Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop

Author:David Diop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Maram had stopped speaking and was observing me as if trying to gauge the effect of her words on me. I doubt she had any difficulty perceiving my extreme emotion. I had thought I knew her uncle Baba Seck, and now I discovered that he was a very different man from the one I had imagined. Having met him so often, I would never have guessed that he could have been the cause of his niece’s disappearance. He continued to live and smile, as if nothing were wrong, protected by a superficial respectability that might easily collapse in seconds were his crime to come to light. Had he managed to dissociate himself from his past and, like many humans, to build a wall between two distinct parts of his soul, one luminous and the other dark? Did he feel remorse or had he succeeded in finding a way to break free from the act that had led to the loss of Maram?

I imagined that Baba Seck had told the invented story of his niece’s disappearance with a particular purpose in mind. Perhaps he had intended to pique my curiosity in order to send me out as a scout, to flush Maram out of hiding, to help him—in some way that I did not yet understand—to rid himself of her. He must have trembled at the words of Senghane Faye, Maram’s envoy, asking if her funeral had already taken place in Sor and demanding that nobody come to see her at the village of Ben. Wasn’t this a way of secretly threatening to denounce him for his crime? Maram must have instructed the messenger to say all that to torture her uncle, who thought he had rid himself of her forever when he sold her to a white man.

Something else troubled me, something that would certainly complicate the plan of vengeance that she had probably dreamed up against Baba Seck. From her description of the white man with the syphilitic face, I had no doubt of his identity: it was Estoupan de la Brüe, director of the Senegal Concession. Which meant that my presence in her company was exposing Maram to danger on a scale that she could not even imagine.

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