Three Strong Women

PART I

AND THE MAN waiting for her at the entrance to the big concrete house — or who happened to be standing in the doorway — was bathed in a light so suddenly intense that it seemed to radiate from his whole body and his pale clothing: yet this short, thickset man before her, who’d just emerged from his enormous house and was glowing bright as a neon tube, no longer possessed, Norah straightaway realized, the stature, arrogance, and youthfulness once so mysteriously his own as to seem everlasting.

He held his hands crossed over his belly and his head tilted sideways; his hair was gray, and under his white shirt the belly sagged limply over the waistband of his cream trousers.

There he stood, bathed in cold light, looking as if he might have dropped to the threshold of his pretentious house from the branch of one of the poincianas with which the garden was filled, for — it had occurred to Norah — as she approached the house staring through the railings at the front door, she hadn’t seen it open to let her father out: and yet there he stood in the sunset, this glowing, shrunken man who at some point must have been dealt an enormous blow to the head that further reduced the harmonious proportions Norah remembered to those of a fat man, neckless with short, thick legs.

He stood there watching her as she approached; nothing in his rather lost, rather hesitant look indicated that he was expecting her, indeed that he’d asked, even begged, her to come and see him (insofar as a man like that, she thought, was capable of requesting help of any kind).

He was simply there, perhaps indeed having flitted down from the thick branch of a poinciana in whose yellow shade the house stood, to land heavily on the cracked concrete of the doorstep; and it was as if Norah had approached the railings at that instant by pure chance.

This man who could transform every entreaty on his part into an appeal made to him by someone else watched her opening the gate and entering the garden. He had the look of a host who was rather put out but trying to hide the fact; he was shading his eyes despite the fading of the light that had left the doorway in shadows but for his strange, shining, electric person.

“Well, well,” he said, “it’s you.” His speech was muffled and weak; despite his mastery of the language he was tentative in French, as if the unease he’d always felt over certain mistakes that were difficult to avoid now caused his voice to tremble.

Norah said nothing.

She gave him a quick hug but did not hold him tight: from the almost imperceptible way the flabby skin on her father’s arms shrank under her grasp she remembered how much he detested physical contact.

She thought she noticed a musty smell.

A smell emanating from the lush, wilting vegetation of the poinciana whose branches overhung the flat roof of the house and among whose leaves there perhaps nested this withdrawn and self-assured man ever on the alert — it pained Norah to imagine — for the slightest sound of footsteps approaching the gate at which he would take flight to land clumsily on the doorstep of his vast house with its rough concrete walls; or was it emanating — this smell — from her father’s body or his clothes or his old, wrinkled, ashen skin: she couldn’t say what it was, she’d no idea where it might be coming from.

At most she could say that this day he was wearing, and probably always wore now, a rumpled, sweat-stained shirt and trousers that were pale and shiny and hideously baggy at the knees, either the effect of his being too heavy a bird, one that fell over each time he landed, or — Norah reflected with rather weary compassion — of his having become after all another slovenly old man, indifferent or blind to lapses of hygiene while still clinging to the forms of conventional elegance, dressing as he’d always done in white and cream and never appearing on the threshold of his unfinished house without tightening the knot of his tie, whatever dusty room he’d emerged from, whatever poinciana, exhausted by flowering, he’d flown down from.

On landing at the airport Norah had taken a taxi, then walked in the heat for a long while because she’d forgotten her father’s exact address and only found her way after she’d recognized the house. She felt sticky, dirty, and spent.

She wore a sleeveless lime-green dress covered with little yellow flowers rather like those strewn over the doorstep under the poinciana, and flat sandals in the same soft green.

And she noticed with a start that her father wore plastic flip-flops, he who had always made a point, it seemed to her, of never appearing in anything other than polished shoes in off-white or beige.

Was it because this untidy man had lost the right to cast a stern or disapproving eye over her, or because, as a confident thirty-eight-year-old, she no longer worried above all else what people thought of her appearance? Whatever the case, fifteen years earlier — she knew — she would have felt mortified to have arrived tired and sweating before her father, whose own aspect and bearing never betrayed in those days the slightest sign of weakness or susceptibility during a heat wave, whereas now she couldn’t care less about showing him an un-made-up, shiny face that she hadn’t bothered to powder in the taxi. Telling herself, with a rather sour, rancorous cheer, He can think of me what he likes, she recalled the cruel casual insults of this superior male when as teenagers she and her sister came to see him: remarks that always turned on his daughters’ lack of elegance or want of lipstick.

She would have liked to say to him now, “You realize, don’t you, that you spoke to us as if we were women whose duty it was to make themselves attractive, whereas we were just kids, not to mention your own daughters.”

She would have liked to say this to him in a flippant, mildly reproachful way, as if all that had been just a rather crude form of humor on his part, and she’d have liked her father to show a little contrition, and for them to have laughed about it together now.

But seeing him standing there in his plastic flip-flops on the concrete doorstep strewn with rotting flowers perhaps knocked loose as he flew down from the poinciana on his tired, heavy wings, she realized that he no more would have understood or grasped the most insistent allusion to the nasty comments he used to make than he now cared to scrutinize her appearance and formulate a judgment about it.

He had a rather fixed, vacant, distant look.

She wondered then if he actually remembered having written asking her to come.

“Shall we go in?” she said, slipping her bag from one shoulder to the other.

“Masseck!” he shouted, clapping his hands.

The icy, bluish light seemed to shine more intensely from his misshapen body.

A barefoot old man in Bermudas and a torn polo shirt hurried forward.

“Take the bag,” Norah’s father ordered.

Then, turning to her, he said, “It’s Masseck, d’you recognize him?”

“I can carry my bag,” she said, immediately regretting her words, which could only have offended the servant, who, despite his age, was used to bearing the most awkward burdens, and so she passed it to him so impetuously that, being taken unawares, he tottered, before recovering his balance and tossing the bag onto his back, returned into the house with it, stooped over.

“When I last came,” she said, “it was Mansour. I don’t know Masseck.”

“What Mansour?” her father asked with a suddenly wild, almost dismayed look that she’d never seen before.

“I don’t know his surname, but that Mansour, he lived here for years and years,” said Norah, who felt herself slowly gripped by a nauseating, stifling feeling of discomfort.

“It was perhaps Masseck’s father, then.”

“Oh no,” she murmured, “Masseck is far too old to be Mansour’s son.”

And since her father seemed increasingly bewildered and even close to wondering whether she wasn’t deliberately trying to confuse him, she quickly added, “Oh, it really doesn’t matter.”

“You’re mistaken, I’ve never employed anyone called Mansour,” he said with a subtle, condescending smile that was the first manifestation of his former self: however irritating that tiny, scornful smile, it had always warmed Norah’s heart; it was as if, to this conceited man, it mattered less to be right than to have the last word.

For she was certain that a diligent, patient, efficient Mansour had been at her father’s side for years on end, and that even if she and her sister had come to this house scarcely three or four times since they were children, it was Mansour whom they’d seen here and not this Masseck, whose face she didn’t recognize.

Once inside, Norah noticed how empty the house was.

Outside, it was now quite dark.

The big living room was dark too, and silent.

Her father switched a lamp on, the kind that uses forty-watt bulbs and lights poorly. Nevertheless it revealed the middle of the room and its long, glass-topped table.

On the rough-plastered walls Norah recognized the framed photographs of the holiday village her father had owned and run and which had made him rich.

He took much pride in his success, and always allowed a large number of people to live in his house. Norah had always thought that this wasn’t so much because he was a generous man but because he was keen to show that he could provide his brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, and sundry other relatives with free board and lodging. As a result, whatever time of day she happened to be there, Norah had never seen the living room empty.

There were always children on the sofas, sprawling belly up like well-fed cats, men drinking tea and watching television, and women moving to-and-fro between the kitchen and the bedrooms.

But that evening the room was empty, harshly exposing the crude materials used in its construction, the shiny floor tiles, the cement rendering on the walls, the narrow window frames.

“Isn’t your wife here?” asked Norah.

He picked up two chairs from the big table, moved them closer to each other, then changed his mind and put them back again.

He switched on the television, and then turned it off before it had time to light up.

