Three Strong Women (6 page)

After the meal they went their separate ways, and although it was a few days before their departure, Sony and their mother never saw each other again and never again would their mother mention him.

Their father had organized a lavish program of tourism, had hired a guide and a chauffeur for them, even paying for a few extra nights at one of the chalets in his holiday village in Dara Salam.

All that, however, their mother refused, dismissing the guide and the chauffeur, and bringing forward their departure date.

She no longer left the hotel. She just went back and forth between her room and the pool, smiling in the same mechanical, distant, very calm way that Sony did, leaving Norah and her sister to entertain the husband, who took pleasure in everything and found nothing to complain about, until the last evening, when, at a loss where to go, they took him to dinner at their father’s, and the two men chatted until two in the morning, parting with reluctance and promising to see each other again.

That had really annoyed Norah. “He was making fun of you the whole time,” she said to the husband, with a snicker, as they went back to the hotel.

“What? Not at all. He’s a very nice man, your dad!”

And Norah immediately felt guilty for her spiteful remark, allowing that it was indeed perfectly possible that their father had genuinely enjoyed the company and that she was simply angry with the two of them for appearing to trivialize her mother’s immense unhappiness, and also that it was her mother, after all, who had accepted the unseemly idea to bring her husband to their
father’s house in the obscure hope, no doubt, of provoking an almighty row, at the end of which she and Sony would be avenged and their father confounded, his cruelty having been exposed and acknowledged, but ought she not to have understood that this ideal husband was not the sort of person to make a scene?

Their mother never saw Sony again, never once wrote to him or telephoned him, and never even mentioned his name.

She and her husband had moved to a house in the outer suburbs. From time to time Norah brought Lucie to see her. She had the impression that since their return her mother had never stopped smiling, a faint smirk that seemed disconnected from her face floating lightly in front of her, as if she’d snatched it from Sony to mask her pain.

Norah continued passing on to her the odd bits of news she got from Sony or their father—about Sony’s studies in London, or his return to their father a few years later—but it often seemed that their mother, through her smiles and nods, was trying not to listen.

Norah spoke about Sony to her less and less, then stopped altogether on learning that, after getting a very good degree, he had ended up in his father’s house, and was leading a strangely passive, idle, lonely existence.

Her heart of course often missed a beat when she thought of him.

Should she not have gone to see him more often, or made him come and see her?

Wasn’t he, despite his money and opportunities, just a hapless boy?

As for Norah, she’d managed to train to become a lawyer. She’d not found life easy, but she’d kept at it.

No one had helped her, and neither her mother nor her father had ever told her that they were proud of her.

And yet she bore no grudge and even felt guilty about not going to help Sony in some way.

But what could she have done?

A devil had possessed the five-year-old boy and had never let go of him.

What could she have done?

That’s what she kept asking herself as she sat on the backseat of the black Mercedes driven by Masseck. As the car moved slowly down the deserted street she gazed in the rearview mirror at her father standing motionless by the gate, waiting perhaps to be alone before lofting himself heavily up again into the deep shade of the poinciana and sitting on the branch stripped and polished by his flip-flops—that was what she kept wondering as she fanned through the official documents stamped everywhere, which her father had given her: had she not, in her carelessness, really let Sony down?

The Mercedes was dirty and dusty, the seats covered in crumbs.

In the past her father would never have put up with such slovenliness.

She leaned toward Masseck and asked him why Sony was in prison.

He clicked his tongue and snickered. Norah realized that he’d been badly put out by her question and wouldn’t answer it.

Deeply embarrassed, she forced herself to laugh too.

How could she have done that?

Obviously it wasn’t his place to tell her.

She’d been thrown. She felt ashamed.

Just before getting into the car she’d tried to contact Jakob. In vain: the phone in the apartment rang, but no one answered.

It seemed to her unlikely that the children had already left for school, and just as unlikely that all three were sleeping so soundly as to not be aroused by the phone’s insistent ringing.

So what was going on?

Her legs were shaking nervously.

She would have been grateful, at that moment, to take refuge herself in the fragrant golden semidarkness of that big tree!

She smoothed her hair back, retied her bun, and, as she stretched forward to see her reflection in the rearview mirror, thought that Sony would perhaps have difficulty recognizing her because, when they’d last met, eight or nine years earlier, she didn’t have those two furrows on either side of her mouth or the rather thick, pudgy chin, against which she remembered having struggled ferociously when younger, guiltily aware that her father found rolls of fat disgusting, before, later, without remorse, and even with a certain provocative satisfaction, she’d allowed it to bloom, knowing full well that such a chin would offend that slender man who admired women, and it was from that moment she’d resolved to be free, to cast aside all concerns about pleasing a father who did not love her.

As for him, well, he’d gotten completely fat.

She shook her head, afraid and lost in thought.

The car was crossing the town center, and Masseck was driving slowly in front of the big hotels, calling out their names in a rather grand tone of voice.

Norah recognized the one where their mother and her husband had briefly stayed, back in the days when Sony, a first-rate student in high school, seemed destined for great things.

She’d never bothered to consider why Sony should have returned to live with his father after studying political science in London, and above all why he seemed to have made nothing of his life or his gifts.

That was because she considered him at the time to be much luckier than she was. She’d had to work her way through college in a fast-food restaurant, so she didn’t think herself under any obligation to worry about her spoiled younger brother’s mental state.

He’d fallen into a devil’s clutches and had never been able to break loose.

Sony must have suffered greatly from clinical depression. Poor, poor boy, she thought.

It was at that moment that she saw before her eyes Jakob, Grete, and Lucie sitting at the hotel terrace where they’d all had lunch before.

Her blood ran cold. She closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, Masseck had turned into another street.

