Читать книгу Haunted Childhoods - Pauline Michel - Страница 8

She is blowing bubbles with soapy water.

In the backyard of her second childhood, in the earthly garden her parents are re-inventing for her.

It is Sunday.

They are planting their flowers in the sunlight, never losing sight of her. They can’t keep their eyes off her. She is the centre of their life. Child of desire, child of expectation, child of hope. Lysandre they have called her, to combine the sounds of their names in hers, like a promise of love that will last, of happiness. A wedding of words, their word given and inscribed in a loved one’s very name and existence. Lysandre, the union of Lise and André.

Nothing is too good for her. They turn themselves into the living, vibrant playthings of her desires, and still... she withdraws far above them, into a space that seems to be out-of-bounds to them, out of their reach. She is leaving them.

Her eyes dive deep into the sky, her chest swelling with sadness, and she blows a bubble so uncertain it hesitates to leave her lips. Intense feelings, extreme and contradictory, tumble out onto her face. It hurts to see, so consumed she is by a vision they cannot see.

The more her heart is filled, the more bubbles she blows. Her sky is full of them.

They are shaken by anguish.

She gets thinner by the day, as the sky swallows her up.

For days now, they have been watching powerless this lonely voyage, moved their child’s disturbing beauty, face to the sky, which she nourishes with her breath.

Before their eyes, she takes flight through the gates of the sky.

They can no longer hold her back.

They have been moving heaven and earth to surround her with beauty and love, but nothing will do.

She can no longer bring herself to let any bubble or balloon leave her lips, because she wants to make sure every single sigh can be captured, wrapped up and sent to the world that is calling to her. She can’t lose a single one. When a balloon bursts, she bursts into tears. If one dallies, she waves her hands to waft it on its way, farther, beyond the clouds, for every single one has an urgent mission to carry out.

This has been going on for several days. Since her birthday.

Something unknown to her parents happened that day, though they surrounded her with friends and children.

In full form, Lysandre threw herself into everyone’s arms, eagerly tore the wrapping paper off all the gifts, marvelled at every one, smudged all the guests’ cheeks with chocolate-icing kisses, pronounced many words she had learned – even complete sentences – aware and happy that she had the attention of these adults so amused at her viva-ciousness and vitality. She offered herself, unabashed, like a crocus to the first rays of the sun.

André and Lise could not stop crowing about their good fortune at having a daughter so full of life and spontaneity:

“Life’s taken on new meaning since we’ve had her!”

“Her laughter fills every crevice of our day-today life,” André put in.

When the cool of day’s end crept into the garden, the adults huddled around the fireplace, their cheeks coloured by the flames, and photos passed from hand to hand, greedy for young memories.

Children gathered in the recreation room to watch new videos with rapt attention. Then Lysandre came back into the living room, tired, or so they thought, from the over-exuberance of the day. Curled in the foetal position on André’s lap, she began sucking her thumb again, as she had at the very first, her forehead warm, her pupils bright and wide, all her toys abandoned.

That night, the little girl didn’t make a sound at bedtime; it was not like the other nights, when she would cry herself to sleep, too feverish and happy to let her eyes close without a last hurrah.

She didn’t want to eat.

Since then, she has spoken little and has started stammering. She swallows nothing but milk; yet there is still no fever, just a distracted air.

André performs wonders to try and bring her back, priceless mimicry, wondrous onomatopoeic sounds, clown stunts. Nothing. Lise points out a humming-bird, the smell of a flower, but nothing draws her attention. For the first time, she will not let her mother’s arms rock her.

She blows bubbles with soapy water. The metamorphosis begins again every time. She fills with sadness, then with hope. Each bubble carries her breath... suspended... fragile, hardly there, yet so heavy with import. Will it reach its destination in time? Suspense holds her with such enormous tension, unusual for a child.

Lise and André have been consulting specialists, endlessly, but the loss of appetite has nothing to do with her health. A psychologist cannot conclude a single thing. There is no apparent cause for the sudden change in her. Surely there has been some sort of shock; perhaps the one and only clue might be the coincidence of her obsession with bubbles and balloons.

The birthday debris languishes in the garden. Streamers are twined through the branches of apple trees and flowering lilacs, in this splendidly warm spring which makes if easy to spend all one’s time outside... beyond the house, at least, with its luxurious and enveloping interior like a fleece-lined glove.

They do their gardening and they watch. She is melting before their eyes, and they are afraid of losing her: “Stay with us. Let us borrow your childhood.” Is it possible that she is returning to the place from which she believes she came? Back to the people to whom she thinks she belongs? Perhaps Lise has overfed her imagination with the legendary story of how she came to them.

“Once upon a time, there was girl named Lysandre. She flew into our lives like a bird. Heaven held her better than any mother’s womb... it brought forth birds and children, having held them a long time in its clouds. Then one day, out they came, like a dream. That morning, there was a veritable migration of little girls from out of the sky, from the clouds over China. We chose you, Lysandre, out of all of them. You fell from just the right part of the sky into our open arms, right where we were waiting for you.”

A fable invented specially for her. A fairy tale to hold off the truth for a while.

“Tell my story again, Mama!”

A hundred times Lise told it, sometimes adding details, colours, smells and seasons. With words and magnificent drawings of stars and clouds being born to the light of day. Had she told lies? Don’t we all have random, mysterious beginnings?

