Her Father's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

she has no recollection at all, nor of reaching the next stop, emerging from the Métro station, seeing daylight again, nor the long trek through the streets all the way to the hospital – because it turns out that they do have to go there. Too tired, too emotional perhaps. Did her mother carry her, in one arm, with the box in the other?
    The child reduced to such a helplessly little child again.

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    It is probably late, too late perhaps, when they reach the hospital. He must be so desperate to see us, says the mother, hurry up, and now the child is trotting along, clinging to her mother while she, the mother, still clutches the Printemps box, which is also looking pretty tired. The mother is rather flushed, her hair slightly awry, the child’s shoes no longer shine.
    They are directed to a room on an upper floor, at the end of a corridor with doors to other rooms, where the child glimpses rows of beds and men’s faces. Rows and rows of beds and faces. It could just as easily be here, this one, now, but it’s never this one. There are still more. The father could be in any one of these rooms, he could be any one of these men. The father could be anybody.
    At last they really are there, this is the right room, the one with the right number over it, the one where they should find the right father.
    All nerves, the mother and child step hand in hand into the large white room filled with the harsh light of tall parallel windows to the right and left towering over tworows of beds, lots of beds, so many beds, the full length of the room. And on every bed a man, sitting or lying, awake or asleep, young or old, it depends, they come in every variety here. Which one’s her father? This one or that one? The child will soon know. And now she’s the one dragging her mother, who’s become peculiarly heavy. The child thinks she’ll be able to identify him without any help, all by herself. As she walks past these men in their beds, she stares at them like an inspector: it’s not this fat man sitting here, stooped, slightly balding, playing cards with a neighbour, not the neighbour either, such an old man; nor this tall, thin man with dishevelled black hair, reading his newspaper; or this one who’s so ill all he can do is lie there with his eyes closed like a corpse; could it be this young man smiling up into her eyes?
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    But her mother has stopped beside a bed in the other row, a bed that, in her speculations about possible fathers, the child didn’t notice: in it is a very thin man with a gaunt face, not very old, but not young either; he’s sitting up in bed looking at them with a peculiar smile, a slightly nervous smile. The child eventually recognizes the face from the photographs. There. It’s him. It’s her father. And yet it’s someone else.
    The child is out of her depths in this mystery.
    She’s being spoken to. She doesn’t hear. Curiously, she’s the one the stranger speaks to first, his words disconcertingly formal. But what it is he’s saying, shedoesn’t grasp. The words, the voice, the tone are not things she knows. Not things she recognizes. Too unfamiliar.
    â€˜Good afternoon, young lady… Hello, France!’ says the man who is her father, while, to the child’s horror, one of his hands pulls the mother close to him, quite simply brings her to him, sits her down on the edge of the bed, right beside him, puts an arm round her, without speaking to her, and the mother lets her head drop onto that shoulder without speaking either, and she buries her face in it, and the child sees that her eyes are full of tears. But it’s all happening so quickly now that the child can’t see or understand everything. Just details.
    â€˜You’re very pretty, Miss France,’ the man goes on, hugging his wife to him, but still keeping his words for the child standing beside the bed, the child who doesn’t know what to do