Three Strong Women (8 page)

He looked stubborn and annoyed.

“What do you mean, no longer here?”

“I sent them north this morning, to her family,” he said, jutting his chin at the photo of his wife.

Suddenly Norah couldn’t bear looking at him any longer. She felt trapped. He’d gotten her in his grip. In truth he had them all in his grip, ever since he first abducted Sony and put the stamp of his ferocity on their very existence.

By sheer strength of will she’d gotten herself an education that had led to a partnership in a law firm. She’d given birth to Lucie and bought an apartment. But she would have given it all up if only she could turn back the clock and prevent Sony from being snatched from them.

“You said once, if I remember rightly, that you would never let go of Sony,” her father exclaimed.

A few yellow flowers had stained the sheet. They’d fallen from his shoulders and been crushed beneath his bulk.

How heavy the devil must now be who held Sony in his grasp, Norah thought.

It was at dinner that night, when Jakob and her father were chatting amiably, that Norah heard him say, “When my daughter Norah lived here …”

“What’re you talking about? I’ve never lived in this house!” she exclaimed.

He was holding a leg of roast chicken. He bit off a chunk, took his time chewing it, then said calmly, “No, I know. I meant when you were living in this town, in Grand Yoff.”

He then looked as if a wad of cotton wool had gotten stuck in his throat. His ears started throbbing gently.

The voices of Jakob and her father, and of the girls conversing in an unduly measured way, seemed to be fading, becoming muffled and almost inaudible.

“Look here,” she muttered angrily, “I’ve never lived in Grand Yoff, nor anywhere else in this country.”

But she wasn’t sure of having spoken, or if she had, of being listened to.

She cleared her throat and repeated more loudly, “I’ve never lived in Grand Yoff.”

Her father raised his eyebrows in amused astonishment.

Jakob looked hesitantly first at Norah, then at her father, and the girls had stopped eating, so Norah, dismayed at appearing to
beg just so they’d believe her, felt obliged to say, yet again, “I’ve never lived anywhere but France, you ought to know that.”

“Masseck!” his father shouted. He said a few words to Masseck, who went to fetch a shoebox, which he put on the table. Norah’s father started rummaging in it impatiently.

He pulled out a small square photo, which he held out to Norah.

Like all the photos he’d ever taken, this one was, intentionally or not, somewhat blurred. He manages to make them fuzzy so he’ll be able to say what he likes about them, Norah thought.

The plump young woman was standing in front of a little house with pink walls and a blue corrugated-iron roof. She was wearing a lime-green dress with yellow flowers.

“That’s not me,” Norah said with relief. “That’s my sister. You’ve always mixed us up, even though she’s older than I am.”

Without answering her he showed the photo to Jakob, then to Grete and Lucie. Embarrassed, the girls gave it a cursory glance.

“I’d have thought it was you, too,” said Jakob with a nervous laugh. “You look very alike.”

“Not really,” Norah murmured. “It’s a bad photo, that’s all.”

Her father waved it in front of Lucie, who’d lowered her eyes and was blushing slightly.

“Come on, Lucie, it’s your mum in the photo, isn’t it?”

Lucie nodded vigorously.

“You see,” he said, “your own daughter recognizes you.”

Furtively, but harsh as always, he glanced sideways at her.

“Didn’t you know your sister once lived in Grand Yoff?” Jakob asked, obviously trying to be helpful. But Norah thought, I don’t need anyone’s help with this.

How absurd it all was!

She suddenly felt very tired. “No, I didn’t know. When she’s away proselytizing for her weird sect my sister hardly ever tells me what she’s up to or where she’s going.” Without looking him in the eye, Norah asked her father, “What was she doing here?”

“It was you who were here, not your sister. You must know why you came.”

In the night, as Jakob slept, she left the house and its oppressive atmosphere and went outside, knowing full well that she would find no peace there either, with her father standing watch up in the branches of the poinciana.

And although in the pitch-black darkness she couldn’t see him, she could hear, hear the noises he made in his throat, the tiny movements of his flip-flops on the branch. All those sounds were amplified in her skull, to the point almost of deafening her.

