Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,61

submerged her.

*

Someone has to die. Someone has to die for us to be happy.

Morbid refrains echo inside Louise’s head when she walks. Phrases that she didn’t invent – and whose meaning she is not sure she fully grasps – fill her mind. Her heart has grown hard. The years have covered it in a thick, cold rind and she can barely hear it beating. Nothing moves her any more. She has to admit that she no longer knows how to love. All the tenderness has been squeezed from her heart. Her hands have nothing left to caress.

I’ll be punished for that, she hears herself think. I’ll be punished for not knowing how to love.

There are photographs of that afternoon. They have not been printed but they exist, somewhere, deep inside an artificial memory. The pictures are mostly of the children. Adam, half-naked, lying in the grass. He is staring absently to the side, with his big blue eyes, his expression almost melancholic despite his tender age. In one of those images, Mila is running down a broad, tree-lined path. She is wearing a white dress with a butterfly design. She is barefoot. In another photo, Paul is carrying Adam on his shoulders and Mila in his arms. Myriam is behind the lens. Her husband’s face is blurred, his smile hidden by one of Adam’s little feet. Myriam laughs too; she doesn’t think to ask them to keep still. To stop wriggling for a moment. ‘Please? I’m trying to take a picture.’

She is fond of these photographs, though. She takes hundreds of them and looks at them in melancholy moments. In the metro, between two meetings, sometimes even during a meal, she scrolls through portraits of her children. She also believes it is her duty as a mother to immortalise these instants, to possess the proof of past joys. One day she will be able to show them to Mila or Adam. She will recount her memories and the image will awaken old sensations, details, an atmosphere. She has always been told that children are just an ephemeral happiness, a fleeting vision, a restlessness. An eternal metamorphosis. Round faces that are gradually imbued with seriousness without us even realising. So, every chance she gets, she looks at her children from behind the screen of her iPhone. For her, those small beings are the most beautiful landscape in the world.

Paul’s friend Thomas invited them to spend the day at his country house. He goes there, alone, to write songs and nurse his alcoholism. Thomas keeps ponies at the bottom of his garden. Picture-book ponies, with short legs and hair as blonde as an American actress. A little stream runs through the vast garden, whose borders even Thomas doesn’t know. The children eat lunch on the grass. The parents drink rosé and in the end Thomas puts the box of wine on the table and helps himself to glass after glass. ‘We’re among friends, aren’t we? Let’s just get stuck in.’

Thomas has no children, and it doesn’t even cross Paul or Myriam’s mind to bother him with their worries about the nanny, the kids’ education or family holidays. During this beautiful May day, they forget their anxieties. Their preoccupations appear to them as they are: minor everyday concerns, mere vagaries. All they think about now is the future, their plans, their ripening happiness. Myriam is sure that Pascal will ask her to become a partner in September. She will be able to choose her cases, delegate the drudgery to interns. Paul looks at his wife and his children. He thinks to himself that the hardest work is over, that the best is yet to come.

They spend a glorious day running around and playing. The children ride ponies and feed them apples and carrots. They pull weeds from what Thomas calls the vegetable garden, even though not a single vegetable has ever grown there. Paul grabs a guitar and makes everyone laugh. Then everyone falls silent when Thomas sings and Myriam harmonises. The children stare wide-eyed at these calm adults singing in a language that they don’t understand.

When it’s time to go home, the children howl in protest. Adam throws himself on the ground and refuses to leave. Mila, who is also exhausted, sobs in Thomas’s arms. Almost as soon as they’re inside the car, the children fall asleep. Myriam and Paul are silent. They watch the fields of rapeseed lying stunned in the fawn sunset that paints the motorway rest areas, the industrial