Her father stopped in front of a closed door.
He grasped the handle and stood still for a moment with his ear against the panel. Norah couldn’t tell if he was trying to listen to something inside or was summoning up the will to open the door. But the attitude of this man, at once scarcely recognizable and illusory as ever — oh, what incorrigible naïveté to think, even not having seen him for years, that time might have altered him and brought them closer together — worried and annoyed her now more than it ever had in the past, when she could never be sure whether, in his brazen recklessness and arrogant flippancy, and utter lack of humor, he wasn’t going to hurl some unforgettably cruel remark at her.
With a quick movement, as if to catch someone in flagrante, he opened the door.
With an air of fear and repugnance, he stood aside and let Norah in.
The tiny room was lit by a lamp with a pink shade. It stood on a small table placed between two beds, on the narrower of which sat the girl whom Norah had seen in the kitchen and who had told her she was called Khady Demba. The lobe of her right ear, Norah noticed, was slit in two.
Sitting cross-legged on the mattress, she was sewing a small green dress.
Looking up briefly, she smiled at Norah.
Two little girls were asleep on the other bed, lying face-to-face under a white sheet.
With a start Norah realized that the faces of the two children were the most beautiful she had ever seen.
Awakened perhaps by the stuffiness of the corridor flooding into the air-conditioned room, or by an imperceptible change in the quiet atmosphere surrounding them, the two little girls opened their eyes at the same time.
They looked at their father gravely and without warmth or feeling. They showed no fear at seeing him, but no pleasure either. As for him, Norah noted with surprise, he seemed to melt under their gaze. His shaven head, his face, his neck in its grubby collar, all were suddenly dripping with sweat and reeking of that acrid odor of flowers crushed underfoot.
This man, who’d managed to maintain around himself a climate of dull fear and who’d never let anyone intimidate him, now seemed terrified.
What could such small girls be making him afraid of? Norah wondered. They — the miraculous offspring of his old age — were so marvelously pretty as to make him forget that they belonged to the lesser sex, and perhaps even forget the plainness of his first two daughters, Norah and her sister.
She went toward the bed and knelt down. Looking into the two small identical faces, round, dark, and delicate like the heads of seals resting on the sand, she smiled.
At that moment the first bars of “And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson …” rang out in the room.
Everyone jumped — even Norah, though it was the ringtone of her cell phone. She reached for the phone in the pocket of her dress. She was about to turn it off when she noticed that the call was coming from her own home. Awkwardly, she put the phone to her ear. The silence of the room seemed to have changed. Calm, ponderous, and lethargic just a moment ago, it had suddenly become alert and vaguely hostile, as if the chance of overhearing something clear and definitive might help them to decide between keeping her at a distance and welcoming her into their midst.
“It’s me, Mummy!” Lucie’s voice rang out.
“Hello, darling! You don’t have to shout, I can hear you quite clearly,” Norah said, red in the face. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes! At the moment we’re making crepes with Grete. Then we’re off to the movies. We’re having a lovely time.”
“Splendid,” said Norah softly. “Lots of love! Speak to you soon.”
She snapped the phone shut and slipped it into her pocket.
The two little girls pretended to be asleep. Their eyelids flickered and their lips were pressed together.
Disappointed, Norah stroked their cheeks, then got up and nodded to Khady before leaving the room with her father, who closed the door carefully behind him.
She thought, plaintively, of what seemed yet another failure on this man’s part to establish a straightforward loving relationship with his children. A man who provoked such a pitiless gaze did not deserve the beautiful little girls born to him in his old age, and nothing, no one could change a man like that except by tearing out his heart.
But as she followed him back down the gloomy corridor, her cell phone knocking gently now against her thigh, she admitted grimly that her irritation with her father was amplified by the outsize excitement in Lucie’s voice, and that the barbs she couldn’t or wouldn’t dare utter to Jakob, the man she’d been living with for a year, would be planted there, in her father’s back, as he walked innocently before her, bowed and overweight, along the obscure passage.
For in her mind’s eye she could see her beloved Paris apartment, the intimate, discreet emblem of her perseverance, of her modest success, into which, having lived there for a few years alone with Lucie, she’d introduced Jakob and his daughter, Grete, and with them, at a stroke, confusion and disorder, whereas the motivation behind the purchase of the three-room apartment in Montmartre (financed by a thirty-year loan) had precisely been her spiritual longing to put an end to the lifelong confusion of which her now elderly, threadbare father, his wings folded under his shirt, looming huge and incongruous in the gloomy corridor, had been the agonizing incarnation.
Oh, she’d quickly sensed in Lucie’s tone — panting, urgent, and shrill — that the apartment was at that very moment the scene of another demonstration of fatherly ardor, a detestable display informed by Jakob’s ostentatious refusal to lay down any limits or exercise the slightest authority over two seven-year-old girls, and by his habit of undertaking, with extravagant commentary, great energy, and much gusto, culinary preparations he usually lacked the ability, will, or patience to see through, so that pancake or cake batter was never set to cook, because in the meantime he’d suddenly suggested going out or doing something else, in the same panting, urgent, shrill tone that the girls adopted, and that got them so overexcited that they often ended up exhausted, fretful, and in tears, a situation made worse, Norah thought, by a vague feeling that, for all the screaming and laughter, the day had been pointless, awkward, and weird.
Yes, she’d been quick to sense all that in Lucie’s voice. She was already worried about not being there. Or rather, the disquiet that she’d started to feel as the day of her departure approached and that she’d firmly suppressed, she now gave free rein to. Not that there was anything that could objectively be considered dangerous in leaving the girls in Jakob’s care, but she was concerned that the discipline, thrift, and high moral values that, it seemed to her, she’d established in her little apartment and that were meant to affirm and adorn her own life and form the basis of Lucie’s upbringing were being demolished in her absence with cold, methodical jubilation by a man. As for bringing the man into her home, nothing had obliged her to do that: only love, and hope.
Now she was unable to recognize that love any longer; it lay smothered by disappointment. She had lost all hope of an ordered, sober, harmonious family life.
She had opened her door and evil — smiling, gentle, and stubborn — had entered.
After years of mistrust, having left Lucie’s father and bought the apartment, after years of austerely constructing an honorable existence, she had opened her door to its destruction.
Shame on her; she couldn’t tell anyone about it. There seemed to be nothing expressible or understandable about the mistake she’d made: a mistake, a crime against her own efforts.
Neither her mother nor her sister nor her few friends could conceive how Jakob and his daughter, Grete — both of them gentle and considerate, well brought up and likable — were working subtly to undermine the delicate balance that had finally been achieved in the lives of Norah and Lucie, before Norah — as if blinded in the end by an excess of mistrust — had obligingly opened her door to the charming incarnation of evil.