been brought into the grey room while she was sleeping, an acrid yet fresh smell which makes her open her eyes. And she sees this tree which has appeared mysteriously, this piece of woodland which seems to have come from the forests her father’s told her about, and, at the foot of the tree, colourful parcels, tied with ribbons. The child is dumbstruck. It’s as miraculous an apparition as those blue beads hanging on the balcony.
The father and mother are there, apparently calmer. They’re smiling; they look a little sad, thinks the child. Particularly the father. But he’s here, and he looks at her as he used to, as he did when she was his little girl and he thought she had such pretty hands.
They tell her all this is for her. She doesn’t understand. Everything’s incomprehensible this morning, and that’s what’s wonderful. It’s at this point that she notices things in the tree, a multitude of little paper figures hanging from the branches or standing on them. Later she’ll know it was her father who drew them, coloured them and cut them out. These are what she wants to touch, to pick up. She’s told she must open her presents first. See what’s in the boxes. But there are too many things, she doesn’t know where to start. Perhaps her feeling of happiness is in all this excess? Right down to the sound of bells which now start pealing, like that strange day, Liberation day, when her grandmother cried. Everything’s miraculous, even the sun, which hasn’t been seen for days and which suddenly fills the room, unexpected and glorious.
The image the child retains, that sticks in her memory, is of her father now sitting in an armchair and her, the child, standing between his legs. He’s the one opening the presents and she watches. But she’s more affected by the magic of the moment – the smells, the soft scrunching of paper, the sound of bells ringing, the light, having her father back – than the contents of those boxes and bags.
Christmas isn’t presents, it’s that moment.
Is it on that morning? Is it another, shortly afterwards, closely associated with Christmas morning in the child’s mind? It snowed… Through the window, on the rooftops, out in the street, everything’s white. She’s never seen snow before, or at least has never been aware of it.
She goes outside with her father and discovers this tremendous oddity. Wrapped up snugly, holding her father’s hand, in all that whiteness which creaks so surprisingly underfoot, she’s intoxicated with the chill of it and a sense of freedom. And of tenderness too.
‘Don’t stay out too long,’ said Li, who was preparing a big meal, in her own way.
But for now the child and her father are walking through this miracle of snow. The world belongs to them. Life itself.
Just an impression the child has.
Christmas was for show. A show put on for one day. A pause. Or perhaps a full stop.
There will be no miracle, no miracle at all. Only very natural things. The child doesn’t understand what’s going on, what’s happening now. And yet she is obscurely aware of its threat all around her.
Your father may leave, her mother had said one
day. She hasn’t said it again. She hasn’t talked about it. But the child hasn’t forgotten.
Interestingly, there’s no more arguing at home now, no more shouting. Something very different has started. The father’s become peculiarly distant, and silent. The father and mother no longer talk to each other, they avoid each other. And it’s in this silence between them that something mysterious has evolved. Something frightening. Unbearable.
It’s so odd when the father comes home in the evenings now. He ignores the mother. Hardly talks to the child.
And on Sundays the father must realize that things aren’t right, that it can’t go on. He most likely knows all this. So he often takes the child out for a little walk, alone with him. But it’s not like before. The child doesn’t feel important, as she used to, when she really was his little girl.
And she feels as if she’s somehow stealing these moments. Has no right to them. But those aren’t her words. She can’t put her uncomfortable feeling into words.
One image from those walks will live on in her mind. For a long time.
It’s almost spring. The child’s wearing a blue coat. She’ll remember that blue.
Her father’s holding her hand, but he isn’t talking. He seems sad, the child thinks, leaning to the side from time to time so she can see his face, check on his mood. She’s always worried, the child is, about her father’s frame of mind. He, though, doesn’t look at her, he doesn’t see her. He’s walking a little too quickly for her, his eyes unseeing, his head full of goodness knows what. He seems to be somewhere else. But there is still his hand, firmly holding the child’s hand, his warm, familiar hand, rough and soft all at the same time, the friendly giraffe-hand.
The father and child walk unsmiling through the indifferent crowd, through that Sunday’s shouts, noises and music. The father walking blindly with the child, who feels like a part of him.
And there in a square stands a merry-go-round with wooden horses circling to stilted music, a barrel organ spilling out an old-time tune. The child thinks it’s lovely, the horses turning, the strange music. She drags her father gently by the hand to show him, to tear him away from his thoughts.
He thinks she’s asking for a ride on the merry-go-round.
‘Do you want to have a ride? Is that it?’
The child nods, solemn. It’s easier.
The merry-go-round happens to stop then anyway. The father hoists the child astride a horse, secures her properly, carefully, with the strap.
‘You’re sure you won’t fall? Will you hold on?’
The child smiles, happy at his concern, his attention. She’s a child who has a father; that’s what she thinks in a muddled way, fleetingly, with pride.
The merry-go-round sets off and the plaintive organ music starts up again. The child clutches the vertical pole that runs through her horse, fixing it to the platform and the brightly painted dome.
And every time she passes her father, as the ride turns, she looks at him. There he is, standing among the other parents. But he doesn’t seem to see anything, miles away, lost in thought. He’s not watching the child.
