Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

  “Oh, why needn’t we?” Lucie had asked in astonishment.

  “Because we’re not going far,” he’d said in his silly, excited voice.

  Norah had gripped the steering wheel, and her hands had begun to tremble.

  She’d ordered the girls to fasten their seat belts at once, the fury she felt against Jakob hardening her tone. Her anger had seemed aimed at them, the unfairness of which Grete and Lucie had expressed to Jakob with a pained look.

  “We’re really not going far,” he’d said. “Anyway, I’m not going to fasten my seat belt.”

  Norah pulled out.

  She, who made a point of never being late, was certainly late now.

  She was on the brink of tears.

  She was a lost, pathetic creature.

  After some hesitation, Grete and Lucie had given up fastening their seat belts and Norah said nothing, furious with Jakob for seeking always to cast her in the role of a killjoy or a villain, but also disgusted with herself for being, she felt, a coward, unworthy.

  She’d felt like heaving the car against a bus, just to show him that fastening seat belts wasn’t pointless, but he knew that, didn’t he?

  That wasn’t the issue. What was she doing? What did she want from this man who was hanging on her back with his adorable child in tow? What did she want from this man with the soft, pale eyes, who’d sunk his painless little claws in her flanks so that no matter what she did she couldn’t shake him off?

  That’s what she could not, dare not, explain to her mother or her sister or her few remaining friends: the sheer ordinariness of such incidents, the narrowness of her concerns, the emptiness of such a life beneath the appearance of fullness that—such was the terrible power of enchantment wielded by Jakob and his daughter—so easily deceived mother, sister, and friends.

  Norah’s father stopped in front of one of the cells that lined the corridor.

  He opened the door carefully and immediately stood back.

  “You’ll be sleeping here,” he said.

  Gesturing toward the far end of the corridor, he added—as if Norah had shown a slight hesitation about this particular assignment—“There’re no longer any beds in the other rooms.”

  Norah switched on the ceiling light.

  The walls were covered with posters of basketball players.

  “Sony’s room?” she mumbled.

  Her father nodded.

  He was breathing more audibly, with his mouth wide open, his back against the wall.

  “What are the girls called?” asked Norah.

  He shrugged, pretending to think.

  She laughed, slightly shocked.

  “Don’t you remember?” she asked.

  “Their mother chose their names, rather strange names, I can never remember them,” he replied, laughing too, but mirthlessly.

  To her great surprise she sensed in him an air of desperation.

  “What do they do during the day, when their mother isn’t there?”

  “They stay in their room,” he said abruptly.

  “All day?”

  “They have all they need. They don’t lack for anything. That girl takes good care of them.”

  Norah then wanted to ask why he’d summoned her.

  But though she knew her father well enough to be aware that it couldn’t have been for the simple pleasure of seeing her after so long and that he must be after something from her in particular, he seemed at that moment so old and vulnerable that she refrained from asking the question. When he’s ready, he’ll let me know, she said to herself, but she couldn’t help telling him, “I can only stay a few days.”

  She thought of Jakob and the two overexcited girls, and her stomach tightened.

  “Ah no,” he said, agitated all of a sudden, “you must stay a lot longer, it’s absolutely essential! Well, see you tomorrow.”

  Slipping into the corridor, he trotted away, his flip-flops clacking on the concrete, his fat hips wiggling under the thin fabric of his trousers.

  With him went the bittersweet smell of rotting flowers, of flowers in full bloom crushed under an indifferent foot or bitterly trampled, and when she removed her dress to go to sleep she took particular care to spread it out on Sony’s bed so that the yellow flowers embroidered on the green cotton cloth remained fresh and distinct to the eye and bore no resemblance to the poinciana’s wilting flowers and the guilty, sad smell left in her father’s wake.

  She found her backpack at the foot of the bed.

  She sat in her nightgown on her brother’s bed. It was covered with a sheet bearing the insignias of American basketball teams. She cast a pained look at the small chest of drawers covered with dusty knickknacks, the child’s desk with its low top, the basketballs piled up in a corner, most of them burst or deflated.

  She recognized every object, every poster, every piece of furniture.

  Her brother Sony was thirty-five and Norah hadn’t seen him for many years, but they had always been close.

  His room hadn’t changed at all since his adolescence.

  How was it possible to live like that?

  She shivered in spite of the heat.

  Outside the small square window everything was pitch black and totally silent.

  No sound came from within the house nor from outside it, except perhaps—she couldn’t be sure—from time to time that of the poinciana’s branches rubbing against the corrugated-iron roof.

  She picked up her cell phone and phoned home.

  No reply.

  Then she remembered that Lucie had mentioned going to the movies, which annoyed her because it was Monday and the girls had to be up early the next day for school, and she had to struggle against a sense of impending catastrophe, of terrifying disorder, that swept over her every time she wasn’t there to see, simply see, what was going on, even if she couldn’t always do much about it.

  She considered such worries as failings on her part, not weaknesses.

