Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

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 his 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?

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?”