The Little Girl on the Ice Floe Read online

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2018

  First publication 2019 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Tina Kover

  Original Title: La petite fille sur la banquise

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art and illustration by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  ISBN 9781609455163

  Adélaïde Bon

  THE LITTLE GIRL

  ON THE ICE FLOE

  Translated from the French

  by Tina Kover

  THE LITTLE GIRL

  ON THE ICE FLOE

  To Doctor Muriel Salmona,

  to the tireless investigator,

  to all the victims of violence,

  my heroines.

  When crimes begin to accumulate,

  they become invisible. When suffering

  becomes unbearable, no one hears the cries

  anymore. The screams fall like summer rain.

  —BERTOLT BRECHT

  Did she wipe her mouth with the back of her hand, run her tongue over her teeth, fix her hair a bit? Did she pull up her underpants, straighten her pinafore, tug the white blouse back down—or did he? She watches him, chin bobbing like one of those little nodding dogs on the rear parcel shelf of a car. I’m a nice girl. I’m pretty. I like it. You’re my friend. You like big thighs. You’re good to me. I am a gourmand. I won’t say anything. It’s our secret, I promise. I won’t say a thing. Words he’s said to her that she doesn’t remember, any more than she remembers what he’s done to her.

  She picks up the white paper bag of sweets and the tin of goldfish flakes she’d put down on the corner of a step.

  Something has tilted; she’s not sure if it’s herself or the floor. She concentrates on climbing the stairs.

  She turns around on the landing when he calls her, promising again, nodding her head.

  She’s lying on her bed, trying to catch a tear on the tip of her tongue. The floorboards creak in the corridor. She picks up her book. Nobody’s Boy, by Hector Malot.

  “Is your book making you cry?” asks her father—concerned, perhaps, because she slipped like a shadow from the apartment’s foyer to her room without the usual thunderous shout of Hello, dear family of mine, without slamming the front door, without coming to tell them about her day.

  Her head moves. Left. Right. Right. Left.

  “Did something happen?”

  Her head moves. Up. Down. Down. Up.

  She’s sitting between her parents on the wine-colored living room sofa. Her brother and sisters have disappeared. She stares at the wallpaper as if she doesn’t recognize it, like she doesn’t recognize her own parents. Everything has changed, suddenly, and she can’t understand why. They’re talking to her, but she can’t quite hear them or understand them. She’s floating.

  She’s sitting next to her father in the back seat of a police car. The police officers are turning on the revolving lights to make her smile. She smiles. She’s a nice girl. She’s no longer there. She’s dead, only no one seems to realize it.

  At the police station, a woman officer asks her questions. She has to answer “yes” or “no.” She nods or shakes her head, depending on the answer. She doesn’t feel anything. The woman police officer writes: He touched me down there, in the front and the back. He grabbed my left hand and put it on his penis.

  They tell her she’s lodging a complaint for sexual touching and that the man from the stairwell is a pedophile. She nods.

  She can’t feel the jellyfish twisting inside her on that day; she can’t feel the long, transparent tentacles penetrating her. She doesn’t know that their filaments are going to drag her, little by little, into a story that isn’t her own, that doesn’t concern her. She doesn’t know that they’re going to derail her completely, pull her down to solitary and unwelcoming depths, hobble her every step, make her doubt her own strength, shrink the world around her year by year until it’s nothing but a tiny air pocket with no way out. She doesn’t know that she is at war now, or that the enemy forces are inside her.

  No one warns her. No one explains. The world has gone quiet.

  The years will pass. They’ll forget about this sunny Sunday in May—or they won’t talk about it, at least. She won’t think about it anymore, either.

  You’d had arguments and heartache before that, too, of course. Angry times and defeats and funerals. You’d already learned that loving someone very much doesn’t stop them from dying, but that you can still talk to them afterward, the way you used to talk to Grandpa under the plum tree. You knew there were illnesses that couldn’t be cured, and questions that couldn’t be answered—and yet you knew, too, that the glittering, dewy spiderwebs held answers that could never be put into words. God lived in the deepest, warmest part of your heart, and in the humming of insects in the springtime. You climbed to the very tops of the trees, to feel yourself sway with them in the breeze. You had a boyfriend who fenced, for whom you drew sketches of the twelve children you’d have together someday. You threw tantrums, flinging yourself down on the pavement and flatly refusing to get up. You collected pretty words, keeping lists of them in notebooks, and lists of crazy words, too. You wanted to be a firefighter, to save the world, to be a great writer. You didn’t give a damn about mirrors or appearances. You were nine years old.

  I

  She tells her boyfriend about it the next day. Lunch break is over, and they’re standing beside his desk. I can’t remember how she said it, exactly, which words she used, but she felt like something had shifted, and she owed it to herself to tell him. She doesn’t wait for his response, but goes and sits down, her back very straight.

