Her Father's Daughter (7 page)

The child cries. The mother won't budge. Counters her tears with icy silence. She gets the child ready, the child crying, protesting. The mother's face is unreadable, like a stranger's. Her movements are hard, abrupt, like an enemy's.

She packs the child's bag, and the child watches these preparations fearfully. She's never been away from her mother. She's never been anywhere alone. She doesn't understand what's going on at all. Why isn't her father here?

She tries to throw herself into her mother's arms, to kiss her; she begs her. The mother pushes her away gently but firmly. Just because, she says. That's the way it is. Be sensible. You'll come back. It's not for long. Your daddy will come to fetch you.

The mother's talking in short, resolute sentences which tear the child apart. She's never talked to her like this. Perhaps it's this shift, this difference, this strangeness, this
strangerness
, that hurts the child. Her mother's no longer her mother, but someone she doesn't know.

They take the Métro, the two of them. Like on that first day, that day long ago when they went to see the father. The mother holds the child's hand, but anyone would think she doesn't love her, that she's angry; she doesn't
talk, and there's a harshness about her fingers that the child doesn't recognize, that almost hurts her.

The child has stopped protesting, deep in the despair of her exile but of something else too, something more serious that she doesn't understand. She can't begin to grasp it, but it's there. Between them. In that silence.

Of her time with her grandmother, the time in August 1944 – how long was it? A few days, a week, more? – the child would remember almost nothing. Apart from waiting. She waited, waited day after day for it to be over. For someone to come for her. For her father to come for her. She thought he would be the one to come.

She keeps asking the grandmother when she can go home. Aren't you happy with me, then? is the grandmother's only reply. She tries to teach the child to sew. She shows her how to throw grain for the three hens she keeps in the yard behind her house. She introduces her to the few customers who are starting to come back. During fittings, the women chatter, look at the child, try to get her to talk.

The child's bored. Filled with despair.

Just one image from that time, the wallpaper featuring bunches of roses in the bedroom where she sleeps alone. It's cold in this room, even in August, because the shutters are always closed. Some idea of the grandmother's. The child's afraid to turn the light out. So she stays there
for a long time, gazing at the roses on the walls, before she goes to sleep.

One evening she's already been in bed quite a while when she thinks she hears talking downstairs: she thinks she recognizes her father's voice, down there, along with the grandmother's. They're talking loudly. Shouting even. Half asleep, the child gets straight out of bed, goes downstairs in the dark… But she must have made a noise: the grandmother looms in front of her, orders her back to bed this minute. But, the child says. No buts. You were dreaming. There's no one here.

And the next morning, nothing. The usual waiting.

And then one morning there's such a noise outside, shots fired, shouting, a great thundering of lorries making the house shake, more shouting, firecrackers, cheers…

‘Thank the Lord!' cries the grandmother, who's been at the windows since dawn. ‘Here they are! They're coming! It's them! It's the liberation! We're saved!' And she runs all over the house to get a better view, from the best window, calls to her neighbours, more excited than the child's ever seen her. The child thinks her grandmother's being unbearable.

‘What about me, when am I going home?' asks the child.

‘Later,' says the grandmother. ‘Your parents have had their talk anyway.'

‘About what?'

‘About things that are none of your business,' says the grandmother.

The father had promised he'd take the child to see the soldiers on the day of the liberation. The liberation's here now. He wasn't telling the truth. The grandmother's liberation, this particular liberation here, is of little interest to the child. And anyway, you can hardly see anything from her windows. The child is filled with sadness.

There is one extraordinary thing, though, one moment: that incredible huge peal of bells which seemed to come from all the churches at once. The grandmother had opened the windows, all the windows and all the shutters, windows and shutters opened at last to the summer and those tumultuous bells, and the old woman cried and pulled a funny face. It's over, she said, the war's over. We're free. And she took the child in her arms, she kissed her. Which really surprised the child: her grandmother never cried, never kissed her. Mind you, her hands were still just as cold.

And she was the one who, the next day, or a bit later, it's no longer clear, told the child she would take her back to her parents. The father probably hadn't been able to come. Or perhaps he'd forgotten.

The day the child comes back is a Sunday. Everyone will be at home, she thinks; we'll all have lunch together. It'll be just like before. The child drags her grandmother by the hand to get there more quickly and talks nineteen to the dozen. My word, will you ever stop! says the grandmother, but she's not really angry. The child laughs. In fact everyone looks happy, out in the street, in the Métro. You can tell the Krauts have left, the old woman says. And it's about time we had something to be happy about. She sighs, the grandmother does, talking to herself, muttering between her teeth about things the child doesn't understand, doesn't listen to. The child is entirely absorbed in her delight at being back in the city, and she can't stop looking around, listening, seeing how pretty everything looks: there seem to be parties going on everywhere, with flags in all directions, people laughing, music on every street corner, lots of people on café terraces. The child keeps thinking they'll be there soon, she'll see her parents again. She can't believe her luck.

On the way her grandmother gives the child advice that she more or less hears: she must be a good girl, she must leave her parents alone, not talk nonsense – you know very well what I mean. Her father's tired, and her mother too, she mustn't pester them, etc. All through the partying streets, the old woman's nagging voice doesn't really reach the child's ears as her heart thumps impatiently at the thought of going home.

But when they get there, when the grandmother rings the bell the first time, no one comes to the door. They listen. Everything's quiet. Perhaps they've gone out, says the grandmother. She rings again. More waiting. The child's frightened, she's not really sure why, but she's frightened. At last they hear footsteps. And it's her father who opens the door. The father looking all strange, or rather similar to how he'd been when the child first met him, even more upright, by the looks of him, more severe, more distant.

