Her Father's Daughter (3 page)

The child, who was sitting thinking under the dining-room table, immediately pops out and comes to prowl around them, and the old woman turns to her irritably and shoos her away.

‘You again, nosy parker! Run along and play. Leave us alone for a minute.' And as the child doesn't do as she's told… ‘Go and play, I said! Oh, honestly. This is all going to change, you'll see. When your father comes home, you'll have to toe the line!'

The mother says nothing. Silent, thoughtful, miles away, not even looking at her child, her daughter. Strangeness surrounds the mother completely.

Furious, the child withdraws to the corridor. There on a chair she finds her grandmother's black overcoat and her handbag. She empties the bag onto the floor. And tramples all over its contents.

What's going on in this house? What's making time drag by so slowly all of a sudden? Why are words spoken so quietly and how come noises are so hushed?

In their grey apartment, where the grandmother is gaining a foothold, now coming every day, it feels as if time has stopped. Weighty, crushing the child who was once so light, so free with her mother, so happy alone with her. The child sang and danced and drew and laughed. And her mother laughed along with her.

Now, though, there's no laughter to be heard.

At the moment the mother and grandmother are conferring, a little way away.

The white faces of worried women. Whisperings. Desultory gestures. Interrupted movements. Waiting. But nothing happens.

The child starts to sing in the silence, but keeps her ears open.

And now, through her singing, she hears perfectly clearly. Those words again. Her father's coming home. Soon. This week. Straight away?

She behaves as if nothing's happened. Carries on singing.

The two women have stopped talking. They're now both gazing at her in silence. For the first time the child thinks they look alike.

Something not unlike fear has come into the room.

Days of this peculiar waiting go by. Nothing happens, but you can feel that everything's about to change, soon, any minute.

This time they explain to the child more clearly that the war isn't yet completely over, but that her father, who's ill, will be coming home, in a special convoy, with other prisoners who are also ill.

‘What's wrong with him?'

The mother says she doesn't really know. All she's received is an official document. No direct news. No letter from the father. Apparently he's had pneumonia; apparently his nerves aren't good either. That's all she knows. The army have told her he's being sent home urgently. That was all.

‘When's he coming back?'

‘Soon, my darling, soon.'

‘When?'

The child would find out nothing else today. But she would ask plenty more questions. In vain.

She wanders around her little domain, which has
become slightly unfamiliar, draws half-heartedly on her favourite wall, watches what's going on around her, listens, lurks, alert to anything that might supply an answer to her concerns.

‘Mummy?'

‘What, my darling?'

‘No, nothing…'

How pale she is, her mother, how pretty she is as she studies herself in the mirror now, with that anxious, darting expression, contemplating an eyebrow with a delicate tilt of her head, lifting a lock of hair with one finger.

‘Wait, Mummy, I'll brush your hair,' the child says.

She fetches a hairbrush and a comb, makes her mother sit on the edge of the bed, then climbs up behind her and starts untangling her curly hair, slowly, tenderly. Then, abandoning the brush, she dives her little hands voluptuously into that black mane, again and again.

In the end she puts her arms around her mother's neck, presses her face to the nape and asks very softly, ‘Will you still love me?'

‘You dotty little thing! Of course I'll still love you!'

‘More than him?'

‘Who do you mean, him?'

The mother's momentarily forgotten, then understands.

‘You mean your daddy?… But it's not the same. You're a little girl…'

‘But even so… Will you love me more than him?'

Why does the mother now look so sad, so tired?

‘If you like, yes. I'll love you more than him.'

The child is satisfied with this assertion, for now.

At last the evening comes when, as she puts her to bed, the mother kisses her child in a ceremonious way. Looks at her. Says nothing. This time, the child thinks, her heart beating hard, she's going to tell me. She's going to tell me now.
He's coming
.

And sure enough, that's what this is about. The mother tells the child that a convoy of prisoners has reached Paris, that her father is in hospital and they'll go to see him tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.

The child says nothing, gripped by the enormity of this news, however anticipated it was, terrified by the imminence of things. She fiddles agitatedly with her mother's hand, a limp, passive white hand. She tries with all her might to picture what's about to happen. She doesn't hear what her mother's saying, in her soft voice, leaning over her, like when she tries to get her to sleep, speaking right up close to her. She can't see her face, her eyes, just her cheeks, the grain of the skin on her cheeks, and those cheeks suddenly look very full to her, odd. She touches them so her
fingers can re-establish the soft feel of them, the truth of them.

The mother and child stay like that in silence.

‘Are you pleased, my darling?' the mother asks eventually. ‘You're going to see your little daddy tomorrow.'

‘He's not little,' the child protests, her words whispered.

‘Yes he is, my darling, it's an expression, you'll see how young and kind he is…'

The child grabs her mother by the neck and, still speaking softly, asks whether just this evening she can sleep with her in the big bed where very soon, she knows, someone else will lie.

Granted. The mother takes the child through to her room, the child who will sleep, right through till morning, curled up against her mother.

And now, this morning, this March morning, here they are running, the mother and the child, running towards the Métro station. They're off to see the father. This experience is happening at last. This adventure.

With one hand the mother keeps hold of the child, with the other she's carrying a big box from Printemps department store, and it keeps bashing against her legs. Inside it there are civilian clothes for her husband, clothes which, till now, were stowed away in the wardrobe, clothes the child has never seen.

She herself, the child, has been dressed very carefully. She's been put into her prettiest dress, the green velvet one with smocking and a lace collar. An attempt has been made to curl her hair, but it didn't work. Anyway, she's wearing shoes of black patent leather and white ankle socks.

