Three Strong Women Read Free Page B

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 floodinginto 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 suddenlybecome 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