  Because it would be too arrogant to think that she alone knew how to organize Lucie and Grete’s life properly, that she alone, through the power of her reason, of her anxious concern, could prevent disaster from crossing the threshold and entering her life.

  Had she not already opened her door to evil in a kindly, smiling form?

  The only way to mitigate the effects of this great blunder was to be constantly, anxiously, on the alert.

  But when her father called she’d simply left.

  Sitting on Sony’s bed, she now regretted it.

  What was her father—this selfish old man—to her, compared with her daughter?

  What did her father’s existence matter now, when her own hung by a thread?

  Although she knew that, if Jakob was sitting in a movie theater at that moment, it was pointless, she still dialed his cell phone.

  She left an exaggeratedly cheery message.

  She could see his affable face, the calm, clear, sensible look in his eyes, the slight droop of his lips, and the general pleasantness of his finely wrought features. She was still able to acknowledge that such amiability had inspired her with confidence, to the extent that she had not dwelled on the puzzling aspects of the life of this man who’d come from Hamburg with his daughter, on the slightly differing versions he’d given of his reasons for coming to France, on the vagueness of his explanations for his less than assiduous attendance at law school, or the fact that Grete never saw, and never spoke about, her mother, who, he claimed, had stayed in Germany.

  She knew now that Jakob would never become a lawyer, or anything else, for that matter, that he would never contribute meaningfully to the expenses of the household even if he did receive from time to time—from his parents, he said—a few hundred euros, which he spent immediately and ostentatiously on expensive meals and on clothes the children didn’t need, and she knew too—finally admitting it to herself—that she had quite simply set up in her home a man and a little girl whom she had to feed and care for, whom she could not throw out, and w
ho had her boxed in.

  That was the way it was.

  She dreamed sometimes that she would return home one evening to find Lucie all by herself, relaxed and happy as she used to be in the past, unaffected by the hollow excitement Jakob provoked, and that Lucie would tell her calmly that the others had left for good.

  That was the way it was. Norah knew that she would never have the strength to throw them out.

  Where would they go, how would they manage?

  Only a miracle, she sometimes thought, could rid her of them, could free her and Lucie from life with this amiable but subtly evil pair.

  Yes, that was the way it was, she was trapped.

  She got up, took a toiletries bag out of her backpack, and went into the corridor.

  So deep was the silence that she seemed to hear it vibrating.

  She opened a door that she remembered concluding was the bathroom.

  But it was her father’s room. It was empty, and the double bed had not been slept in. Something about the stillness of the air and of everything else made her think that the room was no longer used.

  She followed the corridor to the living room and groped her way through it.

  The front door was not locked.

  Hugging her toiletries bag to her chest and feeling her nightgown rubbing against the back of her knees, she went outside. With her bare feet on the warm cement she felt herself trampling on the invisible flowers that had fallen from the poinciana. She dared at last to look up at the tree, in the vain hope of seeing nothing there, of not discerning in the crisscross of branches the pale shape, the cold luminescence of her father’s hunched body. She thought she could hear, coming from the shadows, loud, painful breathing, desolate panting, and even stifled sobs and little groans of distress.

  Overcome with emotion, she wanted to call out to him.

  But what word could she use to address him?

  She’d never been comfortable saying “Daddy,” and couldn’t imagine using his first name, which she barely knew.

  Her urge to call out to him remained stuck in her throat.

  For a long while she watched him rocking very slightly above her head. She couldn’t see his face, but she recognized, gripping the biggest branch, his old plastic flip-flops.

  The body of her father, this broken man, shone palely.

  What a bad omen!

  She wanted to run away from this funereal house as quickly as possible, but she felt that, having agreed to return to it and having managed to locate the tree her father was perching in, she was now too deeply committed to be able to abandon him and go back home.

  She returned to Sony’s room, having given up on the idea of trying to find the bathroom, so fearful was she now of opening a door on a scene or situation that would cause her to feel more guilty.

  Sitting on Sony’s bed again, she toyed with her cell phone, deep in thought.

  Should she try again to call home, at the risk of waking the children if they’d gotten back from the movies?

  Or go to sleep with the guilty feeling of having done nothing to avert a potential catastrophe?

  She’d have liked to hear Lucie’s voice again.

  A hideous thought went through her mind, so fleeting that she forgot the exact form it took, but long enough for her to feel the full horror of it: Might she never hear her daughter’s voice again?

  And what if, in hastening to her father’s side, she’d unwittingly chosen between two camps, two possible ways of life, the one inevitably excluding the other, and between two forms of commitment fiercely jealous of each other?

  Without further ado she dialed the number of the apartment, and then, since no one picked up, the number of Jakob’s cell phone, also in vain.

  Having slept little and badly, she got up at dawn, slipped on her green dress and sandals, and went in search of the bathroom, which was, in fact, next door to Sony’s room.

  She went back to the little girls’ room.

  She gently opened the door.

  The young woman was still asleep. The two little girls were awake and sitting up in bed. Their perfectly identical pairs of eyes were wide open, gazing sternly at Norah.