As for her mother, she's looking very pretty, she's done her make-up beautifully, done her hair beautifully, and she's dug out her navy-blue jacket and a white blouse. The child preferred the low-cut red dress, but
the mother didn't want that. Nevertheless, the result is lovely, and the child told her mother so, which seemed to please her.

They're walking as quickly as they can, because they're now late. Visiting time is eleven o'clock, we'll never get there, says the mother. Flights of stairs in the Métro station at top speed.

Waiting on the platform with her mother, holding her mother's hand, the child sees the huge underground train arriving, its carriages following the curve of the tunnel as it draws in to the station. Strangely, this is the detail she will remember from that day, the image of those carriages solemnly cornering behind the leading car. The image of her anguish.

Now, sitting facing one another as they travel towards the unknown, the child and her mother look at each other. They're emotional, for different reasons, each in her own way, each lost in her own thoughts. Soon the child turns away towards the window and, without seeing it, gazes at the grey walls of the tunnel on which, here and there, the bright colours of an advertising hoarding blaze at her – letters spelling out in yellow and blue
Dubo-Dubon-Dubonnet
, or the jolly face and bouncy white body of the Michelin Man, a funny figure who used to make her laugh. But today she doesn't even look at him.

‘Only five more stops,' her mother whispers. She's holding the Printemps box on her lap, and the child notices that her hands are shaking.

And now all of a sudden the lights have gone out and, with a lurch that piles the standing passengers into each other, the train stops abruptly. A long screech, then nothing. They're in total darkness. Engine off.

At first there's a heavy silence, then exclamations came from every direction in the dark; eventually there's a hubbub of voices in every direction. Someone's shouting that there must be bombing overhead. Someone else mentions a strike.

‘Oh, God,' mutters the mother, ‘and we're already so late!'

A voice comes through a loudspeaker, asking the passengers to stay calm.

A woman screams that she wants to get off.

The mother drops the box to the floor and takes the child on her lap.

The child, just for a moment, is filled with irrational hope: there in the dark, as she huddles against her mother, she thinks something extraordinary is happening and that it might spare her from going to see her father.

But then a ghostly conductor appears with a lamp in his hand: ladies and gentlemen, it's just a power cut. The passengers will have to get to the next station on foot, walking over the ballast, along the tunnel.

Everyone's shouting. People lunge for the doors in the half-dark.

The child will always remember that precise moment, that stampede for the doors, how strange it was climbing down from the carriage onto the ballast, such a long
way down, it seemed to her, in the dark tunnel: people help her mother get down with her box, while she, the child, is carried and handed to her mother.

The memory stops there. With that extraordinary hope, quickly shattered, that nothing's happening. That she could avoid the father. And then this descent in the dark.

Of walking over the stones she has no recollection at all, nor of reaching the next stop, emerging from the Métro station, seeing daylight again, nor the long trek through the streets all the way to the hospital – because it turns out that they do have to go there. Too tired, too emotional perhaps. Did her mother carry her, in one arm, with the box in the other?

The child reduced to such a helplessly little child again.

It is probably late, too late perhaps, when they reach the hospital. He must be so desperate to see us, says the mother, hurry up, and now the child is trotting along, clinging to her mother while she, the mother, still clutches the Printemps box, which is also looking pretty tired. The mother is rather flushed, her hair slightly awry, the child's shoes no longer shine.

They are directed to a room on an upper floor, at the end of a corridor with doors to other rooms, where the child glimpses rows of beds and men's faces. Rows and rows of beds and faces. It could just as easily be here, this one, now, but it's never this one. There are still more. The father could be in any one of these rooms, he could be any one of these men. The father could be anybody.

At last they really are there, this is the right room, the one with the right number over it, the one where they should find the right father.

All nerves, the mother and child step hand in hand into the large white room filled with the harsh light of tall parallel windows to the right and left towering over two
rows of beds, lots of beds, so many beds, the full length of the room. And on every bed a man, sitting or lying, awake or asleep, young or old, it depends, they come in every variety here. Which one's her father? This one or that one? The child will soon know. And now she's the one dragging her mother, who's become peculiarly heavy. The child thinks she'll be able to identify him without any help, all by herself. As she walks past these men in their beds, she stares at them like an inspector: it's not this fat man sitting here, stooped, slightly balding, playing cards with a neighbour, not the neighbour either, such an old man; nor this tall, thin man with dishevelled black hair, reading his newspaper; or this one who's so ill all he can do is lie there with his eyes closed like a corpse; could it be this young man smiling up into her eyes?

But her mother has stopped beside a bed in the other row, a bed that, in her speculations about possible fathers, the child didn't notice: in it is a very thin man with a gaunt face, not very old, but not young either; he's sitting up in bed looking at them with a peculiar smile, a slightly nervous smile. The child eventually recognizes the face from the photographs. There. It's him. It's her father. And yet it's someone else.

The child is out of her depths in this mystery.

She's being spoken to. She doesn't hear. Curiously, she's the one the stranger speaks to first, his words disconcertingly formal. But what it is he's saying, she
doesn't grasp. The words, the voice, the tone are not things she knows. Not things she recognizes. Too unfamiliar.

‘Good afternoon, young lady… Hello, France!' says the man who is her father, while, to the child's horror, one of his hands pulls the mother close to him, quite simply brings her to him, sits her down on the edge of the bed, right beside him, puts an arm round her, without speaking to her, and the mother lets her head drop onto that shoulder without speaking either, and she buries her face in it, and the child sees that her eyes are full of tears. But it's all happening so quickly now that the child can't see or understand everything. Just details.