Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,62

zones, the grey wind turbines with a touch of poetry.

*

The motorway is blocked by an accident and Paul, who has a particular hatred of traffic jams, decides to take the next exit and return to Paris on a B-road. ‘I just have to follow the GPS.’ They rush down long dark streets lined with ugly bourgeois houses, their shutters closed. Myriam nods off. The leaves of trees shine under the streetlights like thousands of black diamonds. Occasionally she opens her eyes, anxious that Paul, too, might have slipped into a dream. He reassures her and she falls back asleep.

She is woken by the blare of car horns. Eyes half-closed, her brain still fogged by sleep and too much rosé, she does not at first recognise the avenue where they are stuck in traffic. ‘Where are we?’ she asks Paul, who doesn’t reply, who has no idea, and who is busy trying to understand what is blocking them. Myriam turns her head to the side. And she would have fallen back asleep had she not seen – there, on the opposite pavement – the familiar figure of Louise.

‘Look,’ she tells Paul, pointing. But Paul is concentrated on the traffic jam. He is thinking about how to get out of it, perhaps by making a U-turn. He is at a crossroads where the cars, coming from all directions, are no longer moving. Scooters wind between the cars; pedestrians brush past the bonnets. The traffic lights change from red to green in a few seconds. No one moves.

‘Look over there. I think it’s Louise.’

Myriam sits up a bit in her seat to get a better look at the face of the woman walking on the other side of the crossroads. She could lower the window and call out to her, but she would feel ridiculous and the nanny probably wouldn’t hear her anyway. Myriam sees the blonde hair, tied up in a bun at the back of her neck; she recognises Louise’s inimitable gait, agile and trembling. The nanny, it seems to her, is walking slowly, staring at the shop windows. Then she moves out of sight, her slender frame concealed by other pedestrians, disappearing behind a group of people who are laughing and waving their arms around. And she reappears on the other side of the zebra crossing, as if in the faded images of an old film, in a Paris rendered unreal by the darkness. Louise looks incongruous, with her eternal Peter Pan collar and her too-long skirt, like a character that has ended up in the wrong story and is doomed to roam endlessly through a foreign world.

Paul honks the horn furiously and the children are startled awake. He puts his arm through the open window, looks behind him and speeds down a side street, cursing loudly. Myriam wants to calm him down, to tell him that they are not in a rush, that there is no point getting so angry. Nostalgically she continues staring, until the last possible moment, at a chimerical, almost hazy Louise, motionless under a streetlamp, who appears to be waiting for something, at the edge of a frontier that she is about to cross and behind which she will vanish.

*

Myriam sinks into her seat. She looks ahead again, troubled, as if she had just seen a memory, a very old acquaintance, a childhood sweetheart. She wonders where Louise is going, if it was really her, what she was doing there. She would have liked to continue observing her through that window, to watch her live. The fact of having seen her on that pavement, by chance, in a place so far from their usual haunts, makes her desperately curious. For the first time she tries to imagine, in a corporeal sense, everything Louise is when she is not with them.

Hearing his mother pronounce the nanny’s name, Adam, too, had looked through the window.

‘It’s my nanny!’ he shouted, pointing at her, as if unable to understand that she might live elsewhere, alone, that she might walk without pushing a pram or holding a child’s hand. ‘Where is Louise going?’ he asked.

‘She’s going home,’ Myriam replied. ‘To her own house.’

Captain Nina Dorval keeps her eyes open as she lies on her bed in her apartment on Boulevard de Strasbourg. Paris is deserted this rainy August. The night is silent. Tomorrow morning, at 7.30 – the time when Louise used to see the children every day – they will remove the police tape from the apartment on Rue