Three Strong Women

PART III

WHEN HER HUSBAND’S parents and sisters told her what was expected of her, what she was going to have to do, Khady knew already.

She hadn’t known what form their wish to get rid of her would take, only that the day would come when she’d be ordered to leave, that much she’d known or gathered or felt (that is to say, before tacit understanding and unexpressed feelings had gradually established knowledge and certainty) from the earliest months of her settling in with her husband’s family following his death.

She remembered her three years of marriage not as a time of serenity, because the longing, the terrible desire for a child, had made each month a frantic climb toward a possible blessing, then, when her period came, a collapse followed by gloomy despondency before hope returned and, with it, the gradual, dazzling, breathless ascent day after day, right up to the cruel moment when a barely perceptible pain in her lower abdomen let her know that it hadn’t worked this time — no, those years had certainly been neither calm nor happy, because Khady never did get pregnant.

Still, she thought of herself as a string stretched to the limit, strong, taut, vibrating in the impassioned confinement of these expectations.

It seemed to her that she’d not been able to concentrate on anything, throughout those three years, other than on the rhythmic alternation of hope and disillusionment, so that disillusionment — provoked by a twinge in her groin — might quickly be followed by the stubborn, almost ridiculous surge of hope regained.

“It’ll perhaps be next month,” she would say to her husband.

And, careful not to show his own disappointment, he would reply in a kindly way, “Yes, for sure.”

Because that husband of hers had been such a nice man.

In their life together he’d given her full latitude to become that desperately taut string that resonated with every emotion, and he’d surrounded her with kindness, always speaking to her with prudence and tact, exactly as if, busy with creating a new life, she needed to be surrounded by an atmosphere of silent deference in order to be able to perfect her art and give form to her obsession.

Never once had he complained about the overwhelming presence in their life of the baby that never got conceived.

He’d played his part rather selflessly, she said to herself later.

Wouldn’t he have been within his rights to complain about the inconsiderate way she pulled him toward her or pushed him away at night, depending on whether she thought her husband’s semen would be of any use at that moment, about the way, during her non-ovulating period, she made no bones about not wanting to make love, as if the expenditure of useless energy could damage the only project she then cared about, as if her husband’s seed constituted a unique, precious resource of which she was the keeper and which should never be squandered in the pursuit of mere pleasure?

He’d never complained.

At the time she hadn’t seen how noble his behavior was because she wouldn’t have understood that he could have complained about — or even simply rejected the legitimacy, necessity, and nobility of — the asceticism (ascetic only in a sense, since their tally of sexual encounters was impressive) that this mania to have a child subjected them.

No, for sure, she wouldn’t have understood that at the time.

It was only after the death of her husband, of the peaceable, kindly man she’d been married to for three years, that she was able to appreciate his forbearance. That only happened once her obsession had left her and she’d become herself again, rediscovering the person she’d been before her marriage, the woman who’d been able to appreciate the qualities of devotion and gallantry that her man possessed in abundance.

She then felt a great unhappiness, remorse, hatred almost, about the mad desire to get pregnant that had blinded her to everything else, in particular her husband’s illness.

Because must he not have been ill for some time to die so suddenly, early one pale morning during the rainy season? He’d scarcely gotten out of bed that day to open as usual the little café they ran in a lane in the medina.

He’d got up and then, with a sort of choking sigh, almost a muted sob, a sound as discreet as the man himself, he collapsed at the foot of the bed.

Still in bed herself and barely awake, at first Khady hadn’t imagined that her husband was dead, no, not for a second.

For a long time she would blame herself about the thought that had flashed through her mind — oh, a year or more later, she was, actually, still angry with herself — about this thought: Wouldn’t it be just their rotten luck if he fell ill just at that moment, a good two weeks after her period, with her breasts feeling slightly harder and more sensitive than usual, leading her to suppose she was fertile, but if this man was so unwell as to be incapable of making love to her that evening, what a mess, what a waste of time, what a horrid letdown!

She’d gotten up in her turn and gone over to him, and when she’d realized he was no longer breathing but just lying there inert, hunched up, his knees almost touching his chin, with one arm trapped under his head and with one innocent, vulnerable hand lying flat, palm upward, on the floor, looking, she’d said to herself, like the child he must have been, small and brave, never contrary but open and forthright, solitary and secretive under a sociable exterior, she’d seized his open palm and pressed it to her lips, tortured at the sight of so much decency in one human being. But even then stupefied grief was battling it out in her heart with an unabated, undeflated exultation at the thought that she was ovulating, and at the same moment as she was running to get help, diving into the house next door, unaware of the tears pouring down her cheeks, that part of her still obsessed with pregnancy was beginning to wonder feverishly what man could, just this once, step in for her husband to avoid missing the chance to get pregnant this month and break the exhausting cycle of hope and despair that, even as she ran shouting that her husband was dead, she saw looming, were she forced to pass up this opportunity.

And as her reason returned, and it began to dawn on her that this fertile period would be wasted, and likewise the months to follow, a huge disappointment — a feeling that she’d put up with all that (hope and despair) for three whole years to no purpose — contaminated her grief at this man’s death with an almost rancorous bitterness.

Couldn’t he have waited for two or three days?

Such thoughts did Khady still, now, reproach herself for having entertained.

After her husband’s death the owner of the café threw her out to make way for another couple, and Khady had had no choice but to go and live with her husband’s family.

Her own parents had handed her over to be brought up by her grandmother, long since dead, and after not seeing them during her childhood for long stretches, Khady had finally lost touch with them altogether.

And although she’d grown up to be a tall, well-built, slender young woman with a smooth oval face and delicate features, although she’d lived for three years with this man who’d always had a kind word for her, and although she’d managed, in the café, to command respect with an attitude that was unconsciously haughty, reserved, a little frosty, and thereby preempt any taunts about her infertility — despite it all, her lonely, anxious childhood, and later her vain efforts to get pregnant, which, while suspending her in an intense, almost fanatical emotional state, had all dealt their barely perceptible but fatal blows to her precarious self-esteem: all that had conditioned her to find humiliation not in the least abnormal.

So that, when she found herself living with in-laws who couldn’t forgive her for having no means of support and no dowry, who despised her openly and angrily for having failed to conceive, she willingly became a poor, self-effacing wretch who entertained only vague impersonal thoughts and inconsistent, pallid dreams, in the shadow of which she wandered about vacantly, mechanically, dragging her indifferent feet and, she believed, hardly suffering at all.

She lived in a three-room rundown house with her husband’s parents, two of her sisters-in-law, and the young children of one of them.

Behind the house there was a backyard of beaten earth shared with the neighbors.

Khady avoided going into the yard because she feared being peppered with sarcastic comments about her worthlessness and the absurdity of her existence as a penniless, childless widow, and when she had to go there to peel the vegetables or prepare the fish she huddled so closely inside her batik, with only her quick hands and high cheekbones showing, that people soon stopped paying her any attention and forgot all about her, as if this silent, uninteresting heap no longer merited a rude or jeering remark.

Without pausing in her work she would slide into a kind of mental stupor that stopped her taking in what was going on around her.

She then felt almost happy.

She seemed to be in a blank, light sleep that was devoid of both joy and anguish.

Early every morning she would leave the house with her sisters-in-law. All three carried on their heads the plastic bowls of various sizes that they would sell in the market.

There they found their usual spot. Khady would squat a little to one side of the two others, who pretended not to notice her presence, and, responding with three or four raised fingers when asked the price of the bowls, she stayed there for hours on end, motionless in the noisy bustle of the market, which made her slightly dizzy and lulled her back into a state of torpor shot through with pleasing, unthreatening, pallid dreams like long veils flapping in the wind, on which there appeared from time to time the blurred face of her husband smiling his everlasting kindly smile, or, less often, the features of the grandmother who’d brought her up and sheltered her and who had been able to see, even while treating her harshly, that she was a special little girl with her own attributes and not any old child.

So much so that she’d always been conscious of her uniqueness and aware, in a manner that could neither be proved nor disproved, that she, Khady Demba, was strictly irreplaceable, even though her parents had abandoned her and her grandmother had only taken her in because there hadn’t been a choice, and even though no being on earth needed her or wanted her around.

She was happy to be Khady, there’d never been a chink of doubt between herself and the implacable reality of the person called Khady Demba.

She’d even happened on occasion to feel proud of being Khady because — she’d often thought with some amazement — children whose lives seemed happy, who every day got generous helpings of chicken or fish and wore clothes to school that weren’t stained or torn, such children were no more human than Khady Demba, who only managed to get a minuscule helping of the good things in life.

That now was still something she never doubted: that she was indivisible and precious and could only ever be herself.

She just felt tired of existence and weary of all the humiliation she had to undergo, even if it didn’t cause her any real pain.

All the time they were sitting together at their stall her husband’s sisters never once spoke to her.

