Zaide’s hand was nothing like Leonidas’s: it was so tiny that Juliette was constantly afraid it would slip out of hers. Standing on the suburban train platform, she battled against the gusts of wind whipping up the crumpled papers left under the molded plastic seats, sucking them up and depositing them a little farther down. The passengers who used this suburban line, she thought, must always walk with a stoop to withstand this intermittent onslaught, their foreheads low, their shoulders hunched.
Dourdan-la-Forêt. That was the name of the last stop. Even then you had to make sure not to get onto the branch that went to Saint-Martin d’Étampes and Marolles-en-Hurepoix. Zaide, standing in front of the train map, had repeated that name several times as if it slid over her tongue, leaving a delicious salty taste.
“This is my journey, this is my journey,” repeated the little girl rhythmically.
She had just invented a hopscotch game with mysterious rules that meant she had to hop along the line marking the do-not-step-over area, which she stepped over with every other hop. Juliette, anxious, pulled her back. Zaide froze and glared at her.
“You’re like Papa. You’re afraid of everything.”
Juliette’s palm grew moist. For the hundredth time, perhaps, she wondered whether she and Leonidas had done the right thing in concealing the truth from Soliman’s daughter. To be honest, not telling Zaide about his death had not been a reasonable, joint decision, nor was it driven by compassion or due to their own grief: they had both simply balked at the difficulty of the task.
Balked, yes. Seeing no further than the wall in front of them, which had to be surmounted—impossible—or knocked down, blindly, without knowing which of the plants that had begun to grow between the stones would die, dry out, or rot, their roots exposed. Zaide was a stubborn little person, with a quick, sometimes sharp tongue; Leonidas thought she was robust, her feet firmly on the ground, long since used to the eccentricities of her father, whom she alternately scolded and indulged.
“Precisely,” said Juliette.
She hadn’t expanded further. She believed that an entire army of psychologists, who advocated telling the truth as the only way of preventing neurosis, would have demolished her intuition in two seconds.
But this intuition was insistent enough for her to decide, for once, to trust her own instincts. For the time being.
Contrary to what Juliette had believed, Zaide received regular letters from her mother. Over the past few days, she had shown her pages of beautiful, colored drawings surrounded by captions written in a tiny compact handwriting. “This is the house.” “A bird in the branches of the pomegranate tree, just outside the kitchen door.” “You’d love this walk. We’ll do it together one day.” “I came across this little donkey on the edge of a field. We talked for ages, he and I. That won’t surprise you, I’m sure.” Firouzeh signed with a very ornate “F,” surrounded by swirls that seemed to float on the paper.
“Firouzeh, that means ‘turquoise,’” Zaide had explained. “My mother lives a long way away … in a town called Shiraz.”
She’d dragged Juliette into her room, pulled out a fat atlas from the pile of books propping up her bed on the door side, and, turning the pages energetically, had pointed at a dot around which she’d drawn a circle with a bright blue marker pen. Juliette had great difficulty holding back the questions she was dying to ask. Why did Zaide’s mother write to her in French? Why had Soliman left Iran with his daughter and how long ago? What had happened? And why had Firouzeh, his wife, come back to France a few months ago, but not come to see them? Leonidas hadn’t been able to give her any answers. For the past few days he’d been listless, silent. He arrived in the morning, installed himself next to Soliman’s desk, and became absorbed in contemplating the photo of Silvia—the woman on Line 6, the one who read recipe books and had chosen one day to ingest her own death, to swallow it, to let herself be carried off by it as if by the surprise of an unknown taste.
Juliette squeezed Zaide’s hand tighter. The shiver that ran through her had nothing to do with the biting wind. She was afraid. Of course, Leonidas had written to the little girl’s mother—he only had a postal address. Of course, Firouzeh had replied, by snail mail, too, a simple “come” scribbled on a card, slipped into the fold of a sheet of paper covered in sketches that Juliette had gazed at for a long while before showing it to Zaide. A little house whose facade was shaded by the branches of a huge-looking tree, an oak or a linden, probably; window boxes full of orange and red flowers; a painted fence, not white, but green, behind which you could see, against a hazy background of foliage already tinged with autumn, the form of a doe.
Zaide had caressed each of these drawings. She did not even seem surprised …
“It’s coming! It’s coming!” Zaide’s backpack jiggled and her braids flew up as she turned her enthralled face toward the far end of the platform. Had she suffered from the seclusion imposed by Soliman, from that sheltered but safe life, going only from the depot to school and back again every day? Juliette had chosen routine, but it had been imposed on Zaide. Today, though, both of them would experience the thrill of adventure.
Dourdan-la-Forêt … yes, this was an adventure. The tiniest departure from routine, if you were open to it, was indeed an adventure.