Her Father's Daughter by Marie Sizun Page A

now, her father said. Armed with a pencil, she starts methodically marking every page with her usual signs.
    And yet, couched within her victory is the sadness, the anxiety, at feeling that roughened broken cover with her little fingers.

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    The child so desperately wants to get the facts straight that an odd idea comes into her head one day. She can see that it’s Li the father’s angry with, it’s because of Li that everything’s going wrong. The child convinces herself she needs to show her father just how well she, the child, his child, understands him. If she wants to be in favour with him.
    One evening when they are arguing, without even taking the precaution of shutting themselves away to do their shouting, the child thinks she sees a way. This time she can show clearly which side she’s on.
    While they shout and as good as come to blows, the child sneaks into the bedroom. On the dressing table is a boxed set of perfumes – three exquisite bottles – that the father gave to Li shortly after he came home. Prestigious white casing, finely edged with gold lines. The perfumer’s name inscribed in black letters. The child traces its magnificent outline with her finger.
    Perfectly obvious the mother no longer deserves it.
    The child opens the box, respectfully, reverently. Hesitates a moment. Makes up her mind. Takes the stopper from one of the bottles. Inhales swooningly. Empties the contents into the basin. Repeats the procedure with the other two.
    The smell must be so penetrating, with the three perfumes unleashed, that the door opens. Li comes in. Screams. The child’s father appears, understands immediately.
    The child watches him and him alone. Ashen, silent, frozen. At last he comes over to her. Still a moment of doubt, of hesitation? But no, he slaps the child, calmly and hard, to the right, then the left, that way he does. Like before. Like when he didn’t love her.
    â€˜Put her straight to bed without any supper,’ he says coldly to his wife.
    The child doesn’t shed a single tear. Too stunned. It’s her mother who’s crying, as usual.
    Later, in bed, the child hears the door to the landing slam. Her father’s gone out. He’ll be back later.
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    For a long time the apartment would still have the persistent smell of that evening.

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    Another evening, an evening when the father and mother had had a particularly vehement row, without even really shouting, but with hard, definitive little sentences, with nasty glowering looks that the child knows well, the father went out alone again.
    That was when this surprising thing happened: the mother came to look for the child and sat her on her lap for the first time in a very long time. The child didn’t move, waiting. And the mother talked to her gently, almost calmly, without crying.
    â€˜You know, my darling, your father may leave. Leave for good. He won’t stay with us.’
    â€˜Oh,’ the child said simply.
    The mother started kissing her, saying sweet nothings to her, as she used to. The child received her attention passively, her thoughts elsewhere.
    Her mother does talk nonsense.
    *
    And, letting herself down from her mother’s lap, the child went off along the corridor singing very loudly, stamping her feet on the floor, the way she’d seen soldiers do.

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    In this confusion, though, there would still be Christmas, there would still be that day. The first Christmas the child would spend with her father, and it was to be the only one. But that she didn’t yet know.
    No memories in the child’s mind of previous Christmases. Perhaps she was too young. Perhaps also – because of the war, the lack of money, the loneliness and plenty of other factors – the festivities had been more or less skipped.
    But this time there is a Christmas.
    The child wakes one morning to the surprising smell of the fir tree that’s been brought into