Her Father's Daughter Read Free

much less interesting than their daughters and their sons, who are brimming with courage, spirit and good looks.
    And then there are animal stories in the children’s books that the child leafs through, looking at the pictures while the mother reads the words out to her: the generations are respected and fathers, be they dogs, horses or bears, are clearly represented; like in the story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, which keeps bombarding you with the triad of Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear and Baby Bear until you’ve completely understood, little children, that a normal family is made up of a father, a mother and a child. But the child isn’t at all convinced. She still thinks Daddy Bear comes across as incongruous in the story, too heavy, too big.
    Of course you can see images of human fathers, proper, realistic, instructive pictures of fathers, in advertising posters in the streets and the Métro. Those big pictures pasted onto the walls of Métro stations, showing smiling families sitting at a table together around a pot of hearty soup or a semolina pudding, which the child happens to loathe. And in the middle, tall, well dressed, closely shaven and smiling twice as much, is the father. An enigma.
    When she looks at the photographs of her own father – casually, slightly at arm’s length, as if almost afraid ofburning her fingers – she gets only a vague impression of him. These photos are images of a past she doesn’t know, of no importance to her. Her mother perseveres, puts a wedding photo in the child’s hand: in it she, the mother, is in a white dress on the arm of a smiling young man, by the door of a church; and look, my darling, he’s so handsome in this one, when the child sees only a soldier in uniform, a stranger with empty eyes; or this one then, one the mother’s just found of a couple, sweethearts dancing at a party, and the young woman is her mother, the young man, her father. But I can’t really see, says the child.
    On the other hand, the one in which you can see him best, really ‘him’, is the larger photograph under glass that always stands on the sideboard in the dining room, a photograph devoted entirely to his face.
    A picture she no longer even notices because it’s there before her eyes every day.
    And ever since those words evoking a possible return were spoken, those terribly peculiar and disturbing words, it is this portrait that the child has taken to studying surreptitiously every time she passes it. Scrutinizing it in great detail when she is alone. The image of the stranger who’s going to come here, to live here with her mother and her, no one knows when, but soon.
    She thinks he looks sad and stern. And yet he doesn’t look old. It’s his eyes that worry the child, eyes loaded with unknown thoughts, eyes that have never seen her, the child, eyes that aren’t looking at her either, but arestaring past her at something else, someone else. It’s this stranger’s stare that frightens her.
    Your father’s coming home . As if she were already subjected to that stare.
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    In the meantime, the child tries to behave as if nothing has changed. She plays under the dining-room table; you can’t see the picture from there. She runs through the apartment singing at the top of her lungs. She uses any excuse to throw her arms around her mother’s neck and kiss her dementedly.
    â€˜The child’s becoming completely insufferable,’ the grandmother says.
    The mother smiles without a word, her pretty, sad smile that seems to understand everything.

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    The grandmother says the child is badly brought up. In fact the child hasn’t been brought up at all: because, with her mother’s backing, under her mother’s adoring eye, she does almost whatever she wants, says what she wants and eats what she wants when she wants. The child is well aware that the mother and grandmother