Her Father's Daughter (6 page)

The conversation trails off. The father hasn't even looked up. He's listening to the radio.

He just gestures to the child to be quiet. A very gentle gesture, very kind, drawing her close to him with his big hand.

How things are changing now, and how quickly it's happening.

The father has an errand to run in town today. As he heads out he announces that, because it's a nice day today, he might as well take the child with him. The mother is a little surprised, but says nothing.

The child is hastily put into her pretty dress, the one from that first day, from the hospital, and she leaves with her father. Alone with her father. It's the first time. The image of her mother, on the doorstep, watching them go.

Out on the street he doesn't tell the child to walk ahead of him: he takes her hand.

The child doesn't talk, intimidated. He doesn't talk either. But the child, who's watching him, can tell he isn't angry, in fact he looks almost cheerful, an expression she's never seen on his face before.

They take the Métro, the father and the child, the father and his daughter, whose hand he holds in the crowds. There are a lot of people in their carriage, but the father finds two seats, sits the child opposite him as
if she were a grown-up. The child doesn't know what to make of it. The father takes an old Métro ticket from his pocket.

‘Look,' he says.

He folds the ticket lengthways, tears away a bit from near the top-left-hand corner, a bit from near both bottom corners. Then, with a pen, he draws an eye here, some whiskers there, and suddenly the ticket's turned into a dog, one of those funny little short-legged dogs that look like sausages.

‘It's a sausage dog,' says the father. ‘
Dackel
in German. There was one on the farm where I worked.'

The child listens. Doesn't dare ask any questions. Not yet.

‘Make another one,' she asks simply.

The father does. The child laughs.

She will hold those two paper dogs carefully in her hand for the whole outing. And once they're back at home, she'll stow them with her precious things, her personal treasures, strange pictures, old toys.

Later, as an adult, she'll never see a dachshund without recalling this scene. And she'll never forget that German name either.
Dackel
.

Is it because it's summer? Is it because everyone's saying the war really is going to end and the Germans are going to be driven out of Paris? There's something in the air, in the streets, and even sometimes in their apartment, despite the arguments between her father and her mother, a kind of lightness; the child can feel it, she experiences it as a huge relief, a sort of happiness that doesn't yet have a name. The father still frequently gets angry but, interestingly, it's not actually so much with the child now as with his wife. With her, the child, the father's hardly ever angry any more. At least, he doesn't shout any more. It's as if he's found a new voice with her. A voice just for her. The child can tell. She's proud of it.

How long is it since the child hugged her mother? Not only has she stopped reaching to put her arms around her neck and cover her with kisses, as she used to, but when her mother tries to catch her on the hop, grab her when she's running past, the child ducks away, races off laughing, doesn't want to be touched any more.

‘What's come over you, my darling?' the mother asks, bewildered.

‘My name's France,' the child yelps, running to sit at the table.

The father, having heard the exchange, laughs out loud.

‘Look, she's more sensible than you are,' he tells his wife.

The child's delighted.

Now when the three of them go out, the child and her parents, it's the father's hand that the child wants to take. It's his hand that she holds, not letting go once for the whole walk. He accepts this. It even seems to make him proud.

One time, he showed Li the child's tiny hand in his, lifting it slightly and opening its delicate fingers in his own palm, and he said, ‘Have you seen what pretty hands my daughter has?'

In the evenings it's next to her father, sitting on the sofa in that grey room, that the child comes and nestles gently, in silence, like a small pet, a tamed animal, one that's found its master. While this is going on, Li clears the table, does the washing-up. They're alone, the father and his child. He reads his paper. She stays next to him, not moving or speaking. She's thinking. She's mulling over her ideas, her stories. She'd like to talk to him about them, but she can't yet. She doesn't yet know. Later. She'll do it later, she's sure of that.

In the hush, there's the rustle of the newspaper as the father turns the pages and, from the kitchen, the more distant sound of her mother putting things away. The child lets her mind wander. She looks at the big blotched hand holding the newspaper and now finds it beautiful. It looks a bit like a giraffe's skin, she thinks. The child loves giraffes. In her mind she baptizes her father's hands giraffe-hands. But she doesn't dare tell him. That's silly, he would say.

Sometimes they talk too. He folds up his newspaper. She asks her father to tell her a story. He makes one up. Or he talks about things in Germany. Not sad things. Not about what he went through. Never about what he went through any more. But about what he liked. The forest. The birds. The sounds in the evening. The wind at night. The child listens and listens, full of admiration. She'd like to tell him things too. She has so much to say.

The child feels a helpless trust.

One evening, without thinking, quite spontaneously, she calls her father Daddy for the first time.

All these things inside her head, things she thinks are so clever, the ideas and memories and stories she's been mulling over such a long time, she'd dearly like to share them. She'd like to give them to her father.

She's now just waiting for the moment. She knows it will come. That she'll launch into it.

She looks at her father. She looks at him when they cross the street together. She looks at him when she sits
next to him on the sofa. She looks at him when they're sitting up at the table.

She knows for sure she'll talk to him.

It's such glorious weather. Everything seems to have become so easy.

It's at this point that something happens, something that breaks the child's heart: her father has to go back to work. He's so much better now that the doctor pronounces him in good health, physically and mentally, fit for work. He's gone back to his job at the insurance company, his job from before the war. When life was normal. Why? the child asks him. Because I have to. Where do you think money comes from? It makes the father laugh, how naïve the child is.