He moved about the room without lifting his feet, so that his flip-flops scraped the tiles.

His lips trembled slightly.

“She’s away traveling at the moment,” he mumbled finally.

Oh, Norah thought anxiously, he can’t admit she’s probably left him.

“And Sony? Where’s Sony?”

“Likewise,” he said, exhaling.

“Sony’s off traveling too?”

The thought that her father, who’d had so many wives and children, that this not particularly handsome but brilliant, clever, quick-witted, and ruthless man who’d been born into poverty but made his fortune, and had since then always lived surrounded by a grateful and submissive crowd, that this spoiled individual now found himself alone and perhaps abandoned, fed a hazy old grudge that Norah harbored in spite of herself.

It seemed to her that her father was at last being taught a lesson he should have learned much earlier.

But what sort of lesson?

It made her feel petty and base, thinking that.

For even if her father had always kept an open house to spongers, even if he’d never had any true friends, honest wives (with the exception, Norah thought, of her own mother), or loving children, and if now, old, ravaged, and probably much diminished, he wandered alone around his gloomy house — how was that justice served? What kind of satisfaction could that be for Norah, except that of a jealous daughter avenged at last for never having been welcomed into her father’s inner circle?

And feeling petty and cheap she now also felt ashamed of her hot, damp skin and her rumpled dress.

As if to atone for her spiteful thoughts, by confirming he wouldn’t be left alone for too long, she asked, “Will Sony be back soon?”

“He’ll tell you himself,” her father murmured.

“How can he, if he’s away?”

Her father clapped his hands and shouted, “Masseck!”

Small yellow poinciana flowers fluttered down from his neck and shoulders onto the tiled floor, and with a swift movement he crushed them under the toe of one of his flip-flops.

It gave Norah the intimation of his doing likewise to the flowers, rather similar, covering her dress.

Masseck came in pushing a cart laden with food, plates, and cutlery, and proceeded to lay the table.

“Sit down,” her father said, “and let’s eat.”

“I’m going to wash my hands first.”

She found herself adopting the tone of peremptory volubility that she never used with anyone but her father, the tone intended to forestall his attempt to have Masseck, and before Masseck Mansour, do what she insisted on doing herself, insisted out of an awareness that he so hated seeing his guests perform the slightest labor in his house, thereby casting doubt on the competence of his servants, that he was quite capable of saying to her, “Masseck will wash your hands for you,” without for a moment imagining that she would fail to obey him as those around him, young and old, had always done.

But her father had hardly heard her.

He’d taken a seat and was staring vacantly at what Masseck was doing.

She found that his skin was now blackish, less dark than before, and dull looking.

He yawned, his mouth wide open, not making a sound, just like a dog.

She now felt certain that the sweet fetid smell that she’d noticed at the threshold came both from the poinciana and from her father’s body; in fact his whole person seemed steeped in the slow putrefaction of the yellowy-orange flowers, this man who, she remembered, had worn none but the chicest of perfumes, this haughty and insecure man who’d never wished to give off an odor that was his own!

Poor soul, who’d have thought he’d wind up a plump old bird, clumsy flying and strong smelling?

She walked toward the kitchen along a concrete corridor lit imperfectly by a bulb covered in fly specks.

The kitchen was the least commodious room in this badly proportioned house, as Norah remembered, having added it to the inexhaustible list of the grievances against her father, though knowing full well that she would mention none of them, neither the serious ones nor the less serious, and that, face-to-face with this unfathomable man, she could never summon up the courage — which she possessed in abundance when far away from him — to express her disapproval; and as a result she was not at all pleased with herself but, rather, very disappointed, and all the angrier for bowing and daring to say nothing.

Her father couldn’t have cared less about making his servants work in a tight, uncomfortable space, where neither he nor his visitors ever set foot.

Any such consideration would have been incomprehensible to him. Indeed, he would put it down to the sentimentality that characterized her sex, the world she inhabited, and a culture he didn’t share.

“We don’t live in the same country, societies are very different,” he would more or less say, in a pedantic, condescending manner, and perhaps summon Masseck to ask him in front of her whether the kitchen suited him — to which Masseck would say yes — and her father, not even looking at her, since that would give the subject an importance it didn’t merit, would, with an air of triumph, simply consider the matter closed.

There’s no point, no sense in having a father you literally can’t communicate with, whose feelings for you have always been in question, she thought, yet again, but this time calmly, not shaking with rage, impotence, and despondency as so often in the past when circumstance had brought up the fundamental differences of perception, outlook, and education between her and this cold, passionless man who’d spent only a few years in France, where she, a vulnerable person of strong feeling, had lived all her life.

And yet here she was, in her father’s house. When he’d called her, she had come.

If she’d possessed less of this capacity for emotion which he so heartily despised (lumping together, with his own daughter, the entire limp-wristed, feminized Western world), she would have found any excuse to avoid making such a journey … “And you would do me a great honor and give me the distinct pleasure if you were able — if you felt strong enough — to leave your family for a time, even for quite a while, and come here, to your father, because I’ve important things to say to you …”

Oh, how she already regretted having weakened, how she longed to return home now and get on with her life.

At the tiny sink in the kitchen a slim young girl in a T-shirt and threadbare skirt was washing some cooking pots.

The table was covered with dishes about to be served, Norah realized, to her father and herself.

She noticed roast chicken, couscous, saffron rice, a dark meat in a peanut sauce, and other dishes she could just make out under their steamy glass covers. The profusion was staggering. It was beginning to make her feel queasy.

She slipped between the table and the sink and waited until the girl, who was laboriously rinsing out a large stew pot, had finished.

The sink was so narrow that the pot kept hitting the edges or the tap and, since there was no draining board, the girl had to crouch to set the vessel down on the floor, where she’d spread out a dish towel on which to dry it, a sight that once again exasperated Norah, who quickly washed her hands, all the while smiling and nodding to the girl.

And when she’d asked her name and the girl, after a brief silence — as if, Norah thought, to give her answer a dignified setting — had replied, “Khady Demba,” her calm assurance, firm voice, and limpid gaze both surprised and soothed Norah, calming her jumpy weariness and feelings of irritation and resentment.

At the end of the corridor her father’s voice rang out, calling her impatiently.

She made haste to rejoin him and found him in a state of some annoyance, anxious to tuck into the prawn and fruit tabbouleh Masseck had served in the two plates set opposite each other.

She’d hardly sat down when he started eating greedily, with his face almost in his plate, and this voraciousness, entirely devoid of polite pretense or small talk, was so much at odds with the old-fashioned manners of this rather affected man that Norah nearly asked him if he’d been depriving himself of food, thinking that he was quite capable — if his financial difficulties were such as she supposed them to be — of trying to impress her by loading this dinner with all the provisions of the three preceding days.

Masseck brought out one dish after another, at such a pace that she couldn’t keep up.

She was relieved to see that her father was paying no attention to what she ate.

He only raised his head to scrutinize gluttonously and suspiciously what Masseck had just put on the table, and when at one point he looked furtively at Norah’s plate, it was with such childlike apprehension that she realized he was simply making sure Masseck had not served her more generously than him.

That really upset her.

Her father — normally so loquacious, so full of fine words — remained silent. The only sounds to be heard in the desolate house were the clatter of plates, the slip-slap of Masseck’s feet on the tiles, and perhaps the rustle of the poinciana’s upper branches brushing against the tin roof. She wondered vaguely whether the lone tree was calling out in the night for her father to come.

He went on eating, moving from the grilled lamb to the chicken in sauce, hardly pausing for breath between mouthfuls, joylessly stuffing himself.

For dessert, Masseck put a mango cut in pieces before him.

He pushed one piece into his mouth, then another. Norah saw him chewing with difficulty, and trying to swallow. In vain.

He spat out the mango pulp onto his plate.

Tears were pouring down his cheeks.

Norah felt her own cheeks burning.

She got up, heard herself mumbling something, she couldn’t tell what, went over and stood behind him, and then didn’t know what to do with her hands, never before having found herself in a position either to comfort her father or to show him anything other than a stiff, forced respect tinged with resentment.

She turned around, looking for Masseck, but after clearing the table he’d left the room.

Her father was still weeping silently, expressionless.

