Upset and subtly furious, she seemed stunned that this woman had failed to see who she was, her, Malinka’s mother, whose goals were plain, who had only one ambition.
“I can’t leave,” she finally mumbled. “I mean, really now, I can’t leave.”
She let out a scandalised, mystified little laugh, eyebrows raised, staring almost wild-eyed at the woman, who smiled uneasily and put on a waiting face.
The servant composed herself and sat down.
And she settled once more into a quiet beatitude, like easing back into a warm bath of delusion, thought Malinka, and this frightened and troubled her even more than the absurd indignation that had brought the servant to her feet.
“You understand,” said the servant in an exaggeratedly reasonable tone, undermined by her suddenly stronger accent, “we’re waiting for someone, and this address is his only way of finding us, so, you know, what’s he supposed to do if we leave? It’s simply out of the question.”
For the first time a harsh, hostile anger rushed to Malinka’s head. After the woman had gone, she cried out, astonished to find herself daring to talk to the servant this way, daring to bring up what she spoke of only by allusions:
“Well, what do you know! News to me! So now he has our address? He’s known our address these past fifteen years, and you always said he had no way to know where we lived, and he’s supposed to come looking for us when all this time he never bothered? And that’s why we can’t go and live in that woman’s flat? That’s why we’re staying in these two miserable rooms?”
Still sitting, the servant looked utterly defeated, and Malinka wished she had kept her mouth shut.
Her anger drained away, she tried to put on a smile, horrified to think that her smile probably looked like her mother’s, similarly impersonal, misplaced and maddening.
Malinka’s mother began to wring her hands.
“I’m not sure anymore,” she said hesitantly. “You’re right, your father must not have our address, how could he? There was no way to tell him before I went away, I didn’t know how to get hold of him, I thought I’d have no trouble finding him here, I thought it was big, but not that big. But if we move, then. .”
“No, let’s not move,” Malinka murmured. “Things are fine right here, let’s not move.”
The servant genuinely seemed to believe, with that part of her reason Malinka could not fathom, as elusive as it was maddening, that a change as major as moving would be a betrayal of the faith that sustained her in her nebulous, desperate, but confident quest for one particular face among so many others, and what did she have to help her go on imperturbably hoping but that faith, with its rituals and commandments, the very first of which was the prohibition against making any change to the life that had seen her certainty sprout and flourish, what did she have but that absurd faith, thought Malinka, to make her seem grander in her own eyes?
Oh, maybe the servant’s heart was not as unassuming as it seemed.
Her pale, smooth-skinned daughter Malinka hoped so. She fervently wanted arrogance, pride and self-indulgence to play some part in her mother’s ridiculous optimism; she hoped she was just a little blinded by her vanity.
Because, while the servant was well thought-of and evidently even liked by the women who employed her, Malinka realised there were others who did not know her, who did not always treat her so well.
Malinka had never seen her mother insulted to her face, but couldn’t help fearing, every day, that she might be.
Everything about her, her hopes, her fears, her embarrassments, was a betrayal of the servant.
And so she ardently hoped that a sheath of outrageous selfimportance and even inflated, unwholesome pride shielded her mother’s heart with its crystalline hardness, but she doubted it, so humble did the servant continually prove, and, when she wasn’t talking about Malinka’s father, so serene and so sensible.
She doubted it.
Rather, she assumed that her mother patiently endured every affront, and that only her placidity, her slight withdrawal from the world, her inexpressive smile, helped her dismiss such things as of no great importance.
When Malinka began to slip, in senior school, she effortlessly hid it from her mother, not fearing her anger but wanting to spare the servant any needless anxiety, because there was little her mother could do for her, and less in that realm than in any other.
She took to signing her school reports herself, never showing them to the servant, who seemed to forget there were such things as marks and school reports.
Clarisse Rivière would later recall that Malinka had struggled to keep up, that she had hung on as best she could, but her downhill slide, starting when she was eleven or twelve, and at first gradual, uncertain, soon took on the sudden brutality of a verdict handed down at last after a long wait.
She would remember that as a very young girl Malinka had ambitions, that she’d sensed doing well in school would bring her nearer her goals than her mother’s ignorant, vague solicitude, that she’d conscientiously striven to be worthy and, in a sense, perfect.
But she attained only perfection’s outer form, as if the great efforts she made had hidden from her the real reason for those labours.
And so she became a model of application and assiduity, a pupil so polite that her presence was often overlooked.
She turned in her homework on time, written in an elegant and readable hand, always a little longer than required so no-one would suspect her of slacking off, although before so serious, so painfully intent a young face not even the sternest teacher would ever think such a thing, and those scrupulous pages, reeking of labour and terror, always drew a regretful, understanding comment and a below-average mark, inflated a little all the same, out of indulgence, in recognition of everything that was sad and unfair in all this.
Malinka never quite seemed to grasp what was asked of her. She understood only the express or unspoken laws governing the relations between pupils and teachers, which she obeyed in a mix of keen pleasure and arduous rigour, and so literally that she could have vanished without anyone noticing, so absolute was her submission to the image of a pupil who was nothing more than a pure receptive mind.
But what they were trying to teach her never found its way into her head, or lingered only a moment, then quickly faded.
At home, she sat for long hours at her desk, slightly befogged, trying in vain to connect her memories of the class with the sentences written down in her impeccable notebook.
She vibrantly remembered every detail of the teacher’s face, expression or dress, and she could picture herself, too, as clearly as if she were studying a photograph, and she deeply admired that girl looking up at the blackboard with her perfectly attentive face.
But what had been said in that classroom, what that exemplary girl had heard and thought she understood, she could not remember.
She read and reread what she had written, and it meant nothing to her, had nothing to do with anything she had managed to hold in her mind, itself nothing more than a magma of words and numbers, misshapen ideas, incoherent hypotheses, which she ended up laboriously dredging through in search of something she could use, almost anything, to fill up a page with her beautiful roundhand.