Three Strong Women (29 page)

Shouts broke out. All Khady could distinguish was a change of tone, to one of considerable anguish.

One child started to cry, then another.

The men in front leading the group halted and shouted orders in a feverish, menacing tone.

They’d switched on flashlights, which they shone in people’s faces as if they were looking for someone in particular.

Then, in the sudden flashes of harsh white light, Khady was able to see, in fleeting fragments, the dazzled, half-closed eyes and faces of those who up till then had seemed to form an undifferentiated mass.

They were all more or less young, like her.

One man with a calm, rather sad air made her think momentarily of her husband.

The beam of light flashed across her own face and she thought, Yes, me, Khady Demba, still happy to utter her name silently and to sense its apt harmony with the precise, satisfying image she had of her own features and of the Khady heart that dwelled within her to which no one but she had access.

But she was afraid now.

She could hear the waves crashing close by, and out at sea she could see other lights, less harsh, yellower, bobbing up and down.

Yes, she was very afraid.

With a fierce effort that made her dizzy she tried frantically to connect what she was seeing and hearing—flickering lights, the roar of the surf, men and women assembled on the beach—to
something she’d heard in her husband’s family, at the market, in the yard of the house she’d been living in, and even before that, in the little café she ran where she thought of nothing all day but of the child she so longed to conceive.

It seemed she ought to have been able to remember snatches of conversation or the odd word heard on the radio, things caught on the wing and stored vaguely in her mind along with other information of no interest at the time but not without the potential one day to acquire it—it seemed to her that, without having paid attention to the subject at one stage in her life, or thinking it important, she’d nevertheless known what such a combination of elements (night, flickering lamps, cold sand, anxious faces) signified, and it seemed to her that she still knew, but for her stubborn sluggish mind blocking access to a region of sparse, jumbled knowledge to which possibly, certainly, the scene before her was in some way connected.

Oh, she was very afraid.

She felt as if she’d been prodded in the back and was being pushed forward by the abrupt surge of the group toward the sound of crashing waves.

The men with flashlights were getting increasingly nervous and were shouting more and more insistently as people got nearer the sea.

Khady felt her flip-flops getting submerged in the water.

She now clearly saw lights moving in front of her and realized that they must be coming from lamps hung on the bow of a boat. Then, as if she’d had to work out what it was all about before being able to see it, she made out the shape of a large craft not
unlike those whose landing she waited for when, as a little girl, she’d been sent by her grandmother to buy fish on the beach.

The people in front of her went into the water, holding their bundles above their heads, then climbed into the boat, helped up by those already on board, whom Khady could make out in the yellowish, fragile, swaying lights, their faces calm and preoccupied, before she too moved forward awkwardly in the cold sea, throwing her bundle in before letting herself be pulled up into the boat.

The bottom was filled with water.

Gripping her bundle, she crouched on one of the sides.

An indeterminate, putrid smell rose from the wood.

There she remained, stunned and dazed. Such a large number of people were still climbing into the boat that she was afraid of being squashed or suffocated.

She staggered to her feet.

Seized with terror, she was panting.

She pulled up her wet batik, put a leg over the edge of the boat, grabbed her bundle, and lifted the other leg.

She felt a terrible pain in her right calf.

She jumped into the water.

She waded back to the beach and began running along the sand. It got increasingly darker as she left the boat behind.

Although her calf hurt a great deal and her heart was beating so fast that she felt sick, she was filled with delirious, fervent, savage joy at realizing, clearly and indubitably, that she’d just done something that
she
had resolved to do, once she’d decided—very quickly—how vitally important it was for her to leave the boat.

She realized too that such a thing had never happened before:
making a decision, quite independently, about something that mattered to
her
. Her marriage, for instance: because it represented a way to cut loose from her grandmother, she’d been only too eager to accept when this quiet, gentle man—a neighbor at the time—had asked her for her hand. It certainly wasn’t—she thought as she ran, gasping for breath—because she thought that her life was her own and that it involved choices that she, Khady Demba, was free to make, oh, certainly not. It was
she
who’d been chosen: by a man who’d turned out fortunately to be a good husband. But she hadn’t known it then: at the time she’d just felt grateful, relieved, to have been chosen.

Exhausted, she collapsed in the sand.

She was barefoot: her flip-flops had remained in the water or perhaps at the bottom of the boat.

She touched her injured calf and felt blood running from her torn flesh.

She told herself she must have caught her leg on a nail as she leaped out of the boat.

It was so dark she couldn’t see the blood on her hand even when holding it close to her eyes.

She rubbed sand on her fingers for a long while.

What she could see—far away, much farther than she thought she could have run—were small yellowish lights, motionless in the distance, and the powerful white beam of a torch, probing the darkness continually, jerkily, enigmatically.

At dawn she realized, before she’d even opened her eyes, that what had aroused her was not anxiety, nor the sharp pain in her calf, nor the still feeble brightness of the day, but the imperceptible sensation of tingling on her skin, of someone’s motionless, insistent
stare. In order to give herself time to regain her composure she pretended to be still asleep, while quite alert.

She suddenly opened her eyes and sat up on the sand.

A few yards away a young man was kneeling. He didn’t lower his eyes when she looked at him. He just cocked his head slightly and held his hands up with their palms toward her to indicate that she had nothing to fear. She scrutinized him furtively and cautiously. Flipping through her mental images of the previous evening with a speed and lucidity she no longer thought herself capable of, she recognized one of the faces she’d glimpsed, pale in the beam of the torch, just before climbing into the boat.

He seemed younger than her, about twenty perhaps.

With a high, shrill voice, almost like a child’s, he asked, “You okay?”

“Yes, thanks, and you?”

“I’m okay. My name’s Lamine.”

