Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

  She was so terrified she felt sick.

  She closed her eyes and tried to call to mind those chalky, shimmering dreams that protected her from intolerable contact with a reality that her anxious, grief-stricken heart full of remorse and doubt had made her a part of, tried desperately to detach herself from the feeble, timorous person she was, but that night her dreams weren’t up to battling life’s intrusions. Khady was left face-to-face with her terrors, and no effort at willed indifference could free her from them.

  Her mother-in-law came to fetch her at dawn, silently indicating to her to get up.

  Khady stepped over her sisters-in-law lying on the second mattress, and although she had no wish to hear their harsh, mocking voices or see their pitiless eyes shining in the gray light of dawn, it seemed to her a bad omen that the two women were pretending to be asleep at the moment of her departure into the unknown.

  Was it because they were sure of never seeing Khady again that they chose to avoid the trouble of looking at her, of waving a hand, of lifting a kindly, angelic palm toward her to say good-bye?

  That was it, no doubt: Khady was walking toward her death, and so, swayed by the very understandable fear of getting involved somehow in her fate, they chose to have nothing further to do with her.

  Khady stifled a moan.

  In the street a man was waiting for her.

  He was dressed in Western clothes: jeans and a checked shirt. Although the sun had barely risen he wore gleaming sunglasses, so that when tiny, anxious Khady, her bundle pressed against her chest, was pushed toward him by her jumpy, irritated, impatient mother-in-law, she couldn’t tell whether he was looking at her, but she could see herself reflected in the twin mirrors of his glasses.

  She noticed his habit of biting his lower lip, so that the lower part of his face was constantly moving, like the jaw of a rodent.

  Her mother-in-law quickly put a few banknotes in his hand and he stuffed them in his pocket without looking at them.

  “You mustn’t come back here,” she murmured in Khady’s ear. “You must send us some money as soon as you get over there. But if you don’t make it, you mustn’t come back here.”

  Khady made as if to clutch the old woman’s arm, but she slipped quickly inside the house and shut the door behind her.

  “It’s this way, follow me,” the man said in a low, flat tone.

  He started down the road without bothering to make sure Khady was behind him, as if, she said to herself, following in his footsteps, tottering clumsily in her pink plastic flip-flops while he seemed to leap along on the light, thick soles of his sneakers, he didn’t doubt for a second her interest in accompanying him, or as if, having been paid in full, he couldn’t care less what she did.

  Such lack of concern about her Khady found somewhat reassuring.

  As soon as she stopped thinking about that, taking care not to get left behind or lose one of her flip-flops, she found her mind being invaded by the usual fog, this time shot through not with the dead faces of her husband or grandmother but with the images she saw as she followed in the man’s footsteps along streets that she couldn’t recall ever having been down before, although, she suddenly thought, she could have walked through them in her usual stupor and mental prostration without remembering it—whereas it seemed to her that, this morning, the most humble scenes along the way were gently insisting on their permanence in a kind of rear projection on the screen of her dreams.

  Was it possible that, now finding herself cast into the unknown, wrenched from her dangerous torpor, she was being protected in spite of herself?

  What surprised her more was the twinge of grief she felt on seeing a pregnant woman sitting under a mango tree feeding a small child boiled rice.

  She’d not felt for a long while—not since she’d gone to live with her husband’s family and everything had frozen inside her—that great distress at not having had a baby, that immense, bitter grief unconnected with any reflex of shame in the face of those around her.

  And now she was gazing at the woman instead of merely glancing at her, unable to take her eyes off that swollen belly and the smeared lips of the little boy, and thinking sadly, Won’t I, Khady, ever have a child? She was however less sad than surprised at being sad, at identifying the emotion that, in an obscure, almost gentle way, stirred a part of her that had grown accustomed to feeling merely sluggish or terrified.

  She hurried on because the man in front of her was walking quickly.

