She could hear all around her shots being fired and cries of fear and pain. She couldn’t tell if she was shouting too, or if it was the sound of the blood throbbing in her skull, enveloping her in an endless threnody. She tried to go higher, remembering that a boy had told her you must never, never stop climbing until you’ve reached the top, but the barbed wire was tearing the skin off her hands and feet and she could now hear herself screaming and feel blood running along her shoulders and down her arms. She kept telling herself never to stop climbing, never, repeating the words over and over again while no longer understanding them, then giving up, letting go, falling slowly backward, and thinking then that the person of Khady Demba — less than a breath, scarcely a puff of air — was surely never to touch the ground, but would float eternal, priceless, too evanescent ever to be smashed in the cold, blinding glare of the floodlights.
COUNTERPOINT
EVERY TIME Lamine was paid for his work, in the kitchen at the back of the restaurant Au bec fin, where he was an evening dishwasher; at the warehouse where he unpacked goods for supermarkets; on a construction site or in the metro: wherever he went to sell his labor, every time euros passed from a foreigner’s hand into his own, he thought of the girl, he silently begged her to forgive him and not to haunt him with curses and poisoned dreams. In the room he shared with others he slept with his money under the pillow and dreamed of the girl. She was either protecting him or — on the contrary — wishing he was in the pit of hell. And when, on bright days, he raised his eyes and let the sun warm his face, it wasn’t unusual for the sky to cloud over suddenly for no obvious reason, and then he would talk to the girl and tell her softly what had become of him, he would give thanks to her, a bird would vanish in the distance.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marie NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, France, in 1967 and spent her childhood with her French mother. Her father was Senegalese. Educated at primary and secondary level in France, NDiaye studied linguistics at the Sorbonne, and obtained a grant from the French Academy that enabled her to stay in the Villa Médicis in Rome. She started writing when she was about twelve or thirteen years old and was only eighteen when her first work was published. NDiaye was awarded the prestigious Femina literary prize for her novel Rosie Carpe in 2001 and the Goncourt Prize, France’s highest literary honor, in 2009 for Trois femmes puissantes. She lives in Berlin.