Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

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.