Her Father's Daughter by Marie Sizun Page B

and a brush.
    â€˜Now,’ the father tells her, ‘you can work next to me in the mornings.’
    The child notices that her mother, who’s sitting nearby, has looked up and is watching the scene in silence, unsmiling.
    So the child looks away, discreetly.

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    A strange incident which really surprised the child.
    It’s Sunday, her grandmother’s there. The two women are cooking lunch in the kitchen. The radio is on. A journalist is talking once again about the Normandy landings.
    The father comes in to listen. The child follows him. She listens too, to be like the others. And the word suddenly strikes her for the first time. One word. That word.
    â€˜In Normandy?’ she asks. ‘Where we went, me and Mummy and Granny?’
    A silence. An extraordinary silence.
    The grandmother is first to react.
    â€˜In Normandy! As if you’ve ever been to Normandy!’
    The child is about to answer back, to press the point. But she notices her mother, very pale, watching her in the most extraordinary way, as if she’s talking to her with her eyes, as if she’s screaming at her to be quiet, to stop right there.
    â€˜Normandy!’ her grandmother says again. ‘I ask you! Nonsense! The child talks complete nonsense!’
    And the mother adds in a blank voice, ‘Maybe she’s getting confused with when we went to Ermenonville?’
    The conversation trails off. The father hasn’t even looked up. He’s listening to the radio.
    He just gestures to the child to be quiet. A very gentle gesture, very kind, drawing her close to him with his big hand.

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    How things are changing now, and how quickly it’s happening.
    The father has an errand to run in town today. As he heads out he announces that, because it’s a nice day today, he might as well take the child with him. The mother is a little surprised, but says nothing.
    The child is hastily put into her pretty dress, the one from that first day, from the hospital, and she leaves with her father. Alone with her father. It’s the first time. The image of her mother, on the doorstep, watching them go.
    Out on the street he doesn’t tell the child to walk ahead of him: he takes her hand.
    The child doesn’t talk, intimidated. He doesn’t talk either. But the child, who’s watching him, can tell he isn’t angry, in fact he looks almost cheerful, an expression she’s never seen on his face before.
    They take the Métro, the father and the child, the father and his daughter, whose hand he holds in the crowds. There are a lot of people in their carriage, but the father finds two seats, sits the child opposite him asif she were a grown-up. The child doesn’t know what to make of it. The father takes an old Métro ticket from his pocket.
    â€˜Look,’ he says.
    He folds the ticket lengthways, tears away a bit from near the top-left-hand corner, a bit from near both bottom corners. Then, with a pen, he draws an eye here, some whiskers there, and suddenly the ticket’s turned into a dog, one of those funny little short-legged dogs that look like sausages.
    â€˜It’s a sausage dog,’ says the father. ‘ Dackel in German. There was one on the farm where I worked.’
    The child listens. Doesn’t dare ask any questions. Not yet.
    â€˜Make another one,’ she asks simply.
    The father does. The child laughs.
    She will hold those two paper dogs carefully in her hand for the whole outing. And once they’re back at home, she’ll stow them with her precious things, her personal treasures, strange pictures, old toys.
    Later, as an adult, she’ll never see a dachshund without recalling this scene. And she’ll never forget that German name either. Dackel .

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    Is it because it’s summer? Is it because everyone’s saying the war really is going to end and the Germans are going to be driven out of Paris? There’s something