On the way back from the market they were still quivering with pleasure, as if all the feverish, impassioned hubbub of the crowd still filled them with excitement and they had to shake it off before getting home, and still they never stopped needling, shoving, and pinching Khady, irritated and titillated by the impregnable firmness of her body, the cold scowl on her face, knowing or surmising that she would blot everything out as soon as they began tormenting her, knowing or surmising that the most cutting remarks were transformed in her mind into reddish veils, which started to get entangled a bit, if fleetingly, with the others, her pallid beneficent dreams — knowing it, surmising it, and feeling silently irritated by it.

Khady sometimes stepped quickly aside or began walking at a dauntingly slow pace, and the two sisters soon started losing interest in her.

On one occasion, one of them shouted, “What’s the matter, you a mute?” when she turned around and noticed the lengthening distance between themselves and Khady.

Khady couldn’t prevent her mind from taking that in. The expression surprised her by revealing what, without realizing it, she already knew: that she hadn’t opened her mouth in quite a long while.

The chattering in her dreams, made up vaguely of the voice of her husband, her own, and that of a few nameless people from the past, had given her the impression that she had been speaking from time to time.

She was seized with a sudden panic: if she forgot how words were formed and uttered, could she count on having a future, even a tiresome one?

She sank back into numb indifference.

But she made no effort to say anything, fearing that she mightn’t succeed and that a strange, disturbing sound would reach her ears.

When her in-laws — backed up by their two daughters, who, for once, were content to listen in silence — told Khady she had to go, they didn’t expect her to reply, because they weren’t asking her a question but giving her an order, and, although her apathy was now being tempered by anxiety, Khady said nothing, asked nothing, believing perhaps that by her silence she avoided the risk of their intentions concerning her person acquiring greater precision, of her departure becoming a reality, as if, she would later tell herself, her husband’s parents had the slightest need to hear their words answered by any words of hers in order to be assured of the reality and validity of what they were proposing.

No, they had no need to hear anything she might have to say, none whatever. Khady knew that for them she simply did not exist.

Because their only son had married her against their wishes, because she had not produced a child, and because she enjoyed no one’s protection, they had tacitly, naturally, without animus or ulterior motive, separated her from the human community, and so their hard, narrow, old people’s eyes made no distinction between the shape called Khady and the innumerable forms of animals and things that also inhabit the world.

Khady knew they were wrong, but she had no way of telling them so other than by being there and looking obviously like them. But she knew that would not be enough, and she’d ceased concerning herself with proving to them that she was human.

So she listened in silence, focusing on the patterned skirts worn by her two sisters-in-law sitting on each side of their parents on the old sofa, their hands lying palms up on their thighs, with a guileless fragility that wasn’t in the women’s nature but that all of a sudden presaged their death — which unveiled and prefigured the innocent vulnerability of their faces when they would be dead — and those defenseless hands were so similar to those of her husband, their brother, after his life had suddenly left him that Khady felt a lump in her throat.

Her mother-in-law’s voice — dry, monotonous, threatening — was still spelling out what must have been, Khady thought distantly, a number of disagreeable recommendations, but she was no longer making any effort to understand.

She barely heard about someone called Fanta, a cousin who’d married a white man and was now living in France.

She opened her mind once again to those insipid pipe dreams that had for her stood in place of thoughts ever since she’d first come to live with these people, forgetting, indeed being quite incapable of remembering, her terror a few moments earlier at the notion of having to leave, not that she wished to stay (she wished for nothing), but as she believed those dreams would not survive such a radical change in her situation, and she would have to ponder, undertake, and decide a number of things (including where to go), no prospect, given her present languor, could have been more terrifying.

Gray snakes on a yellow ground biting their tails, and cheery women’s faces, brown on a red ground above the inscription “Year of the African Woman,” adorned the cloth from which the sisters had made themselves skirts; the snakes and faces, repeated several times, were monstrously crushed by the folds of the fabric, and they danced in a cruel ring inside her head, displacing the kind, cloudy face of her husband.

It seemed to Khady that the two sisters, whose gaze she normally avoided, were gazing at her derisively.

One of them straightened her skirt without taking her eyes off Khady, and now her hands, as they smoothed the fabric insistently, seemed to Khady as dangerous, provocative, and indecipherable as they’d earlier appeared helpless and artless when upturned and at rest.

Khady was hugely relieved when with a wave of her hand her mother-in-law indicated that she was done and that Khady could leave the room.

She’d no idea what had just been said to her about the circumstances of her departure — when she’d leave, where she’d go, with what aim, or how — and since for the next few days no one spoke to her again or paid her any mind, and she went to market as usual, the worrying possibility of her world being turned upside down got mixed up in her head with the memory of the printed snakes and faces, taking on their phantasmagorical and absurd character before sliding into the oblivion to which all pointless dreams are consigned.

Then one evening her mother-in-law prodded her in the back.

“Get your things,” she said.

And since she was afraid Khady might take what didn’t belong to her, she spread out on the floor of their shared bedroom one of Khady’s batiks, placing on it the only other one she herself possessed, together with an old faded blue T-shirt and a piece of bread wrapped in newspaper.

She folded the batik carefully and tied the four corners together.

Then slowly, with an air of solemnity full of pique and regret, she drew a wad of cash from her bra, and (knowing that Khady had no bra of her own?) slid her hand roughly under Khady’s belt and into the top of her panties, tucking the money between the elastic and the skin, which she scratched with her yellow nails.

She added a piece of paper folded in four, which contained, she said, the cousin’s address.

“When you get over there, to Fanta’s, you’ll send us money. Fanta must be wealthy now, she’s a teacher.”

Khady lay down on the mattress she shared with her sister-in-law’s children.

She was so terrified she felt sick.

She closed her eyes and tried to call to mind those chalky, shimmering dreams that protected her from intolerable contact with a reality that her anxious, grief-stricken heart full of remorse and doubt had made her a part of, tried desperately to detach herself from the feeble, timorous person she was, but that night her dreams weren’t up to battling life’s intrusions. Khady was left face-to-face with her terrors, and no effort at willed indifference could free her from them.

Her mother-in-law came to fetch her at dawn, silently indicating to her to get up.

Khady stepped over her sisters-in-law lying on the second mattress, and although she had no wish to hear their harsh, mocking voices or see their pitiless eyes shining in the gray light of dawn, it seemed to her a bad omen that the two women were pretending to be asleep at the moment of her departure into the unknown.

Was it because they were sure of never seeing Khady again that they chose to avoid the trouble of looking at her, of waving a hand, of lifting a kindly, angelic palm toward her to say good-bye?

That was it, no doubt: Khady was walking toward her death, and so, swayed by the very understandable fear of getting involved somehow in her fate, they chose to have nothing further to do with her.

Khady stifled a moan.

In the street a man was waiting for her.

He was dressed in Western clothes: jeans and a checked shirt. Although the sun had barely risen he wore gleaming sunglasses, so that when tiny, anxious Khady, her bundle pressed against her chest, was pushed toward him by her jumpy, irritated, impatient mother-in-law, she couldn’t tell whether he was looking at her, but she could see herself reflected in the twin mirrors of his glasses.

She noticed his habit of biting his lower lip, so that the lower part of his face was constantly moving, like the jaw of a rodent.

Her mother-in-law quickly put a few banknotes in his hand and he stuffed them in his pocket without looking at them.

“You mustn’t come back here,” she murmured in Khady’s ear. “You must send us some money as soon as you get over there. But if you don’t make it, you mustn’t come back here.”

Khady made as if to clutch the old woman’s arm, but she slipped quickly inside the house and shut the door behind her.

“It’s this way, follow me,” the man said in a low, flat tone.

He started down the road without bothering to make sure Khady was behind him, as if, she said to herself, following in his footsteps, tottering clumsily in her pink plastic flip-flops while he seemed to leap along on the light, thick soles of his sneakers, he didn’t doubt for a second her interest in accompanying him, or as if, having been paid in full, he couldn’t care less what she did.

Such lack of concern about her Khady found somewhat reassuring.

As soon as she stopped thinking about that, taking care not to get left behind or lose one of her flip-flops, she found her mind being invaded by the usual fog, this time shot through not with the dead faces of her husband or grandmother but with the images she saw as she followed in the man’s footsteps along streets that she couldn’t recall ever having been down before, although, she suddenly thought, she could have walked through them in her usual stupor and mental prostration without remembering it — whereas it seemed to her that, this morning, the most humble scenes along the way were gently insisting on their permanence in a kind of rear projection on the screen of her dreams.

Was it possible that, now finding herself cast into the unknown, wrenched from her dangerous torpor, she was being protected in spite of herself?

What surprised her more was the twinge of grief she felt on seeing a pregnant woman sitting under a mango tree feeding a small child boiled rice.

