Three Strong Women (28 page)

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.

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.

Dogs were howling in the distance.

Apart from the rustling of people’s clothes and the noise of their flip-flops scraping the sand, that was the only sound to be heard in the darkness.

The last houses disappeared.

She then felt her thin plastic soles sinking into deep sand, still warm on the surface but cold underneath. The march of one and all around her was slowed, impeded by the mass of fine sand that filled their slippers and flip-flops and suddenly froze their toes and ankles, whereas their foreheads were still pouring with sweat.

She was aware, too, almost in advance, almost before it happened, of an end to the prudent hushed consensus that had prevailed in the street, and she guessed, from an imperceptible quiver, from a more pronounced sound of breathing running through the moving, undulating crowd, that the danger, whatever it was, of being heard and noticed had passed, or else perhaps the tension
had reached such a point now as they were approaching the sea that the need for restraint could be set aside and forgotten.