Three Strong Women (3 page)

Sitting cross-legged on the mattress, she was sewing a small green dress.

Looking up briefly, she smiled at Norah.

Two little girls were asleep on the other bed, lying face-to-face under a white sheet.

With a start Norah realized that the faces of the two children were the most beautiful she had ever seen.

Awakened perhaps by the stuffiness of the corridor flooding
into the air-conditioned room, or by an imperceptible change in the quiet atmosphere surrounding them, the two little girls opened their eyes at the same time.

They looked at their father gravely and without warmth or feeling. They showed no fear at seeing him, but no pleasure either. As for him, Norah noted with surprise, he seemed to melt under their gaze. His shaven head, his face, his neck in its grubby collar, all were suddenly dripping with sweat and reeking of that acrid odor of flowers crushed underfoot.

This man, who’d managed to maintain around himself a climate of dull fear and who’d never let anyone intimidate him, now seemed terrified.

What could such small girls be making him afraid of? Norah wondered. They—the miraculous offspring of his old age—were so marvelously pretty as to make him forget that they belonged to the lesser sex, and perhaps even forget the plainness of his first two daughters, Norah and her sister.

She went toward the bed and knelt down. Looking into the two small identical faces, round, dark, and delicate like the heads of seals resting on the sand, she smiled.

At that moment the first bars of “And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson …” rang out in the room.

Everyone jumped—even Norah, though it was the ringtone of her cell phone. She reached for the phone in the pocket of her dress. She was about to turn it off when she noticed that the call was coming from her own home. Awkwardly, she put the phone to her ear. The silence of the room seemed to have changed. Calm, ponderous, and lethargic just a moment ago, it had suddenly
become alert and vaguely hostile, as if the chance of overhearing something clear and definitive might help them to decide between keeping her at a distance and welcoming her into their midst.

“It’s me, Mummy!” Lucie’s voice rang out.

“Hello, darling! You don’t have to shout, I can hear you quite clearly,” Norah said, red in the face. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes! At the moment we’re making crepes with Grete. Then we’re off to the movies. We’re having a lovely time.”

“Splendid,” said Norah softly. “Lots of love! Speak to you soon.”

She snapped the phone shut and slipped it into her pocket.

The two little girls pretended to be asleep. Their eyelids flickered and their lips were pressed together.

Disappointed, Norah stroked their cheeks, then got up and nodded to Khady before leaving the room with her father, who closed the door carefully behind him.

She thought, plaintively, of what seemed yet another failure on this man’s part to establish a straightforward loving relationship with his children. A man who provoked such a pitiless gaze did not deserve the beautiful little girls born to him in his old age, and nothing, no one could change a man like that except by tearing out his heart.

But as she followed him back down the gloomy corridor, her cell phone knocking gently now against her thigh, she admitted grimly that her irritation with her father was amplified by the outsize excitement in Lucie’s voice, and that the barbs she couldn’t or wouldn’t dare utter to Jakob, the man she’d been living with for a year, would be planted there, in her father’s back, as he walked
innocently before her, bowed and overweight, along the obscure passage.

For in her mind’s eye she could see her beloved Paris apartment, the intimate, discreet emblem of her perseverance, of her modest success, into which, having lived there for a few years alone with Lucie, she’d introduced Jakob and his daughter, Grete, and with them, at a stroke, confusion and disorder, whereas the motivation behind the purchase of the three-room apartment in Montmartre (financed by a thirty-year loan) had precisely been her spiritual longing to put an end to the lifelong confusion of which her now elderly, threadbare father, his wings folded under his shirt, looming huge and incongruous in the gloomy corridor, had been the agonizing incarnation.