  A young woman who could have been her, Khady, in her previous life came out onto the pavement and removed the wooden panel that covered the only window of her drinks stall, and on seeing that long, slender body, narrow at the hips and shoulders, with barely a perceptible waist, but as compact and vigorous in its slimness as the body of a snake, Khady recognized a shape very much like her own, and she reawakened to the action of her own muscles in enabling her to move so quickly, of their forgotten vigor and unfailing presence, of the whole of her young body, which she no longer paid the slightest attention to but which she now remembered and rediscovered in the bearing of this unknown young woman, who was arranging on the counter the fizzy-drink bottles she was about to sell and who, with her calm, focused reserve, could have been Khady, in an earlier life.

  The man was now leading her down the avenue de l’Indépendance.

  Schoolboys in blue shorts and white tops were moving slowly along the pavement, holding pieces of bread that they bit into from time to time, scattering crumbs as they went, with the crows hot on their heels.

  Khady hurried, caught up with her guide, and began trotting in order to stay alongside him, her flip-flops making such a racket on the asphalt that the suspicious crows flew away.

  “We’re nearly there,” the man said in a neutral tone of voice, less to reassure or encourage Khady than to forestall a possible question.

  She wondered then if he was embarrassed to be seen walking alongside this woman with her faded batik, short unadorned hair, and feet white with dust, whereas he, with his fitted shirt, sunglasses, and green sneakers, obviously took particular pride in his appearance and cared what people thought of him.

  He crossed the avenue, turned into the boulevard de la République, and walked down toward the sea.

  Khady could see crows and gulls flying in the soft pale blue sky. She was aware of watching them in their flight and was surprised, almost fearful, of this awareness, saying to herself—not clearly but limply and confusedly, her thoughts still impeded by the fog of her dreams—saying to herself, It’s been a while since I’ve come this way, to the seashore where her grandmother sent her as a child to buy fish from the boats that had just landed their catch.

  She then felt so completely sure of the indisputable fact that the thin, valiant little girl haggling fiercely over the price of mullet and the woman accompanying a stranger toward a similar shore were one and the same person with a unique, coherent destiny that she was moved and felt satisfied and fulfilled. Her eyes were stinging, and she forgot the uncertainty of her situation, or, rather, its precariousness no longer appeared so serious in the dazzling radiance of such a truth.

  She felt the ghost of a smile playing on her lips.

  Hello, Khady, she said to herself.

  She remembered how much, as a little girl, she’d enjoyed her own company, and that she never felt lonely when she was by herself but when she was surrounded by other children or by members of the numerous families that had employed her as a servant.

  She remembered too that her husband, a kindly, placid, taciturn, and slightly withdrawn character, had given her the reassuring impression that she’d no need to give up her solitude and that he didn’t expect her to, any more than he imagined she’d attempt to draw him out of himself.

  And for the first time perhaps since his death, as she went, half running, along the boulevard, gripping her flip-flops with her toes to keep them from falling off, as she felt on her forehead the still mild heat of the blue sky, as she heard th
e shrieking of the crows in their fury at being always hungry, and as she saw them at the edge of her field of vision, the innumerable dark specks in their jerky whirls, for the first time in a very long while she missed her husband, precisely because of the kind of man he had been.

  She felt a knot in her chest.

  Because that was such a new sensation for her.

  This pain was very far from the dizzying disillusion and resentment she’d felt when—because of that unexpected death—she faced the certainty that she wouldn’t have a child anytime soon, and the bitter realization that she’d gone to all that trouble for nothing; very far, too, from the no less bitter regret at having forfeited a life that had been perfectly suitable. This feeling of hurt over her loss took her by surprise and upset her, and with her free hand—the other gripping her bundle—she struck her breasts with little taps as if to make herself believe that she suffered from a form of physical imperfection.

