Her Father's Daughter (4 page)

‘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 only 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 quickly 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.

Should the child try to hug her mother as she used to, with her arms clinging around her neck, it's the mother he takes it out on. And in a fairly abrasive tone of voice. The child's certainly noticed that.

‘Stop babying her!' he says. ‘She's too big for you to put up with such childish behaviour.'

If the mother protests, weakly, he gets angry. And the room reverberates with the boom of his fearsome voice,
which hurts the child as much as if it were addressed to her – true, it is about her he's talking.

And what overwhelms the child far more than her fear of her father is the things she's discovering in her mother: her silence, her weakness, her reticence, her extraordinary resignation, which the child doesn't yet know to describe as cowardice but which she feels is an offence, serious, unforgivable.

And this is why sometimes, when the mother's being scolded by her husband, the child isn't altogether displeased that the mother should be punished indirectly for her betrayal.

The child then slinks slyly off to a corner, under the dining-room table, for example, and gazes blankly into space, waiting for the storm to pass. Her heart beats gently, in a state of fear mixed with something like pleasure.

From the child's point of view, arguments between her father and her mother have another advantage in that, for a time, they suspend any lovey-dovey behaviour. Because that – those kisses, the way they tenderly put their arms around each other and whisper things she can't hear – is something the child doesn't like. Likes less and less.

It is strange for the child to discover disenchantment, jealously. Feelings she couldn't put a name to, but which hurt inside your stomach, and your heart.

The child can see she's no longer the object of her mother's adoration. The loved one is her father. He's called ‘darling' now, not her. He's looked at, as she was before, with that tender, slightly anxious expression, not her. He's admired. Not her. Not any more.

As for the stories her mother would read to her, sitting her on her lap, and the invented stories she would tell her at night, speaking so softly in her lilting voice, there are no more of those.

The child's mother has a husband.

When the three of them go out together, the child and her parents, when they go for a walk on a Sunday through the streets in their neighbourhood, and all the way to the Place des Vosges, they make the child walk in front. They follow, with their arms round each other's waists, a pair of lovers, a few paces behind.

At first she didn't understand, accustomed when outside to holding her mother's hand at all times. That was the rule then. It's different now. In fact it's the very opposite.

‘Walk ahead, I tell you,' her father kept saying, when she hesitated. ‘We won't lose you.'

So she walked along, forging blindly in a straight line, intimidated by her solitude, her awkwardness, her empty hands.

And if she showed signs of slowing down or turning round, her father's voice was there: ‘Keep going, don't stop!'

Or perhaps: ‘Left, turn left!'

Left, right, what does that mean? The child has no idea. She really hasn't been taught
anything
, her father shouts. Thank goodness he's there. That's all going to change.

The mother smiles at her husband.

The child suddenly hates the pair of them. It occurs to her that she'd like to be lost. Or to lose them.

Will you still love me? More than him?

Liar.

And then came the scene, one mealtime, a repetition of so many others, but more violent and, for the child, a confirmation of her abandonment.

The three of them are sitting at the table, the father and mother facing each other and the child in between. The parents are talking calmly. The child is silent. On her plate there's still a little pile of pasta that she's eyeing anxiously, whitish twirls; they look disgusting, she doesn't think she'll be able to eat them. The father breaks off from the conversation, pins his pale eyes on the child and says simply, ‘I'm waiting.'

Feeling sick at the sight of the pasta, the child doesn't move.

Then he roars. He thumps the table with his fist. He shouts. He shouts things that have now become routine for the child but, bellowed like this, they terrify her: what he went through, the cold, the hunger, the sickness. He shouts that he's disgusted by the child's fussiness. He shouts, and every word reverberates, and
the table shudders with every blow thumped out in time to his words.

‘Oh, darling, come on,' the mother intervenes timidly, sitting motionless on her side of the table.

‘Keep out of this, Li, please. France knows very well what she needs to do. Don't you, France? And you're going to do it, aren't you?'

He's dropped his voice. But that's almost worse. The father is now white with anger. His words insidious, demented, incontestable.

The child is quivering with nerves. His voice, his repetitions, his closeness are turning her stomach. She wants to be sick. She wants to cry. But she holds herself back. Making a tremendous effort, she loads her fork once more, puts it into her mouth, almost retching in disgust, and makes herself swallow.

‘Again,' says the father. ‘You haven't finished.'

The child looks at him, looks at his strange, stony face, briefly meets those unsettlingly pale eyes, those inflexible eyes. Looking at him feels like drowning.

She makes herself swallow, again and again. Swallowing to the death.

Has she finished? No. With her stomach heaving, she can see there's still food on her plate.

And this time, when the voice needles her again, metallic, unbearable, it's too much. The contents of the child's stomach rise up to her mouth, explode, streaming onto the table, between the plates, onto the clean tablecloth, everywhere.

Unacceptable. Disgusting.

The father stands up, turns to the child, who's sitting abjectly on her chair, yanks her violently by one arm and slaps her, once on one side of the face, once on the other.

The mother lets out a scream. But doesn't move. Doesn't speak.

And because the child is now sobbing, gasping helplessly, he opens the door of the apartment and pushes her, choking, onto the landing.

She wails.

‘You can come back in when you've calmed down,' her father bellows, before slamming the door behind her.