  She smiled at them, murmuring from a distance the tender things she habitually said to Lucie.

  The little girls frowned.

  One of them spat at her. The thin spittle dribbled onto the sheet.

  The other began to imitate her, puffing out her cheeks.

  Norah shut the door, not offended, but unsettled.

  She wondered if she should be doing something for these little waifs, and in what capacity—as a half sister, a kind of mother, an adult morally responsible for every child one came across?

  She once again felt her heart bursting with impotent rage at that thoughtless man who after so many failures couldn’t wait to marry again and produce more children who meant nothing to him, a man whose capacity for love and for showing consideration to others was so small, seemingly used up in his youth in his relationship with his old mother, long dead, whom Norah had never known.

  It’s true he’d shown some affection toward Sony, his only son.

  But what need had he for a new family, this unfeeling man, incomplete, detached?

  He was already eating when she reentered the living room. He was sitting at the table as on the previous evening, dressed in the same pale shabby clothes, his face bent over his plate, stuffing himself with porridge, so that she had to wait until he’d finished and had hurled himself backward, as if after enormous physical exertion, panting and sighing. Only then could she ask, looking him straight in the eye, “Now, what’s this all about?”

  That morning her father had a look that was even more evasive than usual.

  Was it because he knew that she’d seen him in the poinciana?

  But how could that embarrass him, this cynical man who had never batted an eyelid over much more degrading situations?

  “Masseck!” he shouted hoarsely.

  He then asked Norah, “What’ll you have? Tea? Coffee?”

  She tapped on the table lightly with her fist, thinking, with a vacant, worried air, that it was time for Lucie and Grete to get up and go to school, and that Jakob would perhaps have forgotten to set his alarm clock, which would mean that the whole day would bear the mark of failure and neglect. But wasn’t she herself much too virtuous, punctual, and scrupulous? Wasn’t she in reality that tiresome woman whom she reproached Jakob for painting her as?

  “Coffee?” asked Masseck, offering her a full cup.

  “Will you please tell me why I’ve come?” she said calmly, looking her father in the eye.

  Masseck scurried away.

  Her father then started breathing so violently and with such difficulty that Norah leaped from her chair and went up to him.

  She stood there, awkwardly, and would have put her question to him again if she’d been able.

  “You must go and see Sony,” he murmured painfully.

  “Where’s Sony?”

  “In Reubeuss.”

  “What on earth’s Reubeuss?”

  No answer.

  He breathed less painfully, slumped in his chair, his belly sticking out, surrounded by the syrupy odor of poinciana flowers in full bloom.

  Then she was deeply moved to see tears running down his gray cheeks.

  “It’s the prison,” he said.

  She took a step, almost a leap, backward.

  “What’ve you done with Sony?” she cried out. “You were supposed to be looking after him!”

  “He was the one who committed the offense, not me,” he whispered, almost inaudibly.

  “What offense? What’s he done? Oh God, you were supposed to be taking care of him and bringing him up properly!”

  She stepped back and sank onto her chair.

  She gulped down the coffee, which was acrid, lukewarm, and tasteless.

  Her hands trembled so much that she dropped the cup onto the glass-topped table.

  “That
’s another broken cup!” her father said. “I spend all my time buying crockery in this house.”

  “What did Sony do?”

  He got up, shaking his head, his old wizened face ravaged by the impossibility of talking.

  “Masseck will drive you to Reubeuss,” he croaked.

  He walked backward toward the door to the corridor, slowly, as if trying to escape without her noticing.

  His toenails were long and yellow.

  “So,” she asked calmly, “is that why there’s no one here anymore? Is that why everyone has left?”

  Her father’s back met the door; he groped behind him, opened it, and scurried away down the corridor.

  Once, in a meadow in Normandy, she’d seen an old abandoned donkey whose hooves had grown so much he could hardly walk.

  Her father was quite capable of trotting along when it suited him!

  Her immense feeling of resentment lit up her mind and sharpened her thoughts.

  No one, nothing, could ever excuse their father for his failure to keep Sony on the straight and narrow.

  Because when, thirty years earlier, wishing to abandon their mother and France and his dead-end office job, he’d suddenly left, taking Sony, then age five, with him—abducting Sony, in truth, because he knew the mother would never agree to let him take her little boy—when he’d thereby plunged Norah, her sister, and their mother in a despair the mother would never really get over, when he’d promised in a letter left on the kitchen table to take better care of the child than of himself, his business affairs, and his personal ambitions, their mother, in her grief, had clung to that promise, convincing herself that Sony would have a brilliant career and great opportunities that she, a simple hairdresser, couldn’t perhaps have managed to give him.

  Norah couldn’t recall without gasping for breath the day she came home from school to find her father’s letter.

  She was eight, her sister nine, and from the bedroom the three children shared Sony’s things were gone: his clothes in the chest of drawers, his bag of Legos, his teddy bear.

  Her first thought was to hide the letter and, by some miracle, the reality of Sony and their father’s departure, so that her mother wouldn’t notice.