by Marie Ndiaye
Oh, how she already regretted having weakened, how she longed to return home now and get on with her life.
At the tiny sink in the kitchen a slim young girl in a T-shirt and threadbare skirt was washing some cooking pots.
The table was covered with dishes about to be served, Norah realized, to her father and herself.
She noticed roast chicken, couscous, saffron rice, a dark meat in a peanut sauce, and other dishes she could just make out under their steamy glass covers. The profusion was staggering. It was beginning to make her feel queasy.
She slipped between the table and the sink and waited until the girl, who was laboriously rinsing out a large stew pot, had finished.
The sink was so narrow that the pot kept hitting the edges or the tap and, since there was no draining board, the girl had to crouch to set the vessel down on the floor, where she’d spread out a dish towel on which to dry it, a sight that once again exasperated Norah, who quickly washed her hands, all the while smiling and nodding to the girl.
And when she’d asked her name and the girl, after a brief silence—as if, Norah thought, to give her answer a dignified setting—had replied, “Khady Demba,” her calm assurance, firm voice, and limpid gaze both surprised and soothed Norah, calming her jumpy weariness and feelings of irritation and resentment.
At the end of the corridor her father’s voice rang out, calling her impatiently.
She made haste to rejoin him and found him in a state of some annoyance, anxious to tuck into the prawn and fruit tabbouleh Masseck had served in the two plates set opposite each other.
She’d hardly sat down when he started eating greedily, with his face almost in his plate, and this voraciousness, entirely devoid of polite pretense or small talk, was so much at odds with the old-fashioned manners of this rather affected man that Norah nearly asked him if he’d been depriving himself of food, thinking that he was quite capable—if his financial difficulties were such as she supposed them to be—of trying to impress her by loading this dinner with all the provisions of the three preceding days.
Masseck brought out one dish after another, at such a pace that she couldn’t keep up.
She was relieved to see that her father was paying no attention to what she ate.
He only raised his head to scrutinize gluttonously and suspiciously what Masseck had just put on the table, and when at one point he looked furtively at Norah’s plate, it was with such childlike apprehension that she realized he was simply making sure Masseck had not served her more generously than him.
That really upset her.
Her father—normally so loquacious, so full of fine words—remained silent. The only sounds to be heard in the desolate house were the clatter of plates, the slip-slap of Masseck’s feet on the tiles, and perhaps the rustle of the poinciana’s upper branches brushing against the tin roof. She wondered vaguely whether the lone tree was calling out in the night for her father to come.
He went on eating, moving from the grilled lamb to the chicken in sauce, hardly pausing for breath between mouthfuls, joylessly stuffing himself.
For dessert, Masseck put a mango cut in pieces before him.
He pushed one piece into his mouth, then another. Norah saw him chewing with difficulty, and trying to swallow. In vain.
He spat out the mango pulp onto his plate.
Tears were pouring down his cheeks.
Norah felt her own cheeks burning.
She got up, heard herself mumbling something, she couldn’t tell what, went over and stood behind him, and then didn’t know what to do with her hands, never before having found herself in a position either to comfort her father or to show him anything other than a stiff, forced respect tinged with resentment.
She turned around, looking for Masseck, but after clearing the table he’d left the room.
Her father was still weeping silently, expressionless.
She sat down next to him and leaned forward to bring her head as close as possible to his tear-streaked face.
She could smell, under the odor of the food and the spicy sauces, the sickly sweet scent of the rotting flowers of the big tree, and since her father kept his head lowered, she could see how grubby the shirt collar was around his neck.
She remembered a piece of news that two or three years earlier her brother Sony had passed on but that her father hadn’t seen fit to divulge to her or her sister. She’d resented this, but before long she’d forgotten both the news and her bitterness at not having been told. The two things now went through her mind simultaneously and as a result her tone was rather acerbic even though she’d tried to make her voice sound comforting.
“Tell me, where are your children?” she asked.
She remembered that he’d fathered twins but couldn’t recall what gender they were.
He looked at her, distraught.
“My children?”
“The last ones you had. Or so I understand. Has your wife taken them with her?”
“The little girls? Oh, they’re here, yes,” he murmured, and turned his head. It was as if he were disappointed, as if he’d hoped that she would talk about something he didn’t know, whose implications he hadn’t grasped, something that, in a strange, magical way, would save him.
She couldn’t contain a slight shiver of vengeful spite.
So Sony was the only son of this man who didn’t care much for girls, or have much time for them.
Overwhelmed, weighed down by useless, crucifying females who weren’t even pretty, thought Norah calmly, thinking of herself and her sister; they’d always had, for their father, the irremediable defect of being too much like him, that is, quite unlike their mother, and attesting to the pointlessness of his marriage to a Frenchwoman, because what good had it done him? No almost-white children, no well-built sons …
And it had been a failure.
Upset, overwhelmed by a feeling of ironic compassion, she laid her hand lightly on his shoulder.
“I’d like to meet them,” she said, adding at once, so as not to give him time to ask what she meant, “your two daughters, the little girls.”
Her father shook her hand off his fat shoulder in an involuntary gesture signifying that nothing could justify such familiarity on her part.
He rose heavily and wiped his face on his sleeve.
He pushed open an ugly glazed door at the other end of the room, and switched on the solitary bulb that lit another long, gray concrete corridor, off which, she recalled, doors opened onto small square rooms like monastic cells that once were inhabited by her father’s numerous kin.
From the way their footsteps and her father’s loud irregular breathing echoed in the silence, she was sure that the rooms were now empty.
They seemed to have been walking already for several long minutes when the corridor swung first to the left, then to the right, getting almost dark, and so stuffy that Norah nearly turned back.
Her father stopped in front of a closed door.
He grasped the handle and stood still for a moment with his ear against the panel. Norah couldn’t tell if he was trying to listen to something inside or was summoning up the will to open the door. But the attitude of this man, at once scarcely recognizable and illusory as ever—oh, what incorrigible naïveté to think, even not having seen him for years, that time might have altered him and brought them closer together—worried and annoyed her now more than it ever had in the past, when she could never be sure whether, in his brazen recklessness and arrogant flippancy, and utter lack of humor, he wasn’t going to hurl some unforgettably cruel remark at her.
With a quick movement, as if to catch someone in flagrante, he opened the door.
With an air of fear and repugnance, he stood aside and let Norah in.
The tiny room was lit by a lamp with a pink shade. It stood on a small table placed between two beds, on the narrower of which sat the girl whom Norah had seen in the kitchen and who had told her she was called Khady Demba. The lobe of her right ear, Norah notic
ed, was slit in two.
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 th
eir 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.