Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

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.

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.