Oh, she’d quickly sensed in Lucie’s tone—panting, urgent, and shrill—that the apartment was at that very moment the scene of another demonstration of fatherly ardor, a detestable display informed by Jakob’s ostentatious refusal to lay down any limits or exercise the slightest authority over two seven-year-old girls, and by his habit of undertaking, with extravagant commentary, great energy, and much gusto, culinary preparations he usually lacked the ability, will, or patience to see through, so that pancake or cake batter was never set to cook, because in the meantime he’d suddenly suggested going out or doing something else, in the same panting, urgent, shrill tone that the girls adopted, and that got them so overexcited that they often ended up exhausted, fretful, and in tears, a situation made worse, Norah thought, by a vague feeling that, for all the screaming and laughter, the day had been pointless, awkward, and weird.

Yes, she’d been quick to sense all that in Lucie’s voice. She was already worried about not being there. Or rather, the disquiet that she’d started to feel as the day of her departure approached and that she’d firmly suppressed, she now gave free rein to. Not that there was anything that could objectively be considered dangerous in leaving the girls in Jakob’s care, but she was concerned that the discipline, thrift, and high moral values that, it seemed to her, she’d established in her little apartment and that were meant to affirm and adorn her own life and form the basis of Lucie’s upbringing were being demolished in her absence with cold, methodical jubilation by a man. As for bringing the man into her home, nothing had obliged her to do that: only love, and hope.

Now she was unable to recognize that love any longer; it lay smothered by disappointment. She had lost all hope of an ordered, sober, harmonious family life.

She had opened her door and evil—smiling, gentle, and stubborn—had entered.

After years of mistrust, having left Lucie’s father and bought the apartment, after years of austerely constructing an honorable existence, she had opened her door to its destruction.

Shame on her; she couldn’t tell anyone about it. There seemed to be nothing expressible or understandable about the mistake she’d made: a mistake, a crime against her own efforts.

Neither her mother nor her sister nor her few friends could conceive how Jakob and his daughter, Grete—both of them gentle and considerate, well brought up and likable—were working subtly to undermine the delicate balance that had finally been achieved in the lives of Norah and Lucie, before Norah—as if blinded in
the end by an excess of mistrust—had obligingly opened her door to the charming incarnation of evil.

How lonely she felt!

How trapped, how stupid!

Shame on her.

But what words could she find sufficiently precise to comprehend the anger and disquiet that she’d felt two or three days before, during one of those family arguments that epitomized for her Jakob’s nasty underhandedness and her own feeblemindedness, she who had so aspired to simplicity and straightforwardness, she who had been so afraid of twisted thinking while she and Lucie lived alone together that she’d run a mile at the slightest hint of it, determined never to expose her child to eccentric or perverse behavior?

But she had been ignorant of the fact that evil can have a kindly face, that it could be accompanied by a delightful little girl, and that it could be prodigal in love—though, in fact, Jakob’s vague, impersonal, and inexhaustible love cost him nothing; she knew that now.

As on every other morning, Norah had gotten up first, made Grete and Lucie’s breakfast, and gotten them ready for school. Jakob, who normally only woke up after the three of them had left the house, emerged from the bedroom that morning just as Norah was finishing her hair in the bathroom.

The girls were putting on their shoes, and what should he do but start teasing them, undoing one girl’s laces and stealing the other’s shoe, running and hiding it under the sofa with howls of laughter like a mocking child, oblivious of the time and the distress of the
girls, who, amused at first, ran around the apartment in pursuit, begging him to stop his tricks, on the verge of tears but trying to smile because it was all supposed to be comical and in good fun. Norah had to intervene and order him, like a dog, in that faux-gentle tone, pulsing with suppressed anger, that she used only with Jakob, to bring the shoe back at once, which he did with such good grace that Norah, and the girls too, suddenly looked like petty, sad women whom an impish teaser had only tried to cheer up.

Norah knew that she had to hurry now or be late for the first appointment of the day, so she refused tartly when Jakob offered to go with them. But the girls had encouraged him and backed him up, so Norah, weary and demoralized all of a sudden, gave in. Standing silently in the hallway with their coats, shoes, and scarves on, they had to wait for him to get dressed and join them. He had a way of being gay and lighthearted that seemed forced, almost threatening, to Norah. Their eyes had met as she glanced anxiously at her watch. All she saw in Jakob’s look was cruel spite, bordering on hardness, under his stubbornly effervescent manner.

