Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,37

a pleasant inn, a fire crackling in the hearth. They sit near the window, and shafts of dazzling sunlight shine on the children’s pink cheeks. Mila is talkative and she makes the adults laugh with her silliness. Adam, for once, eats heartily.

That evening Myriam and Paul take the exhausted children up to their bedroom. Mila and Adam are calm, their limbs weak, their souls filled with happiness and new discoveries. The parents linger near them. Paul sits on the floor and Myriam on the edge of Mila’s bed. She gently tucks her in, caresses her hair. For the first time in a long time, Myriam and Paul sing a lullaby together. They learned the words to it when Mila was born and they used to sing it to her in a duet when she was a baby. The children’s eyes are closed, but the grown-ups keep singing for the pleasure of accompanying their dreams. So they don’t have to leave them.

Paul doesn’t dare say this to his wife but, that night, he feels relieved. Since coming to his parents’ house, a weight seems to have lifted from his chest. Half-asleep, numb with cold, he thinks about going back to Paris. He imagines his apartment as an aquarium invaded by rotting seaweed, an airless pit where animals with balding fur prowl endlessly, groaning.

Back home, these dark thoughts are quickly forgotten. In the living room, Louise has arranged a bouquet of dahlias. Dinner is ready, the sheets smell clean. After a week in freezing beds, eating chaotic meals at the kitchen table, they are happy to return to their family comforts. It would be impossible, they think, to manage without her. They react like spoiled children, like purring cats.

A few hours after Paul and Myriam’s departure, Louise retraces her footsteps and goes back up Rue d’Hauteville. She enters the Massés’ apartment and opens the shutters that Myriam had closed. She changes all the sheets, empties the cupboards and dusts the shelves. She shakes out the old Berber rugs that Myriam refuses to get rid of, and hoovers the floors.

Her chores accomplished, she sits on the sofa and dozes. She doesn’t leave the apartment all week and spends each day in the living room, with the television on. She never sleeps in Paul and Myriam’s bed. She lives on the sofa. In order not to spend any money, she eats whatever she finds in the fridge and makes a start on the reserves in the pantry; Myriam probably has no idea what’s in there anyway.

Cookery programmes give way to the news, game shows, reality TV shows, a talk show that makes her laugh. She falls asleep in front of a true-crime show called Enquêtes Criminelles. One evening she watches an episode about a man found dead in a house on the outskirts of a small mountain town. The shutters were closed for months, the letterbox was overflowing, and yet no one wondered what had become of the house’s owner. It was only when the neighbourhood was being evacuated that some firemen finally opened the door and discovered the corpse. The body was practically mummified, due to the cold, stale air. Several times the voiceover mentions that it was possible to calculate the date of the man’s death only because of some yoghurts found in the fridge that were several months past their expiration date.

*

One afternoon Louise wakes with a start. She had been in one of those sleeps so heavy that they leave you feeling sad, disorientated, your stomach full of tears. A sleep so deep, so dark, that you see yourself dying, that you wake up soaked with cold sweat, paradoxically exhausted. In a panic, she sits up, slaps her own face. Her head aches so badly that she can hardly open her eyes. She can almost hear the sound of her heart thudding. She looks for her shoes. She slips on the floorboards, weeps with rage. She is late. The children will be waiting for her; the school will call; the nursery will notify Myriam of her absence. How could she have fallen asleep? How could she have been so careless? She has to leave, she has to run, but she can’t find the apartment keys. She looks everywhere and finally spots them by the fireplace. In the stairway, the front door bangs shut behind her. Outside, she has the feeling that everyone is staring at her and she sprints along the streets, out of breath, like a madwoman. She puts