Chapter 2
The Watch
You’re picking up where you left off.
I was seven and a half the first time, and it was because of a glass of milk.
We had been living on the rue des Tilleuls for a year. My room, at the end of the corridor, he had repainted himself in pale yellow over the summer, because my mother had said a little girl ought to have a bright room. He had said: anything you want, Nadine. He said that a lot, that first year. Anything you want. He had put up a border of rabbits at my eye level, kneeling down to check the height. He had asked me if I liked it. I'd said yes. I did like it.
Maxime was eight months old. He slept in the room next to theirs and cried at night, and my mother would get up, and I would listen through the wall to her bare feet on the floorboards and count her steps to the cot. There were seven. Always seven. I fell asleep on the seventh.
It was a Tuesday in September, the third week of school. I remember because I had a new teacher, Mrs Collignon, who smelled of violets, and I'd been given a gold star sticker for my work and was keeping it in my pencil case to show. I wanted to show it to him. That's the strange part, when I think about it. He was the one I wanted to show it to.
The three of us were at the table, Maxime in his high chair. We were having chicory gratin. I didn't like chicory. I ate it anyway, because at home, before, in my father's time, you ate what there was, and Dad used to say chicory was the bitterness of the Belgians and you had to get used to it young. I can barely remember my father's voice. I remember that sentence.
I reached for the salt. My elbow caught the glass.
The milk went across the tablecloth, a long white tongue that ran to the edge and began to drip onto the tiles, and onto his trousers. One drop. Two. On the left knee of his work trousers, the blue overalls he hadn't taken off yet.
I said sorry. I picked up my napkin to mop it up.
“Leave it,” he said.
He didn't shout. That's the first thing. He never shouted, not once in ten years. People think the ones who hit are the ones who shout, red-faced men, drunk, with veins standing out on their foreheads. You hear those ones coming. You didn't hear him.
“Leave it, Lise.”
I put my napkin down.
He looked at the stain on his knee. He looked at my mother. My mother was up at once; she took the sponge from the sink and said: I'll see to it, Roger, it's nothing, it's only milk. He said: sit down, Nadine. She sat down.
And then he undid his watch.
I didn't know what it meant. I want to be clear about that: at seven and a half, at that moment, I didn't know.
I watched him with curiosity, the way you watch a grown-up doing something you don't understand. He had a steel watch with a midnight-blue face and a little window that showed the date. He wore it all the time, even on building sites, even on Sundays. He slid the clasp open with his thumb, unfolded the strap, took the watch off his wrist and laid it on the table in front of his plate, flat, face up, the strap open on either side like the two arms of a little man lying on his back.
He put it down gently. He even straightened the strap with one finger so that it lay perfectly straight.
The date window said 14.
“Stand up,” he said.
I stood up.
“Come here.”
I went to him. ‘Here’ was next to his chair. I took four steps. I counted them without knowing I was counting them; it was the first time I had counted for a reason, and I have never stopped since.
I'm not going to tell what happened next the way you'd tell a film. I'm going to tell what I kept, and what you keep at seven isn't what you'd think.
I didn't keep the pain. I know it was there. I know the slap threw me against the sideboard and the corner of the sideboard split my scalp behind my left ear, because I still have the scar, a white line two centimetres long under my hair that the hairdresser finds every time and brushes with his fingertips, saying oh, sorry. I know there was a second slap, then something heavier, his closed fist perhaps, in my back, between the shoulder blades, where it doesn't show. I know it. I don't remember it.
What I kept was the watch.
While it went on, I had my cheek against the tiles and I could see the table from underneath, the chair legs, Maxime's high chair with his little socks kicking the air, and, above the edge of the tablecloth, a piece of the steel strap sticking out. It gleamed. The ceiling light struck it. And I could hear the second hand. That's impossible, I know. You can't hear a quartz watch from a metre away, not in a kitchen, not with a baby starting to scream. But I heard it. I still hear it. Tick. Tick. Tick. Sixty a minute. You can count on it.
I counted.
I counted up to a hundred and fourteen. I don't know what a hundred and fourteen stood for. I know that when it was over I was at a hundred and fourteen, and that ever since, when something bad happens, anything at all, a phone call, a door slamming, a man following me a little too long on the metro, I start counting, and the voice in my head is the voice of a seven-and-a-half-year-old girl lying on a kitchen floor.
When it was over, he sat back down. He picked up his watch. He folded the strap around his wrist, slid the clasp shut, click, and looked at the time. He really looked at it. As if he had an appointment.
“Go and wash,” he said. “Then bed.”
I got up. I didn't cry. I didn't understand enough to cry, I think. I went as far as the kitchen door, and there I turned round, because I'd left my pencil case on the chair in the hall and the gold star was inside it.
He looked at me. He had picked up his fork again.
“Lise. Listen to me carefully.”
I listened carefully.
“What happens in this house stays in this house. We keep this between ourselves. Do you understand? Between ourselves. Because if you go telling stories at school, or at your grandmother's, or to anyone at all, people will come. People from the state. And do you know what they do, the people from the state, when a mummy doesn't know how to look after her little girl properly?”
I didn't know.
“They take her away. They put the little girl in a home, with other children nobody wants. And the mummy's left all on her own. And she cries. Do you want your mummy crying all on her own?”
I said no.
“Then think of your mother.”
He cut a piece of chicory and ate it.
I haven't said it yet, but my mother was there the whole time.
She was there when he undid his watch. She was there when I stood up, when I took the four steps. And when it began, she stood up too, lifted Maxime out of his high chair because he was crying, and went to the sink.
I could see her from the floor. I could see her calves, her burgundy slippers, the hem of her apron. She held Maxime on her left hip and with her right hand she had turned on the tap, and she was washing a plate. Just one. She washed the same plate, turned it under the water, scrubbed the rim with the sponge, turned it over, scrubbed the underside. The water ran. Maxime screamed into her shoulder. The water ran.
She didn't turn round.
Not once. Not when I hit the sideboard, not when I made that noise I didn't know I could make, not at a hundred, not at a hundred and fourteen. She stood with both feet planted in front of the sink and her head bent over the water, a little to one side, as if she were listening to something in another room.
When I left the kitchen, she was still washing the same plate.
Later, much later, she came into my room. It was dark. She didn't sit on the bed. She stayed standing by the door, and she whispered, so quietly I wasn't sure she was speaking at all:
“You have to be careful, sweetheart. You have to be very careful. He works very hard. He's tired.”
I said yes, Mum.
“You'll be careful?”
I said yes, Mum.
She closed the door without a sound. I listened to her footsteps in the corridor. There were nine of them to their room. The third floorboard creaked under her foot, the way it creaked under everyone's, a small dry groan, the sound of an attic door. I had never paid it any attention. That night I heard it, and I have never forgotten it.
I turned to face the wall. It was too dark to see the rabbits on the border. I knew they were there, at my eye level, where he had put them, kneeling down to check. I counted them in the dark, from memory, from the door to the window.
There were thirty-one.
The next morning, I threw the gold star into the bin at school before I went into class. I didn't know why. I found out later. It reminded me that I had wanted to show it to him.