by Marie Ndiaye
The Mercedes was dirty and dusty, the seats covered in crumbs.
In the past her father would never have put up with such slovenliness.
She leaned toward Masseck and asked him why Sony was in prison.
He clicked his tongue and snickered. Norah realized that he’d been badly put out by her question and wouldn’t answer it.
Deeply embarrassed, she forced herself to laugh too.
How could she have done that?
Obviously it wasn’t his place to tell her.
She’d been thrown. She felt ashamed.
Just before getting into the car she’d tried to contact Jakob. In vain: the phone in the apartment rang, but no one answered.
It seemed to her unlikely that the children had already left for school, and just as unlikely that all three were sleeping so soundly as to not be aroused by the phone’s insistent ringing.
So what was going on?
Her legs were shaking nervously.
She would have been grateful, at that moment, to take refuge herself in the fragrant golden semidarkness of that big tree!
She smoothed her hair back, retied her bun, and, as she stretched forward to see her reflection in the rearview mirror, thought that Sony would perhaps have difficulty recognizing her because, when they’d last met, eight or nine years earlier, she didn’t have those two furrows on either side of her mouth or the rather thick, pudgy chin, against which she remembered having struggled ferociously when younger, guiltily aware that her father found rolls of fat disgusting, before, later, without remorse, and even with a certain provocative satisfaction, she’d allowed it to bloom, knowing full well that such a chin would offend that slender man who admired women, and it was from that moment she’d resolved to be free, to cast aside all concerns about pleasing a father who did not love her.
As for him, well, he’d gotten completely fat.
She shook her head, afraid and lost in thought.
The car was crossing the town center, and Masseck was driving slowly in front of the big hotels, calling out their names in a rather grand tone of voice.
Norah recognized the one where their mother and her husband had briefly stayed, back in the days when Sony, a first-rate student in high school, seemed destined for great things.
She’d never bothered to consider why Sony should have returned to live with his father after studying political science in London, and above all why he seemed to have made nothing of his life or his gifts.
That was because she considered him at the time to be much luckier than she was. She’d had to work her way through college in a fast-food restaurant, so she didn’t think herself under any obligation to worry about her spoiled younger brother’s mental state.
He’d fallen into a devil’s clutches and had never been able to break loose.
Sony must have suffered greatly from clinical depression. Poor, poor boy, she thought.
It was at that moment that she saw before her eyes Jakob, Grete, and Lucie sitting at the hotel terrace where they’d all had lunch before.
Her blood ran cold. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, Masseck had turned into another street.
They were running along the coast road, and the car was filled with the smell of the sea.
Masseck had fallen silent, and his face, which Norah could see in profile, had taken on a sullen, stubborn, hurt look, as if being made to drive to Reubeuss were some personal slight.
He parked opposite the high gray walls of the prison.
Standing in the hot, dry wind, she got in line behind a large number of women. Noticing that they’d all put down on the pavement the baskets and parcels they’d brought with them, she did the same with the plastic bag Masseck had handed to her, telling her grudgingly, with a scornful air, that it contained coffee and food for Sony.
Then, as he had to wait for her with his door wide open so it didn’t get too hot in the car, he settled down in his seat and turned his face away from her.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she’d nearly told him.
But she’d stopped herself, wondering whether it was in fact true.
Her stomach was churning. Who, in reality, were the three people she’d seen on the hotel terrace? Herself and her sister, when they were small, accompanied by some stranger?
Oh no, she was sure it was her daughter and Grete with Jakob. The children were wearing little striped dresses with matching sun hats that she’d bought them the previous summer. She’d felt a spasm of guilt as she left the shop, she remembered, because the outfits were perhaps too elegant for little girls, not at all the sort she and her sister would have ever worn.
What devil had gotten her sister into his clutches?
After a long wait outside the prison she was called into an office where she handed over her passport together with the documents her father had given her which certified that she had the right to visit her brother.
She also handed over the bag of food.
“Are you the lawyer?” asked a guard. He wore a tattered uniform. He had red, shining eyes, and his eyelids twitched nervously.
“No, no,” she said, “I’m his sister.”
“It says here you’re the lawyer.”
Circumspectly she replied, “I am a lawyer, but today I’m just here to see my brother.”
He hesitated and gazed fixedly at the little yellow flowers on Norah’s green dress.
Then she was shown into a big room with pale blue walls, divided down the middle by metal grating. The women who had been waiting with her on the pavement outside were already there.
She went up to the grating and saw her brother Sony entering at the other end of the room.
The men who came in with him rushed toward the grating, making such a din that she couldn’t hear Sony’s greeting.
“Sony, Sony!” she shouted.
She felt giddy and clung to the grating.
