Her Father's Daughter (5 page)

‘Nothing,' the mother calls, ‘nothing, the child just had a dream…'

And she shakes the child by the arm, holding it tightly, as she never has before, ordering her not to say anything, not to say anything. Whatever you do, don't say anything. As if this business with the necklace made her really angry, was so important. And then, without another word, she went back to join her husband.

The child stayed there, choked with sobs and anger. Her mother had hurt her. Why?

Definitely a liar. Like the grandmother. Just another thing she needed to forget.

With the tattered doll's silent support, the child hardened her heart.

They say the Americans are coming. They're going to drive the Germans out. The war will be over.

High time too, says the grandmother, there's nothing left to eat. The big bag of lentils she's been storing at her house is almost empty. Luckily she still has the three hens she keeps in her yard on the rue Bezout and whose eggs she brings over.

The father listens to the radio from morning till night, and sometimes to the station the child doesn't understand at all, the one which is in English one minute and in French the next, but with funny sentences about things like a grandfather's rabbit, lost carrots and other oddities, the station you're not allowed to listen to, apparently.

There's a lot of irritation in the house, and not only on the subject of the Americans. The family's not working properly, the grandmother's wrong to be so pleased, the grandmother doesn't see everything. The child does, though, she's always sniffing out what's going on. The child knows nearly everything.

The child's father and mother argue often, and not always about her. It turns out the mother doesn't behave exactly as she should either. Not exactly as the father would like.

The child watches, listens. And what she sees is strange. Peculiar scenes. The parents are kissing, for example, and then the father's voice starts complaining, quietly at first, but then more loudly. Growing angry. Then the mother cries. She goes out. To run some errands. Visit the grandmother on the rue Bezout.

There were angry words this afternoon, in fact. And with that, the mother headed off. She won't be back till this evening.

The father stays at home, smoking his pipe as he listens to the radio.

As for the child, who's made scenes of her own this afternoon, she's being punished. Her father has just put her out on the landing. For what new misdemeanour, she doesn't know, has already forgotten. But she's not crying. She's grown accustomed to these episodes on the landing, to the clatter of the slammed door and the long wait in the blue shadows of the stairwell. All the same, she nurses her grievances, her rebellion, the shame of being seen in this pitiful situation, alone outside a closed door. At first some neighbours come past, ask what she's doing there, laugh when she says it's a punishment, walk on. Then nothing. Silence. The blue light. Despite her father's instructions to the contrary, she eventually
sits down on the stairs. She waits. She thinks this has been going on for a very long time. Perhaps her father will never open the door. Perhaps she's not wanted any more. Well, good.

She almost wants someone to come past, to talk to her. But there isn't a sound. You'd think there's no one left in the building.

But then, as if her wishes have been granted, a door opens at the end of the corridor: where the neighbours they call the Armenians live, a man and a woman who have a sewing workshop in their apartment. The mother doesn't really like them. She says they're on the Germans' side. So she doesn't talk to them: good morning, good evening, that's all. What does ‘Armenian' mean? the child wonders.

There, through that half-open door, the child can see two motionless figures. They seem to be hesitating. Then a woman comes towards her, smiling. She's smoking, holding a cigarette in her hand. In a slightly husky voice with a funny accent, she gently tells the child she can come in if she'd like to, that she mustn't stay all alone like this, on the stairs. She doesn't ask the child why she's there. Takes her by the hand.

The child's always been told not to talk to strangers. She also knows she was supposed to stay standing outside her own front door. Her father's order. But that doesn't matter now. Her parents don't matter now. She follows the dark-haired woman with the strange voice. The husband greets them on the doorstep with a silent
laugh, shows the child in. What a surprise the place is, comforting, peaceful. The child notices that the man and woman are wearing identical grey overalls, they smile together, look at her in the same calm, attentive way. New, unusual smells around her, of the cigarettes the woman smokes, but also the slightly acrid smell of new fabric, piled up on the roll, of half-finished suits dotted about the place, of sewing-machine oil, and, mingling with all of this, coming from the back of the apartment, there are strong smells of cooking, unfamiliar to the child.

They sit the child down in the workshop. They bring her some peculiar biscuits, some milk and honey. They're kind to her. Very kind. You must come back, says the woman. They don't have children. The child laughs. She feels comfortable. She wonders whether she would rather stay here for ever. She's sleepy.

Perhaps she slept. Looking back, she won't remember. The memory stops with that fantasy about adoption. The bittersweetness of, as she sees it, having left her parents. A feeling of endless time. Of breaking away. A sort of journey.

It's late when she gets home. It's already evening. Evening noises in the building. The light somehow softened, soothed. The Armenian tailor takes the child back to her door. He rings the bell for her. The child's slightly anxious. But the father, who opens the door to them, looking amazed, smiles, not angry at all. Why does he look so happy?

‘Oh, the child!' he says. ‘Good God! I'd completely forgotten about her… What's the time, then? I'm sorry… Thank you so much… She didn't come knocking on your door, did she?'

And before the Armenian has even finished explaining, the father's talking again.

‘It's happened, you know,' he says. ‘The Americans have arrived… The first operations were a success…'

‘Oh,' the Armenian says simply. ‘I see… I'll go and tell my wife.'

They shake hands. The father even invites the Armenian in for a drink, but he declines: he still has work to do. Another time, he says. Another time. And withdraws.

The door closes, leaving the father and child together. They're alone. The mother's still not home.

The father doesn't scold the child this evening. He doesn't criticize her once. He looks at her with a hint of amusement and tenderness in his eye. The child feels that, for the first time since he came home from Germany, he's actually seeing her. He's interested in her.

