Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,49

join the group of housewives who had come to observe the monster. Outside the courthouse an immense tent had been put up, where the crowd could watch the trial broadcast live on a giant screen. She stood slightly apart from the others. She didn’t speak to them. She felt uneasy when these red-faced, short-haired women with their close-cut fingernails would greet the van containing the accused with screamed insults and gobs of spit. Myriam, so full of her principles, so rigid sometimes, was fascinated by that spectacle of open hate, by those calls for vengeance.

Myriam takes the metro and reaches the courthouse early. She smokes a cigarette, her fingertips holding the red string that encircles her huge dossier. For more than a month Myriam has been helping Pascal prepare for this trial. The defendant, a twenty-four-year-old man, is accused of committing a hate crime – along with three accomplices – on two Sri Lankan men. Under the influence of alcohol and cocaine, they beat up the two illegal immigrants, who were employed as cooks. They hit them again and again, hit them until one of the men died, hit them until they realised they had got the wrong men; that they had got their darkies mixed up. They weren’t able to explain why. They weren’t able to deny the charge either, as they’d been caught in the act by surveillance cameras.

During the first meeting, the man told his lawyers his life story, an account littered with obvious lies and exaggerations. On the threshold of life imprisonment, he tried to charm Myriam. She did all she could to keep a ‘good distance’. That was the expression that Pascal always used; the basis, he said, of a successful case. She sought to disentangle truth from falsehood, methodically, with the evidence to back her up. In her teacher’s voice, choosing simple but sharp words, she explained that lying was a poor defence technique and that he had nothing to lose now by telling the truth.

For the trial, she bought the young man a new shirt and advised him not to tell his sick jokes, and to wipe that smug smirk off his face. ‘We have to prove that you, too, are a victim.’

Myriam manages to concentrate, and the work allows her to forget her night of horror. She questions the two experts who stand in the dock to talk about her client’s psychological profile. One of the victims gives evidence, with the aid of a translator. The testimony is laborious but the public’s emotion is palpable. The accused keeps his eyes lowered, his face impassive.

*

During a pause in proceedings, while Pascal is on the telephone, Myriam sits in a corridor, staring into space, seized with a sudden panic. She was probably too high-handed in the way she dealt with that issue of Louise’s debts. Out of discretion or indifference, she didn’t look at the letter from the tax office in much detail. She should have kept the documents, she thinks. Dozens of times she asked Louise to bring them to her. To start with, Louise said she had forgotten them, that she’d think about it tomorrow, she promised. Myriam tried to find out more. She questioned her about Jacques, about those debts that seemed to go back years. She asked her if Stéphanie was aware of her difficulties. But these questions, asked in a gentle, understanding voice, elicited nothing from Louise but an impenetrable silence. It’s modesty, Myriam thought. A way of maintaining the frontier between our two worlds. So she gave up trying to help her. She had the awful feeling that her questions were like the lashes of a whip on Louise’s fragile body, that body which for the previous few days had seemed to be turning pale, withering, fading away. In this dark corridor, filled by a nagging murmur of voices, Myriam feels bereft, prey to a deep and heavy exhaustion.

This morning Paul called her back. He was gentle and conciliatory. He apologised for having reacted so stupidly. For not having taken her seriously. ‘We’ll do what you want,’ he told her. ‘In these circumstances, we can’t keep her.’ And, pragmatic, he added: ‘We’ll wait for the summer. We’ll go on holiday, and when we get back we’ll make it clear to her that we don’t really need her any more.’

Myriam replied in a hollow voice, without conviction. She thinks again of how thrilled the children were when they saw the nanny again after she had been ill for a