She stood there, motionless, with her bare feet on the rough warm concrete of the threshold, aware that her arms, legs, and face were paler than the night and would probably be shining with an almost milky brightness, and that doubtless he could see her as she could now see him, his face in shadow, crouching in his white clothes.

She was torn between satisfaction at having found him out and horror at sharing a secret with this man.

She now felt that he would always resent her being party to this mystery, even though she had never sought to know anything about it.

Was that the reason why he’d tried to sow confusion with that story about a photo taken in Grand Yoff?

She couldn’t remember ever having set foot there.

The only troubling detail—as she freely acknowledged—was that her sister was wearing a frock very similar to hers, because her mother had made the lime-green, yellow-flowered dress thanks to a Bouchara fabric voucher that Norah had found.

Her mother couldn’t have made two dresses out of that one piece of cotton cloth.

Norah went back inside and walked along the corridor to the twins’ room, where Masseck had put up Grete and Lucie.

She pushed the door open gently and, on sniffing the warm smell of the children’s hair, suddenly felt overwhelmed by the love that had earlier deserted her.

But then it faded away, vanished, and once again she felt hard, distracted, remote, as if possessed by something that had quietly and without cause entered her being, refusing now to yield to anyone or anything.

“Lucie, my poppet, my little ginger-haired darling,” she murmured. Her disembodied voice made her think of Sony’s smile, or of their mother’s, because it seemed not to issue from her lips but merely to float in the air before them, a product entirely of the atmosphere; and it seemed that feeling no longer dwelled in those words she had so often uttered.

Once more she found herself in front of Sony, separated from him by the grating against which they had to press their lips in order to have any hope of hearing each other.

She told him that she’d brought him some ointment for his eczema, which would be given to him in the prison infirmary
once it had been checked. Sony burst out laughing, and in the affable tone he used whatever the subject, he said that he’d never see it.

Despite his gauntness, the scabs on his skin, and his unkempt beard, she could now at least recognize her brother’s kind, saintly face, and tried to discern in it any signs of distress, suffering, or remorse.

There were none.

“I can’t believe it, Sony,” she said.

She thought, with pain and bitterness, of the many occasions when she’d heard the same vain words uttered pitifully by a criminal’s family.

But Sony had been, really, a sort of mystic.

Scratching his face, he shook his head.

“I’m going to defend you. I’m going to be your lawyer. I’ll have the right to visit you more frequently.”

Still scratching his cheeks and forehead furiously, he kept shaking his head.

“It wasn’t me, you know,” he said calmly. “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.”

“What? What’s that you’re saying?”

“It wasn’t me.”

“It wasn’t you who killed her? Oh my God, Sony!”

Her teeth hit the grating. Her lips tasted of rust.

“So who killed her, Sony?”

He shrugged his painfully thin shoulders.

He’d already told her that he was hungry the whole time because among the hundred or so prisoners with whom he shared his vast cell there were some who stole part of his rations every day.

Now all he ever dreamed about at night—he told her with a smile—was food.

“It was him,” Sony said.

“Our father?”

He nodded, moistening his dry lips with his tongue over and over again.

Then, realizing that the visit was nearly over, he started speaking very quickly: “You remember, Norah, when I was little and we were still living together, there was this game we played: you’d pick me up, swing me up and down, and shout, ‘With a one, with a two,’ and on ‘with a three!’ you’d throw me onto the bed, saying that it was the ocean and I had to swim back to the shore, do you remember?”

Throwing his head back, he chuckled with delight, and Norah recognized at once, with a shock, the little boy with the wide-open mouth whom she used to throw on the blue chenille counterpane that covered his bed.

“How are the twins?” he asked.

“He’s sent them to their mother’s family, I believe.” She spoke with difficulty. Her teeth were clenched and her tongue was thick.

As he moved away from the grating, following the other prisoners, he turned around and said gravely, “The little girls, the twins, they’re my daughters, not his. He knew that, you understand.”

