by Marie Ndiaye
Grete and Lucie came out of the hotel with their backpacks on and stood beside the table, ready to leave.
Norah gazed intently, sorrowfully, at Lucie’s face. It suddenly seemed to her that this beloved face meant nothing to her anymore.
It was the same face, with its delicate features, smooth skin, tiny nose, and curly forehead, but she didn’t recognize it.
She felt alive but, as a mother, distant, distracted.
She’d always loved her daughter passionately, so what was this?
Was it simply the humiliation of feeling that behind her back Jakob and the children had taken advantage of her absence to become closer?
“Right,” said Jakob, “let’s go, I’ve already paid the bill.”
“Go where?” asked Norah.
“We can’t stay in the hotel, it’s too expensive.”
“True.”
“We can go to your father’s, can’t we?”
“Yes,” said Norah airily.
He asked the girls if they’d been sure to sort their things carefully into their two backpacks and to leave nothing behind. Norah couldn’t help noticing that he was now able to talk to them with just that gentle firmness she’d always wanted to see him adopt.
“And school?” she asked casually.
“The Easter holidays have begun,” Jakob said, somewhat surprised.
“I’d forgotten that.”
She was upset and started trembling.
Things like that had always been her responsibility.
Was Jakob lying to her?
“My father never liked girls much. Now there are suddenly going to be two more!”
Faced with their serious expression she giggled nervously, ashamed to admit having such a father and also for making fun of him.
Yes, nothing ever emerged from that house but heartbreak and dishonor.
In the taxi she had some difficulty indicating precisely where her father lived.
She had only a rough idea of the address, just the name of the district, “Point E,” and so many homes had been built in the last twenty years that she was soon quite lost. She once again misdirected the driver and for a moment worried that Jakob and the children would think she’d made it all up, the existence of the house and of its owner.
She’d taken Lucie’s hand and was alternately squeezing it and stroking it.
In her distress she thought that genuine motherly love was melting away: she no longer felt it, she was cold, jittery, in total disarray.
When they stopped at last in front of the house she jumped out and ran to the door, where her father appeared, still in the same rumpled clothes, his long yellow toenails sticking out from the same brown flip-flops.
He gazed suspiciously past Norah at Jakob and the girls taking their bags out of the trunk.
She asked him nervously if they could stay in the house.
“The redhead is my daughter,” she said.
“So you have a daughter?”
“Yes, I wrote to you when she was born.”
“And him, he’s your husband?”
“Yes.”
“You’re really married?”
“Yes.”
It annoyed her to lie, but she did, knowing how much the proprieties mattered to her father.
He smiled with relief and shook hands affably with Jakob and then with Grete and Lucie, complimenting them on their nice dresses, speaking with the same urbane, winning drawl that he used when showing VIPs around his holiday village.
After lunch—another bout of tortured gluttony, during which he leaned back heavily in his chair to get his breath back every so often, his mouth wide open and his eyes closed—she led him off to Sony’s room.
He showed great reluctance to go in, but being bloated he could not do otherwise than flop down on the bed.
He was gasping like a dying animal.
Norah stood leaning against the door.
He pointed toward a drawer, and Norah opened it. She found on top of Sony’s T-shirts the framed photo of a very young woman with round cheeks and laughing eyes who was making her thin white dress swirl around her slender, beautiful legs.
Norah felt bitter, full of pity for this woman, and shrieked at her father: “Why did you marry again? What more did you want?”
He made a limp, slow gesture with his hand and muttered that he wasn’t interested in being lectured to.
Then, slowly catching his breath, he said, “I asked you to come because I want you to take on Sony’s defense. He hasn’t got a lawyer. I can’t afford a lawyer.”
“He hasn’t got a lawyer yet?”
“No, I tell you. I can’t afford a good lawyer.”
“Can’t afford it? What about Dara Salam?”
She didn’t like the sound of her voice, its spiteful, nagging tone. She didn’t like being drawn into a fight with this baneful man, her father, when she’d tried so hard to keep their relationship bland and innocuous.
“I know where you spend your nights,” she said, more calmly.
He glanced at her askance. There was hostility and menace in his hard, round eyes.
“Dara Salam went bankrupt,” he said. “So there’s nothing there. You’ll have to take on Sony’s case.”
“But that’s not possible, I’m his sister. What makes you think I can be his defense lawyer?”
“It’s not forbidden, is it?”
“No, but it’s not done.”
“So what? Sony needs a lawyer, that’s all that matters.”
“You still love Sony?” she cried out, trying to understand.
He turned over on the bed and put his head in his hands.
“That boy is all I have to live for,” he whispered.
He lay there, curled up in a fetal position, old and enormously fat, and Norah suddenly realized that one day he would be dead. Up till then she’d always thought, with some annoyance, that nothing human could ever happen to him.
He stirred, and sat up on the edge of the bed. He then had difficulty getting up.
He turned his eyes from the pile of balls in the corner to the photo Norah still held in her hand.