They were running along the coast road, and the car was filled with the smell of the sea.

Masseck had fallen silent, and his face, which Norah could see in profile, had taken on a sullen, stubborn, hurt look, as if being made to drive to Reubeuss were some personal slight.

He parked opposite the high gray walls of the prison.

Standing in the hot, dry wind, she got in line behind a large number of women. Noticing that they’d all put down on the pavement the baskets and parcels they’d brought with them, she did the same with the plastic bag Masseck had handed to her, telling her
grudgingly, with a scornful air, that it contained coffee and food for Sony.

Then, as he had to wait for her with his door wide open so it didn’t get too hot in the car, he settled down in his seat and turned his face away from her.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she’d nearly told him.

But she’d stopped herself, wondering whether it was in fact true.

Her stomach was churning. Who, in reality, were the three people she’d seen on the hotel terrace? Herself and her sister, when they were small, accompanied by some stranger?

Oh no, she was sure it was her daughter and Grete with Jakob. The children were wearing little striped dresses with matching sun hats that she’d bought them the previous summer. She’d felt a spasm of guilt as she left the shop, she remembered, because the outfits were perhaps too elegant for little girls, not at all the sort she and her sister would have ever worn.

What devil had gotten her sister into his clutches?

After a long wait outside the prison she was called into an office where she handed over her passport together with the documents her father had given her which certified that she had the right to visit her brother.

She also handed over the bag of food.

“Are you the lawyer?” asked a guard. He wore a tattered uniform. He had red, shining eyes, and his eyelids twitched nervously.

“No, no,” she said, “I’m his sister.”

“It says here you’re the lawyer.”

Circumspectly she replied, “I am a lawyer, but today I’m just here to see my brother.”

He hesitated and gazed fixedly at the little yellow flowers on Norah’s green dress.

Then she was shown into a big room with pale blue walls, divided down the middle by metal grating. The women who had been waiting with her on the pavement outside were already there.

She went up to the grating and saw her brother Sony entering at the other end of the room.

The men who came in with him rushed toward the grating, making such a din that she couldn’t hear Sony’s greeting.

“Sony, Sony!” she shouted.

She felt giddy and clung to the grating.

She got as close as she could to the dirty, dusty metal framework, trying to see as clearly as she could this thirty-year-old man who was her younger brother. Under the blemished skin, behind the eczema scars, she recognized his long handsome face and gentle, rather vague expression. When he smiled, it was the same distant, radiant smile that she’d always known him to wear and that had perpetually tugged at her heartstrings, because she’d always sensed, as she now knew, that it served merely to conceal and contain an inexpressible sadness.

His cheeks were covered in stubble, and his hair, some strands of which were long and some were short, stood up on his head except where it was flattened, on the side he slept on, no doubt.

He was talking to her, smiling—smiling all the time—but she couldn’t hear a word because of the din.

“Sony!” she shouted, “what did you say? Speak up!”

He was scratching his forehead savagely. It was pale with eczema.

“You need a cream for that?” she yelled. “Is that what you’re saying?”

He seemed to hesitate for a moment, then nodded, as if it didn’t matter much whether she’d misunderstood, as if “cream” were as good a reply as any.

He shouted something, a single word.

This time Norah clearly heard the name of their sister.

A fleeting sensation of panic drove every thought out of her mind.

Now a devil had grabbed hold of her, too.

Now it seemed impossible to explain to Sony, to shriek at him that their sister had become an alcoholic and was so far gone—as she herself acknowledged—that she could find no refuge except in a mystical sect, from which she occasionally wrote Norah wild, fanatical, sloppy letters enclosing the odd photo showing her with long gray hair, thin as a rail, meditating on a dirty rubber mat and sucking on her lower lip.

Norah couldn’t very well bellow at Sony, “And all that because our father took you from us when you were five!”

No, she couldn’t, she could say nothing to this haggard face, those hollow, dead eyes, and those dry lips that seemed detached from the smile that played on them.

The visit was over.

The jailers were leading the prisoners out.

Norah glanced at her watch. Only a few minutes had elapsed since she’d entered the room.

She waved to Sony and shouted, “I’ll be back again!” as he moved away, dragging his feet, a tall and gaunt figure in a grubby T-shirt and an old pair of trousers cut off at the knee.

He turned and made the gesture of putting a cup to his lips.

“Yes, yes,” she shouted, “there’s coffee there, and something for you to eat!”

The room was stiflingly hot.

Norah clung to the grating, afraid she’d pass out if she let go.

She was then dismayed to discover she’d lost control of her bladder, as she felt a warm liquid running down her thighs and calves and onto her sandals. But she could do nothing about it and even the sensation of passing urine seemed to elude her.

She stepped away from the puddle in horror.

But in the rush for the exit no one appeared to have noticed.

She was shaking so violently with fury against her father that her teeth were chattering.

What had he done to Sony?

What had he done to them all?

He was ubiquitous, inhabiting each one of them with impunity, and even in death he would go on hurting and tormenting them.

She asked Masseck to drop her at the hotel.

“You can go home,” she said. “I’ll manage, I’ll take a taxi.”

To her intense embarrassment the smell of urine soon filled the Mercedes.

Without saying a word Masseck lowered the windows in front.

She was relieved to find the hotel terrace empty.

But the vision of Jakob and the girls continued to haunt her. The subtle but clearly perceptible shadow of their cheerful, conspiratorial presence hung over her, so that when she felt a puff of wind she looked up. But all she could see above her head was a
large bird with pale feathers outlined against the sky. It flapped its wings heavily and clumsily, casting over the terrace a huge, cold, unnatural shadow.

Once again she felt a spasm of anger, but it passed as soon as the bird did.

She went into the hotel and looked for the bar.