Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye

them, she did the same with the plastic bag Masseck had handed to her, telling hergrudgingly, 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.
    “Sony!” she shouted, “what did you say? Speak up!”
    He was scratching his forehead savagely. It was pale with eczema.
    “You need a cream for that?” she yelled. “Is that what you’re saying?”
    He seemed to hesitate for a moment, then nodded, as if it didn’t matter much whether she’d misunderstood, as if “cream” were as good a reply as any.
    He shouted something, a single word.
    This time Norah clearly heard the name of their sister.
    A fleeting sensation of panic drove every thought out of her mind.
    Now a devil had grabbed hold of her, too.
    Now it seemed impossible to explain to Sony, to shriek at him that their sister had become an alcoholic and was so far gone—as she herself acknowledged—that she could find no refuge except in a mystical sect, from which she occasionally wrote Norah wild, fanatical, sloppy letters enclosing the odd photo showing her with long gray hair, thin as a rail, meditating on a dirty rubber mat