Her Father's Daughter (2 page)

Your father's coming home
. Those words. Now out in the open. Like a threat.

The war had already started when the child was born and he, her father, was very soon captured, a prisoner, sent far away, ‘to eastern Prussia', the mother says, when she occasionally tries to explain things to the child. Then she takes out the photos, shows the child letters, the letters from earlier times, when people still received mail, those strange shiny rectangles of white paper, with postmarks from the Stalags. She cries a little every time. The child doesn't much like these episodes.

What is a father? The notion of fatherhood is beyond the child. And how could it not be? Fathers, these days, are pretty thin on the ground. There was the Lévy children's father, but they didn't see him much. The child has almost forgotten him now. The few other children in the building, the concierge's daughter, for example, don't have one: he's a prisoner, or dead, like the father of the two boys on the first floor. Even the child's mother
is fatherless: the grandmother's husband is someone they never knew.

Fathers are found in fairy tales, and they're always slightly unreal and not very kind. Or else they're dead, distant, weak, and much less interesting than their daughters and their sons, who are brimming with courage, spirit and good looks.

And then there are animal stories in the children's books that the child leafs through, looking at the pictures while the mother reads the words out to her: the generations are respected and fathers, be they dogs, horses or bears, are clearly represented; like in the story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears', which keeps bombarding you with the triad of Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear and Baby Bear until you've completely understood, little children, that a normal family is made up of a father, a mother and a child. But the child isn't at all convinced. She still thinks Daddy Bear comes across as incongruous in the story, too heavy, too big.

Of course you can see images of human fathers, proper, realistic, instructive pictures of fathers, in advertising posters in the streets and the Métro. Those big pictures pasted onto the walls of Métro stations, showing smiling families sitting at a table together around a pot of hearty soup or a semolina pudding, which the child happens to loathe. And in the middle, tall, well dressed, closely shaven and smiling twice as much, is the father. An enigma.

When she looks at the photographs of her own father – casually, slightly at arm's length, as if almost afraid of
burning her fingers – she gets only a vague impression of him. These photos are images of a past she doesn't know, of no importance to her. Her mother perseveres, puts a wedding photo in the child's hand: in it she, the mother, is in a white dress on the arm of a smiling young man, by the door of a church; and look, my darling, he's so handsome in this one, when the child sees only a soldier in uniform, a stranger with empty eyes; or this one then, one the mother's just found of a couple, sweethearts dancing at a party, and the young woman is her mother, the young man, her father. But I can't really see, says the child.

On the other hand, the one in which you can see him best, really ‘him', is the larger photograph under glass that always stands on the sideboard in the dining room, a photograph devoted entirely to his face.

A picture she no longer even notices because it's there before her eyes every day.

And ever since those words evoking a possible return were spoken, those terribly peculiar and disturbing words, it is this portrait that the child has taken to studying surreptitiously every time she passes it. Scrutinizing it in great detail when she is alone. The image of the stranger who's going to come here, to live here with her mother and her, no one knows when, but soon.

She thinks he looks sad and stern. And yet he doesn't look old. It's his eyes that worry the child, eyes loaded with unknown thoughts, eyes that have never seen her, the child, eyes that aren't looking at her either, but are
staring past her at something else, someone else. It's this stranger's stare that frightens her.

Your father's coming home
. As if she were already subjected to that stare.

In the meantime, the child tries to behave as if nothing has changed. She plays under the dining-room table; you can't see the picture from there. She runs through the apartment singing at the top of her lungs. She uses any excuse to throw her arms around her mother's neck and kiss her dementedly.

‘The child's becoming completely insufferable,' the grandmother says.

The mother smiles without a word, her pretty, sad smile that seems to understand everything.

The grandmother says the child is badly brought up. In fact the child hasn't been brought up at all: because, with her mother's backing, under her mother's adoring eye, she does almost whatever she wants, says what she wants and eats what she wants when she wants. The child is well aware that the mother and grandmother disagree on the subject; but it's the mother who decides, who has the last word, and the grandmother can only bow her head with a sigh; the child knows this, listening inquisitively to their conversations, or at least what she understands of them.

As it happens, she abuses this freedom with relative restraint. What does she do? She only draws a little bit on the walls, the grey walls of their small apartment, with her colouring pencils; she fills the pages of the books she finds with mysterious symbols that appeal to her. She likes bringing these dead pages to life. She sings too, very loudly, at any time of day, tunes she has invented, with a warlike feel, particularly if her mother stops paying attention to her, to speak to the grandmother,
for example. Then the child makes sure she's listened to. Demands it.

The child is temperamental, ‘spoilt', in the grandmother's words. She refuses to eat things she doesn't like, particularly the little meals put together by the grandmother using whatever's available, whatever the war has left them: cod stew, Jerusalem artichokes, semolina in milk.

When the fancy takes her, the child gets down from the table without a word and goes off to play. Which makes her mother laugh.

‘Leave her, just leave her,' the mother says in reply to the old lady's protests. ‘If only
I'd
had such freedom as a child…'

She laughs to see the child so happy, watches her go with adoring eyes.

‘You're my darling, aren't you?' she calls after her. And the child, caressed by her gaze, turns round without uttering a word, agrees with a conspiratorial smile, rapturously happy.