“She was evil, that woman, it was she who ensnared him. He would never have dared look at his dad’s wife.”
“That may be so,” Norah hissed, “but she’s the one who’s dead.”
“How long will Sony get? What do you think?” he asked in a tone of utter helplessness. “Surely he won’t spend the next ten years in jail. Will he?”
“She’s dead, he strangled her, she must have suffered a great deal,” Norah murmured. “The little girls, the twins, what did you tell them?”
“I didn’t tell them anything, I never speak to them. They’re no longer here.”
He looked stubborn and annoyed.
“What do you mean, no longer here?”
“I sent them north this morning, to her family,” he said, jutting his chin at the photo of his wife.
Suddenly Norah couldn’t bear looking at him any longer. She felt trapped. He’d gotten her in his grip. In truth he had them all in his grip, ever since he first abducted Sony and put the stamp of his ferocity on their very existence.
By sheer strength of will she’d gotten herself an education that had led to a partnership in a law firm. She’d given birth to Lucie and bought an apartment. But she would have given it all up if only she could turn back the clock and prevent Sony from being snatched from them.
“You said once, if I remember rightly, that you would never let go of Sony,” her father exclaimed.
A few yellow flowers had stained the sheet. They’d fallen from his shoulders and been crushed beneath his bulk.
How heavy the devil must now be who held Sony in his grasp, Norah thought.
It was at dinner that night, when Jakob and her father were chatting amiably, that Norah heard him say, “When my daughter Norah lived here …”
“What’re you talking about? I’ve never lived in this house!” she exclaimed.
> He was holding a leg of roast chicken. He bit off a chunk, took his time chewing it, then said calmly, “No, I know. I meant when you were living in this town, in Grand Yoff.”
He then looked as if a wad of cotton wool had gotten stuck in his throat. His ears started throbbing gently.
The voices of Jakob and her father, and of the girls conversing in an unduly measured way, seemed to be fading, becoming muffled and almost inaudible.
“Look here,” she muttered angrily, “I’ve never lived in Grand Yoff, nor anywhere else in this country.”
But she wasn’t sure of having spoken, or if she had, of being listened to.
She cleared her throat and repeated more loudly, “I’ve never lived in Grand Yoff.”
Her father raised his eyebrows in amused astonishment.
Jakob looked hesitantly first at Norah, then at her father, and the girls had stopped eating, so Norah, dismayed at appearing to beg just so they’d believe her, felt obliged to say, yet again, “I’ve never lived anywhere but France, you ought to know that.”
“Masseck!” his father shouted. He said a few words to Masseck, who went to fetch a shoebox, which he put on the table. Norah’s father started rummaging in it impatiently.
He pulled out a small square photo, which he held out to Norah.
Like all the photos he’d ever taken, this one was, intentionally or not, somewhat blurred. He manages to make them fuzzy so he’ll be able to say what he likes about them, Norah thought.
The plump young woman was standing in front of a little house with pink walls and a blue corrugated-iron roof. She was wearing a lime-green dress with yellow flowers.
“That’s not me,” Norah said with relief. “That’s my sister. You’ve always mixed us up, even though she’s older than I am.”
Without answering her he showed the photo to Jakob, then to Grete and Lucie. Embarrassed, the girls gave it a cursory glance.
“I’d have thought it was you, too,” said Jakob with a nervous laugh. “You look very alike.”
“Not really,” Norah murmured. “It’s a bad photo, that’s all.”
Her father waved it in front of Lucie, who’d lowered her eyes and was blushing slightly.
“Come on, Lucie, it’s your mum in the photo, isn’t it?”
Lucie nodded vigorously.
“You see,” he said, “your own daughter recognizes you.”
Furtively, but harsh as always, he glanced sideways at her.
“Didn’t you know your sister once lived in Grand Yoff?” Jakob asked, obviously trying to be helpful. But Norah thought, I don’t need anyone’s help with this.
How absurd it all was!
She suddenly felt very tired. “No, I didn’t know. When she’s away proselytizing for her weird sect my sister hardly ever tells me what she’s up to or where she’s going.” Without looking him in the eye, Norah asked her father, “What was she doing here?”
“It was you who were here, not your sister. You must know why you came.”
In the night, as Jakob slept, she left the house and its oppressive atmosphere and went outside, knowing full well that she would find no peace there either, with her father standing watch up in the branches of the poinciana.
And although in the pitch-black darkness she couldn’t see him, she could hear, hear the noises he made in his throat, the tiny movements of his flip-flops on the branch. All those sounds were amplified in her skull, to the point almost of deafening her.
She stood there, motionless, with her bare feet on the rough warm concrete of the threshold, aware that her arms, legs, and face were paler than the night and would probably be shining with an almost milky brightness, and that doubtless he could see her as she could now see him, his face in shadow, crouching in his white clothes.
She was torn between satisfaction at having found him out and horror at sharing a secret with this man.
She now felt that he would always resent her being party to this mystery, even though she had never sought to know anything about it.
Was that the reason why he’d tried to sow confusion with that story about a photo taken in Grand Yoff?
