Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,60

don’t care about the contours of our world. They can guess at its harshness, its darkness, but they don’t want to know anything more. Louise tells them about it and they turn away. She holds their hands, crouches down so they are at the same level, but already they are looking elsewhere: they’ve seen something. They’ve found a game that gives them an excuse not to hear. They don’t pretend to feel sorry for those less fortunate than them.

She sits next to Mila. The little girl is squatting on a chair, drawing pictures. She is capable of staying focused on her sheets of paper and her pile of felt-tip pens for nearly an hour. She colours the picture carefully, attentive to the smallest details. Louise likes to sit next to her, to watch as the colours are spread over the paper. She observes, in silence, the blooming of giant flowers in the garden of an orange house where people with long hands and tall, slender bodies sleep on the lawn. Mila leaves no empty spaces. Clouds, flying cars, hot-air balloons fill the densely shimmering sky.

‘Who’s that?’ Louise asks.

‘That?’ Mila puts her finger on a huge, smiling figure, lying on the lawn and covering more than half of the page. ‘That’s Mila.’

Louise can no longer find any consolation in the children. The stories she tells them get stuck in a rut and Mila points this out to her. The mythical creatures have lost their vivacity, their splendour. Now her characters have forgotten what they are fighting for, and her tales are just descriptions of long, broken, confused wanderings, impoverished princesses, sick dragons; selfish soliloquies that the children don’t understand and of which they soon grow weary. ‘Think of something else,’ Mila begs her, but Louise can’t. She is sinking into her own words as into quicksand.

Louise doesn’t laugh as much any more. She puts less enthusiasm into their pillow fights and games of ludo. And yet she adores these two children, whom she spends hours observing. It’s enough to make her cry sometimes, the looks they give her when they want her approval or her help. Most of all, she loves the way Adam looks around at her, wanting her to notice his improvements, his joys, to show her that in everything he does there is something that is meant for her, and her alone. She would like to drink in their innocence, their excitement, until she is intoxicated. She would like to see through their eyes when they look at something for the first time, when they understand the logic of a mechanism, expecting it to repeat itself infinitely without ever thinking of the weariness that will one day slow it down.

All day long Louise leaves the television on. She watches apocalyptic news reports, idiotic shows, games whose rules she doesn’t fully understand. Since the terrorist attacks, Myriam has forbidden her to let the children watch television. But Louise doesn’t care. Mila knows she must not tell her parents what she has seen. That she mustn’t say the words ‘hunt’, ‘terrorist’, ‘killed’. The child watches the news in rapt silence. Then, when she’s had enough, she turns to her brother. They play, they fight. Mila pushes him against the wall and the little boy turns red before retaliating.

Louise does not look round. She stays where she is, eyes glued to the screen, her body completely immobile. The nanny refuses to go to the park. She doesn’t want to talk to the other women or see the old neighbour, whom she humiliated herself with by offering her services. The children get cranky and pace around the apartment. They beg her: they want to go outside, to play with their friends, to buy a chocolate waffle at the top of the street.

The children’s cries irritate her; she’s ready to scream too. The children’s nagging whines, their foghorn voices, their ‘why?’s, their selfish desires seem to split her skull. ‘When is tomorrow?’ Mila asks, hundreds of times. Louise can’t sing a song without them begging her to do it again; they want the eternal repetition of everything – stories, games, funny faces – and Louise can’t stand it any more. She has no patience now for their tears, their tantrums, their hysterical excitement. Sometimes she wants to put her fingers round Adam’s neck and squeeze until he faints. She shakes her head to get rid of these thoughts. She manages to stop thinking about it, but a dark and slimy tide has completely