Three Strong Women (7 page)

“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.”