  She starts eating more. She always liked to eat before, too. I don’t know if she realizes that she isn’t eating to nourish herself anymore, but to comfort herself.

  She has everything a person needs to be happy. Her childhood is privileged, sheltered. She’s healthy, pretty, intelligent. She lives in Paris, goes skiing in the winter and swimming in the summer, visits museums abroad. She comes from a good family in a nice neighborhood; she’s been well brought up, she knows how to behave in polite society. She’s white, with French roots going all the way back to Charlemagne and to Morvan I, king of the Bretons. She was raised in the Catholic Church, brought up to care for others, and one of her grandfathers gave his life in the service of France. Her father is successful, and so is her mother. Both of her parents are industrious, they love their jobs, they work in high value-added industries; their lives are active, abundant, fertile. They’re busy, clumsy, tender parents, and deeply loving ones.

  When she’s alone, she talks to an enormous white yeti that only she can see, and to Pandi Panda, her old stuffed bear. They protect her; they make her feel safe, and she can tell them anything. She still sucks her thumb. She often holds the yeti’s hand when they’re out in the street, or when there are too many people around, when she can’t manage to keep an eye on everything all by herself.

  Some days, the things around her talk to each other, and she can spend a whole hour in the bathroom, not moving, listening to their conversations in her head.

  Some nights, in the years that follow, right when she’s in t
he middle of a dream, something interrupts the story—something, a specific spot she notices on her body that starts turning, faster and faster, and the whirlwind gets bigger and sucks her in, and the edges of her body start to crumble away, little by little—but she can’t look away; her body is a desert, shifting and dissolving; the sand is viscous, and it pours into her mouth. There’s nothing to hold on to, and she slips and slides and melts, and when the whirlwind has filled up the whole space of the dream, when she’s just about to disappear, she screams. She wakes up with a start, and she listens. She’s afraid of actually having screamed, of having woken her parents. There’s something horribly dirty about the dream, something she must never tell.

  The following spring, she is ten years old, and gets a white hoodie. She’s happy to wear something other than crew necks and smocked dresses, for once. One of the coolest, most popular girls on the playground compliments her outfit, and her heart overflows—she, who feels so worthless so ugly so fat, she, who has already forgotten how to see herself except through other people’s eyes.

  At a friend’s birthday party, they play hide-and-seek. Her boyfriend pulls her behind one of the heavy living room curtains. They stare at each other. She blushes. He comes closer to her little lips. She closes her eyes, breathless—and then, suddenly, she freezes. Something has coursed through her whole body, gripping her, something disgusting. A coldness, too terrifying to be described.

  Disappointed, he will go off and kiss someone else.

  Her mother takes her to see her aunt, a nutritionist; she has gained a lot of weight. She’s supposed to write down everything she eats in a little notebook, but sometimes she leaves things out, or changes the amounts. She finishes the food on everyone else’s plate when no one can see her, eating the leftovers instead of throwing them away. She’s always the first one up to clear the table, smiling and helpful, off to degrade herself in the kitchen.

  Day after day, the jellyfish tentacles spread.

  Her mother takes her to a big police station on the banks of the Seine. The policemen show her a binder stuffed with photos of men; she has to look at them carefully, one by one. She wishes she could tell them, That’s him, but the anonymous faces hold no meaning or memory for her. She’s too afraid to ask if all these men, all these hundreds of paper men staring out at her, are pedophiles, too.

  In her sixth-grade history class, the students have to do a presentation on a time period of their choosing. She picks the Holocaust. She spends hours at the local library, looking at pictures of meek, dull-eyed skeletons smiling toothlessly at Red Army photographers. She doesn’t tell her parents that she’s also checked out Night and Fog; she waits until she’s home alone one afternoon to watch it. Her report is so meticulously detailed that it takes up four hours of class time, and the history teacher calls her parents to express his concern.

  She’s lively and cheerful when other people are around, and whenever she can escape the prying eyes, she eats. She laughs a lot, maybe even more than before. Her heart is so heavy that when happiness does approach, she jumps in with both feet.

  She and her mother go back to the big police station by the Seine again. A police officer takes her into a dark room; on the other side of a windowed partition, five men with wary expressions are lined up facing her, gazing at her. She’s very afraid. It’s a one-way mirror, the policeman reassures her, they can’t see you. She doesn’t understand. A one-eyed mirror. She forces herself to smile, to go a little nearer to the window, to look closely at the men. She wants to be helpful, but the faces still don’t mean anything to her.

  That same day, or maybe it’s another day, she has to describe the man in the stairwell. How was his face shaped? Oval? Long? And what about his hair? A bizarre catalogue of body parts scrolls by on the screen of a big grey computer: chins, noses, eyes, foreheads, cheeks, mouths, ears, eyebrows. After a lot of hard work on everyone’s part they finally come up with a face; a strange face, like a cadaver’s face, with no body and no significance attached to it. A face she still doesn’t recognize, even after all that.