She couldn’t remember ever having set foot there.
The only troubling detail—as she freely acknowledged—was that her sister was wearing a frock very similar to hers, because her mother had made the lime-green, yellow-flowered dress thanks to a Bouchara fabric voucher that Norah had found.
Her mother couldn’t have made two dresses out of that one piece of cotton cloth.
Norah went back inside and walked along the corridor to the twins’ room, where Masseck had put up Grete and Lucie.
She pushed the door open gently and, on sniffing the warm smell of the children’s hair, suddenly felt overwhelmed by the love that had earlier deserted her.
But then it faded away, vanished, and once again she felt hard, distracted, remote, as if possessed by something that had quietly and without cause entered her being, refusing now to yield to anyone or anything.
“Lucie, my poppet, my little ginger-haired darling,” she murmured. Her disembodied voice made her think of Sony’s smile, or of their mother’s, because it seemed not to issue from her lips but merely to float in the air before them, a product entirely of the atmosphere; and it seemed that feeling no longer dwelled in those words she had so often uttered.
Once more she found herself in front of Sony, separated from him by the grating against which they had to press their lips in order to have any hope of hearing each other.
She told him that she’d brought him some ointment for his eczema, which would be given to him in the prison infirmary once it had been checked. Sony burst out laughing, and in the affable tone he used whatever the subject, he said that he’d never see it.
Despite his gauntness, the scabs on his skin, and his unkempt beard, she could now at least recognize her brother’s kind, saintly face, and tried to discern in it any signs of distress, suffering, or remorse.
There were none.
“I can’t believe it, Sony,” she said.
She thought, with pain and bitterness, of the many occasions when she’d heard the same vain words uttered pitifully by a criminal’s family.
But Sony had been, really, a sort of mystic.
Scratching his face, he shook his head.
“I’m going to defend you. I’m going to be your lawyer. I’ll have the right to visit you more frequently.”
Still scratching his cheeks and forehead furiously, he kept shaking his head.
“It wasn’t me, you know,” he said calmly. “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.”
“What? What’s that you’re saying?”
“It wasn’t me.”
“It wasn’t you who killed her? Oh my God, Sony!”
Her teeth hit the grating. Her lips tasted of rust.
“So who killed her, Sony?”
He shrugged his painfully thin shoulders.
He’d already told her that he was hungry the whole time because among the hundred or so prisoners with whom he shared his vast cell there were some who stole part of his rations every day.
Now all he ever dreamed about at night—he told her with a smile—was food.
“It was him,” Sony said.
“Our father?”
He nodded, moistening his dry lips with his tongue over and over again.
Then, realizing that the visit was nearly over, he started speaking very quickly: “You remember, Norah, when I was little and we were still living together, there was this game we played: you’d pick me up, swing me up and down, and shout, ‘With a one, with a two,’ and on ‘with a three!’ you’d throw me onto the bed, saying that it was the ocean and I had to swim back to the shore, do you remember?”
Throwing his head back, he chuckled with delight, and Norah recognized at once, with a shock, the little boy with the wide-open mouth whom she used to throw on the blue chenille counterpane that covered his bed.
“How are the twins?” he
asked.
“He’s sent them to their mother’s family, I believe.” She spoke with difficulty. Her teeth were clenched and her tongue was thick.
As he moved away from the grating, following the other prisoners, he turned around and said gravely, “The little girls, the twins, they’re my daughters, not his. He knew that, you understand.”
For a long while she walked up and down the pavement in front of the prison, in the scorching midday sun, trying to summon up the strength to rejoin Masseck in the car.
So everything is falling into place at last, she thought, with icy exultation.
It seemed to her that she was staring into the eyes of the devil holding her brother in his clutches, thinking, I’ll make him let go, but what is it all about, and who can ever restore all that’s been taken away over years?
What, indeed, was it all about?
Masseck returned by a different route from the usual one, she noticed, but she didn’t pay it much mind until he stopped in front of a little house with pink walls and a blue corrugated-iron roof, turned the engine off, and put his hands on his knees. She was determined not to ask any questions, to avoid taking a single step toward a possible trap.
For Sony’s sake, and her own, she had to be a strong, skilled operator. The unsuspected won’t trip me up again, she resolved.
“He told me to show you this house,” Masseck said, “because that’s where you lived.”
“He’s wrong, my sister did.”
Why was she so reluctant to look closely at the house?
Feeling disconcerted, she cast an eye over the faded pink walls, the narrow balustrade in front, and the humbler houses nearby where children were playing.
Since she’d seen the photo, she thought she could not help remembering the place.
But didn’t the memory come from further back?
Were there not, behind the pink walls, two small rooms with dark blue tiles, and at the back, a tiny kitchen that smelled of curry?
During dinner she noticed that Jakob and her father were chatting contentedly and even that the latter, who could scarcely pretend to be interested in children, nonetheless managed to make an occasional face at Lucie and Grete, accompanied by funny noises intended to make them laugh.
