Her Father's Daughter by Marie Sizun Page A

lights, the smells. Following in her father’s wake, the child gamely steps further into this strange world, amid the hubbub of voices, the clink of cutlery and the bright newness of the lighting.
    Meanwhile, her father’s heading straight for one of the tables, by the window. A small table covered with a white tablecloth like the others. Now, there’s a lady sitting at this particular table, a lady who’s looking at the child and smiling.
    â€˜France,’ the father says, ‘I’d like to introduce you to a friend: Agnès.’
    The child is taken aback. She doesn’t understand. He must have got this wrong. She stands next to her father and stares at this stranger, this pretty, young, blonde, nicely made-up, well-dressed, smiling stranger. And everything happens very quickly. The father gets the child to sit down, sits down himself. He takes the chair facing the woman; the child is in the middle, between them. The father says something. What? The child doesn’t know. The lady carries on smiling with her pretty lips, smoothed over with dazzling red, and her pretty teeth. She just won’t stop smiling, her eyes on the father one moment and the child the next. And the father, well, he just won’t stop talking. The child doesn’t grasp, doesn’t hear what he’s saying.
    The waiter comes to take their order and the child can’t tear her eyes away from this woman with her perpetual smile. But now the lady’s talking, the redlips are moving very quickly. Her voice is soft, musical, pleasing – and yet the child can’t make out any words. Actually, what was the question her mother told her to ask?
    In fact she, the child, is the one who’s being asked something. When it comes to questions, it’s the lady who’s doing the asking, leaning towards her slightly: Does this big girl go to school yet, then? Of course not, of course she doesn’t go to school, the child mutters inwardly, giving just a shake of her head in reply. Not bored all on her own? What a thought. The child shakes her head furiously.
    She’s so sweet! Shame she’s lost her tongue… Or hasn’t she? Has she?
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    The conversation falters. Or rather is reduced to an exchange between the lady and the child’s father, over her head, given they’re facing each other, as her father and mother used to before, the child now thinks. But here, is it because of the noise, in order to talk and hear each other, these two lean slightly closer together over the table, which is so narrow that it wouldn’t take much for their heads to touch. And with them there are no arguments.
    Their food arrives. The child has no idea what she’s eating. She’ll never know. But what she does know is that it’s not going down.
    â€˜Eat up, then,’ says her father, as he used to at home; and it feels very funny to the child, those same words,words she hasn’t heard for a long time. But what’s changed is that he’s saying them very gently. Not angry at all.
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    And now the question she’s meant to ask comes back to her all of a sudden. What if I asked now? thinks the child. But just then she sees something, something that catches her attention, something extraordinary.
    There across the table, her father’s hand, the big rust-speckled hand she knows so well, the giraffe-hand, the hand that belongs to her, the child, has just come down over that small, elegant white hand with the red nail varnish which was resting meekly next to the plate: the lady’s hand.
    Time stands still.
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    The child won’t remember anything of the rest of the meal, nor how it ended. Anything of what was said, what happened, what was eaten or what she herself didn’t eat. Oh, it doesn’t matter, leave it, it’s all right … Yes, her father said those words, very sweetly, that much she does remember. You’d think nothing matters any more for the