  Oh, that was it, all right: she wanted her husband to be there—or simply to be somewhere in that vast country of which she knew only this town (even only a small part of this town), a country whose borders, extent, and shape she had merely the vaguest notion of—in the end she wanted her husband to be there so she could remember his smooth, dark, calm features and feel secure in the knowledge of that face remaining unchanged, warm and animated, waving like hers, somewhere on earth, a heavy flower on its stalk. Khady now turned her own face mechanically toward that of the stranger (“That’s where the car will pick people up, it’ll be here soon”), the unknown, disdainful face twitching disconcertingly, the living presence that Khady couldn’t fail to acknowledge beside her own, whose heat she could feel close to her cheek and whose faint odor of sweat she could smell, whereas what her husband’s face might look like now she had no idea and couldn’t even imagine.

  That beloved face, she would have endured never seeing it again if she could have been sure that, even far removed from her, it was intact, warm and damp with sweat.

  But the thought that it would exist forever only in the memory of a handful of people suddenly filled her with sadness and pity for her husband, and although she ached and kept hitting her chest, she couldn’t help feeling lucky.

  The man had stopped at the bottom of the boulevard near a small group of people laden with packages.

  Khady had put her bundle down and sat upon it.

  She let her body relax and wiggled her toes on the thin plastic soles of her flip-flops.

  She’d pulled her batik almost up to her knee to let the sun play on her dry, cracked, and dusty legs.

  She wasn’t bothered that she didn’t matter to anyone or that no one gave her a single thought.

  She was herself, she was calm, she was alive, she was still young, and she was in excellent health; every fiber of her being was savoring the kindly warmth of the early-morning sun, and her twitching nostrils gratefully sniffed the salty air blowing in off the sea, which, though not visible, she could hear just at the bottom of the boulevard like a surge of blue-green radiance in the morning light, like the glint of bronze against the soft blue of the sky.

  She half closed her eyes, leaving only a slit through which to watch the man assigned to drive her pacing nervously up and down.

  To drive her where?

  She’d never dare ask him; in any case she didn’t want to know, not yet anyway, because, she wondered, what would her poor brain do with the information, knowing as little as it did of the world, knowing only a small number of names, names of things in everyday use but not the names of what cannot be seen, used, or comprehended.

  Whenever memories of the school to which her grandmother had briefly sent her insinuated themselves into her dreams, it was all noise, confusion, jibes, and scuffles and a few vague images of a bony, mistrustful girl quick to scratch the face of anyone who attacked her, who, squatting on the tiled floor because there weren’t enough chairs, could hear (but couldn’t discern) the rapid, dry, impatient, cross words of a teacher who luckily paid her not the slightest attention, whose perpetually scandalized look (or perpetual looking for something to be scandalized by) passed over the girl without seeing her, and if the girl was content to be left in peace she wasn’t in the least afraid of that woman or of the other children, and if she put up with humiliation she wasn’t, for all that, cowed by anyone.

  Khady smiled inwardly. That small, cantankerous girl was her.

  She touched her right ear mechanically and smiled again at the feeling of the two separate parts of her lobe: a child had jumped on her in class and torn off her earring.

  Oh no, she’d never learned or understood anything at school.

  She would simply let the litany of indistinguishable words—uttered in a toneless voice by the woman with the unlovely face and annoyed expression—wash over her. She’d no idea what sort of things the words referred to; she was aware that they involved a language, French, which she could understand and even speak a little but couldn’t follow in the woman’s rapid, irascible delivery. Meanwhile, a part of her remained constantly on the alert for that group of children who might at any moment launch a surprise attack and kick or slap her when the teacher turned around to face the blackboard.

  That was why, today, all she knew of life was what she’d lived through.

  She therefore preferred that the man imposed on her as her guide or companion or protector didn’t inflict on her ignorant mind—were she to ask him where they were going—the pointless torment of a vocable it couldn’t possibly recognize, since she was well aware that her fate was linked to the obscure, even bizarre and quite unmemorizable name.

