“No, calm yourselves, my children,” Maman Abé said. “Do not envy the mistress’s daughter. Keep your hearts clean toward your fellow human being, and you will see that life will smile on you sooner or later, I tell you, and listen to my advice.” After the meal, Hawa took out a notebook, the one in which she wrote her letters and her thoughts. She opened it to the first page and gently tore out the note she had written to herself a few days earlier.
She crumpled it and placed it in the bin. She no longer wanted to flee. She no longer wanted to guess. She wanted to exist. Later, while the house was almost asleep, she knocked softly on the door of Madame Kan’s room. “Come in,” said a tired but gentle voice. Awa entered.
The room was bathed in warm light. On the bed, a light blanket, a book. “I want to know, I want to know everything. Who was my father? Why were you so afraid? Why did you leave me? Not to judge you, but because I no longer want to walk blindly through my own life.” Madame Kan invited her to sit at the edge of the bed, and that night she spoke for a long time.
Of her years of youth, of mistakes, of forbidden love, of the child she had wanted to forget but whom her soul had never been able to let go of. She also spoke of her ambitions, her sacrifices, her sleepless nights. And the more she spoke, the more her voice broke, the more human her gaze became. Hawa listened without interrupting.
When she had finished, there were no more questions. Only a silence of peace. Awa stood up, took a step toward the door, then stopped. “I do not yet know what I am going to do with all of this,” she said. “But I know one thing, Mother.” Madame Kan started softly on hearing that word for the first time. “I am here now, and I am no longer a stranger,” Awa said.
She left, and that evening, for the first time in twenty-four years, the house seemed to breathe. A few months later, there was a quiet change. Awa no longer wore the servants’ uniform. She no longer lived in the windowless room. She now had her own room, decorated to her taste, near her mother’s office.
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