Read Her Father's Daughter Online

Authors: Marie Sizun

Her Father's Daughter (9 page)

BOOK: Her Father's Daughter
11.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

 

Now they're out in the street again, in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. The child is connected to the known world, to security, only by her father's hand. And she thinks that's nice. He can take her where he likes. He takes care of her. He's her father.

He asks her whether she's hungry. Now there's a question. To please him she says that yes, she's hungry. He looks happy. ‘We'll be there soon,' he says, and he looks happier by the minute.

But now the thought of her mission has come back to haunt the child and, once again, she can feel anxiety creeping over her. When? Before lunch? During it? Afterwards maybe?

‘Here we are,' says her father.

He opens a glazed door and goes in with the child close behind him. She's never been to a restaurant before, never
gone into a place like this. She's dazed by the noise, the bustle, the lights, the smells. Following in her father's wake, the child gamely steps further into this strange world, amid the hubbub of voices, the clink of cutlery and the bright newness of the lighting.

Meanwhile, her father's heading straight for one of the tables, by the window. A small table covered with a white tablecloth like the others. Now, there's a lady sitting at this particular table, a lady who's looking at the child and smiling.

‘France,' the father says, ‘I'd like to introduce you to a friend: Agnès.'

The child is taken aback. She doesn't understand. He must have got this wrong. She stands next to her father and stares at this stranger, this pretty, young, blonde, nicely made-up, well-dressed, smiling stranger. And everything happens very quickly. The father gets the child to sit down, sits down himself. He takes the chair facing the woman; the child is in the middle, between them. The father says something. What? The child doesn't know. The lady carries on smiling with her pretty lips, smoothed over with dazzling red, and her pretty teeth. She just won't stop smiling, her eyes on the father one moment and the child the next. And the father, well, he just won't stop talking. The child doesn't grasp, doesn't hear what he's saying.

The waiter comes to take their order and the child can't tear her eyes away from this woman with her perpetual smile. But now the lady's talking, the red
lips are moving very quickly. Her voice is soft, musical, pleasing – and yet the child can't make out any words. Actually, what was the question her mother told her to ask?

In fact she, the child, is the one who's being asked something. When it comes to questions, it's the lady who's doing the asking, leaning towards her slightly:
Does this big girl go to school yet, then?
Of course not, of course she doesn't go to school, the child mutters inwardly, giving just a shake of her head in reply.
Not bored all on her own?
What a thought. The child shakes her head furiously.

She's so sweet! Shame she's lost her tongue… Or hasn't she? Has she?

 

The conversation falters. Or rather is reduced to an exchange between the lady and the child's father, over her head, given they're facing each other, as her father and mother used to before, the child now thinks. But here, is it because of the noise, in order to talk and hear each other, these two lean slightly closer together over the table, which is so narrow that it wouldn't take much for their heads to touch. And with them there are no arguments.

Their food arrives. The child has no idea what she's eating. She'll never know. But what she does know is that it's not going down.

‘Eat up, then,' says her father, as he used to at home; and it feels very funny to the child, those same words,
words she hasn't heard for a long time. But what's changed is that he's saying them very gently. Not angry at all.

 

And now the question she's meant to ask comes back to her all of a sudden. What if I asked now? thinks the child. But just then she sees something, something that catches her attention, something extraordinary.

There across the table, her father's hand, the big rust-speckled hand she knows so well, the giraffe-hand, the hand that belongs to her, the child, has just come down over that small, elegant white hand with the red nail varnish which was resting meekly next to the plate: the lady's hand.

Time stands still.

 

The child won't remember anything of the rest of the meal, nor how it ended. Anything of what was said, what happened, what was eaten or what she herself didn't eat.
Oh, it doesn't matter, leave it, it's all right
… Yes, her father said those words, very sweetly, that much she does remember. You'd think nothing matters any more for the father.

No memories at all, up until the moment when she was alone with him again, walking through the streets, after the lady had left, the lady who'd wanted to kiss her goodbye.

‘You'll see her again soon,' the father said as they walked away. ‘I love her very much, you know.'

The child said nothing. It's true, she lost her tongue that day.

 

The father and child walk back through the streets they came along that morning. They're both thinking about all sorts of things. And then the father asks the child what she thought of the lady. The child thinks. She ends up saying she doesn't know.

‘But you do think she's pretty, don't you?' the father says, not letting it drop.

Yes, the child thinks she's pretty. She won't say more than that. That will be all for today. She's tired.

The father gently squeezes the child's hand in his. But the child thinks of the lady's white hand, and her own hand stays inert.

When they arrive home, the child's father takes her all the way to the door, kisses her and then leaves, very quickly, as usual.

 

The child realizes she hasn't asked the wretched question.

When her mother appears and asks how she got on with her task, she says she forgot.

 

 

That night the child has a strange dream. She's in the local square with her mother, as she so often used to be. Her mother is sitting on a bench alone and the child's not far away, playing with a ball. It's a beautiful day. The mother's wearing a very pretty dress, a red one, and her nails are painted red too.

All of a sudden someone arrives, someone the child doesn't immediately recognize. But yes, of course, it's her father, wearing the blue jumper he wore to the restaurant and with his pipe in his hand. He sits down next to the mother and talks to her, right up close. They're not at all angry, quite the opposite; he's put an arm around her shoulders, like lovers do, and they're looking at each other the way they used to, when the father came home.

And the child feels something inside her, an odd, a very odd kind of contentment.

 

But just then she wakes up. The feeling of happiness lasts a little longer. And a little longer. And disappears.

 

 

Now the father comes to pick up the child every other Sunday. Sometimes the blonde lady is there, sometimes she isn't.

