Marie Ndiaye - All My Friends

“Shh, mama. It’s OK, he’s going now, poor papa. You don’t have to talk so loud.”

“It’s just that stupid elephant, getting me all worked up. I don’t like that, I don’t like it one bit.”

She was still shouting, in spite of herself. She forced herself to keep quiet. She could hear her watch crystal clicking against the metal of her sheath, but she knew she was the only one who could hear it.

“You don’t have to call him an elephant in front of all these people.”

The air whistled between Paula’s teeth. Zaka lifted her chin with one outstretched finger, and the girl looked up at her with Marlène Vador’s marvelous face.

“How I love you,” cried Zaka, charmed, proud, unbelieving.

A jolt of pain pierced the back of her head. She fell to the sidewalk, not slumping but toppling, stiff and firm in her armor.

* * *

Doctor Zaka and her daughter Paula took a bus line unknown to them both. They got off at the last stop, as far into the suburbs of Paris as they’d ever been. Paula had refused to take a window seat. And when Zaka gaily pointed out all the changes the place had seen since her childhood, her daughter Paula answered only with a noncommittal flexing of her very red lips (red as Vador’s lipsticked lips, and not a trace of rouge, Zaka repeated to herself reflexively) and a polite nod, never looking at her or so much as glancing outside.

Off the bus, she kept that same impregnable halo of coldness around her.

Zaka wondered if the child was afraid. Or was she, like herself, her mother Zaka, walking down this street in a protective sheath that she feared might ring out if tapped by her fingernails or belt buckle?

Zaka had advised Paula on the clothes she should wear for this outing. She examined the little girl with pleasure and surprise. Paula was dressed as Marlène was no doubt in the habit of dressing: a clinging tee-shirt printed with fuchsia scorpions, so tiny and numerous that you had to squint to withstand the sight of them, and a pair of tight, very light-colored jeans, cinched with an alligator-print belt. On the child’s feet, high-heeled boots of cream-colored canvas, specially purchased by Zaka for their trip to the outer suburbs.

She was quite aware that Paula was not of an age to be dressed in this way.

Oh yes, she knew that.

She smiled at herself, a little stiffly, but who would dare claim that she dressed her daughter in such clothes for music lessons or school? Not even the unpleasant man who happened to be the child’s father could deny that Paula’s very busy little social life unfolded against a background of muted shades and full, classic cuts, that they were both, mother and daughter alike, true bourgeoises, refined and invisible. Zaka was not in the habit of showing off Paula’s beauty.

But was it her fault if Marlène Vador did not have the same tastes, the same ways?

Paula’s long black hair clapped gently against her slender back.

“Where are we going?” she asked quietly.

“To visit a friend.”

Zaka put on a cheery voice — what was Paula afraid of, here in the very neighborhood where her mother had grown up? Why was her daughter afraid, with Marlène Vador’s features on her face?

“You have a friend here?”

“My best friend, even if it’s been thirty years since I last saw her. And why, if you please, shouldn’t I have a friend here, and even a very good friend?”

She saw a little muscle twitching on Paula’s cheek. How pale the child was today, and how tense! Zaka began to fear she might not carry this off, or perhaps she’d been wrong from the start. Paula staggered on her platform soles. Zaka steadied her, eyeing her closely, that little-girl face so unlike her own, and nothing like her husband’s, but in every way, by the grace of a chemistry of prayers and calculations, like a stranger’s. She was annoyed by the child’s apprehensions. She herself once lived in this place — it wasn’t right to be afraid.

On her own face, Doctor Zaka plastered a resolutely carefree expression. She wasn’t beautiful, she was rough and angular, but was she not an accommodating person? She took Paula’s arm and, slowly caressing the hollow of her elbow, did her best to look around through her daughter’s eyes.

“You’re not too cold? My little one! Maybe you’re hungry? You want something to eat? Do you want a roll, a brioche?” She went on and on, not even hearing herself speak. Overwrought, she squeezed Paula’s arm a little too hard, and the child politely pulled free.

How could she deny it, how could she deny it? And shame fogged her glasses’ thick lenses. From Paula’s lost, dismayed air, she could see what had become of the street she’d so often walked with Vador at her side, from the housing project to the junior high, and that narrow street was once lined with tidy little homes, low apartment houses with flowers in windowboxes, not, oh no, these blighted gray concrete buildings, doors and windows closed off with plywood or cinderblocks, courtyards congested with trash. Two video clubs and a dusty-windowed sex shop, perhaps open, perhaps out of business, had replaced. . Zaka couldn’t recall what.

“I think there was a bakery around here somewhere. Do you want to find a bakery? If my little one wants something to eat, then we’ll find a bakery. .”

“I don’t want anything,” Paula whispered.

“In my day, there were two or three bakeries just in this neighborhood.”

Her tone was almost pleading. How to believe someone could walk down a street such as this every day and then, much later, give birth to a girl like Paula? If Paula refused to believe it, that was only common sense.

Zaka felt cruelly humiliated. How stupid of her to try to take pride in the life she’d led here, in this drab disaster! She touched the thick bandage swaddling the back of her head.

“Does it hurt?” asked Paula, anxious.

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t have been so mean to him.”

Paula stopped to look at her, eyes dilated with fear.

“You’re right,” mumbled Zaka, forcing a deferential grimace.

“Wouldn’t you have thrown a rock at him if he’d talked to you like that?”

“You’re right, I would have thrown a rock at him.”

She almost added “that fat animal,” but she managed to choke back those words, which would have hurt Paula (and why could her daughter find no better cause for compassion than her idiot father, why?). Instead, with a mocking snort aimed at gaining the child’s complicity, she quickly added:

“I would have thrown a much bigger rock than he did, but would that have been enough to flatten him?”

“I’m sick of this!” Paula shouted.

“You’re right, honey,” said Zaka, putting her arms around her.

Tenderly pressing the small of her back, she started Paula walking again.

“You want something to eat? You want a little bun? A brioche?”

“I’m sick of this,” Paula murmured, distant and unhostile, as if to herself.

* * *

A little later, she asked the child to wait in front of the building, where there was still a vast playground. The sand was much dirtier and more meager than she remembered. Doctor Zaka felt the inside of her mouth go dry.

“You can play, but don’t get dirty,” she said with some effort.

Then she remembered: Paula had stopped playing in the sand long ago.

Lips oddly downturned, Paula told her she didn’t want to stay in this place by herself.

“When I was your age,” said Zaka, “I spent all day outside, right here where we’re standing.”

She kissed her daughter and walked off toward the front door, its cracked pane of glass patched with brown packing tape, here reflecting scattered pieces of stormy gray sky, the sign of a heavy, hot rain soon to come, there reflecting — or was she mistaken? — Paula’s face, imprisoned in a broken triangular shard, so creased and distorted by panic as to seem shrunken, crumpled around a gaping mouth that might, at any moment, open into a bellow of fear.