And then that astonishing thing, with her there, sitting on the sofa beside him, and him sort of dreaming, lost in thought, the sudden gesture.

‘What pretty hair you have,' he says. And, just for a moment, she feels the big hand with the freckles smoothing over her hair in a sort of caress.

Was it that evening, the evening of the landings, which would always be the evening of the Armenians in the child's mind, or was it a bit later – because surely things didn't happen that quickly? Anyway, it was at this point in their story that her father took her, awkwardly, onto his lap, just like that, to tell her something. For the first time. Like a normal father. A real father. Like the ones who tell their children stories, in the evening, affectionately, just like that.

It's a funny old story that the father tells the child, a story about trees and farm workers, about carts, grey skies and snow, a story she didn't understand at all – a story from Germany, he said. Most likely she was too surprised, too affected by the novelty of what was happening, to pay attention. So odd sitting on those big enemy knees, being close up to the smell of tobacco, mingled with a subtle fragrance of eau de cologne. And she watches that hand she so dreads, the hand that slaps, and she feels it stroking her hair. It is very gentle now, very soft and attentive.

But oddest of all is hearing this other voice her father has, a voice that isn't scolding, or shouting or being sarcastic. A voice telling a story. A voice talking. A voice talking to her. It's the voice she's listening to. Not the words.

It didn't last very long. Li came home. She went into the kitchen with some provisions and called to her husband. He gently lifted the child onto the floor and got up to go into the kitchen.

Maybe he'd also had enough of having her there, on his lap, the child, all stiff and silent. Maybe she was in his way.

She stayed there, a little dazed, caught up in the surprise of what had happened.

From the grey room with its fading daylight, she could see the light shining from the kitchen, where her mother and father were. But she stayed there, in the darkness, thinking.

One morning, waking in the grey room where they now eat their meals and where the child still has her bed, the child saw that her father was already awake, sitting in the window, apparently writing in the sunlight.

She went over rather fearfully, without making a sound, and he didn't shoo her away. So she stayed there, standing beside him, watching what he was doing in rapt silence.

He was actually drawing, in pencil. And what he was drawing, what the child saw evolving on the page, was a forest of very tall, dense trees planted close together, growing thickly around a clearing. At the far end of the clearing she could make out a long, low house made of logs.

The child didn't move, kept watching.

Then her father took a box of watercolours from his bag and put it on the table. He went to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water – the child didn't move, stayed there, waiting – and put it down next to the box and the drawing, and, apparently unaware of the child, started painting. But she knew he knew she was there. His
silence constituted acquiescence. Better: approval. The only sound was the gentle flop-flop of the brush dipped into the water from time to time, and the complicity of the child's breathing, standing there with her hands in the small of her back, behind her father, occasionally catching her breath, attentive to the developing colours on the trees, the sky, the house and the grass on the ground.

When the watercolour was finished, the father sat back slightly so the child could see better.

‘Do you like it?' he asked.

The child simply nodded: she did. Then he tore another sheet of white paper from the pad and sat the child down where he'd been sitting. Gave her a pencil.

‘Now it's your turn. Draw whatever you like.'

Terrified of her power (and to think she'd always been so bold), she draws a shapeless outline on the paper. To her it's a tree. She says so, very quietly.

And now her father's the one standing behind her, but so tall he has to lean over the child to take her right hand in his and alter – only slightly – the contours of her tree. She lets him guide her, doesn't even think of protesting, because the warmth of that great hand around hers is so wonderful (but oh, how she shrieked if her mother ever took it upon herself to correct her drawings). Then, still holding the little hand, he makes her pick up the brush, makes her load it with water, takes her left hand and guides it with his to show her how to squeeze off the excess water with two fingers, then he swirls the brush round a small pot of green paint and,
with both their hands, puts a touch of green on the leaves of their tree.

Swooning with tenderness, the child surrenders to the instructions given by his big hands.

‘You see, it's not that difficult!' her father says eventually, flourishing their joint work: a feather duster of green, which the child finds magnificent.

She takes it to her room. Stows it with her precious things.

Where's her mother? She's still asleep. Didn't see. Doesn't know.

That afternoon the father goes out alone. Comes back with a small parcel in his hand. Calls the child.

‘Here, this is for you,' he says simply.

The child tears clumsily at the wrapping, in a delicious state of anticipation.

Inside is a tiny box of watercolours: six round blocks of colour and a brush.

‘Now,' the father tells her, ‘you can work next to me in the mornings.'

The child notices that her mother, who's sitting nearby, has looked up and is watching the scene in silence, unsmiling.

So the child looks away, discreetly.

A strange incident which really surprised the child.

It's Sunday, her grandmother's there. The two women are cooking lunch in the kitchen. The radio is on. A journalist is talking once again about the Normandy landings.

The father comes in to listen. The child follows him. She listens too, to be like the others. And the word suddenly strikes her for the first time. One word. That word.

‘In Normandy?' she asks. ‘Where we went, me and Mummy and Granny?'

A silence. An extraordinary silence.

The grandmother is first to react.

‘In Normandy! As if you've ever been to Normandy!'

The child is about to answer back, to press the point. But she notices her mother, very pale, watching her in the most extraordinary way, as if she's talking to her with her eyes, as if she's screaming at her to be quiet, to stop right there.

‘Normandy!' her grandmother says again. ‘I ask you! Nonsense! The child talks complete nonsense!'

And the mother adds in a blank voice, ‘Maybe she's getting confused with when we went to Ermenonville?'