  She receives a Catholic education, which stamps on her memory an image of the Devil and his temptations. Of sin, and the all-seeing eye of God, fixed on her. Of Hell. Lectures on the primacy of the soul teach hatred of the body, rejection of one’s feelings. This comforts her; she despises her body, seeing it only as a vehicle imposed on her, a cesspit. She wants desperately to have a pure and virgin soul, united with God, torn away from this body inhabited by Satan.

  She masturbates often, in the Latin sense, manus stupratio, defiling herself with her hand. She doesn’t know when she started doing it, or where she learned these movements, which are always the same. She doesn’t know what they’re called. She only has to be alone for a moment for the Devil to come and pull down her underpants. Then, she thumps her vulva mechanically, compulsively, with her hand, until it’s swollen and painful and she falls into a dazed, boneless torpor. She doesn’t tell anyone about it; she knows it’s wrong, but she can’t keep herself from doing it. She needs the weightless feeling that always comes afterward. In churches she avoids the hollow eyes of the sculpted imps on the capitals of the columns; always watching her, sneering at her. She is one of them. She punishes her body, stuffing it, striking it. She tries to exist outside of it, and she prays, de profundis clamo ad te Domine; she prays with all the ardor in her young heart for God to come and help her. De profundis clamo ad te Domine. De profundis clamo ad te Domine. De profundis clamo, clamo, clamo ad te Domine. De profundis.

  She reads Les Misérables, and it isn’t Cosette’s childhood or Gavroche’s death that moves her the most; no, she sobs with gratitude all through the chapter in which Hugo explains how the sewers of Paris fertilize the fields of the countryside.

  During long road trips she sits in the very back of the family car, her forehead pressed to the window, her gaze riveted to a point far in the distance, deep inside herself, in a place where her thoughts fragment and drift apart, where her daydreams have no sense or structure. While her parents listen to Radio Classique in the front and her brother and sisters squabble in the middle row, sitting in the very back, she is no longer there.

  On weekends, she cocoons herself in the silence of her bedroom in their country cottage and reads. Reads everything, anything, for hours and hours. Sometimes she wrenches herself away from a book she is in the midst of, and then there is pain—pain in her throat, in her jaws; so much pain that she buries her head beneath the pillows and tries to scream it out, to vomit it out, spit it out, to get it out of her body at last; she opens her mouth as wide as she can until she is exhausted, but nothing comes out, ever; not even a murmur, no noise at all. Nothing. So she swallows the pain back down and, nauseated, goes back to her book. Page by page she consoles herself, and forgets herself, and flies away.

  She tries to be good. To avoid disappointing anyone. She gets sadder and sadder, and she doesn’t know why. She smiles, and lies, and fools everyone. She feels shame. Above all, she mustn’t ever let anyone realize it; no one must ever guess. Nothing must ever, ever show.

  When she is thirteen years old, a boy French kisses her at a party. Over the moon at being chosen, she applies herself until her tongue aches and her lips are chapped, but soon enough she gets bored. She writes him passionate notes that go unanswered, blind to the discrepancy between her enthusiastic words and the tension in her jaw.

  She is very close to her sister, who is three years older. On some nights she helps her sneak out of the house, distracting their parents at the crucial moment while her sister slips from the piano to the front door. She wakes up when her sister comes home, cuddling up in her bed to hear about the evening; the tricks used to get into a nightclub despite being underage; the other girls’ outfits, the boys; the hookups and breakups, the excuses of the heart.

  She takes drama classes, and gradually develops a passion for the theater, telling anyone who will listen t
hat she’s going to be an actress when she grows up. Onstage, she can have a thousand faces; she doesn’t have to pretend a thing. She throws herself wholeheartedly into the role of another person; she embodies herself. Onstage, she experiences an intensity and a clarity that she cannot find anywhere else, but which is nothing more, perhaps, than the warmth of being alive.

  She doesn’t collect words anymore; now, in her ancient Greek class, she learns to analyze them, to follow their roots, which are tangled up with the history of mankind.

  One day, stunned, she suddenly understands the meaning of pedophile. Someone who is friends with a child. A phrase that bursts violently back into her memory, a phrase like a punch in the gut, a phrase the wrong way around. A phrase uttered by the man in the stairwell.

  I am your friend.

  She wants to smash apart her desk, burn the dictionaries, scream out how words lie—but this time, as so many others, as quickly as the fire roars up inside her, she tamps it back down. She is too frightened by these instances of sudden rage to spend time trying to understand them; she stifles them as soon as they appear and then hurries to the kitchen or the nearest bakery, to smother them between two slices of bread.

  Though she knows, now, that some things mean the opposite of what they claim to mean, she doesn’t yet wonder why someone would choose to use precisely those words.