The child doesn't like her grandmother. Not at all. She doesn't like that grey hair, that tight bun at the nape of the grandmother's neck, those eyes which are such a pale blue they look transparent, those cool, drooping white cheeks, that flat chest, that immutable sadness, a sadness which weighs down on her old shoulders and diffuses a veil of gloom and boredom. The child doesn't like the insipid smell of the old woman. She doesn't like the hushed, monotonous, sensible voice, which never has any spark, any gusto. She doesn't like the touch of the permanently icy hands when the grandmother's making a dress for the child and wants to try it on her (how the child shies away then, how she screams that she's afraid of the pins). And most of all the child doesn't like the private conversations her grandmother has with the mother, her own mother, the child's, her property, and she can't see how her mother can conceivably be this woman's daughter. She hates the old woman's love for her daughter, the demonstrations of affection, kisses, gestures, words. She particularly loathes the name she
calls her, that pet name, Li, for Liliane. Sometimes, and this is the worst of it, the grandmother even says, ‘Li, my child.'
She
is the child, and no one else, and her mother is Mummy. No other names. The child thinks there's something odd, inappropriate, about any familiarity between the two women, anything that implies a special connection between them. And specifically, recently, the conversations from which she, the child, is excluded.

But what she especially hates, what she can't abide, is that her grandmother is a liar. Her grandmother lied to her once, and this the child has never forgotten.

The mother lied too that time. But that doesn't matter. It's not the same. The child doesn't resent her mother for it.

It feels like a long time ago. She can't really tell any more. It was in the past. They don't talk about it now.
We're not allowed to talk about it
.

It was an event the child didn't understand. Something very peculiar. That she's never managed to clarify. She still thinks about it sometimes. She settles under the dining-room table and wonders about it.

She was lied to once. There was something she'd seen with her own eyes, and was told she hadn't seen. Told she'd dreamed it. That's what her grandmother and her mother said. They lied. But it mustn't be mentioned again. It's completely forbidden. How angry they were, even her mother. They shouted. Forbidden ever to raise the subject again. The only thing forbidden to this child, who usually does as she pleases.

So she thinks about it, all alone, from time to time. Such a strange, muddled memory, but so clear too. You were dreaming, her mother and grandmother said. No, she wasn't dreaming. She knows
it
did exist. But it now feels so long ago. It's true, it is a bit like a dream.

The thing happened during that glorious, unusual trip to Normandy with her mother and grandmother, an almost make-believe trip – When? How long ago? The child doesn't know, doesn't yet have a sense of duration, dates, calendars – a trip filled with indistinct images, all the more exquisite for their volatility, a garden in the rain, the red splash of tear-shaped flowers, smells of woodsmoke.

It was right in the middle of this wonderful trip that the peculiar scene appeared, incomprehensible and yet infinitely pleasurable, like every other part of it, this would even be its crowning moment, if they hadn't told her it never happened and that they didn't want to hear it mentioned.

It's like a dream,
but it isn't a dream
.

She goes with her grandmother to visit the mother, who, rather surprisingly, is in hospital, in a white room, in a white bed, but she isn't ill, she's smiling. They sit the child down next to the bed, on a chair, beside her
grandmother, who's also on a chair. All at once the door opens: in comes a nurse, carrying a snugly swaddled baby, which she hands to the mother; then, noticing the child, the nurse smiles at her, lifts her nimbly over the bed so she has a better view, and tells her to
look how pretty her little sister is. They're going to have a lot of fun together, aren't they
.

Those words. And then the nurse leaves.

Just for a moment the child saw, wrapped in a blanket, the crumpled red face of a sleeping baby.

Astonishment. Momentary rapturous delight.

But after that, nothing. Afterwards, there's nothing. The child remembers nothing. How her mother behaved, or her grandmother, what they did and said.

Her memories pick up with the journey back to the house in Normandy, the child accompanied only by her grandmother. Her mother stayed in hospital.

‘And the baby?' the child asks. ‘When's she coming? When?'

Silence. The child continues obstinately.

‘When's
my little sister
coming back with Mummy?' she keeps saying.

And from the grandmother: ‘What are you talking about? You've got things wrong. You don't have a little sister. The nurse made a mistake. But your mummy's coming back,
she's
coming back. Soon. She's been a bit ill, that's all.'

Fury from the child, who ploughs on, incredulous. Protests. Persists. In vain.

When, some time later, the mother returns, alone, without a baby, the child bombards them with questions again, obstinate, sure the grandmother misunderstood, didn't know, was lying. But now her mother too is telling her she's wrong, she dreamed it. The child works herself into a state, stamping her feet with rage and hurt, crying. She knows what she saw, doesn't she?

Loathing her grandmother, who's shaking her head inanely.

Towards her mother, the child feels no anger. Just tremendous surprise. The sadness of not being believed. The disappointment of not understanding.

And eventually the child would calm down. Would forget a bit. Would stop asking questions. Besides, she'll be forbidden to mention the whole episode again.

She does think about it from time to time, though, about this oddity. She doesn't know. She no longer knows.

The child often dreams, and sometimes believes she's living something for real. Her dreams can be so beautiful and so powerful. Like the time when she stepped into an astonishing house made of glass, in the middle of a forest. Those colours, that light, those smells… And then she woke up and there was nothing there, no house of glass, no forest, just the grey dining room where she sleeps. And it was this reality that she couldn't immediately believe.

So when are we living and when are we dreaming?

That's complicated enough already. But the child suspects that grown-ups confuse things on purpose. As
her mother and grandmother did, that fateful day, for some obscure reason.

The child is wary of anything that might bring the women closer. Like these recent confabulations, these whispered words, when they think she, the child, can't hear. The mysterious looks they exchange.

This very morning, in fact, the grandmother has just arrived and she's already towing her daughter off towards the window and talking to her in a hushed voice. The mother has that frightened expression the child doesn't like.