Free Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye

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 infirmaryonce 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