She’d not felt for a long while — not since she’d gone to live with her husband’s family and everything had frozen inside her — that great distress at not having had a baby, that immense, bitter grief unconnected with any reflex of shame in the face of those around her.

And now she was gazing at the woman instead of merely glancing at her, unable to take her eyes off that swollen belly and the smeared lips of the little boy, and thinking sadly, Won’t I, Khady, ever have a child? She was however less sad than surprised at being sad, at identifying the emotion that, in an obscure, almost gentle way, stirred a part of her that had grown accustomed to feeling merely sluggish or terrified.

She hurried on because the man in front of her was walking quickly.

A young woman who could have been her, Khady, in her previous life came out onto the pavement and removed the wooden panel that covered the only window of her drinks stall, and on seeing that long, slender body, narrow at the hips and shoulders, with barely a perceptible waist, but as compact and vigorous in its slimness as the body of a snake, Khady recognized a shape very much like her own, and she reawakened to the action of her own muscles in enabling her to move so quickly, of their forgotten vigor and unfailing presence, of the whole of her young body, which she no longer paid the slightest attention to but which she now remembered and rediscovered in the bearing of this unknown young woman, who was arranging on the counter the fizzy-drink bottles she was about to sell and who, with her calm, focused reserve, could have been Khady, in an earlier life.

The man was now leading her down the avenue de l’Indépendance.

Schoolboys in blue shorts and white tops were moving slowly along the pavement, holding pieces of bread that they bit into from time to time, scattering crumbs as they went, with the crows hot on their heels.

Khady hurried, caught up with her guide, and began trotting in order to stay alongside him, her flip-flops making such a racket on the asphalt that the suspicious crows flew away.

“We’re nearly there,” the man said in a neutral tone of voice, less to reassure or encourage Khady than to forestall a possible question.

She wondered then if he was embarrassed to be seen walking alongside this woman with her faded batik, short unadorned hair, and feet white with dust, whereas he, with his fitted shirt, sunglasses, and green sneakers, obviously took particular pride in his appearance and cared what people thought of him.

He crossed the avenue, turned into the boulevard de la République, and walked down toward the sea.

Khady could see crows and gulls flying in the soft pale blue sky. She was aware of watching them in their flight and was surprised, almost fearful, of this awareness, saying to herself — not clearly but limply and confusedly, her thoughts still impeded by the fog of her dreams — saying to herself, It’s been a while since I’ve come this way, to the seashore where her grandmother sent her as a child to buy fish from the boats that had just landed their catch.

She then felt so completely sure of the indisputable fact that the thin, valiant little girl haggling fiercely over the price of mullet and the woman accompanying a stranger toward a similar shore were one and the same person with a unique, coherent destiny that she was moved and felt satisfied and fulfilled. Her eyes were stinging, and she forgot the uncertainty of her situation, or, rather, its precariousness no longer appeared so serious in the dazzling radiance of such a truth.

She felt the ghost of a smile playing on her lips.

Hello, Khady, she said to herself.

She remembered how much, as a little girl, she’d enjoyed her own company, and that she never felt lonely when she was by herself but when she was surrounded by other children or by members of the numerous families that had employed her as a servant.

She remembered too that her husband, a kindly, placid, taciturn, and slightly withdrawn character, had given her the reassuring impression that she’d no need to give up her solitude and that he didn’t expect her to, any more than he imagined she’d attempt to draw him out of himself.

And for the first time perhaps since his death, as she went, half running, along the boulevard, gripping her flip-flops with her toes to keep them from falling off, as she felt on her forehead the still mild heat of the blue sky, as she heard the shrieking of the crows in their fury at being always hungry, and as she saw them at the edge of her field of vision, the innumerable dark specks in their jerky whirls, for the first time in a very long while she missed her husband, precisely because of the kind of man he had been.

She felt a knot in her chest.

Because that was such a new sensation for her.

This pain was very far from the dizzying disillusion and resentment she’d felt when — because of that unexpected death — she faced the certainty that she wouldn’t have a child anytime soon, and the bitter realization that she’d gone to all that trouble for nothing; very far, too, from the no less bitter regret at having forfeited a life that had been perfectly suitable. This feeling of hurt over her loss took her by surprise and upset her, and with her free hand — the other gripping her bundle — she struck her breasts with little taps as if to make herself believe that she suffered from a form of physical imperfection.

Oh, that was it, all right: she wanted her husband to be there — or simply to be somewhere in that vast country of which she knew only this town (even only a small part of this town), a country whose borders, extent, and shape she had merely the vaguest notion of — in the end she wanted her husband to be there so she could remember his smooth, dark, calm features and feel secure in the knowledge of that face remaining unchanged, warm and animated, waving like hers, somewhere on earth, a heavy flower on its stalk. Khady now turned her own face mechanically toward that of the stranger (“That’s where the car will pick people up, it’ll be here soon”), the unknown, disdainful face twitching disconcertingly, the living presence that Khady couldn’t fail to acknowledge beside her own, whose heat she could feel close to her cheek and whose faint odor of sweat she could smell, whereas what her husband’s face might look like now she had no idea and couldn’t even imagine.

That beloved face, she would have endured never seeing it again if she could have been sure that, even far removed from her, it was intact, warm and damp with sweat.

But the thought that it would exist forever only in the memory of a handful of people suddenly filled her with sadness and pity for her husband, and although she ached and kept hitting her chest, she couldn’t help feeling lucky.

The man had stopped at the bottom of the boulevard near a small group of people laden with packages.

Khady had put her bundle down and sat upon it.

She let her body relax and wiggled her toes on the thin plastic soles of her flip-flops.

She’d pulled her batik almost up to her knee to let the sun play on her dry, cracked, and dusty legs.

She wasn’t bothered that she didn’t matter to anyone or that no one gave her a single thought.

She was herself, she was calm, she was alive, she was still young, and she was in excellent health; every fiber of her being was savoring the kindly warmth of the early-morning sun, and her twitching nostrils gratefully sniffed the salty air blowing in off the sea, which, though not visible, she could hear just at the bottom of the boulevard like a surge of blue-green radiance in the morning light, like the glint of bronze against the soft blue of the sky.

She half closed her eyes, leaving only a slit through which to watch the man assigned to drive her pacing nervously up and down.

To drive her where?

She’d never dare ask him; in any case she didn’t want to know, not yet anyway, because, she wondered, what would her poor brain do with the information, knowing as little as it did of the world, knowing only a small number of names, names of things in everyday use but not the names of what cannot be seen, used, or comprehended.

Whenever memories of the school to which her grandmother had briefly sent her insinuated themselves into her dreams, it was all noise, confusion, jibes, and scuffles and a few vague images of a bony, mistrustful girl quick to scratch the face of anyone who attacked her, who, squatting on the tiled floor because there weren’t enough chairs, could hear (but couldn’t discern) the rapid, dry, impatient, cross words of a teacher who luckily paid her not the slightest attention, whose perpetually scandalized look (or perpetual looking for something to be scandalized by) passed over the girl without seeing her, and if the girl was content to be left in peace she wasn’t in the least afraid of that woman or of the other children, and if she put up with humiliation she wasn’t, for all that, cowed by anyone.

Khady smiled inwardly. That small, cantankerous girl was her.

She touched her right ear mechanically and smiled again at the feeling of the two separate parts of her lobe: a child had jumped on her in class and torn off her earring.

Oh no, she’d never learned or understood anything at school.

She would simply let the litany of indistinguishable words — uttered in a toneless voice by the woman with the unlovely face and annoyed expression — wash over her. She’d no idea what sort of things the words referred to; she was aware that they involved a language, French, which she could understand and even speak a little but couldn’t follow in the woman’s rapid, irascible delivery. Meanwhile, a part of her remained constantly on the alert for that group of children who might at any moment launch a surprise attack and kick or slap her when the teacher turned around to face the blackboard.

That was why, today, all she knew of life was what she’d lived through.

She therefore preferred that the man imposed on her as her guide or companion or protector didn’t inflict on her ignorant mind — were she to ask him where they were going — the pointless torment of a vocable it couldn’t possibly recognize, since she was well aware that her fate was linked to the obscure, even bizarre and quite unmemorizable name.

It wasn’t that her fate bothered her all that much, no, but why spoil this brand-new, beneficent feeling of pleasure at the warm atmosphere and slight odor of fermentation, of healthy rot, rising from the pavement on which her feet were resting contentedly and her body was relaxing in that state of complete immobility that it knew so well how to attain — why risk spoiling all that for no good reason?

The people around her were doing much the same as they waited, sitting on large tartan plastic bags or cardboard boxes tied with string, and although Khady looked straight in front of her through half-closed eyelids, she could tell from the absence of vibration, from a certain stagnant quality of the air around her, that the man — shepherd or jailer or protector or secret caster of evil spells — was the only one fidgeting, pacing feverishly up and down the sandy, uneven pavement, bouncing and hopping about involuntarily in his green sneakers exactly like (Khady thought) the black and white crows nearby — black crows with broad white collars — whose brother he perhaps was, subtly changed into a man in order to carry Khady off.