She sat down next to him and leaned forward to bring her head as close as possible to his tear-streaked face.

She could smell, under the odor of the food and the spicy sauces, the sickly sweet scent of the rotting flowers of the big tree, and since her father kept his head lowered, she could see how grubby the shirt collar was around his neck.

She remembered a piece of news that two or three years earlier her brother Sony had passed on but that her father hadn’t seen fit to divulge to her or her sister. She’d resented this, but before long she’d forgotten both the news and her bitterness at not having been told. The two things now went through her mind simultaneously and as a result her tone was rather acerbic even though she’d tried to make her voice sound comforting.

“Tell me, where are your children?” she asked.

She remembered that he’d fathered twins but couldn’t recall what gender they were.

He looked at her, distraught.

“My children?”

“The last ones you had. Or so I understand. Has your wife taken them with her?”

“The little girls? Oh, they’re here, yes,” he murmured, and turned his head. It was as if he were disappointed, as if he’d hoped that she would talk about something he didn’t know, whose implications he hadn’t grasped, something that, in a strange, magical way, would save him.

She couldn’t contain a slight shiver of vengeful spite.

So Sony was the only son of this man who didn’t care much for girls, or have much time for them.

Overwhelmed, weighed down by useless, crucifying females who weren’t even pretty, thought Norah calmly, thinking of herself and her sister; they’d always had, for their father, the irremediable defect of being too much like him, that is, quite unlike their mother, and attesting to the pointlessness of his marriage to a Frenchwoman, because what good had it done him? No almost-white children, no well-built sons …

And it had been a failure.

Upset, overwhelmed by a feeling of ironic compassion, she laid her hand lightly on his shoulder.

“I’d like to meet them,” she said, adding at once, so as not to give him time to ask what she meant, “your two daughters, the little girls.”

Her father shook her hand off his fat shoulder in an involuntary gesture signifying that nothing could justify such familiarity on her part.

He rose heavily and wiped his face on his sleeve.

He pushed open an ugly glazed door at the other end of the room, and switched on the solitary bulb that lit another long, gray concrete corridor, off which, she recalled, doors opened onto small square rooms like monastic cells that once were inhabited by her father’s numerous kin.

From the way their footsteps and her father’s loud irregular breathing echoed in the silence, she was sure that the rooms were now empty.

They seemed to have been walking already for several long minutes when the corridor swung first to the left, then to the right, getting almost dark, and so stuffy that Norah nearly turned back.

Her father stopped in front of a closed door.

He grasped the handle and stood still for a moment with his ear against the panel. Norah couldn’t tell if he was trying to listen to something inside or was summoning up the will to open the door. But the attitude of this man, at once scarcely recognizable and illusory as ever — oh, what incorrigible naïveté to think, even not having seen him for years, that time might have altered him and brought them closer together — worried and annoyed her now more than it ever had in the past, when she could never be sure whether, in his brazen recklessness and arrogant flippancy, and utter lack of humor, he wasn’t going to hurl some unforgettably cruel remark at her.

With a quick movement, as if to catch someone in flagrante, he opened the door.

With an air of fear and repugnance, he stood aside and let Norah in.

The tiny room was lit by a lamp with a pink shade. It stood on a small table placed between two beds, on the narrower of which sat the girl whom Norah had seen in the kitchen and who had told her she was called Khady Demba. The lobe of her right ear, Norah noticed, was slit in two.

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

Looking up briefly, she smiled at Norah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How lonely she felt!

How trapped, how stupid!

Shame on her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Norah pulled out.

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

She was on the brink of tears.

She was a lost, pathetic creature.

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

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

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

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

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

He opened the door carefully and immediately stood back.

“You’ll be sleeping here,” he said.

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

Norah switched on the ceiling light.

The walls were covered with posters of basketball players.

“Sony’s room?” she mumbled.

Her father nodded.

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

“What are the girls called?” asked Norah.

He shrugged, pretending to think.

She laughed, slightly shocked.

“Don’t you remember?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

“All day?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

With him went the bittersweet smell of rotting flowers, of flowers in full bloom crushed under an indifferent foot or bitterly trampled, and when she removed her dress to go to sleep she took particular care to spread it out on Sony’s bed so that the yellow flowers embroidered on the green cotton cloth remained fresh and distinct to the eye and bore no resemblance to the poinciana’s wilting flowers and the guilty, sad smell left in her father’s wake.

She found her backpack at the foot of the bed.

She sat in her nightgown on her brother’s bed. It was covered with a sheet bearing the insignias of American basketball teams. She cast a pained look at the small chest of drawers covered with dusty knickknacks, the child’s desk with its low top, the basketballs piled up in a corner, most of them burst or deflated.

She recognized every object, every poster, every piece of furniture.

Her brother Sony was thirty-five and Norah hadn’t seen him for many years, but they had always been close.

His room hadn’t changed at all since his adolescence.

How was it possible to live like that?

She shivered in spite of the heat.

Outside the small square window everything was pitch black and totally silent.

No sound came from within the house nor from outside it, except perhaps — she couldn’t be sure — from time to time that of the poinciana’s branches rubbing against the corrugated-iron roof.

She picked up her cell phone and phoned home.

No reply.

Then she remembered that Lucie had mentioned going to the movies, which annoyed her because it was Monday and the girls had to be up early the next day for school, and she had to struggle against a sense of impending catastrophe, of terrifying disorder, that swept over her every time she wasn’t there to see, simply see, what was going on, even if she couldn’t always do much about it.

She considered such worries as failings on her part, not weaknesses.

Because it would be too arrogant to think that she alone knew how to organize Lucie and Grete’s life properly, that she alone, through the power of her reason, of her anxious concern, could prevent disaster from crossing the threshold and entering her life.

Had she not already opened her door to evil in a kindly, smiling form?

The only way to mitigate the effects of this great blunder was to be constantly, anxiously, on the alert.

But when her father called she’d simply left.

Sitting on Sony’s bed, she now regretted it.

What was her father — this selfish old man — to her, compared with her daughter?

What did her father’s existence matter now, when her own hung by a thread?

Although she knew that, if Jakob was sitting in a movie theater at that moment, it was pointless, she still dialed his cell phone.

She left an exaggeratedly cheery message.

She could see his affable face, the calm, clear, sensible look in his eyes, the slight droop of his lips, and the general pleasantness of his finely wrought features. She was still able to acknowledge that such amiability had inspired her with confidence, to the extent that she had not dwelled on the puzzling aspects of the life of this man who’d come from Hamburg with his daughter, on the slightly differing versions he’d given of his reasons for coming to France, on the vagueness of his explanations for his less than assiduous attendance at law school, or the fact that Grete never saw, and never spoke about, her mother, who, he claimed, had stayed in Germany.

She knew now that Jakob would never become a lawyer, or anything else, for that matter, that he would never contribute meaningfully to the expenses of the household even if he did receive from time to time — from his parents, he said — a few hundred euros, which he spent immediately and ostentatiously on expensive meals and on clothes the children didn’t need, and she knew too — finally admitting it to herself — that she had quite simply set up in her home a man and a little girl whom she had to feed and care for, whom she could not throw out, and who had her boxed in.

That was the way it was.

She dreamed sometimes that she would return home one evening to find Lucie all by herself, relaxed and happy as she used to be in the past, unaffected by the hollow excitement Jakob provoked, and that Lucie would tell her calmly that the others had left for good.

That was the way it was. Norah knew that she would never have the strength to throw them out.

Where would they go, how would they manage?

Only a miracle, she sometimes thought, could rid her of them, could free her and Lucie from life with this amiable but subtly evil pair.

Yes, that was the way it was, she was trapped.

She got up, took a toiletries bag out of her backpack, and went into the corridor.

So deep was the silence that she seemed to hear it vibrating.

She opened a door that she remembered concluding was the bathroom.

But it was her father’s room. It was empty, and the double bed had not been slept in. Something about the stillness of the air and of everything else made her think that the room was no longer used.

She followed the corridor to the living room and groped her way through it.

The front door was not locked.