Then all of a sudden she feels very strongly that he’s going to leave, that he’s in the process of leaving now and she won’t be able to see him again. She wants to get off this horse, to stop everything, to stop this thing which is now happening, which will carry on happening, going on and on, like the merry-go-round.
When the ride finally comes to an end, it’s the old man who runs it who unhitches her. She throws herself into her father’s arms. He’s amazed by this show of emotion. He doesn’t understand. He’s already gone.
On a few more occasions, when the father gets home – he comes back from the office later and later now – he goes to sit next to the child on the sofa in the dining room, or on the edge of her bed if she’s already gone down. He asks her what she’s done today, whether she’s been good, if everything’s all right. That sort of thing. The father isn’t very imaginative these days. The child always gives the right answer: everything’s always all right, isn’t it? He seems satisfied, even though she thinks she can see something like sadness in his eyes. Perhaps it’s just boredom: nowadays the father often seems slightly removed from what he’s saying, or what he’s looking at.
The child asks him, as she used to before, to tell her a story. The one about the forest and the dwarves. He starts. Then he realizes she’s not following it, not listening. And he’s right, it’s not the story she’s hearing. It’s his voice she’s listening to, as she thinks about very difficult things.
Then the father gets annoyed and walks away.
The evening when the father didn’t come home for the first time, the child waited an age. She waited for him like a woman in love. Helplessly. She waited after supper. And even long after she’d been put to bed. He didn’t come.
He didn’t come home the next day either, and she waited again.
She will always remember this new kind of waiting. The furious need to hear his voice, to be reunited with the smell of his pipe, with the freckles on his hands. His giraffe-hands. To touch them. To play with them. And to talk to him. To say what? She doesn’t know. But she would know, she thinks, if he were there. She’d know.
She waits, huddled in a corner by the door. She listens out for the familiar sound of the lift, footsteps on the landing. It’s never him. He’s still not back. She waits.
The child’s mother walks past, sees her, and tells her not to hang around there like that, he won’t come back. In fact he’ll never come back. My darling. He’s left them.
The child doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t understand these words. She doesn’t believe what she’s being told. Anything her mother tells her. She escapes the clutches of this woman who wants to touch her, to talk to her, her mother with her tears and her ugly face, she ducks away from her brutally, she doesn’t want to see her, or hear her. She runs away to the grey room where her bed is, and there, next to her bed, she sits on the floor and shunts her toys around on the carpet, singing to herself.
The grandmother, who just so happens to be there, strays from room to room, muttering goodness knows what.
Over her words, the neighbours’ radio keeps up its noise. It’s suppertime, as if everything’s normal.
Peculiar days now for the child. With her father’s absence, everything seems to have become absence. Hazy images, muted sounds, indistinct words, lost in indifference.
It’s a world of absence. The child has become absence too.
She is living, though. And one thing proves she’s even reverted to being as difficult and capricious as she was before her father came home: she’s gone back to smothering the walls with drawings and signs in coloured crayon, with complete impunity. It doesn’t seem to bother anyone any more.
‘Your father lives in a different house now,’ the mother says one day.
Just like that. Incidentally. She’s holding a letter in her hand.
And this, for once, the child takes in. Is it the word house that strikes her, that creates an image? In any event, it’s enough. She takes it in. She learns this fact, this news, that her father has left. This time her mother’s telling the truth.
The mother hasn’t cried for a while now. Her face is blank, severe, altered. She dresses badly. In clothes she used to wear for doing housework. She doesn’t wear make-up. She looks like an old woman. She looks more and more like the grandmother.
They’re facing each other, the child and her mother, both serious, and the child feels like a grown-up looking across at another grown-up.
The mother doesn’t try to kiss her, to draw her close. No. She looks at her seriously. And the child understands this look.
The child doesn’t ask any questions. Her mother goes on to tell her that her father wants her to know he’ll come to see her. Soon.
When’s soon? thinks the child. But she doesn’t ask anything, doesn’t say anything. She’s just anxious at the thought of this visit she’d stopp
ed hoping for – well, almost stopped – this visit with its terribly sketchy outline, this visit she can’t picture.
When? What will he say? What will he do? And then what when the visit’s over? Will he really leave? How will he go about it? And what about her, the child, what will she say? What should she do?
Days go by.
The evening her father appears, the child has no warning. The mother probably has none either. The bell rings. The mother calls to the child to open the door, which is a struggle for her, given her height. And she suddenly finds herself confronted with her father’s stature. She’d already forgotten how tall he is. She can’t speak. It’s too soon for the child. Too difficult. Wrong-footed, she doesn’t say a thing, tilts her head to receive the kiss her father leans forward to give her.
He sits in the grey room. Looks around like a traveller returning to a forgotten country. The child follows him. But then Li suddenly appears in the kitchen doorway, theatrical, eyes shining, monopolizing the scene. And words fly, the argument begins, voices are raised here and there. Not for long. The mother’s wonderful assurance is snapping already and she’s crying, as she stands there by the door, like a broken thing.
Meanwhile the child has come and sat silently on the sofa, beside her father, who’s still talking loudly, not looking at her.
Li abandons the fight, slamming the door behind her.