With all the noise, doors have opened here and there, and are swiftly closed again. Intimidated and ashamed, the child falls silent and, still convulsed by sobs, she goes and sits sniffling in a quiet corner, on a stair. And she waits, filled with loathing, for someone to be good enough to come and get her.

But, interestingly, it's towards her mother – passive, submissive and slightly ridiculous – that all her resentment is directed.

One person who's very happy with the new shape of things is the grandmother. At last a bit of discipline and organization in this house! At last someone's going to teach the child how to behave! At last her little Li has seen sense! The grandmother is all smiles when she comes, all sweetness towards her returning son-in-law, the head of the family. But she manages to be discreet, the grandmother does, she doesn't force herself on them too often.

She comes over for lunch on Sundays. Oh, the satisfaction when the child is brought into line! She smiles at her daughter, smiles at her daughter's husband. Life has gone back to normal. They make a proper family.

Sitting at the table during those long Sunday lunches, the child, who isn't included in the conversation, is at her leisure to watch them, the three of them, the grandmother, the father and the mother. She watches them surreptitiously, pretending she isn't, sneakily, the grandmother says.

The grandmother, triumphant, their guest, in pride of place at the head of the table, her eyes bright, her words honeyed, her every move self-assured.

The father, whom the child now knows, she knows him by heart, but he still astonishes her. She knows the blond, almost white hair cut very short, the very light blue eyes which focus fiercely under the effects of anger, the pale complexion which can flush red or, conversely, go deathly white. She also knows, and dreads, the big hands, which like his arms are smattered with freckles, strong hands resting on either side of his plate when he's calm, hands the child can't take her eyes off. She now recognizes, even from a distance, the smell of tobacco that hovers over them.

When everything's all right, when there's no reason for irritation, the father looks tenderly at his wife, talks softly to her, thoughtfully to the grandmother, and ignores the child. In the event of a problem, if a storm threatens, if a criticism comes to light, the grandmother invariably and with sugary servility takes her son-in-law's side, even going so far as to disagree with her darling Li. The child is highly amused by this, when the thunderbolt strike isn't aimed at her.

As for the mother, whom the child watches out of the corner of her eye, most of the time she sits in silence; she doesn't seem especially happy. As if she's trying to behave herself, too. As if she's working quite hard at it. Perhaps she's having trouble adapting to the new regulations. Then why does she look at her husband so
tenderly? Why the blind acceptance of all his orders? The constant efforts to please him? She even tries to cook, but it always goes wrong. Before, it was the grandmother who cooked. The mother doesn't know how to do anything, has never taken an interest in household matters. Why, then?

The child knows her mother well enough to realize she's sad. Her eyes, her smile, the few words she utters, her silences, they're sad. The child can tell. But it doesn't have any effect on her. She's only watching. She even thinks she had it coming, her mother did, if she's a little unhappy now.

One evening when the child came racing into the kitchen, she caught her sitting on a stool in tears, and the child immediately ran off: as if, on top of everything else, she would ever console her, the liar. And she went and sat in silence in the dining room, not far from the father, who was casually reading his newspaper.

Something's going on here, something the child can tell is unusual but that she doesn't understand. She thinks about all this, turns it over in her mind, serious, excluded from the adults' conversation, her head full of images, memories, questions, amid the boredom of a never-ending Sunday lunch.

During the day, because no one now looks after her and she's not allowed to make any noise, the child has come up with a game. She takes a tattered doll that she rejected in the old days – she didn't like dolls in the old days – and sits under the dining-room table, which is still covered with the long tablecloth used at mealtimes: she'll be left in peace there, she can't be seen. So she stays there, talking quietly to the tattered doll, commenting on her grievances, going over her resentments. She thinks about everything new in her mother's behaviour, everything new about her disenchantment. And then the child mulls over things she keeps to herself: memories, old problems, unresolved questions. In her head she tries to establish the boundary between dreams and reality, and explores, yet again, the dishonesty displayed by adults.

Like what happened one morning recently.

The child always wakes early, long before her parents. She got up that morning and, bored but afraid of making a noise, she thought she would look out of the dining-room window to see what was going on in the
street. She immediately noticed something through the window, something blue and glittery hanging on the railing: a sort of necklace of blue beads, or rather some beads threaded onto a piece of cord, hanging there, with no clue as to how they got there, out of her reach and wafting slightly in the breeze. Such a beautiful sight for the child, such a surprising gift out of nowhere. Without even thinking, she ran to get her mother, who was still in bed, who had to be begged to come and look, and when the mother finally let herself be led, dragged over to the window, the necklace had disappeared. Nothing. There wasn't anything there, not on the balcony, not even in the street below. Nothing to be seen. ‘You were dreaming, my darling,' her mother said. Those words again.

Fury from the child. She can still picture the blue sparkle, the fluid swaying of that string of magic beads. You were dreaming. No, I wasn't dreaming, I saw it. Yes, you were dreaming. No, Mummy, I wasn't!

Whatever's happened to the child? She's starting to shout now, and soon she's shrieking, stamping her feet, struggling frantically to get away from her mother, who's trying to calm her. It's not so much because of the necklace, but because she isn't believed. Because she's being lied to. Because her mother's lying to her. That's what it is, that's exactly what it is, like that other time, that time long ago. The child remembers: it's just like with the baby. The baby in Normandy. In a flash the whole thing comes back to her. But she doesn't mention it.

‘Liar,' she roars simply. ‘Liar!'

‘What's going on now?' asks the father from the bedroom, his lie-in interrupted.