The last time the child is to be alone with her father he suggests taking her outside in the fresh air, onto the fortifications at the old city gate, the Porte des Lilas. The child thinks this lilac-scented name is pretty, but you know, her father says, there are no lilacs there. Even so, the child says.

It's a Sunday afternoon. Her father didn't come to pick her up till after lunch. He seems in a good mood. In fact he seems in a much better mood since he left home.

It's a lovely day. In the bus they stood on the platform at the back, which delighted the child.

Once there, at the fortifications (the father also calls it
the wastelands
, an expression the child rather likes), there are sorts of hills and lots of grass. It's almost the country. There are people sitting or lying on the grass, children running. Youngsters tearing down the slopes on bicycles.

The father and his child climb up the highest hill. It's hard for the child. When she tires, her father puts her on his shoulders. From up there the child risks this gesture, wrapping her arms around her father's neck. She presses her cheek to her father's head and is happy to be reacquainted with the smell of his hair, and of his skin, which is always mingled with the smell of pipe tobacco.

They reach the summit. Hoisted up on her father's shoulders, the child feels she's on top of the world.

Above them and around them there's nothing but the vast blue sky, dangling its unusual-shaped clouds over the city, a city they can see stretching away in the distance, hazy, unreal-looking. It's the clouds that look real, these big, cottony, slow-moving clouds depicting things up there, an ocean, waves, cliffs. Everything else has stopped existing.

‘Look, my darling,' says the father, ‘look how pretty it is… That's what the sea looks like, you know.'

But what the child heard, the important thing she's just heard, something she's more interested in than the sea, which she's never seen, is that her father called her
my darling
. For the first time he spoke to her the way her mother used to. And he called her, the child, the name he used to call her mother.

The child's heart starts beating faster. Now's the time to do it. She's going to put the unspoken question to him. She's going to ask him. Now.

She does it in a very quiet voice, a voice so quiet you might wonder whether he'll hear.

‘Daddy, are you going to come back home?'

But he has, he has heard her, and he heard so clearly you'd think he'd been stung by a wasp.

He peels the child's little arms away from his neck and sets her gently down on the ground. And then, very bluntly, very clearly, he says, ‘France, you know very well that's impossible.'

 

It's true, she knows perfectly well. The child realizes she knows this. She knew it.

They set off down the hill hand in hand. The father talks about one thing and another, in a smiling voice.

Near the bus stop there's a man selling candyfloss. The father buys a big stick of it for the child.

On the journey back, hiding behind the pink cloud she's nibbling her way through, the child thinks things over.

She understands so much now.

 

 

Perhaps it's that evening, the evening of the fortifications, perhaps it's the evening of another Sunday spent with her father, but it is a Sunday because the intermittent sounds of a street party can be heard wafting outside. The child has her own key now, and the father uses it to open the door for her before slipping away, never once coming in. When she gets inside, the child calls her mother. She doesn't see her straight away. Then she finds her all alone, sitting in the kitchen. The light isn't on and it's already dark.

The mother's alone, sitting on a stool, motionless. The child sees her from behind. And, hearing a noise, the mother turns round. The child notices she's still in her dressing gown, as she was this morning, when the child left. She must have spent the day like this, in the kitchen. She looks so lost, so miserable, that the child is quite struck by it. As if seeing her in this condition for the first time. Although it's not the first time. But it's the first time the child notices it.

Is it because the mother's sitting on a low stool that the child suddenly thinks she looks very small? She even
feels that she, the child, is bigger than her. It feels, oddly, as if the roles have been reversed, as if the mother has become the child and the child the mother.

She goes over to her mother, who has turned away from her again, and affectionately, as she used to before, she puts her arms around her neck. And when the mother, in her surprise, turns imperceptibly to look at her, the child delves her small fingers into her black hair and, quite naturally, so naturally, asks, ‘Do you want me to brush your hair, Mummy?'

And, in that position, standing behind her mother, she really is bigger now.

 

This evening, the two of them are back in this kitchen, alone, as if nothing has gone on, as if nothing has happened. As if no one knows the father.

Everything's almost like the old days.

But there's that music, the music from the party outside, which tells them the war's over. That time has passed. That the child has indeed grown bigger.

 

 

One morning, looking out of the kitchen window, the child watches the concierge playing with his daughter in the courtyard. This girl is just a little older than the child. In her hair she's wearing a big blue bow, which the child envies. But the mother thinks it looks a bit ‘Easter egg' and doesn't want to buy her one. The concierge's daughter is throwing a little red ball to her father and he catches it cack-handedly. He's a hefty, dark-haired man who came home from the war in the last convoy of prisoners.

The concierge's daughter is laughing because her father makes such a funny face as he tries to catch the little ball in his big hands. The concierge is actually so clumsy only because he's watching his daughter more than the ball. He has that gleam of admiration and tenderness that the child has occasionally seen in her father's eye. And then, in a flash, when he's missed the ball yet again, he throws himself at his daughter, picks her up in his arms, way up high, and spins her around with him. She shrieks with mock terror and delight.

The child closes the window.

That same feeling when, in the street, now, while she's doing the shopping with her mother, she comes across a father holding his child's hand, walking at his child's pace and leaning down to talk to him or her.

 

 

The child's father won't be coming back. He's really left. For ever. He's no longer part of this household, the child's and her mother's household. She now knows that. She understands it. Far more fully, more quickly, than her mother, who still cries from time to time, but it's hard to know exactly why.

BOOK: Her Father's Daughter
11.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Sowing Secrets by Trisha Ashley
Bad Boy's Cinderella: A Sports Romance by Raleigh Blake, Alexa Wilder
Wolver's Rescue by Jacqueline Rhoades
Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi
A Promise of More by Bronwen Evans
Valentine's Child by Nancy Bush
Blood of the Nile by Annalynne Russo