Her equanimity was disrupted by a shudder of dread.

Later, after it turned so hot that Khady had wrapped herself in the batik packed the night before and the small group of individuals had become a tumultuous crowd, the man suddenly grabbed her by the arm, pulled her to her feet, and pushed her into the back of a car already occupied by several others, then jumped in himself, protesting loudly, scornfully, and indignantly; it seemed to Khady that he was furious at finding so many people in the car, that he’d been assured it wouldn’t be so, and that perhaps he’d even paid for it not to be.

Unsettled, she stopped listening, feeling the hot anger of this man against her thigh and his anxious, quivering exasperation.

Was he hiding behind his reflective lenses the small, hard, round eyes, the fixed stare of the crows, was he concealing under his checked shirt curiously buttoned up at the neck that collar of whitish feathers they all wore?

She shot him a sideways glance as the car started moving slowly and with difficulty out of the square that was now filled with minibuses and other big, heavy vehicles like theirs into which there clambered, or tried to, large numbers of people whose words and occasional shouts and cries mingled with the aggressive shrieks of the black-and-white crows flying low over the roadway — she looked at the man’s mouth, which never stopped twitching, and at the feverish quivering of his neck, and she thought then that the crows opened and closed their black beaks ceaselessly in much the same way, that their black-and-white breasts — black trimmed with white — jerked rhythmically in a similar fashion, as if life were so fragile that it had to signal, or warn of, how delicate and vulnerable it was.

She wouldn’t have put a question to him for all the world.

Because what she feared now wasn’t that he would say something that corresponded with nothing in the little she knew, but that, on the contrary, he would remind her of his fellow crows and conjure up the dark, far-off place to which he was perhaps taking her: she, Khady, who hadn’t earned enough in the family to pay for her food and who was being put out in this way, but, oh, were those banknotes tucked in her waistband intended to pay for her passage to that undoubtedly baleful, terrible place?

Enveloped again by the fleeting confusion into which she had previously been plunged, but without the gentle slowness that had protected her, she was on the verge of panic.

What was she supposed to think, what was she failing to understand?

How was she to interpret the clues to her misfortune?

She vaguely remembered a story her grandmother used to tell about a snake, a violent and invisible creature that had several times tried to carry the grandmother off before a neighbor had managed to kill it even though it couldn’t be seen, but she was unable to recall any mention of crows, and that frightened her.

Should she have remembered something?

Had she already, at some time past, been warned?

She tried to move away a little from her companion by pressing up against the two old women on her left, but the one closest elbowed her purposefully in the ribs without looking at her.

Khady then tried to make herself as small as possible by hugging her bundle tight.

She stared at the folds of skin on the back of the driver’s shaven head and tried not to think about anything, just allowing herself to note that she was now hungry and thirsty, reflecting longingly on the piece of bread her mother-in-law had packed, feeling its hard edges against her chest, her head swaying left and right as she was thrown about roughly by the car bouncing up and down as it went along a wide, badly rutted road that Khady could see unfolding rapidly between the head of the driver and that of the front-seat passenger, through the cracked windshield: a soothing view, despite the jolts.

The road was lined by cinder-block houses with corrugated-iron roofs in front of which small white hens were pecking and lively children were playing, houses and children such as Khady had dreamed of having with her husband (he of the kindly face): a house of well-laid cement blocks and with a shiny roof, a tiny, clean yard, and bright-eyed children with healthy skin, her children, who would romp about at the roadside without a care in the world although it seemed to Khady that the car was going to gobble them up as surely as it was swallowing the fast, wide, rutted road.

Something inside her wanted to shout a warning to them about the danger and to beg the driver not to devour her children — they’d all inherited her husband’s kindly face — but the moment she was about to utter it she held back, feeling horribly ashamed and frustrated to realize that her children were only crows with unkempt plumage pecking in front of the houses and sometimes grumpily flying off when the cars passed by, black and white and quarrelsome, sailing toward the low branches of a kapok tree, and what would people say if she got it into her head to try and protect her crow-children, she who by chance still had the face and name of Khady Demba and would keep her human features only as long as she remained in that car staring at the fat shaven nape of the driver and thus out of his clutches, this ferocious light-footed bird, what would people say about Khady Demba?

She jumped violently as the man gripped her shoulder.

Having already gotten out of the car he pulled her toward him to make her get out too, while the other women pushed her unceremoniously (one of them complaining that their door was jammed).

Khady stumbled out, still half asleep, leaving the stuffy heat of the car for the suffocating humidity of a place that, if it didn’t remind her of anywhere in particular, wasn’t unlike the neighborhood she’d been living in, with sandy streets and pink or pale blue or roughcast walls, so that she began to lose her fear of having been brought to the crows’ lair.

The man gestured impatiently for her to follow him.

Khady took a quick look around her.

Stalls lined the little square where the car had parked among others just like it, long, badly dented vehicles, and a crowd of men and women was moving between the cars haggling over fares.

Khady noticed in a corner the two letters WC painted on a wall.

She pointed them out to the man, who’d turned around to make sure she was still there, then ran to relieve herself.

When she came out of the latrines, he’d disappeared.

She stopped exactly where he’d stood a few moments before.

She undid her bundle carefully, tore off a piece of bread, and began eating it slowly.

She let each mouthful dissolve on her tongue because she wanted to savor it fully. It was stale, so rather bland and tasteless, but she enjoyed eating it. At the same time, her eyes darted from one end of the square to the other trying to find the man who held her fate in his hands.

Because now that the crows were no longer to be seen anywhere (only pigeons and gray sparrows were flitting here and there), she was much less afraid of a possible family connection between those birds and the man she was with than of being abandoned there: she, Khady Demba, who had no idea where she was and didn’t care to ask.

The sky was dull and overcast.

From the dimmed brilliance of the light and the low position of the pink halo behind the pale gray of the sky Khady guessed with some surprise that night was drawing in, meaning they’d been driving for several hours.

Suddenly the man was standing in front of her again.

He thrust a bottle of orange soda toward her.

“Come on, come on,” he breathed in an urgent, edgy tone of voice, and Khady began trotting behind him again, her flip-flops scraping along the dusty ground, taking big gulps straight from the bottle and, in a state of focused, lucid terror, pausing to inhale the distant smells of putrefaction blowing in from the sea and the crumbling facades, facades such as she’d never seen before, of enormous houses with sagging balconies and dilapidated columns that seemed, in the fading light of violet dusk, to take on the look of very old bones propping up the ravaged body of some large animal. Then the faint smell of rotting fish became more insistent as the man turned toward one of those half-collapsed monsters, and pushed a door open to let Khady into a courtyard, where she saw nothing at first but a pile of sacks and bundles scarcely darker than the violet dusk of the fading day.

The man whispered to her to sit down but Khady remained standing close to the door they’d just come through, not out of any wish to disobey him but rather because in the awesome effort she was making, within her limited powers and sparse points of reference, to force her unbridled, impulsive, timorous mind to note then try to interpret what her eyes were taking in — in that terrible feat of will and intellect, her body had frozen, her legs had stiffened, and her knees had been transformed into two tight balls as hard and inflexible as two knots on a tree branch.

Between herself and the other people there was but one connection: they all found themselves huddled together in the same place at the same time.

But what was the nature of — and the reason for — that connection, and was the situation a good one for them and for her, and how would she recognize a bad situation, and was she a free person or not?

That she was capable of formulating such questions surprised and troubled her.

Her laboriously inquisitive mind was suffering under the burden of so much reflection, but she was not displeased at the progress of that hard work within her, indeed she found it fascinating.

The man didn’t insist on her sitting down.

She could smell the chalybeate odor of his sweat and feel, too, the almost electrical vibrations of his anxious excitement.

For the first time he took off his sunglasses.

In the semidarkness his pitch-black eyes seemed very round and shiny.

Khady was gripped again by her old fear that the man had something to do with crows.

She glanced at the blurred mass of packages and of people sitting or lying among them. She would have been scarcely surprised to see wings flapping there, recognizable in the dark by their white fringes, or hear those white-fringed wings beating against invisible sides. She felt then that in this very fear of hers an escape was being plotted, an attempted flight toward the pallid, dreamy, solitary lands she’d just left — only that very morning, in fact — and she forced herself to suppress her anxiety and to concentrate on nothing but the immediate reality of imminent threat she discerned in the man’s gleaming eyes, on the voracious hiss of his voice asking for, indeed demanding, money.

“Pay me now, you have to pay me!”

Khady suddenly realized that he might be attributing her motionlessness, her lack of reaction, to a reluctance to give him what he wanted, so she softened her stance and facial expression and opened her mouth in a kind of conciliatory smile that he probably couldn’t see in the dark.

