The Restless. Gerty Dambury

trees have closed up their arms and become immobile, like they’re sleeping. It’s so dark in the streets that even when you open your eyes wide, as if you’re about to cry, you stay suspended in a kind of vast nothingness, wondering where looking stops and blindness begins.

      But what am I going on about? I should get back to the child and her family, a family I know very well. Let’s start with the father.

      He arrived in town got up like a total gentleman. A “gentleman.”

      That’s a word I really like, even if I have trouble pronouncing it, now that I’m toothless. That’s another thing they forgot to put in the coffin, my false teeth. As if somebody could use them after me. That’s a habit they can’t shake, burying people without their teeth. How ignorant! Don’t they know that in the Lord’s garden we’ll finally be able to eat the hazelnuts we were denied in our lifetime? Some have teeth, but can’t eat. Some have food, but don’t have teeth.

      Anyhow, this gentleman, Sauveur Emmanuel Absalon, looked real skinny in his suit! Yes indeed, real skinny, hardly any flesh on his bones. His clothes almost floated around him, way too big, and as they were cut from white cloth—not very expensive but white all the same (fashion was everything then)—he looked like a ghost, a real phantom.

      You know there’s still a photo of him in that immaculate suit, the only one that Sauveur Emmanuel wanted to keep from that period of pretty lean times when he was still proud of himself. Before he turned into a bourgeois.

      He was almost skeletal, and his eyes didn’t have the depth they took on later, that touch of dark sweetness in a white and pure ocean. No, in those days, he looked hungry and worried, a look he didn’t want caught on any camera, so no one could see his distress. But the photographer must have insisted: he really should look at the camera, communicate something, no matter what, even distress, to those the photo was meant for. And the photographer probably assured him his family wouldn’t see how thin he was as they’d be too busy being thrilled by the novelty of having their brother or their son living in the big city. Sauveur Emmanuel’s father, tall and silent like a tree from the deep woods—those trees that nothing can stop from growing—would harbor a smile of surprise, while his mother would laugh and hide her mouth discreetly behind her hand. His sisters would jump for joy to see him like that, all dressed in white, serious and hatted, and they’d see in that photographic pause the sign of success.

      That’s the story the photographer told Emmanuel so he’d allow his anxiety to be captured on camera, while of course trying to appear in control.

      From the beginning, he gave himself the airs of someone who’d had good luck, and it worked! He went very far for a boy who arrived with nothing in his hands except a needle and thread.

      He’s still been heard to say, “Give me a needle and thread!” when one of his children has a button loose, a hem coming apart, a torn shirt. If he’d been around at noon and seen his daughter’s dress, he would’ve made her get up on that little bench. She would have stood there in the middle of the courtyard in the full sun while he busied himself sewing her dress back up, sometimes perched on his heels, sometimes bent over, sometimes kneeling. That’s the way he is: he seems indifferent, but he’s capable of great care when he feels like it, or when he wants to show off in front of the mother.

      She’d been his apprentice, and at first he didn’t even notice her. And if he did, he didn’t mention it. He wanted to marry the daughter of a lawyer. It was his friend Bèze who convinced him that was a bad idea. “When you don’t have any customers for a month or two and when times are hard, those kinds of people will never forgive you, and they won’t help you out either. Be a little more modest in your thinking!”

      That’s what Bèze said and that’s when Emmanuel started paying attention to Emma, the child’s mother. Before that she’d just been “the girl” who’d basted the suits he’d cut, ironed the seams, and made the deliveries.

      Now that Emmanuel has sold his tailor’s shop and launched into construction, his wife says she hates sewing. But I know that’s not true. I think she has a dressmaker come over just because it exasperates her husband: “Who is this woman who won’t even sew a little dress for her children?”

      See, he doesn’t know she’s the one making all the clothes. She waits for him to leave before the fittings; she walks around her children—taking in a seam here, measuring there—perched on the same little bench in the courtyard. “Raise your arms, don’t move, you’ll make Mama stick you with her mouth full of pins.” “It needs a pocket. I’m going to add a pocket.” She wraps the measuring tape around her neck. “I wanted to make it sleeveless, but I didn’t cut enough cloth out of the bodice.” She puts the scissors in the pocket of her apron.

      She waits for her husband to leave, and then she looks for labels to sew into her designs to make it seem as if she’d bought them. She uses labels from other clothes because it drives him crazy: “Who is this woman who won’t even sew a little dress for her children?”

      “So you want me to make dresses out of dish towels?”

      They argue all the time about tailoring.

      All this to say that the wife is a former employee still rebelling against her boss. You should know that, in those days, even the least important black boss had an attitude.

      One day I heard her call him a slave driver.

      I thought she’d overdone it with that word—slave driver. It’s true he acted like a big man in his little suburban workshop, and that kind of arrogance is still part of who he is. Always will be. He called his workers idiots, deadbeats, niggers—and they hated him. But calling him a slave driver is really overdoing it. Don’t people know what words mean?

      4.

      When our teacher comes back, our joy has disappeared. It’s just like Marlyse, who’s a Jehovah’s Witness, says: “Joy has withered away, away from the sons of men.”

      The first thing to know, Papa, is that Madame Ladal arrives late that afternoon. That’s really strange. You should know she’s never late.

      We ask her, “Why are you out of breath?”

      She doesn’t answer.

      She calls us by our last names like when she takes roll: from Absalon to Zakarius. But normally, in class, she always uses our first names. She makes us come to her desk, one by one, and she hands out our report cards.

      “But madame, you always give us our report cards the last Wednesday of the month. Today’s only the twenty-fourth.”

      “Get them signed tomorrow, Thursday, and bring them back on Friday.” Normally on the Saturday after report cards, we come to school to clean our desks. We scrape off the ink stains, we wash the inkwells, and then we have finally earned our prizes.

      “Why are you handing out the report cards early?”

      This May has been really strange. Our teacher has been nervous all month long, and I even failed composition.

      I’m ranked thirty-one out of thirty-two students.

      I don’t want to tell anyone at home because Émile will make fun of me: “We’re going to laugh real hard when our father’s little princess has to repeat a grade.”

      All because I failed the dictation! I tried to erase my mistakes and rubbed my paper with the hard side of the eraser, but it left blue marks. So I rubbed even harder and made a hole in the paper. I tried to recopy it but wasn’t able to finish, and I didn’t get to answer any of the questions.

      Émile is going to make fun of me: “Her first zero in spelling—Papa’s little girl.”

      And