Hugging her toiletries bag to her chest and feeling her nightgown rubbing against the back of her knees, she went outside. With her bare feet on the warm cement she felt herself trampling on the invisible flowers that had fallen from the poinciana. She dared at last to look up at the tree, in the vain hope of seeing nothing there, of not discerning in the crisscross of branches the pale shape, the cold luminescence of her father’s hunched body. She thought she could hear, coming from the shadows, loud, painful breathing, desolate panting, and even stifled sobs and little groans of distress.

Overcome with emotion, she wanted to call out to him.

But what word could she use to address him?

She’d never been comfortable saying “Daddy,” and couldn’t imagine using his first name, which she barely knew.

Her urge to call out to him remained stuck in her throat.

For a long while she watched him rocking very slightly above her head. She couldn’t see his face, but she recognized, gripping the biggest branch, his old plastic flip-flops.

The body of her father, this broken man, shone palely.

What a bad omen!

She wanted to run away from this funereal house as quickly as possible, but she felt that, having agreed to return to it and having managed to locate the tree her father was perching in, she was now too deeply committed to be able to abandon him and go back home.

She returned to Sony’s room, having given up on the idea of trying to find the bathroom, so fearful was she now of opening a door on a scene or situation that would cause her to feel more guilty.

Sitting on Sony’s bed again, she toyed with her cell phone, deep in thought.

Should she try again to call home, at the risk of waking the children if they’d gotten back from the movies?

Or go to sleep with the guilty feeling of having done nothing to avert a potential catastrophe?

She’d have liked to hear Lucie’s voice again.

A hideous thought went through her mind, so fleeting that she forgot the exact form it took, but long enough for her to feel the full horror of it: Might she never hear her daughter’s voice again?

And what if, in hastening to her father’s side, she’d unwittingly chosen between two camps, two possible ways of life, the one inevitably excluding the other, and between two forms of commitment fiercely jealous of each other?

Without further ado she dialed the number of the apartment, and then, since no one picked up, the number of Jakob’s cell phone, also in vain.

Having slept little and badly, she got up at dawn, slipped on her green dress and sandals, and went in search of the bathroom, which was, in fact, next door to Sony’s room.

She went back to the little girls’ room.

She gently opened the door.

The young woman was still asleep. The two little girls were awake and sitting up in bed. Their perfectly identical pairs of eyes were wide open, gazing sternly at Norah.

She smiled at them, murmuring from a distance the tender things she habitually said to Lucie.

The little girls frowned.

One of them spat at her. The thin spittle dribbled onto the sheet.

The other began to imitate her, puffing out her cheeks.

Norah shut the door, not offended, but unsettled.

She wondered if she should be doing something for these little waifs, and in what capacity — as a half sister, a kind of mother, an adult morally responsible for every child one came across?

She once again felt her heart bursting with impotent rage at that thoughtless man who after so many failures couldn’t wait to marry again and produce more children who meant nothing to him, a man whose capacity for love and for showing consideration to others was so small, seemingly used up in his youth in his relationship with his old mother, long dead, whom Norah had never known.

It’s true he’d shown some affection toward Sony, his only son.

But what need had he for a new family, this unfeeling man, incomplete, detached?

He was already eating when she reentered the living room. He was sitting at the table as on the previous evening, dressed in the same pale shabby clothes, his face bent over his plate, stuffing himself with porridge, so that she had to wait until he’d finished and had hurled himself backward, as if after enormous physical exertion, panting and sighing. Only then could she ask, looking him straight in the eye, “Now, what’s this all about?”

That morning her father had a look that was even more evasive than usual.

Was it because he knew that she’d seen him in the poinciana?

But how could that embarrass him, this cynical man who had never batted an eyelid over much more degrading situations?

“Masseck!” he shouted hoarsely.

He then asked Norah, “What’ll you have? Tea? Coffee?”

She tapped on the table lightly with her fist, thinking, with a vacant, worried air, that it was time for Lucie and Grete to get up and go to school, and that Jakob would perhaps have forgotten to set his alarm clock, which would mean that the whole day would bear the mark of failure and neglect. But wasn’t she herself much too virtuous, punctual, and scrupulous? Wasn’t she in reality that tiresome woman whom she reproached Jakob for painting her as?

“Coffee?” asked Masseck, offering her a full cup.

“Will you please tell me why I’ve come?” she said calmly, looking her father in the eye.

Masseck scurried away.

Her father then started breathing so violently and with such difficulty that Norah leaped from her chair and went up to him.

She stood there, awkwardly, and would have put her question to him again if she’d been able.

“You must go and see Sony,” he murmured painfully.

“Where’s Sony?”

“In Reubeuss.”

“What on earth’s Reubeuss?”

No answer.

He breathed less painfully, slumped in his chair, his belly sticking out, surrounded by the syrupy odor of poinciana flowers in full bloom.

Then she was deeply moved to see tears running down his gray cheeks.

“It’s the prison,” he said.

She took a step, almost a leap, backward.

“What’ve you done with Sony?” she cried out. “You were supposed to be looking after him!”

“He was the one who committed the offense, not me,” he whispered, almost inaudibly.

“What offense? What’s he done? Oh God, you were supposed to be taking care of him and bringing him up properly!”

She stepped back and sank onto her chair.

She gulped down the coffee, which was acrid, lukewarm, and tasteless.

Her hands trembled so much that she dropped the cup onto the glass-topped table.

“That’s another broken cup!” her father said. “I spend all my time buying crockery in this house.”

“What did Sony do?”

He got up, shaking his head, his old wizened face ravaged by the impossibility of talking.

“Masseck will drive you to Reubeuss,” he croaked.

He walked backward toward the door to the corridor, slowly, as if trying to escape without her noticing.

His toenails were long and yellow.

“So,” she asked calmly, “is that why there’s no one here anymore? Is that why everyone has left?”

Her father’s back met the door; he groped behind him, opened it, and scurried away down the corridor.

Once, in a meadow in Normandy, she’d seen an old abandoned donkey whose hooves had grown so much he could hardly walk.

Her father was quite capable of trotting along when it suited him!

Her immense feeling of resentment lit up her mind and sharpened her thoughts.

No one, nothing, could ever excuse their father for his failure to keep Sony on the straight and narrow.

Because when, thirty years earlier, wishing to abandon their mother and France and his dead-end office job, he’d suddenly left, taking Sony, then age five, with him — abducting Sony, in truth, because he knew the mother would never agree to let him take her little boy — when he’d thereby plunged Norah, her sister, and their mother in a despair the mother would never really get over, when he’d promised in a letter left on the kitchen table to take better care of the child than of himself, his business affairs, and his personal ambitions, their mother, in her grief, had clung to that promise, convincing herself that Sony would have a brilliant career and great opportunities that she, a simple hairdresser, couldn’t perhaps have managed to give him.

Norah couldn’t recall without gasping for breath the day she came home from school to find her father’s letter.

She was eight, her sister nine, and from the bedroom the three children shared Sony’s things were gone: his clothes in the chest of drawers, his bag of Legos, his teddy bear.

Her first thought was to hide the letter and, by some miracle, the reality of Sony and their father’s departure, so that her mother wouldn’t notice.

Then, grasping how powerless she was, she’d wandered around the small, dark apartment, dizzy with worry and pain, staggered by the realization of what had happened, of the huge suffering already inflicted and certain to go on being inflicted, and of the fact that nothing could undo the terrible thing that had occurred.

She’d then taken the metro to the salon where her mother worked.

Even now, thirty years later, she couldn’t summon the strength to recall precisely the moment when she told her mother what had happened and what suffering still lay in wait.

It was all she could do to remember, little by little, her mother’s wild stare as she sat on Sony’s bed, frantically smoothing the pale blue chenille coverlet and repeating shrilly, monotonously, “He’s too young to live without me. Five years old, that’s much too small!”

Their father had phoned the day after his arrival. He was triumphant, full of gusto, and their mother had made an effort to be conciliatory, to sound almost calm, fearing above all that this man who hated open conflict would break off all relations if he thought she was making a big fuss.

He’d let Sony talk on the phone but had grabbed the receiver back when the child, hearing his mother’s voice, had started to cry.

Time had passed, and the bitter, heartrending, unacceptable situation had become diluted in the routine of everyday life, had melted in the normality of an existence only disrupted at regular intervals by the arrival of a clumsy, stilted letter from Sony, which Norah and her sister had to answer in a similarly formal way so that — their mother calculated — it would appear to their father that there was no risk in allowing greater contact.