As if from a great distance she could hear herself cawing — and wasn’t it a bit as if she were imitating the man’s voice?

“Pay you? Why must I pay you?”

“I brought you here, it was agreed!”

Abruptly turning her back on him she slid her hand along her belly, felt around, and pulled out five warm, damp banknotes, so soft and worn they looked like bits of rag.

She spun around and shoved the notes into the man’s hand.

He counted them without looking at them.

Satisfied, he muttered something to himself and stuffed the notes in the pocket of his jeans. Seeing him so easily placated, Khady immediately regretted having given him so much.

She had the vague feeling that she would have been ready now to ask him, not the name of the town he’d brought her to nor the name of the place they found themselves in, but the reason for their journey — that she would now have been in a position to listen to him and try to learn something, but she was loath to speak to him again, to hear her own voice and then his, the rasping sound of his throat being cleared, which reminded her of the cry of those ferocious black birds with the white wingtips.

But he’d already turned on his heels and left the courtyard.

And though she’d not known all day whether he was her jailer or her guardian angel, fearsome or benevolent, though she’d been afraid to look him in the eye, his disappearance blocked the calm, studious, rapt flow of her newly directed, controlled thought, and Khady slipped back into the faintly anguished mists of her monotonous daydreams.

She slid to the ground and curled up on her bundle.

She lay prostrate, neither awake nor sleepy, and was almost unaware of what was going on around her. In the depths of an inertia interrupted by occasional jolts of anxiety she was conscious only of feeling hot, hungry, and thirsty. Then a sudden commotion made her lift her head and start to get up.

All the people in the courtyard had stood up, responding, Khady hastily supposed, to the arrival of a small group of men.

There was much whispering among the previously silent crowd.

The darkness was heavy and deep.

As she crouched Khady could feel the sweat running down her arms, between her breasts, and at the back of her knees.

She heard short, deliberately stifled shouts coming from the three or four men who’d just entered, and although she hadn’t grasped what they were saying, either because she was too far away or because they were speaking a language she wasn’t familiar with, Khady understood, from the busy, preoccupied, muffled rustling that ran through the crowd, that what the people in the courtyard had been waiting for was now at last to happen.

Her head was buzzing.

She picked up her bundle and, a little unsteadily, followed the slow procession to the door.

Hardly had they reached the sandy street, dimly lit by a thin crescent moon, than silence fell once again on the group walking slowly in a spontaneously organized single file behind the men whose arrival had put an end to the long wait in the courtyard, and even the small children, strapped to their mothers’ backs, were quiet.

Dogs were howling in the distance.

Apart from the rustling of people’s clothes and the noise of their flip-flops scraping the sand, that was the only sound to be heard in the darkness.

The last houses disappeared.

She then felt her thin plastic soles sinking into deep sand, still warm on the surface but cold underneath. The march of one and all around her was slowed, impeded by the mass of fine sand that filled their slippers and flip-flops and suddenly froze their toes and ankles, whereas their foreheads were still pouring with sweat.

She was aware, too, almost in advance, almost before it happened, of an end to the prudent hushed consensus that had prevailed in the street, and she guessed, from an imperceptible quiver, from a more pronounced sound of breathing running through the moving, undulating crowd, that the danger, whatever it was, of being heard and noticed had passed, or else perhaps the tension had reached such a point now as they were approaching the sea that the need for restraint could be set aside and forgotten.

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.

Although Khady spontaneously blotted out everything to do with the boy’s earlier life, although she tried not to listen to anything she thought inessential, whatever was likely to upset or embarrass her, even, inexplicably, to fill her with a muted sadness, as if her own earliest memories were being revived rather than his, she couldn’t help retaining the fact that a stepmother — his father’s new wife after his mother’s death — had for years beaten Lamine so hard he’d almost gone mad.

He pulled up his T-shirt to show her the pinkish, slightly puffy marks on his back.

He’d gone to the lycée and failed the baccalaureate twice.

But he wanted badly to go on studying, he dreamed of becoming an engineer. (What did that mean? Khady wondered despite herself, trying hard not to get interested.)

When after a few days she made to remove the cloth protecting her calf, it was stuck so hard to the wound that she had to wrench it off, causing such pain that she couldn’t help crying out.

She wrapped a strip of clean cloth tightly around it.

She limped from one corner of the courtyard to another, trying to habituate herself to the hindrance, to train her body to cope with the slower pace and constant pain, until they became a part of her that she could forget or ignore by relegating it to the status of other merely circumstantial matters, like the painful stories of Lamine’s past, that served no useful purpose but merely risked deflecting and slowing down the still budding, precarious development of her thinking by insinuating into it elements of turmoil and uncontrollable suffering.

She similarly let her eyes flit across the faces of the people who arrived ever more numerous each day in the courtyard — and her look, she knew, was neutral, cold, and a permanent discouragement to anyone attempting conversation, not because she was afraid of being asked something (she had no fear of that) but because her mind panicked at the mere possibility of hearing about painful, complicated lives and being told at great length about things she found difficult to understand since she lacked the principles for interpreting matters in life that others seemed to possess as a matter of course.

One day the boy took her through narrow, sandy streets to a barber shop where a woman in the back took photos of her.

A few days later he came back with a worn, creased, blue booklet that he gave Khady, telling her she was now called Bintou Thiam.

His eyes had a look of pride, triumph, and self-assurance that put Khady slightly on guard.

She had a passing feeling that she was becoming feeble again and subject to the decisions, knowledge, and inscrutable intentions of others. Through sheer weariness she was briefly tempted to accept this subordination, to stop thinking about anything and to let her mind once again drift in the milky flow of its dreams.

Feeling a little disgusted, she pulled herself together.

She thanked the boy with a nod.

She felt terrible shooting pains in her calf that made it hard for her to think straight.

But though still determined not to discuss money unless he did, she couldn’t ignore the issue, nor the fact that Lamine had bought a passport for her and was behaving as if it were obvious that she had no money, or that one way or another she’d pay later — that worried her to the point that she sometimes wished he’d disappear, vanish from her life.

But she was becoming attached to his eager features, his adolescent voice.

She surprised herself by looking at him with pleasure, almost with tender amusement, when, hopping about the courtyard like the delicate birds with long spindly legs that she remembered seeing as a child on the beach (although she thought she couldn’t now remember what they were called, she could see that everything had a name even if she didn’t know it, and realized with embarrassment she’d once believed that only those things whose names she knew possessed one), he moved from one group to another, busying himself with a spirited, childlike innocence that inspired confidence.

He was possessed of a particular intuition.

She was beginning to grow impatient, but never for a moment thought to complain about it, when he announced they’d be leaving the next day. It was as if — she thought — he’d guessed that without realizing it she was starting to get bored, and had decided it was a bad thing: but why?

What could that matter to him?

Oh, she certainly felt affection for the boy.

That night, in the darkness of the courtyard where they were lying, she felt him moving close to her, hesitantly, as if unsure of her reaction.

She didn’t rebuff him; rather, she encouraged him by turning toward him.

She pulled her batik up and, carefully rolling the banknotes in them, slipped her panties off and laid her head on them.

It was years since she’d made love: not once since her husband’s death.

She carefully stroked the boy’s heavily scarred back and was surprised at the same time by the extreme lightness of his body and by the almost excessive gentleness and delicacy (because she could barely feel he was there) with which he moved within her. Almost as a reflex, recalled by the sensation of a body on top of hers, even one so different from her husband’s compact, heavy frame, there came back to her the prayers to be got with child which she’d never ceased murmuring at the time and which had prevented her having an orgasm by distracting her from the necessary concentration on her own pleasure.

She vehemently chased all such prayers away.

She was filled with a kind of well-being, a sort of physical comfort — nothing more pointed than that, nothing at all like what her sisters-in-law giggled and sighed about between themselves — but it made Khady feel happy and grateful to the boy.

As he pulled away from her he inadvertently bumped against her calf.

An explosion of pain tore through Khady.

She was panting and almost fainted.

She could hear Lamine murmuring anxiously in her ear and — suffering so much that she felt surprised, almost detached, a stranger to a self that was in such violent pain — she said to herself, Who ever cared about me the way he does, this lad, and so young too! I’m lucky, I’m really lucky …

Before dawn they clambered onto an open-bed truck where so many people were already huddling that it seemed impossible for Khady to find any room for herself.

She perched on a pile of sacks in the back, high up above the wheels.

Lamine advised her to grip the string on the packaging firmly so as not to fall off.

He was sitting astride a box right next to her and Khady could smell on their arms, pressed close together, the slightly sharp odor of his sweat mingling with hers.

“If you fall, the driver won’t stop and you’ll die in the desert,” Lamine whispered.

He’d given her a leather flask filled with tepid water.

