by Marie Ndiaye
She herself couldn’t feel at peace if she sensed a disharmony in her trinkets’ society, and certain rainy Sundays, when a gray daylight filled her ground-floor apartment, seeming to make the room even darker, she blamed her melancholy on the tension turning her figurines against one another because she hadn’t paired them up properly.
Her mind at peace, her hair carefully pulled back, she threw a cream linen jacket over her shoulders, took her shopping cart from its place by the door, and went out.
It was a sunny Saturday in May. The narrow sidewalks shone, freshly cleaned, and the cramped, dingy street had the pure, comforting smell of a springtime morning.
Ladivine Sylla began to review what she would need from the market to make the nice lunch she had planned for the following Tuesday, when Malinka and that Freddy Moliger would be coming.
She could only think of him as “that Freddy Moliger,” and even this, even this distant and circumspect way of naming him, stirred her so violently that she went weak in the knees.
She didn’t dare think of him simply as “Freddy,” though that familiarity would have more precisely expressed the affection and gratitude she felt for that man, because she feared the depth of her own emotion, she feared that, should she ever happen to murmur “Malinka and Freddy,” she’d have to sit down on the sidewalk, trembling uncontrollably.
“That Freddy Moliger” let her hold her excitement at bay.
She walked toward the market at her unhurried pace, pulling her squeaking cart, and with mingled pleasure and astonishment remembered Freddy Moliger’s thin face, his off-blue eyes, like stagnant water, so empty and dull when words weren’t enlivening them, and the fact that her present happiness, her fondest wish, had taken the desolate form of that stranger intrigued her endlessly. That was simply how it was; there was nothing more to understand.
That man was rescuing them both from their curse, her, Ladivine Sylla, and her daughter Malinka, the only real creature she loved in this world—how hard it was to have only her daughter to love!
Malinka had brought her that Freddy Moliger, and he’d settled into Ladivine Sylla’s life and thoughts with miraculous ease and inevitability, and she immediately realized he would free them from the spell.
What matter that he seemed such a sad case! Was that not the very sign of an envoy’s power, the perfect humility of his appearance?
She wanted to make a leg of lamb with Soissons beans and haricot vert bundles bound up with strips of bacon. She’d forgotten to ask when he last came if he liked his meat rare or well done, but she could get around that, she thought, by putting the lamb in the oven only when they got there, even if it meant waiting awhile with a glass of wine and some finger foods. She was already, delightedly, imagining whipping up puff pastry canapés with Roquefort or anchovies and mini-tartlets with onion jam.
That Freddy Moliger was always hungry, she’d noticed, almost gluttonous; he ate quickly, preoccupied and contemptuous, as if scorning his own appetite, but, thought Ladivine Sylla indulgently, isn’t that how those who weren’t well fed as children always wanted to seem, people used to having badly cooked, meager helpings slammed down before them, with even less love than for a dog?
She entered the Marché des Capucins and made for the butcher’s stand she considered the best, even if, because its meat was expensive, she almost never shopped there. But for that Freddy Moliger she wanted only the finest and tenderest.
As for her daughter Malinka, she ate everything in the same way, without to-do, without interest or awareness, and she was happy with everything because food meant nothing to her.
Oh, her daughter Malinka! How heartbreaking, yes, that Ladivine Sylla had never found anyone else to love!
She’d long been convinced that Malinka kept her out of her life because she was ashamed of her, Ladivine Sylla, who couldn’t be other than what she was. Then, as the years went by, she came to believe that they were both entangled in the coils of a shared spell, bonds that Malinka could no more loosen than she could, that they were both being punished with the same cruelty, the same injustice, and this helped her bear her bitter existence and cast off all ill will toward Malinka, whom she loved ever since with a purified heart, a comforted heart.
And Malinka had brought her that Freddy Moliger, and now displayed a new face, shimmering with hopefulness, and her clear, quiet gaze, now unafraid to meet her mother’s, told her she’d accepted, with joy in her heart, this new order: the introduction of Ladivine Sylla.
Suddenly it was all nearly too much for her.
She’d often tried to picture the life Malinka was leading. Once, she thought she saw faint brown patches on her daughter’s cheeks, as if she were pregnant, and then she didn’t come back for weeks.