How accommodating and sadly devious this gentle, benumbed woman had shown herself to be in her distress! She’d gone on buying clothes for Sony, folding them carefully, and putting them away in the little boy’s chest of drawers.

“For when he gets back,” she’d say.

But from the outset Norah and her sister had been fully aware that Sony would never come back, knowing as they did their father’s lack of feeling, his indifference to the feelings of others, and his penchant for imposing his iron will on those around him.

Once he’d decided that Sony was his by right he would ignore everything that could restrain his desire to have his only son at his side.

He considered of little importance the unhappiness that Sony felt about his exile, just as he viewed the suffering of his wife as unavoidable and purely temporary. For he was like that: implacable and terrifying.

Throughout the time their mother still expected Sony to return, Norah and her sister knew that she hadn’t gotten the full measure of her husband’s intransigence. He would stubbornly refuse, for instance, to send the boy back to France for the holidays.

For he was like that: an implacable, terrifying man.

The years passed and the painful subservience of their mother was rewarded only by an invitation to Norah and her sister to visit their brother.

“Why won’t you let Sony come and see us?” their mother shouted into the phone, her face contorted in grief.

“Because I know that you wouldn’t let him go again,” their father, calm and self-assured, probably answered, slightly annoyed perhaps because he loathed weeping and shouting.

“Of course I would, I swear to you!”

But he knew she was lying, and she knew it too. Choking and gasping, she couldn’t go on.

That their father would never want to be burdened with his two daughters, that he’d do nothing to keep them, was so blindingly obvious that their mother let them go to see him, sending Norah and her sister as emissaries and witnesses to her immense affliction, to her somewhat disembodied love for a boy whose photograph his father from time to time sent to her, a badly taken picture, always blurred, which invariably showed Sony smiling broadly, in excellent health, amazingly handsome, and expensively dressed.

Their father had acquired a holiday village while it was still under construction. He’d given it a complete, luxurious makeover, and it was now making him a wealthy man.

Meanwhile, in Paris, in a symmetrical but contrary manner, as if she felt she had to atone for her misfortune by letting things slide, their mother was experiencing money troubles. She kept getting into debt and having to negotiate endlessly with credit card companies.

Their father sent a little money at irregular intervals, different amounts each time, doubtless because he wished to convey the impression that he was doing all he could.

He was like that, implacable and terrifying.

He was incapable of compassion and remorse, and because as a child he’d been tormented by hunger on a daily basis, he was determined now to gorge himself and apply his quick intelligence to no aim but ensuring his comfort and establishing his power. He had no need to tell himself, “I deserve all this,” because he never doubted for a second that his privileges and the wealth amassed so quickly were his by right.

Meanwhile their conscientious, desperate, insecure mother was getting into a mess with her accounts. Eventually, that meant she had to move. In the rue des Pyrénées they took a two-bedroom apartment that looked onto an inner courtyard. Sony’s drawer was stocked with fewer and fewer new clothes.

So when the two girls, aged twelve and thirteen, arrived for the first time in their father’s enormous house, stricken with emotion and exhausted by the heat, they brought with them the decorous, austere, repressed sadness in which they lived, a sentiment betrayed by their short, simple haircuts, their denim dresses bought too big so as to last longer, and their graceless missionary sandals. It all aroused an overwhelming feeling of disgust in their father, made only worse by the fact that they were neither of them very pretty, as well as suffering from acne and being overweight. As they grew older they shed the extra pounds, but they would always, in a way, look fat to their father, because he was like that: a man deeply shocked and repelled by ugliness.

That’s why, Norah thought, he’d loved Sony as much as he could love anyone.

Their younger brother appeared on the threshold of the house. He hadn’t dropped from the poinciana, then still a small and delicate shrub, but had just dismounted from a pony on which he’d been slowly trotting around the garden.

Dressed in a cream-colored riding outfit and wearing real riding boots, he stood with one foot forward, his riding hat tucked under his arm.

No smell of rotting flowers clung to his lithe, elegant frame. The nine-year-old boy’s narrow chest was not lit from within by any unusual glow.

He was simply there, smiling, happy, and magnificent, stretching his arms out to his sisters, as dazzling and carefree as they were dull and serious.

And Sony treated them with extreme unpretentious kindness throughout their stay, during which, though scared and reproachful, they tasted a life of luxury beyond their wildest imaginings.

He greeted every remark they made, every question they asked, with a gentle smile and a few noncommittal words, making a joke of it, so they failed to notice that they never got a straight response to anything.

He remained silent whenever they mentioned their mother.

He gazed into space and his lower lip quivered slightly.

But it didn’t last; he quickly became once again the happy, calm, unpretentious, smooth-skinned, almost too gentle boy whom their father would gaze at proudly, obviously comparing him with his two lumpish anxious-looking daughters and telling himself — Norah supposed — that he’d done right in not leaving Sony behind, in removing him from his mother’s baleful influence, which had transformed two amiable little girls into a pair of tubby nuns, particularly since the beautiful woman with the scornful expression and slightly bulging eyes whom he’d married two or three years earlier and who wandered the property silently with a weary, irritated, melancholy, and intimidating air, had yet to give him a child and never would.

When at the end of three weeks Norah and her sister returned home they were actually relieved to escape a way of life that their loyalty to their mother made them feel duty bound to condemn (“Mummy has money troubles,” they’d found the courage to tell their father on learning that Sony was being sent to a prestigious private school, to which he’d responded with a sigh, “My poor dear girls, who doesn’t have money troubles!”). They were also deeply saddened to be leaving Sony behind.

Standing on the threshold with one foot in front of the other, dressed this time in his basketball uniform, his ball under his arm, and making every effort to smile, Sony had said good-bye, his lower lip trembling slightly, but otherwise maintaining the kind, inscrutably smooth, and submissive air he’d shown throughout.

Their father was there too, standing up straight beneath the scanty foliage of the young poinciana, looking elegant, his narrow hips turned slightly away.

He’d laid a hand on Sony’s shoulder, at which the boy had seemed to cringe, almost as if doubling over, greatly surprising Norah, who had thought, He’s afraid of him, but then, before getting into the car to be driven away by Mansour, rejecting the idea, since it bore no relation to anything she’d seen during their stay.

Because their father, that terrifying, unbending man, had always treated Sony with great kindness.

He had even shown him some tenderness.

But then Norah had tried to imagine how distraught her five-year-old brother must have been to have found himself in this unknown country, alone in a hotel with his father, then in this hastily rented house soon invaded by numerous unfamiliar relatives, and how it must have slowly dawned on him that he was embarking on a new existence and that there was no longer any question of his ever returning to live with his mother and sisters in the little apartment in the twelfth arrondissement that up till then had constituted his whole universe.

She felt very sorry for Sony and no longer envied him his father’s love or the pony in the garden.

And the life those three lived, grim and solemn, thrifty and deserving, suddenly struck her as free and easy compared with that of Sony, the pampered little prisoner.

Their mother, hungry for news, listened dejectedly and in silence to the two sisters’ cautious account of what they’d seen and heard.

Then she burst into tears and kept repeating, “So he’s lost to me, lost!” as if the education and affluence Sony enjoyed was erecting an impenetrable barrier between herself and the boy, were she even able to see him again.

It was at this time that their mother’s behavior changed.

She left the hairdresser’s where she’d been slaving away for twenty years or more and began going out in the evening. Although Norah and her sister never suspected it at the time, they would gather years later that their mother must have worked as a prostitute and that this activity, which her outward cheerfulness belied, was the particular form her grief took.

Norah and her sister would return to their father’s on holiday once or twice.

But no longer did their mother ever want to be told anything about what they’d seen there.

She’d assumed a hard, determined look; her face was smooth under her makeup; and whatever the context, with a sarcastic curl of the lip and an angry sweep of the hand, she was given to saying, “Oh, what do I care?”

This new demeanor and this gritty bitterness enabled her to meet exactly the kind of man she was looking for. She married a bank manager, who like her was divorced and remained her husband to this day. He was an uncomplicated, likable, and well-paid man, very kind to Norah and her sister, even to the point of — at their father’s invitation — taking them with their mother to see Sony all together for the first time.