Khady had seen him give the driver a wad of bills, explaining that he was paying for her too, then he’d helped her onto the truck, since her leg seemed to have become so heavy she couldn’t manage it alone.

Lamine’s barely contained excitement — which he attempted to conceal by fussy, precise gestures (such as frequently checking that the top of the water bottle was screwed on tight) and by continual warnings, repeated in a soft, slow voice (“Hang on tight, if you fall off the driver won’t stop and you’ll die in the desert”) — she could sense from the slight twitch of his face: she found herself infected by his slightly intoxicated eagerness, so that she felt neither afraid nor humiliated at being helped in the simplest ways by the boy, nor by the constant support he gave her, such as cupping his hands together to give her a leg up onto the truck; none of that called into question the idea she now had of her own independence, of being free from constraints imposed by the will of others. In much the same manner she endeavored not to see, in the money that Lamine had given the driver on her behalf, anything that amounted to a personal commitment on her part.

For Khady Demba, all that was of no consequence.

If it pleased Lamine to play a crucial role in her liberation, she was sincerely grateful to him for that — yes, she felt a great deal of affection for the boy, but it didn’t make her accountable in any way.

Her head was spinning a little.

There was no relief now from the intense pain in her leg. It mingled with a feeling of joy that also appeared to be urging her fiercely onward.

As it moved off, the truck juddered so violently she was nearly thrown from her perch.

Lamine grabbed her in the nick of time.

“Hold on tight, hold on tight!” he shouted in her ear, and close up in the rosy light of dawn she could see his thin, hollow cheeks and the pale chapped lips he moistened often with his tongue, and his eyes: a bit wild, a bit frantic, she thought, like those dark and terrified eyes of a large yellowish dog that had been cornered in the market by women armed with sticks determined to make it pay for the theft of a chicken — Lamine’s were just like the dog’s eyes, filled with innocent terror, that had met hers in the market and pierced her numb, cold heart and had for a brief moment aroused strong feelings of sympathy and shame.

Was it for her that Lamine had been so afraid?

She was to recall, with dull remorse but without bitterness, how very attentive Lamine had been toward her.

She would remember all that, never thinking, however, that he’d sought to deceive her. In thinking back to his concern for her, the sadness she would feel, though at some remove, would be more for him than herself: it would be the boy’s fate that would affect her to the point of shedding a few cold tears, whereas she would judge her own destiny dispassionately, almost with detachment, as if she, Khady Demba, who had never wagered on life as much hope as Lamine did, had no reason to complain about losing everything.

She had not lost much, she would think, insisting with that imponderable pride, that discreet, unshakable assurance, I’m me, Khady Demba, even as she would get up, with sore thighs, the lips of her hot, inflamed vagina still swollen, up from that sad excuse for a mattress — a piece of grayish, stinking foam, actually — that throughout those long months was to be her place of work.

She’d not lost much, she thought.

Because, however great her exhaustion or intense her affliction, she would never regret that period of her life when her mind wandered in the foggy, numbing protective confinement of her frozen dreams, the time she lived with her husband’s family.

Nor would she have missed for anything the years of her marriage when the longing to get pregnant occupied every thinking moment.

Truth to tell, she would regret nothing, even while plunged in the reality of a horrific present that she could see only too clearly, to which she would apply thinking full of both pragmatism and pride (she would never have pointless feelings of shame, she would never forget the value of the human being she was: Khady Demba, honest and true) — a reality that above all she considered transitory, convinced that this period of suffering would have an end, and that while she would certainly not be rewarded (she couldn’t believe she was owed anything for having suffered) she would simply move on to something else. She didn’t yet know what that would be, but she was curious to find out.

As for the chain of events that had brought them — her and Lamine — to this point, she had a precise picture of that and was trying, calmly and coldly, to understand it.

After a day and a night on the road, the truck had stopped at a border.

All the passengers had gotten out, formed a line, and shown their passports to soldiers who shouted one word that Khady did understand even though it was not her language.

Money.

Those who put their hands up to indicate that they had none, or who offered too little, were then so badly beaten that some fell to the ground, where, even lying there, they were sometimes thrashed further by a soldier who seemed mad with rage at this hard job he had of hitting people, the trouble they put him to.

Khady began to tremble all over.

Lamine, next to her, had gripped her hand.

She could see his jaw quivering as if behind those lips shut tight his teeth were chattering.

He’d held out his passport to the soldier and a roll of banknotes, pointing to Khady and then himself.

The man had taken the notes with the tips of his fingers, contemptuously, and thrown them on the ground.

He’d given a soldier an order. The soldier hit Lamine in the stomach.

The boy doubled over and fell to his knees without a word, without a groan.

The soldier had taken out a knife, lifted one of Lamine’s feet and slashed the sole of his shoe. He’d felt the slit, then he’d done the same with the other foot.

And when, with his bony knees knocking, Lamine had straightaway staggered to his feet, as if it was more dangerous to lie prostrate than face his enemy, Khady could see two thin lines of blood running into the dust from under his shoes.

The commander had then turned to her. Khady had shown him the passport that Lamine had procured for her.

Clearheadedly, even though she couldn’t stop shivering, she’d slipped her hand under her batik and drawn out the thin wad of banknotes, which, soaked in sweat all this time in the elastic of her panties, looked like a piece of greenish rag. She had placed the money delicately and respectfully in the man’s hands while clinging tight to Lamine to make it clear that they were an item.

• • •

It was now several weeks — she wasn’t sure how many — that they’d been holed up in this desert town, not where the soldier had slashed the soles of Lamine’s feet but in another one, farther on from their original point of departure, where, once through that first checkpoint, they’d been brought by the truck.

Those travelers who still had money, either because they’d managed cleverly to hold some back or because for some obscure reason they hadn’t been beaten or searched, had been able to pay the driver to take them on the next leg of their journey.

But Khady, Lamine, and a few others had had to stop here, in this town infested with sand, with low sand-colored houses and with streets and gardens covered in sand.

Exhausted and famished, they’d lain down to sleep in front of a sort of bus station where the truck had dumped them.

Other trucks, laden with their human cargo, were waiting, ready to leave.

When Khady and Lamine had awoken at dawn, numb with cold, they were covered in sand from head to foot. Khady’s leg was hurting so much that it seemed to her, in flashes, that her suffering couldn’t be real, that either she was struggling inside the cruelest nightmare of her entire life or she was already dead and was being made to understand that her death was just that: an unbearable — yet abiding — constant physical pain.

The cloth she’d used to bind her calf several days earlier was embedded in the wound.

It was damp under the grains of sand, impregnated by the seepage of a foul, reddish liquid.

She hadn’t the strength to take it off, even though she knew she ought to — all she managed to do was gently move her leg, which was stiff and shot through with pins and needles. In the end she got up, shook the sand out of her hair and clothing.

She hopped around a bit.

On the ground sand-covered shapes were stirring.

She came back to Lamine, who was now sitting up. He’d taken his shoes off and was inspecting the soles of his feet, which the soldier’s knife had cut while searching the boy’s shoes.

A crust of dried blood made a dark line on the hard, broken skin.

She knew that the boy, though in pain, wouldn’t show it or ever speak about his wounds; she knew too that her questioning look would be met only by a deliberately gloomy expression masking his humiliation (oh, how humiliated he was, how sorry she was for him, and how upset too at not being able to take on the humiliation for him, she who could bear it, who was so little affected by it), because what convincing explanation could he give, if not of their failure, at least of such a setback occurring so early in their journey, he who had assured her that he knew the ropes, knew about all the obstacles and dangers likely to be met with on the road?

She was aware of it, she understood and accepted it: the mortification he was feeling, which left him with that blank look and made him seem remote, so different from the intense, friendly boy he had been.

Understanding it, she didn’t hold it against him.

What she didn’t then know, what would only gradually become clear but what at the time she was unequipped to envision, was that the boy was doubly humiliated, both by what had happened the day before and, as a matter of deduction, by something that hadn’t yet happened, something that Khady, who, though not naive, was too inexperienced to have yet intuited but that he, Lamine, knew would happen: that was why — Khady would later understand — he’d felt so ashamed in her presence, ashamed both at knowing she didn’t know and ashamed at the thing itself: that was why, out of fear and unwillingness to have anything to do with Khady’s innocence, he was so withdrawn from her.

Had he, later on, said anything specific to her?

She couldn’t remember exactly.

But it seemed to her that he hadn’t.

They’d simply wandered around, each limping in a different fashion (he trying to step only on the outer edges of his feet, she hopping along with irregular steps, trying to favor her sore leg), through streets heavy with dry, dusty heat under a yellowish, shimmering, sand-colored sky.

Lamine’s close-cropped hair, face, and chapped lips were still covered with sand.