She still has no concept of money, of material problems. She doesn't understand his going away, leaving her like that, not now that he's her father, his going off all day without her. He seems to be happy, though, he seems glad to be going back to work.

The child is rediscovering the world of before her father. Rediscovering her home as it used to be. But it's as if everything has changed. Disorientated and bored, she wanders around the apartment, which is suddenly empty, pointless, drifting between the mother she's no longer interested in, the mother who actually seems listless, indifferent, and the grandmother, who's now back
with a vengeance, who comes to keep her daughter company during the day, while her son-in-law's away. Her grandmother, who's always busy, feeling important.

Everything's going back to how it used to be and yet nothing's the same.

The conversations between the two women have started again, the whispering and silent nodding. But this complicity, which the child used to loathe, now means nothing to her, barely ruffles her. She thinks about her father. She feels his absence. The grandmother's presence only bothers the child in the sense that she seems to be replacing the father. To have driven him out.

So the child displays her impatience by pulling faces at the old lady, who threatens her exasperatedly: ‘You'll see, I'll tell your father.'

The child doesn't worry about this. She's no longer afraid of her father. Because he's her father.

In fact one time, confronted with both women criticizing her, complaining because she's started singing her old warlike songs again, she's suddenly inspired to snap, ‘And, anyway, you're liars.'

She doesn't really know what makes her say it. Habit. Or perhaps some sort of instinct.

The mother and grandmother stop talking. Look at each other.

The child, who's now singing again, won't say any more on the subject. She's already vanished under the dining-room table. Her refuge.

The child waits for her father. She waits for him the way you can wait as a child, a way you also can later, in love. She knows it will be a long time, but she waits. She knows he'll be back when evening comes. So she listens out for the sound of the lift, the familiar footsteps on the landing, the rattle of the key in the lock.

And the moment he comes in, even though she knows it annoys her mother, and perhaps him too sometimes – but it doesn't, she can tell it doesn't, isn't she his child now? – she rushes over to him, won't stop until she has his full attention, has secured his affection, taken possession of his big hands.

But the best bit is when, after the grandmother has left and the mother's busy in the kitchen, she finally has her father all to herself.

There. She's sitting next to him, snuggled up to him on the big sofa. She doesn't even want him to read the paper. But the news is very exciting at the moment: they're expecting the Allies to arrive any minute and
Paris to be liberated. The father tries to explain it all to the child. But she doesn't want this. She wants to do the talking. She's waited too long.
She
now wants to say things, all sorts of things.

He laughs, her father does, not understanding what's got into the child, whatever's come over her. He thinks it's funny and sweet.

It will be an evening like this when she speaks.

What makes the child speak isn't her jealousy, her ongoing resentment towards her mother. It's not that sort of feeling, she's not old enough for that. It's just the overflowing love she feels for her father, the excessive tenderness and trust, which urges her to give up her most secret thing. To hand it over.

And her admiration for him. The notion that he knows so much. And that
he
speaks the truth. So she's going to ask him the questions no one's ever answered. Those old questions. The ones from the borderline between dreams and reality. That mystery. He must know, surely. He won't be evasive, won't lie like her mother and grandmother.

‘You know, Daddy…'

Perhaps that's how she started. In snatches at first, tentative steps, disconnected snippets. The child isn't very artful. Then it all came out. The old story. That memorable trip. Normandy. The hospital. The nurse. The baby. All of it.

In all likelihood a slow, muddled description, punctuated by her father's questions, indulgent at first, amused and then increasingly urgent, incisive, irritated, brutal.

Then there's a blank, emptiness. Something happened, something the child didn't understand, a sort of cataclysm which turned everything upside down, abruptly turned her father into someone completely different, made him go very pale and say in an altered voice that she's
talking
nonsense
– the very expression the women had used – and made him tell her to shut up, made him shove her aside and get to his feet, and, in a flash, shattered the harmony of that evening.

From that moment on, everything's confused for the child. She'll remember only that she was left on her own, looking mechanically through the pictures in a book that was lying around, so upset she couldn't see anything, while her parents shut themselves away in the kitchen, and from there came the disturbing sounds of an argument, muted at first and then growing more and more violent, an argument in which she could pick out the interwoven patterns of their two voices, her mother's whispering and tearful, and her father's harsh and angry.

No one puts the child to bed that evening. She ends up falling asleep on the sofa, filled with the sadness of having failed to secure an answer to her question and with an obscure, very distant sense of having said the wrong thing.

When the child wakes the next morning, very early, in the bed she must have been carried to while she was asleep, she can tell something's happened. There's an unusual silence in the apartment. Has her father already left this morning? Isn't he having breakfast with them? Everything looks different today… The mother, who's telling the child to get up, has an upside-down face. The face she has on tearful days. She's obviously been crying a lot. She hasn't done her hair, hasn't put on her make-up. She's wearing an old dress, a boring, ugly one. She sits next to the child, on the bed, and explains in a funny-sounding voice, an odd voice, that she won't be able to look after her for a few days, that she's going to take her to her grandmother.

Consternation. The child protests. Why? When? What about the Americans coming to Paris? And other armies too, her father told her, he promised he'd take her to see… he explained it all to her… She wants to see the soldiers, the tanks, everything… It must be soon, her father said…

Her mother says that that's just it, it'll be dangerous, that the grandmother's neighbourhood is quieter. The father will come to fetch the child when it's all over, when Paris has been liberated. When the Germans have left.