She got as close as she could to the dirty, dusty metal framework, trying to see as clearly as she could this thirty-year-old man who was her younger brother. Under the blemished skin, behind the eczema scars, she recognized his long handsome face and gentle, rather vague expression. When he smiled, it was the same distant, radiant smile that she’d always known him to wear and that had perpetually tugged at her heartstrings, because she’d always sensed, as she now knew, that it served merely to conceal and contain an inexpressible sadness.
His cheeks were covered in stubble, and his hair, some strands of which were long and some were short, stood up on his head except where it was flattened, on the side he slept on, no doubt.
He was talking to her, smiling—smiling all the time—but she couldn’t hear a word because of the din.
“Sony!” she shouted, “what did you say? Speak up!”
He was scratching his forehead savagely. It was pale with eczema.
“You need a cream for that?” she yelled. “Is that what you’re saying?”
He seemed to hesitate for a moment, then nodded, as if it didn’t matter much whether she’d misunderstood, as if “cream” were as good a reply as any.
He shouted something, a single word.
This time Norah clearly heard the name of their sister.
A fleeting sensation of panic drove every thought out of her mind.
Now a devil had grabbed hold of her, too.
Now it seemed impossible to explain to Sony, to shriek at him that their sister had become an alcoholic and was so far gone—as she herself acknowledged—that she could find no refuge except in a mystical sect, from which she occasionally wrote Norah wild, fanatical, sloppy letters enclosing the odd photo showing her with long gray hair, thin as a rail, meditating on a dirty rubber mat and sucking on her lower lip.
Norah couldn’t very well bellow at Sony, “And all that because our father took you from us when you were five!”
No, she couldn’t, she could say nothing to this haggard face, those hollow, dead eyes, and those dry lips
that seemed detached from the smile that played on them.
The visit was over.
The jailers were leading the prisoners out.
Norah glanced at her watch. Only a few minutes had elapsed since she’d entered the room.
She waved to Sony and shouted, “I’ll be back again!” as he moved away, dragging his feet, a tall and gaunt figure in a grubby T-shirt and an old pair of trousers cut off at the knee.
He turned and made the gesture of putting a cup to his lips.
“Yes, yes,” she shouted, “there’s coffee there, and something for you to eat!”
The room was stiflingly hot.
Norah clung to the grating, afraid she’d pass out if she let go.
She was then dismayed to discover she’d lost control of her bladder, as she felt a warm liquid running down her thighs and calves and onto her sandals. But she could do nothing about it and even the sensation of passing urine seemed to elude her.
She stepped away from the puddle in horror.
But in the rush for the exit no one appeared to have noticed.
She was shaking so violently with fury against her father that her teeth were chattering.
What had he done to Sony?
What had he done to them all?
He was ubiquitous, inhabiting each one of them with impunity, and even in death he would go on hurting and tormenting them.
She asked Masseck to drop her at the hotel.
“You can go home,” she said. “I’ll manage, I’ll take a taxi.”
To her intense embarrassment the smell of urine soon filled the Mercedes.
Without saying a word Masseck lowered the windows in front.
She was relieved to find the hotel terrace empty.
But the vision of Jakob and the girls continued to haunt her. The subtle but clearly perceptible shadow of their cheerful, conspiratorial presence hung over her, so that when she felt a puff of wind she looked up. But all she could see above her head was a large bird with pale feathers outlined against the sky. It flapped its wings heavily and clumsily, casting over the terrace a huge, cold, unnatural shadow.
Once again she felt a spasm of anger, but it passed as soon as the bird did.
She went into the hotel and looked for the bar.
“I’m looking for Monsieur Jakob Ganzer,” she said to the man at the reception desk.
He nodded, and Norah made her way to the bar in her wet sandals. The green carpet with its golden leafy pattern was the same as it had been twenty years earlier.
She ordered tea and went to the toilet to wash her legs and feet.
She took her panties off, rinsed them in the basin, squeezed the water out of them, and held them for a long time under the hand dryer.
She was afraid of what awaited her in the bar, where she’d noticed that there was a computer connected to the Internet that customers could use.
Sipping her tea slowly, so as to postpone as long as possible the moment when she’d have to start her Internet search, she eyed the barman as he watched a soccer match on the big screen above the bar, and she kept thinking that for the children of a dangerous man like her father there was no worse fate than to be loved by him.
Because Sony was certainly the one who’d paid most dearly for being the child of such a man.
As for herself, well, it was true that nothing irreparable had happened yet, just as it was possible she hadn’t yet understood what was in store for her and Lucie, or even realized that the devil gripping her was crouching there and biding his time.
She paid for thirty minutes of connection time and soon found, in the archives of the paper Le Soleil, a long article about Sony.
She read and reread it with increasing horror, going over the same words again and again.
Holding her head in her hands she stammered, “Oh my God, Sony, oh my God, Sony,” unable at first to imagine her brother connected to such an appalling crime, then, almost despite herself, lingering on the precise details, such as his date of birth and physical description, which banished all hope that it could have been a case of mistaken identity.