Dazed and desperate to find some shade, they’d sought out a cheap place to eat, with earthen walls and no windows, where, in the semidarkness, they’d eaten tough, stringy pieces of grilled goat’s meat and drunk Coke, both knowing that they’d no money left to pay even for this meager fare, and Lamine retreated into a bitter, heartrending detachment behind which — he perhaps thought — he could take refuge alone with his indignity without it contaminating Khady, he who knew what was going to happen while she — he perhaps believed — still did not. But she’d had an inkling when, chewing the last piece of meat and washing it down with a last gulp of Coke, her eyes had met the hostile, half-closed eyes of the woman who had served them and who, breathing noisily, slumped on a chair in the darkest corner, had been scrutinizing the two of them, her and the boy. Khady had wondered then how they were now going to pay what they owed. In a way the woman’s unfriendly, judgmental, inquisitive gaze had given her the answer.

Throughout this period she would cling ferociously to the conviction that only the reality of physical pain had to be taken into account.

Because her body was in a permanent state of suffering.

The woman made her work in a tiny room that gave onto a courtyard at the back of the chophouse.

There was a foam mattress on the hard floor.

Khady spent most of her time lying on it, dressed in a beige slip. The woman would bring a customer in, usually a wretched-looking young man who, like Khady and Lamine, had fetched up in this town, where he scraped together a living as a houseboy, and who often on entering the hot stuffy room would cast frightened looks around him as if caught in a trap of what was hardly — Khady thought — his own desires but the machinations of the woman who tried to inveigle every diner into visiting the room at the back.

The woman would then lock the door and go away.

The man would then lower his trousers with almost anxious haste, as if it were a matter of getting a tiresome and vaguely threatening obligation over with as quickly as possible. He’d lie down on Khady, who — to avoid jolting it as best she could — would move aside her injured leg, on which the woman put a fresh bandage each day. He would then enter her, often groaning in surprise, because a recent attack of pruritus that made Khady’s vagina dry and inflamed also caused his penis some discomfort. She summoned all her mental strength to counter the multiple shooting pains in her back, her lower abdomen, and her calf, thinking, There’s a time when it stops, feeling on her chest half hidden by the lace edging of her slip and on her neck the man’s copious sweat mingling with hers, thinking again, There’s a time when it stops, until the man finished his labors and, in a murmur of pain and disappointment, promptly withdrew.

He would then bang on the door and they would both hear the slow, heavy tread of the woman coming to open it.

Some customers would complain, saying that it had hurt, that the girl was infected.

And Khady thought with surprise, Ah, “the girl,” that’s me, almost amused to be the one referred to that way, she, Khady Demba, in all her singularity.

She would remain lying there a while after the other two had gone.

Breathing slowly, with her eyes wide open, she would calmly inspect the cracks in the pinkish walls, the corrugated-iron ceiling, and the white plastic chair under which she’d put her bundle.

Lying perfectly still, she could hear the blood throbbing calmly, softly, in her ears, and if she moved slightly, the sucking sound of her wet back on the mattress — which was also soaked in sweat — and the tiny lapping noise made by her burning vulva, and then, feeling the pain oozing gently away, overcome by the youthful, tempestuous vigor of her solid, willful physique, she would think, calmly, almost serenely, There’s a time when it stops, so calmly, so serenely, that when the woman came back not alone, as she usually did, to wash her, nurse her, and give her something to drink, but in the company of another customer whom — with a vague gesture of regret or excuse in Khady’s direction — she would bring in: even then Khady would experience only a brief moment of dejection, weakness, and disorientation, before once more thinking calmly, There’s a time when it stops.

After imposing one customer after another upon her, the woman would take care of Khady with motherly solicitude.

She’d bring a towel and a bucket filled with cool water and gently wash Khady’s nether regions.

In the evening they would sit down together in the courtyard and Khady would eat a solid meal of goat’s meat and boiled corn washed down with Coke, keeping back a portion for Lamine.

The woman would take off Khady’s bandage, smear fat on the wound, which was swollen and foul smelling, and bind it up again with a clean piece of cloth.

And as they sat there, full up, enjoying the quiet of the cool evening, Khady would turn to look at the woman. In the dusk she could see only the outline of a round, kindly face, and it sometimes seemed to her that she’d gone back to the time of her childhood, which, although harsh, muddled, and often grim, had had its happier moments, such as when Khady sat in front of the house at her grandmother’s feet to have her hair done.

Just before nightfall, Lamine would arrive.

He slipped into the courtyard — Khady thought with a touch of pity and disgust — like a dog afraid of getting a hiding, but even more of finding his bowl empty. Lamine was at once quick and stooping, keen and furtive. Khady and the woman pretended not to notice, Khady out of delicacy and the woman out of scorn, and Lamine would pick up the full plate and carry it to Khady’s room, where the woman allowed him — or at least didn’t forbid him — to spend the night, on the unspoken proviso that he’d be gone by dawn.

Before going to bed, the woman would give Khady a small part of the money she’d earned.

Khady would also turn in, going back to the pinkish room lit by a grimy bulb hanging from the tin roof.

Seeing Lamine, once so energetic, crouched in a corner scraping his plate with his spoon, made Khady feel her aches and pains all come flooding back.

Because what — beyond the faintly tired evidence of her own honor now forever secured, and the rather weary awareness of her irrevocable dignity — could she set against the incurable shame the boy felt?

Perhaps he’d have preferred to see her humiliated and in despair.

But he carried the whole burden of despair and humiliation. Khady felt that, without realizing it, he held it against her. That was why she’d have preferred him not to be there in the evening, filling up the cramped space with his bitterness and his silent, obscure, unjust reproaches.

She also knew that he bore a grudge over her refusal to let him now make love to her.

Her reason — the one she gave herself and the one she told him — was that her swollen, ulcerated vagina needed a rest.

But this she guessed too: Lamine was ashamed of her, and for her, as much as he was ashamed of himself.

That annoyed her.

What right had he to include her in his feelings of abjection just because he lacked her strength of spirit?

She didn’t see why she should put up with pain in her genitalia just to satisfy his needs.

Silently, wearily, she would slide down onto the mattress.

What he did all day long in the dry, suffocating heat of the town, she didn’t care to be told.

She would feel a sullen pout beginning to play on her lips, aimed at discouraging any timid wish he might have for a chat.

Meanwhile her fingers would start moving mechanically toward the wall to stroke its nooks and crannies and, just before she fell asleep, a wild surge of joy would make her exhausted body quiver all over as she recalled suddenly, pretending to have forgotten, that she was Khady Demba: Khady Demba.

She awoke one morning to find Lamine gone.

Curiously, she understood what had happened before noticing his absence; she understood as soon as she woke up and leaped toward her bundle, which was wide open. She’d left it, tightly knotted, under the chair. She pulled out its meager contents — two T-shirts, a batik, a clean empty beer bottle — and groaned as she took in what she’d guessed before remarking anything else: that all her money was gone.

It was only at that instant she realized she was alone in the room.

In her distress she started making little whimpering sounds.

She opened her mouth wide. She felt she was suffocating.

Having awoken in the certainty that something bad had been done to her, had she, during the night, heard something, or had she had one of those dreams that foretell in precise detail what’s about to happen?

She rushed out, limping so badly that she nearly fell over at every step, crossed the courtyard, and went into the chophouse, where the woman was drinking her first coffee of the day.

“He’s gone! He’s stolen everything from me!” she shouted.

She slumped down onto a chair.

With rather distant pity, the woman eyed her coldly and knowingly.

She finished her coffee, slightly spoiled by Khady’s entry, and clicked her tongue. Then she got up heavily and, taking the girl in her arms and cradling her awkwardly, promised she’d never throw her out.

“No risk of that,” Khady whispered, “with what I bring you.”

In utter dejection she thought that she’d have to start all over again, that everything had to be endured once more, and even worse, because her body was so horribly bruised, whereas the night before she’d worked out that just two or three months’ more work would suffice to enable her and Lamine to continue their journey.

As for the boy, well, she’d already forgotten him.

It wouldn’t be long before all recollection of his name and what he looked like would fade from her mind. In retrospect she would see his betrayal as just one more cruel blow of fate.

Whenever she looked back to that period, she would round down to about a year the time she’d spent at the chophouse and in the pinkish room, but she knew that it had probably lasted a great deal longer and that she, too, had gotten bogged down in the sand of the desert town, like most of the men who visited her, who’d come from several different countries and who’d been wandering around the place for years, their eyes flitting apathetically over everything but seeming to take nothing in. They’d lost count of how long they’d been there, and people back home must have thought them dead because, in their shame over their situation, they’d failed to keep in touch with their families.

With their inert and impenetrable manners, they’d often linger by Khady’s side, having seemingly forgotten what they’d come for or thought it so exhausting and pointless that in the end they preferred just to lie there, neither asleep nor really alive.

Month after month Khady got thinner and thinner.

She had fewer and fewer customers and spent a good part of her day in the semidarkness of the chophouse.

