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.