Their mother hadn’t seen the boy since he’d left.

Sony was now sixteen.

On learning that their mother had remarried, their father wasted no time inviting them, and reserving several nights’ accommodation for them in the town’s best hotel. It was as if — Norah thought — he’d been waiting for their mother to make a new life for herself before he could stop worrying that she’d try to abduct Sony.

And that’s how they all found themselves, like a big, happy, reconstituted family, Norah and her sister, their mother and her husband, Sony and their father, seated in the hotel dining room eating local delicacies, their father and the new husband discussing calmly, with only a hint of awkwardness, the international situation, while the boy and his mother, sitting close together, shot furtive, uneasy glances at each other.

Sony was as usual superbly turned out: he wore a dark linen suit; his skin was soft and smooth, and he had a short Afro haircut.

Their mother’s face wore its new fixed expression. Her mouth was slightly twisted, her heavily lacquered hair was dyed pale blond, and Norah noticed as her mother asked Sony about school and his favorite subjects that she took care with her grammar and syntax, knowing that Sony was now much better educated and more refined than herself, a mortifying and uncomfortable awareness.

Their father looked at them with a happy air of relief, as if at long last he’d managed to reconcile old enemies.

Is that what he really thinks now? Norah wondered, cross and astonished. Has he managed to convince himself that it was Sony and our mother all these years who were unwilling to meet?

Long before, when, wild with grief, their mother had told him on the telephone that if he refused to send Sony to spend the holidays with her she would borrow the airfare to visit her son in his house, their father had said, “If I see you getting off that plane, I’ll slit his throat and mine right before your eyes!”

But was he really man enough to cut his own throat?

There he was now, seated at the head of the table, handsome, charming, exquisitely polite, his cold dark eyes shining with love and pride whenever he gazed at Sony’s adorable face.

Norah noticed that her brother never looked anyone straight in the eye. His affable, impersonal gaze flitted from one person to another without dwelling on any face in particular, and when spoken to he stared fixedly at an invisible point in the distance, without ceasing to smile or to adopt an expression of serious interest in whatever was being said to him.

He was particularly careful, Norah thought, not to be caught unawares by their father’s gaze. Even then, even when their father looked at him and Sony glanced elsewhere, he seemed to withdraw, to curl up in the depths of his being, where he was safe from every judgment, every feeling that involved him.

He exchanged a few words with his mother’s husband, and then with her, haltingly, because she had reached the limit of what she dared ask him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what could she have done?

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

What could she have done?

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

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

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

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

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

Deeply embarrassed, she forced herself to laugh too.

How could she have done that?

Obviously it wasn’t his place to tell her.

She’d been thrown. She felt ashamed.

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

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

So what was going on?

Her legs were shaking nervously.

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

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

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

She shook her head, afraid and lost in thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her blood ran cold. She closed her eyes.

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

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

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

He parked opposite the high gray walls of the prison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What devil had gotten her sister into his clutches?

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

She also handed over the bag of food.

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

“No, no,” she said, “I’m his sister.”

“It says here you’re the lawyer.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Sony, Sony!” she shouted.

She felt giddy and clung to the grating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shouted something, a single word.

This time Norah clearly heard the name of their sister.

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

Now a devil had grabbed hold of her, too.

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

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

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

The visit was over.

The jailers were leading the prisoners out.

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

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

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

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

The room was stiflingly hot.

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

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

She stepped away from the puddle in horror.

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

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

What had he done to Sony?

What had he done to them all?

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

She asked Masseck to drop her at the hotel.

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

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

Without saying a word Masseck lowered the windows in front.

She was relieved to find the hotel terrace empty.

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

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

She went into the hotel and looked for the bar.

“I’m looking for Monsieur Jakob Ganzer,” she said to the man at the reception desk.

He nodded, and Norah made her way to the bar in her wet sandals. The green carpet with its golden leafy pattern was the same as it had been twenty years earlier.

She ordered tea and went to the toilet to wash her legs and feet.

She took her panties off, rinsed them in the basin, squeezed the water out of them, and held them for a long time under the hand dryer.

She was afraid of what awaited her in the bar, where she’d noticed that there was a computer connected to the Internet that customers could use.

Sipping her tea slowly, so as to postpone as long as possible the moment when she’d have to start her Internet search, she eyed the barman as he watched a soccer match on the big screen above the bar, and she kept thinking that for the children of a dangerous man like her father there was no worse fate than to be loved by him.

Because Sony was certainly the one who’d paid most dearly for being the child of such a man.

As for herself, well, it was true that nothing irreparable had happened yet, just as it was possible she hadn’t yet understood what was in store for her and Lucie, or even realized that the devil gripping her was crouching there and biding his time.

She paid for thirty minutes of connection time and soon found, in the archives of the paper Le Soleil, a long article about Sony.

She read and reread it with increasing horror, going over the same words again and again.

Holding her head in her hands she stammered, “Oh my God, Sony, oh my God, Sony,” unable at first to imagine her brother connected to such an appalling crime, then, almost despite herself, lingering on the precise details, such as his date of birth and physical description, which banished all hope that it could have been a case of mistaken identity.

And who else could have been the son of the father mentioned in the article? Who else could have shown, in the midst of such horror, the immense kindness that the writer of the article singled out as being particularly despicable?

She started to moan, “My poor, dear Sony,” but immediately swallowed the words like a mouthful of spit, realizing that a woman was dead and remembering that she herself was a defender of women who’d died in such circumstances, one who felt no pity for their tormenters even if they were gentle, smiling, unhappy men who’d been in the grip of a devil since the age of five.

She carefully logged off from the newspaper’s Web site and walked away from the computer, eager now to get back as soon as possible to her father’s house to ply him with questions, almost afraid that if she lingered he might fly off for good.

She was crossing the terrace when she saw them — Jakob, Grete, and Lucie — sitting where they’d been before. They were being served bissap juice.

They hadn’t seen her yet.

The two little girls, wearing sun hats that matched the red-and-white-striped dresses with short puff sleeves and smock tops that she’d later regretted buying (though at the time having imagined her father would have approved of the choice, of the vague longing to transform the girls into expensive dolls), were chatting gaily, addressing the occasional remark to Jakob, which he answered in the same cheerful, level tone.

And that was what Norah noticed straightaway: their calm, ready banter. She was filled with a strange melancholy.

Could it be that the unhealthy excitement that she suspected Jakob of provoking and feeding was triggered by her presence, and that in the end everything went well when she was not there?

It seemed to her that she’d never been able to create for the children the serene atmosphere that she now observed bathing the little group.

The pink shade of the umbrella cast a fresh, innocent blush on their skin.

Oh, she thought, that unhealthy feverishness, was she perhaps not the source of it?

She went up to their table, pulled up a chair, and sat down between Grete and Lucie.

“Hello, Mum,” Lucie said, getting up to kiss her on the cheek.

And Grete said, “Hello, Norah.”

They went on with their conversation, about a character in a cartoon they’d been watching that morning in their room.

“Have a taste of this, it’s delicious,” said Jakob, pushing his bissap juice toward her.

She found that he’d already gotten a tan, and that the long fair hair that hung over his forehead and down the back of his neck seemed even more bleached by the sun.

“Go up and get your things,” he told the girls.

They left the table and went into the hotel with their arms around each other. One girl was fair and the other dark. Their closeness had never seemed entirely credible to Norah, because, while they got on very well, they were always silently jockeying for the first place in Norah and Jakob’s affections.

“You know my brother, Sony,” Norah hastened to say.

“Yes?”

She took a deep breath but couldn’t help bursting into tears, into a flood of tears that her hands were powerless to wipe away.

Jakob picked up a tissue, dried her cheeks, took her in his arms, and patted her back.

She suddenly wondered why she’d always had the vague feeling, whenever they made love, that it was work for him, that he was paying for his and Grete’s keep, because, at that moment, she felt great tenderness in him. She held him tight.

“Sony’s in prison,” she said quickly, her voice breaking.

Glancing around to make sure the children were not back, she told Jakob that four months earlier Sony had strangled his stepmother, the woman his father had married a few years before but whom Norah had never met.

