Marie Ndiaye: Three Strong Women

With him went the bittersweet smell of rotting flowers, of flowers in full bloom crushed under an indifferent foot or bitterly trampled, and when she removed her dress to go to sleep she took particular care to spread it out on Sony’s bed so that the yellow flowers embroidered on the green cotton cloth remained fresh and distinct to the eye and bore no resemblance to the poinciana’s wilting flowers and the guilty, sad smell left in her father’s wake.

She found her backpack at the foot of the bed.

She sat in her nightgown on her brother’s bed. It was covered with a sheet bearing the insignias of American basketball teams. She cast a pained look at the small chest of drawers covered with dusty knickknacks, the child’s desk with its low top, the basketballs piled up in a corner, most of them burst or deflated.

She recognized every object, every poster, every piece of furniture.

Her brother Sony was thirty-five and Norah hadn’t seen him for many years, but they had always been close.

His room hadn’t changed at all since his adolescence.

How was it possible to live like that?

She shivered in spite of the heat.

Outside the small square window everything was pitch black and totally silent.

No sound came from within the house nor from outside it, except perhaps — she couldn’t be sure — from time to time that of the poinciana’s branches rubbing against the corrugated-iron roof.

She picked up her cell phone and phoned home.

No reply.

Then she remembered that Lucie had mentioned going to the movies, which annoyed her because it was Monday and the girls had to be up early the next day for school, and she had to struggle against a sense of impending catastrophe, of terrifying disorder, that swept over her every time she wasn’t there to see, simply see, what was going on, even if she couldn’t always do much about it.

She considered such worries as failings on her part, not weaknesses.

Because it would be too arrogant to think that she alone knew how to organize Lucie and Grete’s life properly, that she alone, through the power of her reason, of her anxious concern, could prevent disaster from crossing the threshold and entering her life.

Had she not already opened her door to evil in a kindly, smiling form?

The only way to mitigate the effects of this great blunder was to be constantly, anxiously, on the alert.

But when her father called she’d simply left.

Sitting on Sony’s bed, she now regretted it.

What was her father — this selfish old man — to her, compared with her daughter?

What did her father’s existence matter now, when her own hung by a thread?

Although she knew that, if Jakob was sitting in a movie theater at that moment, it was pointless, she still dialed his cell phone.

She left an exaggeratedly cheery message.

She could see his affable face, the calm, clear, sensible look in his eyes, the slight droop of his lips, and the general pleasantness of his finely wrought features. She was still able to acknowledge that such amiability had inspired her with confidence, to the extent that she had not dwelled on the puzzling aspects of the life of this man who’d come from Hamburg with his daughter, on the slightly differing versions he’d given of his reasons for coming to France, on the vagueness of his explanations for his less than assiduous attendance at law school, or the fact that Grete never saw, and never spoke about, her mother, who, he claimed, had stayed in Germany.

She knew now that Jakob would never become a lawyer, or anything else, for that matter, that he would never contribute meaningfully to the expenses of the household even if he did receive from time to time — from his parents, he said — a few hundred euros, which he spent immediately and ostentatiously on expensive meals and on clothes the children didn’t need, and she knew too — finally admitting it to herself — that she had quite simply set up in her home a man and a little girl whom she had to feed and care for, whom she could not throw out, and who had her boxed in.

That was the way it was.

She dreamed sometimes that she would return home one evening to find Lucie all by herself, relaxed and happy as she used to be in the past, unaffected by the hollow excitement Jakob provoked, and that Lucie would tell her calmly that the others had left for good.

That was the way it was. Norah knew that she would never have the strength to throw them out.

Where would they go, how would they manage?

Only a miracle, she sometimes thought, could rid her of them, could free her and Lucie from life with this amiable but subtly evil pair.

Yes, that was the way it was, she was trapped.

She got up, took a toiletries bag out of her backpack, and went into the corridor.

So deep was the silence that she seemed to hear it vibrating.

She opened a door that she remembered concluding was the bathroom.

But it was her father’s room. It was empty, and the double bed had not been slept in. Something about the stillness of the air and of everything else made her think that the room was no longer used.

She followed the corridor to the living room and groped her way through it.

The front door was not locked.

Hugging her toiletries bag to her chest and feeling her nightgown rubbing against the back of her knees, she went outside. With her bare feet on the warm cement she felt herself trampling on the invisible flowers that had fallen from the poinciana. She dared at last to look up at the tree, in the vain hope of seeing nothing there, of not discerning in the crisscross of branches the pale shape, the cold luminescence of her father’s hunched body. She thought she could hear, coming from the shadows, loud, painful breathing, desolate panting, and even stifled sobs and little groans of distress.

Overcome with emotion, she wanted to call out to him.

But what word could she use to address him?

She’d never been comfortable saying “Daddy,” and couldn’t imagine using his first name, which she barely knew.

Her urge to call out to him remained stuck in her throat.

For a long while she watched him rocking very slightly above her head. She couldn’t see his face, but she recognized, gripping the biggest branch, his old plastic flip-flops.

The body of her father, this broken man, shone palely.

What a bad omen!

She wanted to run away from this funereal house as quickly as possible, but she felt that, having agreed to return to it and having managed to locate the tree her father was perching in, she was now too deeply committed to be able to abandon him and go back home.

She returned to Sony’s room, having given up on the idea of trying to find the bathroom, so fearful was she now of opening a door on a scene or situation that would cause her to feel more guilty.

Sitting on Sony’s bed again, she toyed with her cell phone, deep in thought.

Should she try again to call home, at the risk of waking the children if they’d gotten back from the movies?

Or go to sleep with the guilty feeling of having done nothing to avert a potential catastrophe?

She’d have liked to hear Lucie’s voice again.

A hideous thought went through her mind, so fleeting that she forgot the exact form it took, but long enough for her to feel the full horror of it: Might she never hear her daughter’s voice again?

And what if, in hastening to her father’s side, she’d unwittingly chosen between two camps, two possible ways of life, the one inevitably excluding the other, and between two forms of commitment fiercely jealous of each other?

Without further ado she dialed the number of the apartment, and then, since no one picked up, the number of Jakob’s cell phone, also in vain.