by Marie Ndiaye
The road was lined by cinder-block houses with corrugated-iron roofs in front of which small white hens were pecking and lively children were playing, houses and children such as Khady had dreamed of having with her husband (he of the kindly face): a house of well-laid cement blocks and with a shiny roof, a tiny, clean yard, and bright-eyed children with healthy skin, her children, who would romp about at the roadside without a care in the world although it seemed to Khady that the car was going to gobble them up as surely as it was swallowing the fast, wide, rutted road.
Something inside her wanted to shout a warning to them about the danger and to beg the driver not to devour her children—they’d all inherited her husband’s kindly face—but the moment she was about to utter it she held back, feeling horribly ashamed and frustrated to realize that her children were only crows with unkempt plumage pecking in front of the houses and sometimes grumpily flying off when the cars passed by, black and white and quarrelsome, sailing toward the low branches of a kapok tree, and what would people say if she got it into her head to try and protect her crow-children, she who by chance still had the face and name of Khady Demba and would keep her human features only as long as she remained in that car staring at the fat shaven nape of the driver and thus out of his clutches, this ferocious light-footed bird, what would people say about Khady Demba?
She jumped violently as the man gripped her shoulder.
Having already gotten out of the car he pulled her toward him to make her get out too, while the other women pushed her unceremoniously (one of them complaining that their door was jammed).
Khady stumbled out, still half asleep, leaving the stuffy heat of the car for the suffocating humidity of a place that, if it didn’t remind her of anywhere in particular, wasn’t unlike the neighborhood she’d been living in, with sandy streets and pink or pale blue or roughcast walls, so that she began to lose her fear of having been brought to the crows’ lair.
The man gestured impatiently for her to follow him.
Khady took a quick look around her.
Stalls lined the little square where the car had parked among others just like it, long, badly dented vehicles, and a crowd of men and women was moving between the cars haggling over fares.
Khady noticed in a corner the two letters WC painted on a wall.
She pointed them out to the man, who’d turned around to make sure she was still there, then ran to relieve herself.
When she came out of the latrines, he’d disappeared.
She stopped exactly where he’d stood a few moments before.
She undid her bundle carefully, tore off a piece of bread, and began eating it slowly.
She let each mouthful dissolve on her tongue because she wanted to savor it fully. It was stale, so rather bland and tasteless, but she enjoyed eating it. At the same time, her eyes darted from one end of the square to the other trying to find the man who held her fate in his hands.
Because now that the crows were no longer to be seen anywhere (only pigeons and gray sparrows were flitting here and there), she was much less afraid of a possible family connection between those birds and the man she was with than of being abandoned there: she, Khady Demba, who had no idea where she was and didn’t care to ask.
The sky was dull and overcast.
From the dimmed brilliance of the light and the low position of the pink halo behind the pale gray of the sky Khady guessed with some surprise that night was drawing in, meaning they’d been driving for several hours.
Suddenly the man was standing in front of her again.
He thrust a bottle of orange soda toward her.
“Come on, come on,” he breathed in an urgent, edgy tone of voice, and Khady began trotting behind him again, her flip-flops scraping along the dusty ground, taking big gulps straight from the bottle and, in a state of focused, lucid terror, pausing to inhale the distant smells of putrefaction blowing in from the sea and the crumbling facades, facades such as she’d never seen before, of enormous houses with sagging balconies and dilapidated columns that seemed, in the fading light of violet dusk, to take on the look of very old bones propping up the ravaged body of some large animal. Then the faint smell of rotting fish became more insistent as the man turned toward one of those half-collapsed monsters, and pushed a door open to let Khady into a courtyard, where she saw nothing at first but a pile of sacks and bundles scarcely darker than the violet dusk of the fading day.
The man whispered to her to sit down but Khady remained standing close to the door they’d just come through, not out of any wish to disobey him but rather because in the awesome effort she was making, within her limited powers and sparse points of reference, to force her unbridled, impulsive, timorous mind to note then try to interpret what her eyes were taking in—in that terrible feat of will and intellect, her body had frozen, her legs had stiffened, and her knees had been transformed into two tight balls as hard and inflexible as two knots on a tree branch.
Between herself and the other people there was but one connection: they all found themselves huddled together in the same place at the same time.
But what was the nature of—and the reason for—that connection, and was the situation a good one for them and for her, and how would she recognize a bad situation, and was she a free person or not?
That she was capable of formulating such questions surprised and troubled her.
Her laboriously inquisitive mind was suffering under the burden of so much reflection, but she was not displeased at the progress of that hard work within her, indeed she found it fascinating.
The man didn’t insist on her sitting down.
She could smell the chalybeate odor of his sweat and feel, too, the almost electrical vibrations of his anxious excitement.
For the first time he took off his sunglasses.
In the semidarkness his pitch-black eyes seemed very round and shiny.