  It wasn’t that her fate bothered her all that much, no, but why spoil this brand-new, beneficent feeling of pleasure at the warm atmosphere and slight odor of fermentation, of healthy rot, rising from the pavement on which her feet were resting contentedly and her body was relaxing in that state of complete immobility that it knew so well how to attain—why risk spoiling all that for no good reason?

  The people around her were doing much the same as they waited, sitting on large tartan plastic bags or cardboard boxes tied with string, and although Khady looked straight in front of her through half-closed eyelids, she could tell from the absence of vibration, from a certain stagnant quality of the air around her, that the man—shepherd or jailer or protector or secret caster of evil spells—was the only one fidgeting, pacing feverishly up and down the sandy, uneven pavement, bouncing and hopping about involuntarily in his green sneakers exactly like (Khady thought) the black and white crows nearby—black crows with broad white collars—whose brother he perhaps was, subtly changed into a man in order to carry Khady off.

  Her equanimity was disrupted by a shudder of dread.

  Later, after it turned so hot that Khady had wrapped herself in the batik packed the night before and the small group of individuals had become a tumultuous crowd, the man suddenly grabbed her by the arm, pulled her to her feet, and pushed her into the back of a car already occupied by several others, then jumped in himself, protesting loudly, scornfully, and indignantly; it seemed to Khady that he was furious at finding so many people in the car, that he’d been assured it wouldn’t be so, and that perhaps he’d even paid for it not to be.

  Unsettled, she stopped listening, feeling the hot anger of this man against her thigh and his anxious, quivering exasperation.

  Was he hiding behind his reflective lenses the small, hard, round eyes, the fixed stare of the crows, was he concealing under his checked shirt curiously buttoned up at the neck that collar of whitish feathers they all wore?

  She shot him a sideways glance as the car started moving slowly and with difficulty out of the square that was now filled with minibuses and other big, heavy vehicles like theirs into which there clambered, or tried to, large numbers of people whose words and occasional shouts and cries mingled with the aggressive shrieks of the black-and-white crows flying low over the roadway—she looked at the man’s mouth, which never stopped twitching
, and at the feverish quivering of his neck, and she thought then that the crows opened and closed their black beaks ceaselessly in much the same way, that their black-and-white breasts—black trimmed with white—jerked rhythmically in a similar fashion, as if life were so fragile that it had to signal, or warn of, how delicate and vulnerable it was.

  She wouldn’t have put a question to him for all the world.

  Because what she feared now wasn’t that he would say something that corresponded with nothing in the little she knew, but that, on the contrary, he would remind her of his fellow crows and conjure up the dark, far-off place to which he was perhaps taking her: she, Khady, who hadn’t earned enough in the family to pay for her food and who was being put out in this way, but, oh, were those banknotes tucked in her waistband intended to pay for her passage to that undoubtedly baleful, terrible place?

  Enveloped again by the fleeting confusion into which she had previously been plunged, but without the gentle slowness that had protected her, she was on the verge of panic.

  What was she supposed to think, what was she failing to understand?

  How was she to interpret the clues to her misfortune?

  She vaguely remembered a story her grandmother used to tell about a snake, a violent and invisible creature that had several times tried to carry the grandmother off before a neighbor had managed to kill it even though it couldn’t be seen, but she was unable to recall any mention of crows, and that frightened her.

  Should she have remembered something?

  Had she already, at some time past, been warned?

  She tried to move away a little from her companion by pressing up against the two old women on her left, but the one closest elbowed her purposefully in the ribs without looking at her.

  Khady then tried to make herself as small as possible by hugging her bundle tight.

  She stared at the folds of skin on the back of the driver’s shaven head and tried not to think about anything, just allowing herself to note that she was now hungry and thirsty, reflecting longingly on the piece of bread her mother-in-law had packed, feeling its hard edges against her chest, her head swaying left and right as she was thrown about roughly by the car bouncing up and down as it went along a wide, badly rutted road that Khady could see unfolding rapidly between the head of the driver and that of the front-seat passenger, through the cracked windshield: a soothing view, despite the jolts.