She hesitated a moment, then, not quite managing to suppress a proud, almost arrogant note creeping into her voice, she told him her name: “Khady Demba.”

He got up and sat down beside her.

The deserted beach of grayish sand was covered in garbage (plastic bottles, rubbish bags split open, and the like), which Lamine eyed with cold detachment, looking to see if any of it could possibly still be of use, passing from one item to the next, promptly forgetting each one the moment he’d dismissed it, consigning it to oblivion as though it had never existed.

His eyes fell on Khady’s leg. His face was twisted in horror, but he tried to hide it clumsily behind a hesitant smile.

“You’re really hurt, aren’t you?”

A bit peeved, she looked down in turn.

It was a gaping wound, encrusted with dried blood covered in sand.

The dull nagging pain seemed to get worse the more she looked at it. Khady let out a groan.

“I know where we can get some water,” Lamine said.

He helped her to her feet.

She sensed the nervous strength of his rawboned, tight body, like a coiled spring, as if it were being kept firm, hardened by the constant vigilance and the privations he’d endured, no less than by his ability to blot them out, just as he seemed to negate, to banish from his mind, any object on the beach that was of no interest.

Khady knew her own body was slim and robust, but it did not compare to this boy’s, tempered in the icy water of unavoidable deprivation, so that for the first time in her life she felt luckier than another human being.

She checked to make sure that the wad of banknotes was still there, held in her elastic waistband.

Then, refusing his offer of help, she walked beside Lamine toward the row of houses and shops with corrugated-iron roofs that lined the beach above the high-water mark.

At every step, the pain intensified.

And because, on top of that, she was very hungry, she yearned to be able to acquire an insensible, inorganic body, with no needs or desires, nothing but a tool in the service of a plan that she still knew nothing of but that she understood she’d be made to learn about.

Well, she did know one thing. And this she knew, not as she usually
knew things—that is, without knowing that she knew—but in a clear and conscious way.

I can’t go back to the family, she said to herself, not even wondering (because it was useless) whether that was a good thing or just an extra source of unhappiness. Thinking clearly and calmly, she was well aware that she had, in a way, made a choice.

And when Lamine had told her of his own intentions, when—in a rather strident voice interrupted by little nervous giggles when he couldn’t think of a word or seemed afraid of not being taken seriously—he’d assured her that he’d get to Europe one day or die in the attempt, that there was no other solution to his problems, it appeared to Khady that all he was doing there was making her own plan explicit.

So, in deciding to join him, her conviction that she was now in control of the precarious, unsteady equipage that was her existence hadn’t been shaken in any way.

Quite the opposite.

He’d led her to a pump in the center of town so that she could wash off the sand sticking to her wound. Then he explained that he’d tried several times to leave, that he’d always been prevented by unforeseen circumstances, sometimes large impediments, sometimes small (last night it had been the ramshackle condition of the boat), but that he now had sufficient knowledge of what he might find to brave the obstacles and evade or overcome all eventualities, of which there couldn’t be that many and surely he’d seen them all.

Khady instantly recognized that he was up to speed with things she couldn’t even imagine, and that by staying with him she’d benefit
from absorbing his knowledge, instead of having to grope her own laborious way to it.

How remarkable she found it that she hadn’t said to herself, What else can I do, in any case, but follow this boy? but rather had thought that she could take control of the situation and profit from it.

Racked with pain, she washed her torn calf.

The two pieces of flesh were clearly separated.

She tore a strip off the batik that contained her belongings and wrapped it tightly around her calf, binding together the two flaps of the wound.

Throughout the heavy, still days that followed, the place remained grayish, but the light was bright, as if the shimmering metallic surface of the sea were diffusing a leaden glare.

It seemed to Khady that she’d been granted a reprieve so she could steep herself in information such as she’d never acquired in twenty-five years; and discreetly, too, without appearing to learn anything, an instinctive caution having stopped her revealing to Lamine how ignorant she was.

He’d brought her back to the courtyard their group had departed from.

Many new people were gathered there, and the boy went around collecting orders for food and water, which he then ran to get in town.

He never asked Khady to pay for what he’d bring back for them to eat (omelet sandwiches, bananas, grilled fish), and Khady never
offered, because she’d decided never to talk about anything that hadn’t already been aired, confining herself to short replies to questions that were equally laconic, not mentioning money since Lamine didn’t, questioning him on the other hand with suppressed eagerness about the journey he was planning and the means of achieving it. On that topic she tried to conceal her hunger for information behind an air of gloomy, bored restraint; she felt a veil of morose impenetrability covering her face, just as it had done in her husband’s family, hiding her wan, tepid thoughts behind it.

Oh, how fast her mind was working now! Sometimes it got in a muddle, as if intoxicated by its own abilities.

It was not too sure now whether the ardent young man standing before it was Khady’s husband or a stranger called Lamine, or why exactly it had to remember everything that came out of that mouth with the hot, almost feverish breath, and it felt tempted—at rare, very brief moments—to flush itself clean and return to its previous state, where nothing was demanded of it except to avoid getting involved in anything to do with real life.

Khady memorized, then, at nightfall, lying in the courtyard, filed away the new pieces of information in order of importance.

What had to be kept continually in mind was this: the journey could take months, even years, as it had for a neighbor of Lamine’s who’d only reached Europe (what “Europe” was exactly, where it was situated, she put off until later to find out) five whole years after leaving home.

This too: it was imperative to buy a passport. Lamine had reliable connections for getting one.

And then: the boy now refused to go by sea from this coast.

The journey would be longer, much longer, but it would go through the desert and arrive at a certain place where you had to climb to get into Europe.

And then, and then: Lamine had said many times—his suddenly mulish, inscrutable, smooth face shining with sweat—that he didn’t mind dying if that was the price of pursuing his aim, but to go on living as he had done up till now, that he refused to do.