Sony had informed her at the time that their father had remarried and that his new wife had given birth to twin girls, something the old man had not seen fit to tell her himself.

But Sony hadn’t revealed that he’d embarked on a relationship with his stepmother, nor that, as the article in Le Soleil put it, they’d planned to run away together. He’d never mentioned having fallen head over heels in love with the woman, who was about his own age, much less that she changed her mind, broke off the affair, and asked him to move out of the house.

He’d lain in wait for her in her bedroom, where she slept alone.

“I know why my father wasn’t there,” Norah said. “I know where he goes at night.”

Standing by the door he’d waited in the shadows while she put her children to bed in another room.

When she entered he grabbed her from behind and strangled her with a length of plastic-coated clothesline.

He’d then carefully set the woman’s body onto the bed and gone back to his own room, where he’d slept until morning.

All that he had himself described, without prompting and with dazzling affability, as the newspaper article, very reproachfully, stressed.

Jakob listened closely, gently shaking the ice cubes at the bottom of his glass.

He was wearing jeans and a newly laundered blue shirt that smelled nice and fresh.

Norah said nothing, afraid she might be about to pee again without realizing it.

It came back to her, the burning, suffocating, scandalized incomprehension she’d felt on reading the article, but her indignation stubbornly refused to remain focused on Sony. Their father alone was to blame. He’d gotten into the habit of replacing one wife with another, of expecting a woman too young for him, a woman he’d bought in one way or another, to live with his aging body and damaged spirit.

What right had he to snatch from the ranks of men in their thirties a love that was their due, to help himself so freely to that store of burning passion, this man who’d been perching for so long on the big branch of the poinciana that his flip-flops had made it shine?

Grete and Lucie came out of the hotel with their backpacks on and stood beside the table, ready to leave.

Norah gazed intently, sorrowfully, at Lucie’s face. It suddenly seemed to her that this beloved face meant nothing to her anymore.

It was the same face, with its delicate features, smooth skin, tiny nose, and curly forehead, but she didn’t recognize it.

She felt alive but, as a mother, distant, distracted.

She’d always loved her daughter passionately, so what was this?

Was it simply the humiliation of feeling that behind her back Jakob and the children had taken advantage of her absence to become closer?

“Right,” said Jakob, “let’s go, I’ve already paid the bill.”

“Go where?” asked Norah.

“We can’t stay in the hotel, it’s too expensive.”

“True.”

“We can go to your father’s, can’t we?”

“Yes,” said Norah airily.

He asked the girls if they’d been sure to sort their things carefully into their two backpacks and to leave nothing behind. Norah couldn’t help noticing that he was now able to talk to them with just that gentle firmness she’d always wanted to see him adopt.

“And school?” she asked casually.

“The Easter holidays have begun,” Jakob said, somewhat surprised.

“I’d forgotten that.”

She was upset and started trembling.

Things like that had always been her responsibility.

Was Jakob lying to her?

“My father never liked girls much. Now there are suddenly going to be two more!”

Faced with their serious expression she giggled nervously, ashamed to admit having such a father and also for making fun of him.

Yes, nothing ever emerged from that house but heartbreak and dishonor.

In the taxi she had some difficulty indicating precisely where her father lived.

She had only a rough idea of the address, just the name of the district, “Point E,” and so many homes had been built in the last twenty years that she was soon quite lost. She once again misdirected the driver and for a moment worried that Jakob and the children would think she’d made it all up, the existence of the house and of its owner.

She’d taken Lucie’s hand and was alternately squeezing it and stroking it.

In her distress she thought that genuine motherly love was melting away: she no longer felt it, she was cold, jittery, in total disarray.

When they stopped at last in front of the house she jumped out and ran to the door, where her father appeared, still in the same rumpled clothes, his long yellow toenails sticking out from the same brown flip-flops.

He gazed suspiciously past Norah at Jakob and the girls taking their bags out of the trunk.

She asked him nervously if they could stay in the house.

“The redhead is my daughter,” she said.

“So you have a daughter?”

“Yes, I wrote to you when she was born.”

“And him, he’s your husband?”

“Yes.”

“You’re really married?”

“Yes.”

It annoyed her to lie, but she did, knowing how much the proprieties mattered to her father.

He smiled with relief and shook hands affably with Jakob and then with Grete and Lucie, complimenting them on their nice dresses, speaking with the same urbane, winning drawl that he used when showing VIPs around his holiday village.

After lunch — another bout of tortured gluttony, during which he leaned back heavily in his chair to get his breath back every so often, his mouth wide open and his eyes closed — she led him off to Sony’s room.

He showed great reluctance to go in, but being bloated he could not do otherwise than flop down on the bed.

He was gasping like a dying animal.

Norah stood leaning against the door.

He pointed toward a drawer, and Norah opened it. She found on top of Sony’s T-shirts the framed photo of a very young woman with round cheeks and laughing eyes who was making her thin white dress swirl around her slender, beautiful legs.

Norah felt bitter, full of pity for this woman, and shrieked at her father: “Why did you marry again? What more did you want?”

He made a limp, slow gesture with his hand and muttered that he wasn’t interested in being lectured to.

Then, slowly catching his breath, he said, “I asked you to come because I want you to take on Sony’s defense. He hasn’t got a lawyer. I can’t afford a lawyer.”

“He hasn’t got a lawyer yet?”

“No, I tell you. I can’t afford a good lawyer.”

“Can’t afford it? What about Dara Salam?”

She didn’t like the sound of her voice, its spiteful, nagging tone. She didn’t like being drawn into a fight with this baneful man, her father, when she’d tried so hard to keep their relationship bland and innocuous.

“I know where you spend your nights,” she said, more calmly.

He glanced at her askance. There was hostility and menace in his hard, round eyes.

“Dara Salam went bankrupt,” he said. “So there’s nothing there. You’ll have to take on Sony’s case.”

“But that’s not possible, I’m his sister. What makes you think I can be his defense lawyer?”

“It’s not forbidden, is it?”

“No, but it’s not done.”

“So what? Sony needs a lawyer, that’s all that matters.”

“You still love Sony?” she cried out, trying to understand.

He turned over on the bed and put his head in his hands.

“That boy is all I have to live for,” he whispered.

He lay there, curled up in a fetal position, old and enormously fat, and Norah suddenly realized that one day he would be dead. Up till then she’d always thought, with some annoyance, that nothing human could ever happen to him.

He stirred, and sat up on the edge of the bed. He then had difficulty getting up.

He turned his eyes from the pile of balls in the corner to the photo Norah still held in her hand.

“She was evil, that woman, it was she who ensnared him. He would never have dared look at his dad’s wife.”

“That may be so,” Norah hissed, “but she’s the one who’s dead.”

“How long will Sony get? What do you think?” he asked in a tone of utter helplessness. “Surely he won’t spend the next ten years in jail. Will he?”

“She’s dead, he strangled her, she must have suffered a great deal,” Norah murmured. “The little girls, the twins, what did you tell them?”

“I didn’t tell them anything, I never speak to them. They’re no longer here.”

He looked stubborn and annoyed.

“What do you mean, no longer here?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her father raised his eyebrows in amused astonishment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucie nodded vigorously.

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

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

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

How absurd it all was!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She couldn’t remember ever having set foot there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were none.

“I can’t believe it, Sony,” she said.

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

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

Scratching his face, he shook his head.

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

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

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

“What? What’s that you’re saying?”

“It wasn’t me.”

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

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

“So who killed her, Sony?”

He shrugged his painfully thin shoulders.

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

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

“It was him,” Sony said.

“Our father?”

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

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

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

“How are the twins?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

What, indeed, was it all about?

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

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

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

“He’s wrong, my sister did.”

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

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

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

But didn’t the memory come from further back?

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

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

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

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

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

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

He gave a knowing, offhand laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And didn’t they have a point?

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

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

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

She felt her dress anxiously.

In despair she wiped her wet fingers on her napkin.

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

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

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

Her face and her neck were burning.

She said nothing, kept her eyes lowered, and remained seated until everyone had left the table. Then she went to the kitchen to fetch a rag.