Khady was gripped again by her old fear that the man had something to do with crows.
She glanced at the blurred mass of packages and of people sitting or lying among them. She would have been scarcely surprised to see wings flapping there, recognizable in the dark by their white fringes, or hear those white-fringed wings beating against invisible sides. She felt then that in this very fear of hers an escape was being plotted, an attempted flight toward the pallid, dreamy, solitary lands she’d just left—only that very morning, in fact—and she forced herself to suppress her anxiety and to concentrate on nothing but the immediate reality of imminent threat she discerned in the man’s gleaming eyes, on the voracious hiss of his voice asking for, indeed demanding, money.
“Pay me now, you have to pay me!”
Khady suddenly realized that he might be attributing her motionlessness, her lack of reaction, to a reluctance to give him what he wanted, so she softened her stance and facial expression and opened her mouth in a kind of conciliatory smile that he probably couldn’t see in the dark.
As if from a great distance she could hear herself cawing—and wasn’t it a bit as if she were imitating the man’s voice?
“Pay you? Why must I pay you?”
“I brought you here, it was agreed!”
Abruptly turning her back on him she slid her hand along her belly, felt around, and pulled out five warm, damp banknotes, so soft and worn they looked like bits of rag.
She spun around and shoved the notes into the man’s hand.
He counted them without looking at them.
Satisfied, he muttered something to himself and stuffed the notes in the pocket of his jeans. Seeing him so easily placated, Khady immediately regretted having given him so much.
She had the vague feeling that she would have been ready now to ask him, not the name of the town he’d brought her to nor the name of the place they found themselves in, but the reason for their journey—that she would now have been in a position to listen to him and try to learn something, but she was loath to speak to him again, to hear her own voice and then his, the rasping
sound of his throat being cleared, which reminded her of the cry of those ferocious black birds with the white wingtips.
But he’d already turned on his heels and left the courtyard.
And though she’d not known all day whether he was her jailer or her guardian angel, fearsome or benevolent, though she’d been afraid to look him in the eye, his disappearance blocked the calm, studious, rapt flow of her newly directed, controlled thought, and Khady slipped back into the faintly anguished mists of her monotonous daydreams.
She slid to the ground and curled up on her bundle.
She lay prostrate, neither awake nor sleepy, and was almost unaware of what was going on around her. In the depths of an inertia interrupted by occasional jolts of anxiety she was conscious only of feeling hot, hungry, and thirsty. Then a sudden commotion made her lift her head and start to get up.
All the people in the courtyard had stood up, responding, Khady hastily supposed, to the arrival of a small group of men.
There was much whispering among the previously silent crowd.
The darkness was heavy and deep.
As she crouched Khady could feel the sweat running down her arms, between her breasts, and at the back of her knees.
She heard short, deliberately stifled shouts coming from the three or four men who’d just entered, and although she hadn’t grasped what they were saying, either because she was too far away or because they were speaking a language she wasn’t familiar with, Khady understood, from the busy, preoccupied, muffled rustling that ran through the crowd, that what the people in the courtyard had been waiting for was now at last to happen.
Her head was buzzing.
She picked up her bundle and, a little unsteadily, followed the slow procession to the door.
Hardly had they reached the sandy street, dimly lit by a thin crescent moon, than silence fell once again on the group walking slowly in a spontaneously organized single file behind the men whose arrival had put an end to the long wait in the courtyard, and even the small children, strapped to their mothers’ backs, were quiet.
Dogs were howling in the distance.
Apart from the rustling of people’s clothes and the noise of their flip-flops scraping the sand, that was the only sound to be heard in the darkness.
The last houses disappeared.
She then felt her thin plastic soles sinking into deep sand, still warm on the surface but cold underneath. The march of one and all around her was slowed, impeded by the mass of fine sand that filled their slippers and flip-flops and suddenly froze their toes and ankles, whereas their foreheads were still pouring with sweat.
She was aware, too, almost in advance, almost before it happened, of an end to the prudent hushed consensus that had prevailed in the street, and she guessed, from an imperceptible quiver, from a more pronounced sound of breathing running through the moving, undulating crowd, that the danger, whatever it was, of being heard and noticed had passed, or else perhaps the tension had reached such a point now as they were approaching the sea that the need for restraint could be set aside and forgotten.
Shouts broke out. All Khady could distinguish was a change of tone, to one of considerable anguish.
One child started to cry, then another.
The men in front leading the group halted and shouted orders in a feverish, menacing tone.
They’d switched on flashlights, which they shone in people’s faces as if they were looking for someone in particular.
Then, in the sudden flashes of harsh white light, Khady was able to see, in fleeting fragments, the dazzled, half-closed eyes and faces of those who up till then had seemed to form an undifferentiated mass.
They were all more or less young, like her.
One man with a calm, rather sad air made her think momentarily of her husband.