For a long while she walked up and down the pavement in front of the prison, in the scorching midday sun, trying to summon up the strength to rejoin Masseck in the car.

So everything is falling into place at last, she thought, with icy exultation.

It seemed to her that she was staring into the eyes of the devil holding her brother in his clutches, thinking, I’ll make him let go, but what is it all about, and who can ever restore all that’s been taken away over years?

What, indeed, was it all about?

Masseck returned by a different route from the usual one, she noticed, but she didn’t pay it much mind until he stopped in front of a little house with pink walls and a blue corrugated-iron roof, turned the engine off, and put his hands on his knees. She was determined not to ask any questions, to avoid taking a single step toward a possible trap.

For Sony’s sake, and her own, she had to be a strong, skilled operator. The unsuspected won’t trip me up again, she resolved.

“He told me to show you this house,” Masseck said, “because that’s where you lived.”

“He’s wrong, my sister did.”

Why was she so reluctant to look closely at the house?

Feeling disconcerted, she cast an eye over the faded pink walls, the narrow balustrade in front, and the humbler houses nearby where children were playing.

Since she’d seen the photo, she thought she could not help remembering the place.

But didn’t the memory come from further back?

Were there not, behind the pink walls, two small rooms with
dark blue tiles, and at the back, a tiny kitchen that smelled of curry?

During dinner she noticed that Jakob and her father were chatting contentedly and even that the latter, who could scarcely pretend to be interested in children, nonetheless managed to make an occasional face at Lucie and Grete, accompanied by funny noises intended to make them laugh.

He was relaxed, almost merry, as if—Norah thought—she’d lifted the terrible weight of Sony’s incarceration off his shoulders, as if all he had to do now was wait until she sorted things out, as if she’d taken upon herself the moral burden, relieving him of it forever.

Even in her father’s way with the girls she sensed an element of his courting her favor.

“Masseck showed you the house?” he suddenly asked.

“Yes, he showed me where my sister must have lived.”

He gave a knowing, offhand laugh.

“I know,” he said, “why you came to Grand Yoff, I’ve given it some thought, and now I remember.”

She was dizzy all of a sudden and felt like jumping up from her chair and rushing into the garden, but she thought of Sony and suppressed every fear and doubt, every discomfort and disappointment.

It didn’t matter what he might say to her, because she’d get him to cough up the truth.

“You came in order to get closer to me, yes. You must have been, I’m not sure exactly, twenty-eight or twenty-nine.”

He spoke in a very neutral tone, as if he wanted to dispel any hint of conflict between them.

Jakob and the children were listening carefully. Norah felt that her father’s affable manner, together with the air of authority conferred on him by his years and by the vestiges of wealth, ensured that those three gave him the benefit of the doubt where she never could: indeed, they were now inclined to believe him and not her.

And didn’t they have a point?

Weren’t all her child-rearing principles being called into question, their rigor, their fierceness, their luster?

For if Jakob, Grete, and Lucie came to think that she’d lied, dissembled, or somehow weirdly managed to forget, would she not seem all the more culpable for having, in their home life, preached and insisted on such rectitude?

A warm dampness slid along her thighs and insinuated itself between her buttocks and the chair.

She felt her dress anxiously.

In despair she wiped her wet fingers on her napkin.

“You were keen to know what it was like to live near Sony and me,” her father went on in his kindly voice, “so you rented that house in Grand Yoff. I suppose you wanted to be independent, because of course I’d never have refused to put you up. You didn’t stay long, did you? You’d probably imagined, I don’t know, that things would be as they are in your country now, with people constantly blathering on about ‘opening up,’ ‘asking for forgiveness,’ inventing all sorts of problems and banging on about how much they love each other, but I had work to do in Dara Salam and in any case it’s just not my thing to bare my soul. No, you didn’t stay long, you must have been disappointed. I don’t know. And Sony wasn’t exactly in top form at the time so perhaps he disappointed you too.”

Norah didn’t budge, so concerned was she not to let on just how wretched she felt.

She raised her feet and held them above the little puddle under her chair.