Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

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.