That evening before dark she went outside and stood in the doorway, knowing she’d find her father there, waiting patiently as always for the moment he could make the leap.

In his grubby shirt he shone as never before.

He looked at the beige dress she’d put on, pursed his lips, and said, almost kindly, “You peed yourself just now. It doesn’t matter, you know.”

“Sony told me you strangled your wife,” Norah remarked, ignoring what he’d just said.

He didn’t jump, nor even shoot a sideways glance at her; he was already somewhat absent, absorbed no doubt by his awareness of night’s approach and his eagerness to regain his dusky perch in the poinciana.

“Sony acknowledges that he did it,” her father said at last, as if dragged back to a tedious present. “He’s never said, and will never say, anything different. I know him. I’ve every confidence in him.”

“But why all this?”

“I’m old, my girl. Can you see me in Reubeuss? Come on. Besides, you weren’t there, so far as I’m aware. What do you know about who did what? Nothing. Sony confessed, they’ve wound up the investigation, so that’s that.”

His thin, dreamy voice became fainter and fainter.

“My poor dear boy,” he whispered.

In the bedroom turned into a temporary office she read for the umpteenth time the file on Sony’s case.

Jakob and the girls had gone back to Paris as she was moving herself into the little house with the pink walls and the blue corrugated-iron roof. She’d reached an agreement with her colleagues at the firm that she could conduct Sony’s defense.

She occasionally looked up from the file to gaze with pleasure on the small, white, bare room. She accepted the idea that she had perhaps, ten years earlier, slept in this same room, because it was now much simpler to freely acknowledge that possibility than to deny it in fear and anger. As a result she no longer feared being overwhelmed by a feeling of déjà vu, which could just as well have been provoked by a dream she’d had as by what she was currently living through.

There she was, alone in the intense brightness of a strange house, sitting on a cool, hard, shiny metal chair. Her whole body was at peace and her mind was equally calm.

She understood what had happened in her father’s house, understood all those involved as if she were the devil gripping each one of them.

For this is what Sony had told the examining magistrate:

“I hid in my stepmother’s bedroom. I stood in a corner between the wardrobe and the wall. I had in my pocket a bit of cord I’d taken from the cupboard under the kitchen sink, a piece left over from the clothesline in the garden. I knew my stepmother would enter the room alone after putting the twins to bed because that was what she did every evening. I knew my father would not be joining her because he’d stopped sleeping in that room, I can’t say where he sleeps, I know but I can’t tell you. That means I acted with premeditation throughout, because I knew that my stepmother would go toward the wardrobe and that it would be easy to slip the cord around her neck. She was on the tall side, but quite slim and not particularly strong. Her slender arms were not very strong, so I knew she wouldn’t put up much of a struggle. I’d hugged her often enough in that same room, I’d put my arms around her often enough, to know that I was a great deal stronger than she was. She was so delicate that my hands almost touched my shoulders when I hugged her. Then everything went as planned. She came in, closed the door behind her, walked to the wardrobe, I reached out to her and did it. Her throat gurgled, she tried to grip the cord around her neck, but she was already too weak. She slumped a little, I lifted her up again and put her on the bed. I left the room and closed the door. Back in my own bedroom I pumped up all my basketballs. I knew that no one was going to pump them up for quite a while and I feel better if they’re correctly inflated. I went to bed and slept soundly. At six I was awoken by the twins screaming. They’d gone to see their mother and it was their screams that aroused me. A little later the police arrived and I told them what had happened, just as I’m telling you today. I did it because my stepmother and I were involved in a love affair that had been going on for three years. She was my age and it was the first time I’d ever been in love. I loved her more than anything or anyone in the whole world. When my father married and brought her home, it was love at first sight. It was very hard, I felt guilty, I felt dirty. But she had fallen for me too and we started making love. It was my first time, I’d waited until then, I’d never dared before. I found her carefree and beautiful, I was very happy. She got pregnant and I became very fond of the twins: I was sure they were mine. I was happy with the situation because my father didn’t suffer at all, I wasn’t afraid of him anymore and he took no interest in me. But she began to tire of me. She wasn’t capable of loving me for the rest of her life as I was capable of loving her for the rest of mine. She was unhappy and started hating me. She said I had to leave the house and make my life elsewhere. But where could I go and what could I do and who else could I love? My home was in my father’s house and I was irrevocably married to my father’s wife and my father’s children were my children. As a result my father’s secrets were my secrets, too, which is why I can’t speak about him even though I know everything about him.”

And the young Khady Demba, eighteen, had said:

“I was in the kitchen and I heard the two little girls screaming. I left the kitchen and went to the bedroom where the girls were. They were standing close to the bed and their mother was stretched out on it. I saw that her eyes were open and her face wasn’t its normal color.”

And the father had said:

“I’m a self-made man and I think I’m entitled to take some pride in that. My parents had nothing, no one around me had anything, we lived by our wits and survived thanks to various schemes, but each day’s gains never equaled the amount of mental effort expended. I was a clever boy so I went to study in France. Then I returned with my son Sony, who was age five at the time, and I went into business. I bought a half-built holiday village in Dara Salam and I managed to turn it into a popular resort and make it profitable. But times changed and I had to sell Dara Salam. As you see me today I have to make do with very little, but I don’t care, I haven’t much pride left. When I entered the house I was greeted by all that screaming. If my son Sony affirms that he did this, I accept that, and I forgive him because I’ve always loved my son the way he is, even though people sometimes tell me, ‘Your son has never made good use of his intelligence,’ but he’s made what use he could of it, he’s done what he wanted, it’s not my concern. My wife betrayed me, he didn’t. He’s my son and I accept and understand what he’s done because I see myself in him. My son Sony is better than me, his generosity of spirit is greater than that of anyone else I’ve ever known, nevertheless I can see myself in him and I forgive him. I accept what he’s affirmed, I’ve nothing to add, nothing else to say, and if he were to withdraw his confession I’d accept that likewise. He’s my son and I raised him, that’s all. My wife, I didn’t raise her. I don’t know her and I can’t forgive her and my hatred of this woman who cuckolded me in my own house and didn’t care a fig for me will never fade.”

At afternoon’s end, when the shade made the heat less oppressive, Norah went to see Sony.

She left each day at the same time, walking slowly so as not to sweat too much.

And she went over in her mind the questions she would put to Sony, well aware that he would only answer with a smile, never going back on his resolve to protect their father, but she wanted to show him that she at least was determined to save him and was therefore prepared to confront him fair and square.

She walked joyfully along the familiar street. She was at peace with herself and her body was behaving itself.

She said hello to a neighbor who was sitting at her door and thought, What good neighbors I have, and if one or another of them, the Lebanese baker or the old woman who sold sodas in the street, piped up, claiming to have known her ten years earlier, it didn’t upset her.

She accepted it humbly, without reason, as a mystery.

In the same way she’d stopped wondering why she no longer doubted that her love for her child would be rekindled once she’d done all she could for Sony, once she’d delivered them both from the devils that had sunk their claws into them when she was eight and Sony was five.

That’s the way it was.

And she was able to contemplate with equanimity and gratitude the way Jakob was taking care of the children. His way of doing it was perhaps no worse than her way, and so she was able to think of Lucie without worrying.

She was able to think of her brother Sony’s radiant expression when, in the old days, she used to throw him playfully on the bed. She could think of it now without suffering the torments of the damned.

That’s the way it was.

And she’d watch over Sony and bring him back home.

That’s the way it was.

COUNTERPOINT

HE SENSED near him a breath not his own, another presence in the branches. For some weeks now he’d been aware that he was not alone in his hideout, and patiently, without irritation, he was waiting for the stranger to reveal herself, even though he knew what was going on since it could be nothing else. He wasn’t annoyed, and in the tranquil darkness of the poinciana his heart was beating languidly and his mind was lethargic. No, he wasn’t cross: his daughter Norah was there, close by, perched among the branches now bereft of flowers, surrounded by the bitter smell of the tiny leaves; she was there in the dark, in her lime-green dress, at a safe distance from her father’s phosphorescence. Why would she come and alight on the poinciana if it wasn’t to make peace, once and for all? His heart beat languidly, his mind was lethargic. He heard his daughter breathing, and it didn’t make him angry.