Three Strong Women Read Online Free PDF Page A

furniture.
    Her brother Sony was thirty-five and Norah hadn’t seen him for many years, but they had always been close.
    His room hadn’t changed at all since his adolescence.
    How was it possible to live like that?
    She shivered in spite of the heat.
    Outside the small square window everything was pitch black and totally silent.
    No sound came from within the house nor from outside it, except perhaps—she couldn’t be sure—from time to time that of the poinciana’s branches rubbing against the corrugated-iron roof.
    She picked up her cell phone and phoned home.
    No reply.
    Then she remembered that Lucie had mentioned going to the movies, which annoyed her because it was Monday and the girls had to be up early the next day for school, and she had to struggle against a sense of impending catastrophe, of terrifying disorder, that swept over her every time she wasn’t there to see, simply see, what was going on, even if she couldn’t always do much about it.
    She considered such worries as failings on her part, not weaknesses.
    Because it would be too arrogant to think that she alone knew how to organize Lucie and Grete’s life properly, that she alone, through the power of her reason, of her anxious concern, could prevent disaster from crossing the threshold and entering her life.
    Had she not already opened her door to evil in a kindly, smiling form?
    The only way to mitigate the effects of this great blunder was to be constantly, anxiously, on the alert.
    But when her father called she’d simply left.
    Sitting on Sony’s bed, she now regretted it.
    What was her father—this selfish old man—to her, compared with her daughter?
    What did her father’s existence matter now, when her own hung by a thread?
    Although she knew that, if Jakob was sitting in a movie theater at that moment, it was pointless, she still dialed his cell phone.
    She left an exaggeratedly cheery message.
    She could see his affable face, the calm, clear, sensible look in his eyes, the slight droop of his lips, and the general pleasantness of his finely wrought features. She was still able to acknowledge that such amiability had inspired her with confidence, to the extent that she had not dwelled on the puzzling aspects of the life of this man who’d come from Hamburg with his daughter, on the slightly differing versions he’d given of his reasons for coming to France, on the vagueness of his explanations for his less than assiduous attendance at law school, or the fact that Grete never saw, and never spoke about, her mother, who, he claimed, had stayed in Germany.
    She knew now that Jakob would never become a lawyer, or anything else, for that matter, that he would never contribute meaningfully to the expenses of the household even if he did receive from time to time—from his parents, he said—a few hundred euros, which he spent immediately and ostentatiously on expensivemeals and on clothes the children didn’t need, and she knew too—finally admitting it to herself—that she had quite simply set up in her home a man and a little girl whom she had to feed and care for, whom she could not throw out, and who had her boxed in.
    That was the way it was.
    She dreamed sometimes that she would return home one evening to find Lucie all by herself, relaxed and happy as she used to be in the past, unaffected by the hollow excitement Jakob provoked, and that Lucie would tell her calmly that the others had left for good.
    That was the way it was. Norah knew that she would never have the strength to throw them out.
    Where would they go, how would they manage?
    Only a miracle, she sometimes thought, could rid her of them, could free her and Lucie from life with this amiable but subtly evil pair.
    Yes, that was the way it was, she was trapped.
    She got up, took a toiletries bag out of her backpack, and went into the corridor.
    So deep was the silence that she seemed to hear it vibrating.
    She opened a door that she remembered concluding was the