Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,59
self-control, bourgeois manners, that she is capable of a thoughtfulness beyond her age. Louise orders another glass of wine. While she drinks, she watches Mila stare at the television screen, and she can make out, very clearly, her mother’s features beneath the mask of childhood. Those innocent, little-girl gestures are the bud containing the woman’s edginess, the boss’s severity.
The Chinese man picks up the empty glasses and the half-full plate. He puts the bill – scribbled on a scrap of graph paper – on the table. Louise doesn’t move. She waits for the time to pass, for the sky outside to grow darker; she thinks about Paul and Myriam, enjoying their time alone, about the empty apartment, the meal she left for them on the table. They’ve eaten by now, she imagines, standing up in the kitchen, the way they used to do before the children were born. Paul pours his wife more wine and finishes his own glass. His hand slides over Myriam’s skin and they laugh. That’s the kind of people they are: they laugh with love, with desire, shameless.
At last Louise stands up. They leave the restaurant. Mila is relieved. Her eyelids are heavy; she wants to go to bed now. In his pushchair, Adam has fallen asleep. Louise straightens his blanket. As soon as night falls, the winter cold returns from its hiding place, sneaking under their clothes.
Louise holds the little girl’s hand, and for a long time they walk through city streets where all the other children have disappeared. In the Grands Boulevards, they pass theatres and packed cafés. They head down streets that become ever darker and narrower, sometimes emerging into a little square where young people lean against bins, smoking joints.
Mila does not recognise these streets. A yellow glow illuminates the pavements. To her, these houses, these restaurants seem very far from home and she looks up at Louise with anxious eyes. She waits for a reassuring word. A surprise, perhaps? But Louise just keeps walking and walking, breaking her silence only to mutter: ‘Come on – aren’t you coming?’ The little girl twists her ankles on the cobblestones. Her stomach is racked with anxiety. She feels sure that, if she complained, it would only make things worse. She senses that a tantrum would do no good. In Rue Montmartre, Mila observes the girls smoking outside bars, the girls in high heels, who shout too loud, causing the bar owner to bark at them: ‘Shut up, will you? We’ve got neighbours here.’ Mila is completely lost; she doesn’t know if this is even the same city, if she can see her house from here, if her parents know where she is.
Abruptly, Louise stops in the middle of a busy street. She glances up, parks the pushchair next to a wall and asks Mila: ‘What flavour do you want?’
Behind the counter a man waits wearily for the child to make up her mind. Mila is too small to see the trays of ice cream, so she stands on tiptoes and then answers nervously: ‘Strawberry.’
One hand holding Louise’s, the other gripping her cone, Mila walks back the way they’ve come through the darkness of the night, licking her ice cream, which gives her a terrible headache. She squeezes her eyes shut to make the pain go away, trying to concentrate on the taste of crushed strawberries and the little pieces of fruit that get stuck between her teeth. Inside her empty stomach, the ice cream falls in heavy flakes.
They take the bus home. Mila asks if she can put the ticket in the machine, as she does whenever they take the bus together. But Louise shushes her. ‘We don’t need a ticket at night. Don’t worry about it.’
*
When Louise opens the door of the apartment, Paul is lying on the sofa. He is listening to a record, eyes closed. Mila rushes over to him. She jumps in his arms and buries her frozen face in her father’s neck. Paul pretends to tell her off for coming home so late, going out and having fun at a restaurant, like a big girl. Myriam, he tells them, took a bath and went to bed early. ‘She was exhausted by work. I didn’t even see her.’
A sudden melancholy chokes Louise. So all that was for nothing. She is cold, her legs ache, she spent the last of her cash, and Myriam didn’t even wait for her husband before she went to sleep.
She feels alone with the children. Children