The beam of light flashed across her own face and she thought, Yes, me, Khady Demba, still happy to utter her name silently and to sense its apt harmony with the precise, satisfying image she had of her own features and of the Khady heart that dwelled within her to which no one but she had access.
But she was afraid now.
She could hear the waves crashing close by, and out at sea she could see other lights, less harsh, yellower, bobbing up and down.
Yes, she was very afraid.
With a fierce effort that made her dizzy she tried frantically to connect what she was seeing and hearing—flickering lights, the roar of the surf, men and women assembled on the beach—to something she’d heard in her husband’s family, at the market, in the yard of the house she’d been living in, and even before that, in the little café she ran where she thought of nothing all day but of the child she so longed to conceive.
It seemed she ought to have been able to remember snatches of conversation or the odd word heard on the radio, things caught on the wing and stored vaguely in her mind along with other information of no interest at the time but not without the potential one day to acquire it—it seemed to her that, without having paid attention to the subject at one stage in her life, or thinking it important, she’d nevertheless known what such a combination of elements (night, flickering lamps, cold sand, anxious faces) signified, and it seemed to her that she still knew, but for her stubborn sluggish mind blocking access to a region of sparse, jumbled knowledge to which possibly, certainly, the scene before her was in some way connected.
Oh, she was very afraid.
She felt as if she’d been prodded in the back and was being pushed forward by the abrupt surge of the group toward the sound of crashing waves.
The men with flashlights were getting increasingly nervous and were shouting more and more insistently as people got nearer the sea.
Khady felt her flip-flops getting submerged in the water.
She now clearly saw lights moving in front of her and realized that they must be coming from lamps hung on the bow of a boat. Then, as if she’d had to work out what it was all about before being able to see it, she made out the shape of a large craft not unlike those whose landing she waited for when, as a little girl, she’d been sent by her grandmother to buy fish on the beach.
The people in front of her went into the water, holding their bundles above their heads, then climbed into the boat, helped up by those already on board, whom Khady could make out in the yellowish, fragile, swaying lights, their faces calm and preoccupied, before she too moved forward awkwardly in the cold sea, throwing her bundle in before letting herself be pulled up into the boat.
The bottom was filled with water.
Gripping her bundle, she crouched on one of the sides.
An indeterminate, putrid smell rose from the wood.
There she remained, stunned and dazed. Such a large number of people were still climbing into the boat that she was afraid of being squashed or suffocated.
She staggered to her feet.
Seized with terror, she was panting.
She pulled up her wet batik, put a leg over the edge of the boat, grabbed her bundle, and lifted the other leg.
She felt a terrible pain in her right calf.
She jumped into the water.
She waded back to the beach and began running along the sand. It got increasingly darker as she left the boat behind.
Although her calf hurt a great deal and her heart was beating so fast that she felt sick, she was filled with delirious, fervent, savage joy at realizing, clearly and indubitably, that she’d just done something that she had resolved to do, once she’d decided—very quickly—how vitally important it was for her to leave the boat.
She realized too that such a thing had never happened before: making a decision, quite independently, about something that mattered to her. Her marriage, for instance: because it represented a way to cut loose from her grandmother, she’d been only too eager to accept when this quiet, gentle man—a neighbor at the time—had asked her for her hand. It certainly wasn’t—she thought as she ran, gasping for breath—because she thought that her life was her own and th
at it involved choices that she, Khady Demba, was free to make, oh, certainly not. It was she who’d been chosen: by a man who’d turned out fortunately to be a good husband. But she hadn’t known it then: at the time she’d just felt grateful, relieved, to have been chosen.
Exhausted, she collapsed in the sand.
She was barefoot: her flip-flops had remained in the water or perhaps at the bottom of the boat.
She touched her injured calf and felt blood running from her torn flesh.
She told herself she must have caught her leg on a nail as she leaped out of the boat.
It was so dark she couldn’t see the blood on her hand even when holding it close to her eyes.
She rubbed sand on her fingers for a long while.
What she could see—far away, much farther than she thought she could have run—were small yellowish lights, motionless in the distance, and the powerful white beam of a torch, probing the darkness continually, jerkily, enigmatically.
At dawn she realized, before she’d even opened her eyes, that what had aroused her was not anxiety, nor the sharp pain in her calf, nor the still feeble brightness of the day, but the imperceptible sensation of tingling on her skin, of someone’s motionless, insistent stare. In order to give herself time to regain her composure she pretended to be still asleep, while quite alert.
She suddenly opened her eyes and sat up on the sand.
A few yards away a young man was kneeling. He didn’t lower his eyes when she looked at him. He just cocked his head slightly and held his hands up with their palms toward her to indicate that she had nothing to fear. She scrutinized him furtively and cautiously. Flipping through her mental images of the previous evening with a speed and lucidity she no longer thought herself capable of, she recognized one of the faces she’d glimpsed, pale in the beam of the torch, just before climbing into the boat.