And who else could have been the son of the father mentioned in the article? Who else could have shown, in the midst of such horror, the immense kindness that the writer of the article singled out as being particularly despicable?
She started to moan, “My poor, dear Sony,” but immediately swallowed the words like a mouthful of spit, realizing that a woman was dead and remembering that she herself was a defender of women who’d died in such circumstances, one who felt no pity for their tormenters even if they were gentle, smiling, unhappy men who’d been in the grip of a devil since the age of five.
She carefully logged off from the newspaper’s Web site and walked away from the computer, eager now to get back as soon as possible to her father’s house to ply him with questions, almost afraid that if she lingered he might fly off for good.
She was crossing the terrace when she saw them—Jakob, Grete, and Lucie—sitting where they’d been before. They were being served bissap juice.
They hadn’t seen her yet.
The two little girls, wearing sun hats that matched the red-and-white-striped dresses with short puff sleeves and smock tops that she’d later regretted buying (though at the time having imagined her father would have approved of the choice, of the vague longing to transform the girls into expensive dolls), were chatting gaily, addressing the occasional remark to Jakob, which he answered in the same cheerful, level tone.
And that was what Norah noticed straightaway: their calm, ready banter. She was filled with a strange melancholy.
Could it be that the unhealthy excitement that she suspected Jakob of provoking and feeding was triggered by her presence, and that in the end everything went well when she was not there?
It seemed to her that she’d never been able to create for the children the serene atmosphere that she now observed bathing the little group.
The pink shade of the umbrella cast a fresh, innocent blush on their skin.
Oh, she thought, that unhealthy feverishness, was she perhaps not the source of it?
She went up to their table, pulled up a chair, and sat down between Grete and Lucie.
“Hello, Mum,” Lucie said, getting up to kiss her on the cheek.
And Grete said, “Hello, Norah.”
They went on with their conversation, about a character in a cartoon they’d been watching that morning in their room.
“Have a taste of this, it’s delicious,” said Jakob, pushing his bissap juice toward her.
She found that he’d already gotten a tan, and that the long fair hair that hung over his forehead and down the back of his neck seemed even more bleached by the sun.
“Go up and get your things,” he told the girls.
They left the table and went into the hotel with their arms around each other. One girl was fair and the other dark. Their closeness had never seemed entirely credible to Norah, because, while they got on very well, they were always silently jockeying for the first place in Norah and Jakob’s affections.
“You know my brother, Sony,” Norah hastened to say.
“Yes?”
She took a deep breath but couldn’t help bursting into tears, into a flood of tears that her hands were powerless to wipe away.
Jakob picked up a tissue, dried her cheeks, took her in his arms, and patted her back.
She suddenly wondered why she’d always had the vague feeling, whenever they made love, that it was work for him, that he was paying for his and Grete’s keep, because, at that moment, she felt great tenderness in him. She held him tight.
“Sony’s in prison,” she said quickly, her voice breaking.
Glancing around to make sure the children were not back, she told Jakob that four months earlier Sony had strangled his stepmother, the woman his father had married a few years before but whom Norah had never met.
Sony had informed her at the time that their father had remarried and that hi
s new wife had given birth to twin girls, something the old man had not seen fit to tell her himself.
But Sony hadn’t revealed that he’d embarked on a relationship with his stepmother, nor that, as the article in Le Soleil put it, they’d planned to run away together. He’d never mentioned having fallen head over heels in love with the woman, who was about his own age, much less that she changed her mind, broke off the affair, and asked him to move out of the house.
He’d lain in wait for her in her bedroom, where she slept alone.
“I know why my father wasn’t there,” Norah said. “I know where he goes at night.”
Standing by the door he’d waited in the shadows while she put her children to bed in another room.
When she entered he grabbed her from behind and strangled her with a length of plastic-coated clothesline.
He’d then carefully set the woman’s body onto the bed and gone back to his own room, where he’d slept until morning.
All that he had himself described, without prompting and with dazzling affability, as the newspaper article, very reproachfully, stressed.
Jakob listened closely, gently shaking the ice cubes at the bottom of his glass.
He was wearing jeans and a newly laundered blue shirt that smelled nice and fresh.
Norah said nothing, afraid she might be about to pee again without realizing it.
It came back to her, the burning, suffocating, scandalized incomprehension she’d felt on reading the article, but her indignation stubbornly refused to remain focused on Sony. Their father alone was to blame. He’d gotten into the habit of replacing one wife with another, of expecting a woman too young for him, a woman he’d bought in one way or another, to live with his aging body and damaged spirit.
What right had he to snatch from the ranks of men in their thirties a love that was their due, to help himself so freely to that store of burning passion, this man who’d been perching for so long on the big branch of the poinciana that his flip-flops had made it shine?
