The little girls frowned.
One of them spat at her. The thin spittle dribbled onto the sheet.
The other began to imitate her, puffing out her cheeks.
Norah shut the door, not offended, but unsettled.
She wondered if she should be doing something for these little waifs, and in what capacity — as a half sister, a kind of mother, an adult morally responsible for every child one came across?
She once again felt her heart bursting with impotent rage at that thoughtless man who after so many failures couldn’t wait to marry again and produce more children who meant nothing to him, a man whose capacity for love and for showing consideration to others was so small, seemingly used up in his youth in his relationship with his old mother, long dead, whom Norah had never known.
It’s true he’d shown some affection toward Sony, his only son.
But what need had he for a new family, this unfeeling man, incomplete, detached?
He was already eating when she reentered the living room. He was sitting at the table as on the previous evening, dressed in the same pale shabby clothes, his face bent over his plate, stuffing himself with porridge, so that she had to wait until he’d finished and had hurled himself backward, as if after enormous physical exertion, panting and sighing. Only then could she ask, looking him straight in the eye, “Now, what’s this all about?”
That morning her father had a look that was even more evasive than usual.
Was it because he knew that she’d seen him in the poinciana?
But how could that embarrass him, this cynical man who had never batted an eyelid over much more degrading situations?
“Masseck!” he shouted hoarsely.
He then asked Norah, “What’ll you have? Tea? Coffee?”
She tapped on the table lightly with her fist, thinking, with a vacant, worried air, that it was time for Lucie and Grete to get up and go to school, and that Jakob would perhaps have forgotten to set his alarm clock, which would mean that the whole day would bear the mark of failure and neglect. But wasn’t she herself much too virtuous, punctual, and scrupulous? Wasn’t she in reality that tiresome woman whom she reproached Jakob for painting her as?
“Coffee?” asked Masseck, offering her a full cup.
“Will you please tell me why I’ve come?” she said calmly, looking her father in the eye.
Masseck scurried away.
Her father then started breathing so violently and with such difficulty that Norah leaped from her chair and went up to him.
She stood there, awkwardly, and would have put her question to him again if she’d been able.
“You must go and see Sony,” he murmured painfully.
“Where’s Sony?”
“In Reubeuss.”
“What on earth’s Reubeuss?”
No answer.
He breathed less painfully, slumped in his chair, his belly sticking out, surrounded by the syrupy odor of poinciana flowers in full bloom.
Then she was deeply moved to see tears running down his gray cheeks.
“It’s the prison,” he said.
She took a step, almost a leap, backward.
“What’ve you done with Sony?” she cried out. “You were supposed to be looking after him!”
“He was the one who committed the offense, not me,” he whispered, almost inaudibly.
“What offense? What’s he done? Oh God, you were supposed to be taking care of him and bringing him up properly!”
She stepped back and sank onto her chair.
She gulped down the coffee, which was acrid, lukewarm, and tasteless.
Her hands trembled so much that she dropped the cup onto the glass-topped table.
“That’s another broken cup!” her father said. “I spend all my time buying crockery in this house.”
“What did Sony do?”
He got up, shaking his head, his old wizened face ravaged by the impossibility of talking.
“Masseck will drive you to Reubeuss,” he croaked.
He walked backward toward the door to the corridor, slowly, as if trying to escape without her noticing.
His toenails were long and yellow.
“So,” she asked calmly, “is that why there’s no one here anymore? Is that why everyone has left?”
Her father’s back met the door; he groped behind him, opened it, and scurried away down the corridor.
Once, in a meadow in Normandy, she’d seen an old abandoned donkey whose hooves had grown so much he could hardly walk.
Her father was quite capable of trotting along when it suited him!
Her immense feeling of resentment lit up her mind and sharpened her thoughts.
No one, nothing, could ever excuse their father for his failure to keep Sony on the straight and narrow.
Because when, thirty years earlier, wishing to abandon their mother and France and his dead-end office job, he’d suddenly left, taking Sony, then age five, with him — abducting Sony, in truth, because he knew the mother would never agree to let him take her little boy — when he’d thereby plunged Norah, her sister, and their mother in a despair the mother would never really get over, when he’d promised in a letter left on the kitchen table to take better care of the child than of himself, his business affairs, and his personal ambitions, their mother, in her grief, had clung to that promise, convincing herself that Sony would have a brilliant career and great opportunities that she, a simple hairdresser, couldn’t perhaps have managed to give him.
Norah couldn’t recall without gasping for breath the day she came home from school to find her father’s letter.
She was eight, her sister nine, and from the bedroom the three children shared Sony’s things were gone: his clothes in the chest of drawers, his bag of Legos, his teddy bear.
Her first thought was to hide the letter and, by some miracle, the reality of Sony and their father’s departure, so that her mother wouldn’t notice.
Then, grasping how powerless she was, she’d wandered around the small, dark apartment, dizzy with worry and pain, staggered by the realization of what had happened, of the huge suffering already inflicted and certain to go on being inflicted, and of the fact that nothing could undo the terrible thing that had occurred.
She’d then taken the metro to the salon where her mother worked.
Even now, thirty years later, she couldn’t summon the strength to recall precisely the moment when she told her mother what had happened and what suffering still lay in wait.
It was all she could do to remember, little by little, her mother’s wild stare as she sat on Sony’s bed, frantically smoothing the pale blue chenille coverlet and repeating shrilly, monotonously, “He’s too young to live without me. Five years old, that’s much too small!”
Their father had phoned the day after his arrival. He was triumphant, full of gusto, and their mother had made an effort to be conciliatory, to sound almost calm, fearing above all that this man who hated open conflict would break off all relations if he thought she was making a big fuss.
He’d let Sony talk on the phone but had grabbed the receiver back when the child, hearing his mother’s voice, had started to cry.
Time had passed, and the bitter, heartrending, unacceptable situation had become diluted in the routine of everyday life, had melted in the normality of an existence only disrupted at regular intervals by the arrival of a clumsy, stilted letter from Sony, which Norah and her sister had to answer in a similarly formal way so that — their mother calculated — it would appear to their father that there was no risk in allowing greater contact.
How accommodating and sadly devious this gentle, benumbed woman had shown herself to be in her distress! She’d gone on buying clothes for Sony, folding them carefully, and putting them away in the little boy’s chest of drawers.
“For when he gets back,” she’d say.