“When exactly should one start to distinguish between fantasy and reality?” Lise asked, “Have I been telling too many tales?”

“No, it can’t be that. She’s been hearing that story of yours ever since we adopted her. Something else has got into her, but what? We need to see the children again to find out what happened.”

Two years before, when she first came to them, Lysandre’s eyes could not have been wide enough to take everything in; her hands always gripped her toys like buoys; her heart was so lovingly overwhelmed and filled with all the love she received in doses perfectly suited to her excessive need. They had created the padded paradise of an only child emerging from the hell of an orphanage. Had she not forgotten it? Perhaps a single object or a word was all it took; perhaps something had re-awakened the horrors in her memory.

“There’s something we’re missing. We’ve got to find out what it is,” said André, “It’s obviously serious if it’s disturbing her so...”

It is too late for that. She already knows.

Small she may be, but she now knows that all over the earth children are launching their breath into the world. She knows in the desert sand a mouth covered with flies screams in hunger, and the sound is swallowed up by space. She knows in the snows of the far north, the lips of a newborn are cracked by cold, freezing its first call into its last silence. She knows on the warm sand a beloved child sees only the wings of birds.

Each child has a sky of its own: a sky of flies, a sky of lethal snow, or a sky full of birds, depending on which side of life you are born, the good or bad side of things, the world, other people’s hearts.

Being on the right side, she wants to share it!

Like them all, she launches her breath into the world, in her own way.

With each breath she draws, she invents a unique design, creating bubbles and balloons.

Created with every breath love has brought her. Designed with all the colours of the looks that light on her, giving wings to the soul of this fulfilled child.

The little one she sees out in the cold inspires a warm breath to take the chill off. The poor children get shiny bubbles as playthings. Far off, her balloons burst to chase away the flies gathered ‘round the starving ones.

She is convinced the bubbles penetrate the clouds, mixing with the magic beauty of the cumuli dancing in the sky. Migrating with hope, they can surely chase away misery as soon as they arrive.

Nothing else interests her any more. Not toys, not anything.

Since that birthday, that terrible videocassette, that mistake. Out of the watchful eye of the adults. That horrendous vision of hunger, where Lysandre came from. She wants to become like the ones who stayed behind. She no longer wants to eat. Unconsciously, she becomes a living reproach, a Third World child in a land of the rich.

It was the one thing her parents didn’t think of...

The immense eye opening on the world of dying children on the placid consciousnesses of others.

Lysandre can still see the slanted eyes of her crying mother, crying right there in front of her. Her mouth is forming words that hurt, words like goodbyes, her face submerged in her long dark hair. Lysandre dimly remembers an infinite pain lodged in her newborn body. She is torn from warmth of the arms of the crying woman. A chill shiver runs through her. She is emerging from this woman a second time: once from her belly, another from her arms and her cries. She too begins to cry. It hurts. A part of her is torn away and remains behind in someone else dissolving into the retreating countryside. A face so round and a mouth calling to her, getting smaller and smaller, barely as large as a balloon, then a bubble, then a dot lost on the horizon.

She had forgotten all of this: a row of other slanted eyes shut in a straight line, a row of other lips no longer rooting for the nipple. All it took to shatter her happiness was images on a screen. She seems to hear them cry out to her: “Let me borrow your life!”

All had been forgotten. With infinite tenderness, she had been placed in other arms even warmer, before two other faces also crying – though with joy – her cheeks covered with kisses, wrapped in a blanket as soft as her newly perfumed skin, carried away into a sky full of birds and put in a nest of flowers, surrounded by a new family come from far off for a breath of new life, a reason to live and rejoice and satisfy her every whim. She needed only wish for something and her parents became her obedient servants, blinded by love. Nothing was too good for her. Meanwhile, her sisters suffered in an orphanage or lay abandoned by the roadside: “Let me borrow your life!”

Her parents fed her on lies and illusions. Plant flowers in the sun as they may, she will always see the open lips of thirsty, hungry children in those petals.

Lise and André are looking at her and wondering, seeing only too well that adult despair has taken over this child’s soul. How could they free her? What is it she has understood before she should?

One day, the answer comes to them.

This time, they have deliberately mixed too little soap with the water, and all the bubbles burst on the child’s lips.

She chokes as though strangled. Then begins to howl and cry and speak:

“Quick, the other children are waiting!”

“Where?”

“There, under that other sky”

“What children?”

“My sisters.”

“What other sky?”

“Back there, where I came from.”

She is telling them everything, more with tears and drawings than with words. She sketches what she has seen, felt and suffered: the mother she remembers, the moment of parting, her sisters – it has flooded back to her memory all at once – and most of all, the bubbles of hope launched to that other sky... signs she wants to send to those who are not a lucky as she.

“If you get strong again, we’ll go see your sisters at home.”

“First, though, we’ll go see the migration, the new children landing at the airport.”

Then they begin once again the story of migrating birds following the seasons of each country so as to guide their departures and assuage their hunger.

“There is a film we want to show you,” Lise says.

There on the screen she sees herself arriving, and many other children too, also in the arms of parents prepared to give them a new life.

Tonight, Lysandre is eating her supper, but she is the only one. It is her parents’ turn to stare at the sky through a double window of helplessness and hope.