He says hello to the grandmother, but takes the child in his arms, without a word. He carries her to the dining room, strokes her hair, looks at her, looks at her as if he's discovering her.

The child barely has time to believe it's happening before he puts her down, takes his jacket from the back of a chair and goes out, leaves, closing the door behind him.

‘I'll be off, I'll be off,' the grandmother says quickly. ‘I'll just say hello to Li, I'm not having lunch with you…'

The father's already left, without responding to her words. But where's the mother?

The grandmother calls in vain. The child finds no one in the kitchen. The grandmother opens the bedroom door: Li is lying down, asleep. Curtains drawn. On the bedside table there are pills.

‘Is she ill?' asks the child, who's come over and is gazing in awe at her mother's face, unreadable in sleep, at her pallor, her mess of hair.

The grandmother wakes her daughter and she opens her eyes at last. She looks so peculiar, so befuddled, that the child instinctively backs away. She doesn't want her mother to touch her. To kiss her.

But no. Nothing like that happens. The mother just says – but in a strange, thick, lazy voice – it would be better if the grandmother left, that it'll be OK now.

‘Are you sure?' the old lady asks.

‘Absolutely. What's the time? Anyway, the child can help me…'

She gets out of bed, puts on a dressing gown and sees the grandmother to the door. The old lady very swiftly slips away.

The child and her mother are left alone. The child frozen in a sort of dread that her mother might want to kiss her. But nothing happens.

The mother, still in her dressing gown, an old pink dressing gown that the child doesn't like, drifts about the
place, puts a few things away. The child notices that the apartment's very untidy, with clothes on the furniture, the kitchen in a mess, full of dirty dishes.

‘We're going to have lunch,' says the mother. ‘I'm bound to find something.'

Outside in the street they can hear a band playing. A woman singing. People join in the chorus.

The child goes off to play under the dining-room table, reunited with her old doll.

Her suitcase, which the grandmother left in the hall by the door, is still there; but perhaps her father will put it away when he comes home.

Of the weeks, the few months that come next, what will one day be left in the child's memory? A few images, a few snatches of meaning taken from an obscure, muddled, mysterious continuum?

Since she came home everything's been so strange, her parents' behaviour so peculiar. The child doesn't understand any of it. Not lovey-dovey any more, the parents aren't. Don't talk to each other now, or look at each other, and suddenly start arguing. About everything and nothing: Li's untidiness, her lethargy, which ‘goes with all the rest of it', her inability to run a household, and then there's the way she dresses, the money she spends. The same old criticisms, but more needling now, spiteful. The father shouts. The mother cries. And then she shouts too. Sometimes they go and shut themselves in the bedroom or the kitchen to shout louder. The child can't hear the words then, but she understands the tone of voice.

Sometimes the grandmother comes over and it's worse; the three of them shut themselves in the kitchen and then
they talk so loudly, the grandmother's voice is so squeaky, the father's so violent, that the child only clutches at words in passing, strange words:
Too young. Your fault. Indulgent. Lies. Shameful. Why? Disgusting
. Then she hears her mother crying, uncontrollably, like a child.

The child can't believe it. Grown-ups and their mad goings-on. But she continues playing under the table. She's perfectly all right under the table, with her old doll. She brushes the doll's hair for ages and ages, waiting for it to be over, this performance in the kitchen, waiting for the door to open and for them to come out, with the funny faces they have then. After these arguments the grandmother usually picks up her coat in a dignified way and leaves.

And when the father isn't there, when he's gone to work, when she's left alone with her mother, that's a whole other story, and the child can't be sure she prefers it. Then there's a very special kind of silence in the apartment. An icy silence. A terrifying silence.

The mother gets up late. Gives the child something to eat, dresses her without a word. Then she drifts from one room to another, irritated to have the child there, hanging around not knowing what to do with herself. Every now and then the mother starts to cry, and the child is frightened by the puffy, deformed red face her tears give her.

She asks her mother to put the radio on. She needs to hear something, some music, songs, the announcers' reassuring voices. It's so cheerful now, the radio: military
marches, love songs, jazz, the news delivered in a jaunty voice. The child listens to everything. Indiscriminately.

In fact one day she hears them say on the news that the war really is over, that all the prisoners will be coming home. Families will be able to pick them up at the Gare de l'Est. The child runs to tell her mother. But why does this make her cry and then laugh?

Her mother really has become very strange.

In among all this, it's as if no one sees the child any more. Almost as if she's become invisible. No one has time for her now. She is there, though.

When the father comes home in the evening he hardly even kisses her. An absent-minded stroke of her hair as he comes in, acknowledging that she's been waiting for him, standing in that awkward way she now has. A stroke of his big hand with its freckles. And then, straight away, the arguing starts with the mother, the shouts and tears.

The child would dearly like to be interesting. She follows the conversation as best she can. She watches and listens. She hopes her father will acknowledge her presence, her attentiveness. She comes running at the least sign of conflict, waiting for an opportunity to get involved, to make her father understand that she's there, with him.

One image in all this confusion will become a memory: the business of the accounts book.

The father feels they're spending too much in this household. Can't think where the money's going. Is flabbergasted. Appalled. He's asked Li to keep a record of her daily expenses from now on and has bought her a special book for this. A book the child thinks is glorious. On the glossy hard cover there are birds in every colour and on the inside is a printed page for each day of the week. Some days later he asks to check through it. The mother can't find it. Has she lost it? Mislaid, she says, I've just mislaid it. She'll find it, it's bound to be somewhere.

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.