Free Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye Page A

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 withdark 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