It made her head spin, wondering what kind of man she’d allowed into her home.

He’d then taken her in his arms and embraced her more tenderly than anyone had ever done. Feeling miserable, she chided herself: Who can enjoy a taste of tenderness and then willingly give it up?

They had then trudged through the muddy slush on the pavement and clambered into Norah’s little car. It was cold and uncomfortable.

Jakob had gotten into the back with the girls (as was his annoying habit, Norah thought: as an adult, wasn’t his place in the front,
next to her?), and while she let the engine warm up, she’d heard him whisper to the girls that they needn’t fasten their seat belts.

“Oh, why needn’t we?” Lucie had asked in astonishment.

“Because we’re not going far,” he’d said in his silly, excited voice.

Norah had gripped the steering wheel, and her hands had begun to tremble.

She’d ordered the girls to fasten their seat belts at once, the fury she felt against Jakob hardening her tone. Her anger had seemed aimed at them, the unfairness of which Grete and Lucie had expressed to Jakob with a pained look.

“We’re really not going far,” he’d said. “Anyway, I’m not going to fasten my seat belt.”

Norah pulled out.

She, who made a point of never being late, was certainly late now.

She was on the brink of tears.

She was a lost, pathetic creature.

After some hesitation, Grete and Lucie had given up fastening their seat belts and Norah said nothing, furious with Jakob for seeking always to cast her in the role of a killjoy or a villain, but also disgusted with herself for being, she felt, a coward, unworthy.

She’d felt like heaving the car against a bus, just to show him that fastening seat belts wasn’t pointless, but he knew that, didn’t he?

That wasn’t the issue. What was
she
doing? What did she want from this man who was hanging on her back with his adorable child in tow? What did she want from this man with the soft, pale eyes, who’d sunk his painless little claws in her flanks so that no matter what she did she couldn’t shake him off?

That’s what she could not, dare not, explain to her mother or her sister or her few remaining friends: the sheer ordinariness of such incidents, the narrowness of her concerns, the emptiness of such a life beneath the appearance of fullness that—such was the terrible power of enchantment wielded by Jakob and his daughter—so easily deceived mother, sister, and friends.

Norah’s father stopped in front of one of the cells that lined the corridor.

He opened the door carefully and immediately stood back.

“You’ll be sleeping here,” he said.

Gesturing toward the far end of the corridor, he added—as if Norah had shown a slight hesitation about this particular assignment—“There’re no longer any beds in the other rooms.”

Norah switched on the ceiling light.

The walls were covered with posters of basketball players.

“Sony’s room?” she mumbled.

Her father nodded.

He was breathing more audibly, with his mouth wide open, his back against the wall.

“What are the girls called?” asked Norah.

He shrugged, pretending to think.

She laughed, slightly shocked.

“Don’t you remember?” she asked.

“Their mother chose their names, rather strange names, I can never remember them,” he replied, laughing too, but mirthlessly.

To her great surprise she sensed in him an air of desperation.

“What do they do during the day, when their mother isn’t there?”

“They stay in their room,” he said abruptly.

“All day?”

“They have all they need. They don’t lack for anything. That girl takes good care of them.”

Norah then wanted to ask why he’d summoned her.

But though she knew her father well enough to be aware that it couldn’t have been for the simple pleasure of seeing her after so long and that he must be after something from her in particular, he seemed at that moment so old and vulnerable that she refrained from asking the question. When he’s ready, he’ll let me know, she said to herself, but she couldn’t help telling him, “I can only stay a few days.”

She thought of Jakob and the two overexcited girls, and her stomach tightened.

“Ah no,” he said, agitated all of a sudden, “you must stay a lot longer, it’s absolutely essential! Well, see you tomorrow.”

Slipping into the corridor, he trotted away, his flip-flops clacking on the concrete, his fat hips wiggling under the thin fabric of his trousers.

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.