Still, her mind was clear and alert, and she was sometimes overwhelmed with joy when, alone at night, she murmured her own name and once again savored how perfectly suited it was to her self.

But she was losing weight and getting weaker all the time, and the wound in her leg was slow to heal.

One day, though, she reckoned she’d saved up enough to try to leave.

For the first time in months she went out into the street, and limping in the scorching heat she made her way to the parking lot where the trucks left from.

She came back stubbornly each day, trying to work out which of the numerous men hanging about the place she should link up with so as to be able to get onto one of the trucks.

And she was no longer surprised by the harsh, combative tone in her own hard, sexless voice as she asked questions in the few words of English she’d picked up at the chophouse, any more than she was surprised by the reflection, in a truck’s rearview mirror, of a gaunt, gray face with matted, reddish hair, a face with pinched lips and dry skin that happened, now, to be her own and of which, she thought, one couldn’t be sure it was a woman’s face, any more than it could be said that her skeletal body was a woman’s, and yet she was still Khady Demba, unique and indispensable to the orderly functioning of things in the world, even though she now looked more and more like the lost, sluggish, scrawny creatures roaming the town, in fact so much like them that she thought, What difference is there between them and me, basically? after which she laughed inwardly, delighted to have told herself a good joke, saying, It’s because I’m me, Khady Demba!

No, nothing surprised her anymore; nothing, any longer, made her afraid, not even the great weariness she felt all day long that caused her thin limbs suddenly to feel so heavy that she labored to lift a spoon to her mouth and to put one foot in front of the other.

To all that, too, she’d grown accustomed.

Now she looked upon exhaustion as the natural condition of her body.

Weeks later, in a forest the name of which she’d forgotten, among trees that were unfamiliar to her, her state of great weakness would prevent her from leaving the makeshift tent of plastic and foliage in which she was lying.

She’d no idea how long she’d been there, nor how it was possible for the sunlight filtering through the blue plastic to reveal her arms, legs, and feet that were so thin and so far gone. She felt herself weighing so heavily on the earth that it seemed gravity was causing her to sink into it as soon as she closed her eyes.

And she, Khady Demba, who was ashamed of nothing, was dying of shame at seeing herself like that: huge, unwieldy, and immovable.

A damp, strong-smelling hand was lifting her head, trying to put something into her mouth.

She tried to prevent it, because the smell of that something and of the hand holding it sickened her, but she had so little strength left that her lips parted in spite of herself and she let a sort of insipid, sticky paste slide down her gullet.

She felt cold all the time. The cold was so deep and awful that it couldn’t be assuaged either by the blanket covering her or the warm hands that occasionally massaged her.

And while she hoped to find in the earth being hollowed out under the weight of her enormous body the warmth that she thought would get her back on her feet, as soon as she closed her eyes she encountered an even greater cold, against which the bluish sun filtering through the plastic was of no effect, any more than was the humid, stuffy, and (to judge by her profuse sweating) probably warm air inside the tent under the trees.

Oh, she was certainly cold and every inch of her body was hurting, but she reflected with such intensity on how she might forget the cold and the pain that when she saw again in her mind’s eye the faces of her grandmother and of her husband — the two people who’d been good to her and had reinforced her in the view that her life, her person, had no less meaning and value than theirs — and when she wondered if the child she’d so longed to bear could have prevented her falling into such a wretched situation, she realized that these were only thoughts and not regrets, because she didn’t lament her present state, didn’t want to change it, and even found herself in a way delighted, not at her suffering but simply at her condition as a human being confronting as bravely as possible all sorts of perils.

She got better.

She could sit up and eat and drink normally.

A man and a woman who appeared to be living together under the tent gave her a little bread and some boiled wheat that they prepared outside on a log fire in an old saucepan without a handle.

Khady remembered that she’d traveled in the truck with them.

They were both taciturn, and besides had no language in common with Khady, beyond a few words of English; still, she grasped eventually that they had been trying for years to get to Europe and that the man had managed to live there for a while before being expelled.

They both had children somewhere whom they hadn’t seen in a long time.

The tent was part of a vast encampment of shacks or tarpaulins lofted on poles, and men in rags were moving among the trees, carrying branches or tin cans.

Khady’d noticed she had nothing anymore: no bundle, passport, or money.

Both the man and the woman spent their days making ladders. After watching for a while how they did it, Khady went in search of branches and worked in her turn at building a ladder, dredging up from memory a story she’d been told (by the nameless faceless boy of her thwarted ascension) about a wire fence separating Africa from Europe, and questioning in her new hoarse, rough voice the man and the woman, who replied with a few words that she didn’t always know but that, linked to others she had learned, or translated summarily by a sketch drawn on the ground, ended up corresponding fairly closely to what she’d gathered from the boy. The couple tossed in her direction bits of string, which they used to tie each rung of the ladder to the uprights. They did so reluctantly and with some annoyance, as if, Khady thought calmly, having robbed her of all she possessed, as she assumed they had, they could hardly refuse to help her however much they didn’t like it.

She left the forest with the woman, and they followed a tarmac road to the gates of a town.

She was limping badly and her damaged calf could be seen below the hem of her old batik.

They begged in the streets.

Khady held her hand out as the woman did.

In an incomprehensible language people hurled what must have been insults at them. Some spat at their feet. Others gave them bread.

Khady was so hungry she bit violently into the bread.

Her hands trembled.

Her gums were bleeding. They left traces of blood on the bread.

But her heart was beating gently, calmly, and she felt the same way: gentle and calm, beyond reach, shielded by her unshakable humanity.

A short time later barking, shouting, and the sound of people running echoed through the camp.

Soldiers were pulling down the shacks, tearing off tarpaulin covers, and scattering the stones where cooking fires had been lit.

One of them grabbed Khady and ripped her batik off.

She saw him hesitate and realized he was repulsed by her thin body and the blackish marks on her skin.

He punched her in the face and threw her on the ground, his mouth twisted in anger and disgust.

Later, much later, weeks and months later perhaps, with every night in the forest feeling colder than the last and the sun seeming every day to look paler and hang lower in the sky, the men who’d been elected — or who’d appointed themselves — as leaders of the camp announced that the assault on the fence would take place the day after next.

They set off at night, dozens and dozens of men and women among whom Khady felt particularly flimsy, almost impalpable, a mere puff of wind.

Like the others she was carrying a ladder, which, though light, seemed to weigh more than she did, just as things sometimes — absurdly — do in dreams, and yet, as her enormous heart beat within the little bony cage of her fragile, burning chest, she limped along no slower than her companions.

They walked for a long while in silence through the forest, then over stony fields where Khady stumbled and fell several times, but she picked herself up and returned to her place in the group, she who felt herself but an infinitesimal displacement of air, a glacial nuance of the atmosphere — so cold was she, so cold through and through.

They arrived at last in a deserted area bathed in a white light that resembled the brightness of the moon made incandescent, and Khady saw the fence they’d all been talking about.

As they moved forward dogs began barking and shots rang out. Khady heard a voice made strident and uneven by anxiety: “They’re firing in the air,” then the same person, perhaps, shouted the agreed-upon signal, a single word, and everyone began running toward the fence.

She ran too. Her mouth was wide open but she couldn’t breathe. Her eyes were staring and her throat was blocked. Already the fence was there and she leaned her ladder against it. Then, rung by rung, she climbed up until she reached the top and gripped the fence.

She could hear all around her shots being fired and cries of fear and pain. She couldn’t tell if she was shouting too, or if it was the sound of the blood throbbing in her skull, enveloping her in an endless threnody. She tried to go higher, remembering that a boy had told her you must never, never stop climbing until you’ve reached the top, but the barbed wire was tearing the skin off her hands and feet and she could now hear herself screaming and feel blood running along her shoulders and down her arms. She kept telling herself never to stop climbing, never, repeating the words over and over again while no longer understanding them, then giving up, letting go, falling slowly backward, and thinking then that the person of Khady Demba — less than a breath, scarcely a puff of air — was surely never to touch the ground, but would float eternal, priceless, too evanescent ever to be smashed in the cold, blinding glare of the floodlights.

COUNTERPOINT

EVERY TIME Lamine was paid for his work, in the kitchen at the back of the restaurant Au bec fin, where he was an evening dishwasher; at the warehouse where he unpacked goods for supermarkets; on a construction site or in the metro: wherever he went to sell his labor, every time euros passed from a foreigner’s hand into his own, he thought of the girl, he silently begged her to forgive him and not to haunt him with curses and poisoned dreams. In the room he shared with others he slept with his money under the pillow and dreamed of the girl. She was either protecting him or — on the contrary — wishing he was in the pit of hell. And when, on bright days, he raised his eyes and let the sun warm his face, it wasn’t unusual for the sky to cloud over suddenly for no obvious reason, and then he would talk to the girl and tell her softly what had become of him, he would give thanks to her, a bird would vanish in the distance.