How she dreamed of meeting that child, and how she feared it as well! He or she would be over thirty by now, and Ladivine Sylla was an insignificant woman whose appearance, whose status, whose uninspired conversation, might very well, she had no doubt, come as a disappointment.
At the activities center where she went several times a week to play checkers or knit in the company of other neighborhood women, she generally sat silent, imprisoned in the shameful emptiness of her life, listening distantly as her neighbors talked of their children and grandchildren, of their husbands, living or dead, asking no questions so none would be asked of her.
Who could claim to know Ladivine Sylla? There was nothing to discover in her; there was too little to her.
She bought a four-pound leg of lamb, a pound of haricots verts, some apricots for a tart. The shopkeepers knew her and greeted her amiably, despite her reserve, her habit of answering their banter with nothing more than a nod, and their observations on the fine weather with a thin smile. But that Saturday she was open, almost cordial. Little by little, her daughter Malinka was acknowledging her!
Leaving the market, she decided to make a detour down a street parallel to her own, where she could enjoy the sunshine.
She was passing by a newsstand when the front page of Sud-Ouest caught her attention after a few seconds’ delay, making her retrace her steps, still pulling her cart, and then, her legs suddenly weak, her arms limp, as if her limbs had understood before her head, she stared hard at a photograph of a beautiful, serious Malinka, her face slightly sad and uneasy, narrow and delicate like her own and framed by locks that fell in light waves over her slender shoulders, looking into the lens, at the photographer, anxious to please.
That attractive fifty-four-year-old woman was her daughter Malinka. No question about it; that was her.
Ladivine Sylla tried feebly to reach for the newspaper, but her arm refused to move. She clutched the handle of her cart with both hands and bent down to read the headline: LANGON WOMAN STABBED IN HER HOME.
She stood up with a little cry and, still clasping the handle, scurried off down the sunlit sidewalk, in the perfumed air, rich with anticipations and promises. She realized she was crying out as she lurched along, but her voice was muffled, hoarse, low, and no one paid her any mind.
The dog was there, on the other side of the street, it was there for her now, waiting for Ladivine Rivière to emerge squinting from the dimness of the hotel and stand for a few seconds on the potholed sidewalk, in the blazing late-morning light, as she did every day, undecided, happy, and deeply calm, until some chance happening, a child’s cry, a flight of pigeons, oh even a fly on her cheek, led her to set off toward the right or the left.
Never straight ahead, because that’s where the dog was, because it was watching her.
She had no doubt that the dog came for her now, after first coming, perhaps, perhaps, for Marko or the children.
But she so hated the idea of Daniel and Annika being monitored, guarded, or looked after by that dog, the idea that they might need any such protection or oversight, and that the dog might have known it, she so hated that idea that she’d pushed it aside in disgust, and so the very notion struck her as absurd.
Not because it was, but
because even thinking of it was troubling, repellent, and hurtful.
The children needed only the vigilance, the deep, anxious love that she gave them, she and Marko, and the big brown dog that in this unknown land had decided to serve as her consort or sentinel had that right alone, for her alone—certainly not the right to take responsibility for her children.
But suppose Marko would have been pleased to have that dog looking after him?
Still, she was by no means sure that the dog meant her well; she never approached it, never waved at it, never even met its gaze.
Marko could nonetheless have used that animal’s discreet solicitude, unmistakable or uncertain. It seemed like this trip was bringing them nothing but trouble, he’d complained once again at breakfast, defeated and confused.
If he could believe that some citizen of this strange country had found it natural to express his devotion by temporarily inhabiting the flesh and the skin of a huge scrawny dog, its mission to follow Marko Berger’s every step, if he could believe such a thing as she did, trust in it as she did, he would have found infinite consolation.
But Marko could imagine no such thing.
And so she’d given up thinking the dog might be coming for Marko as well.
It came for her alone. And so, too, she never spoke of the dog around Marko.
He wouldn’t have mocked her, no, would have shown none of the coldness—the irritated scowl, the condescending pursed lips, the shrugged shoulders—that, for example, his father would.
He would have looked at her closely, his brow furrowed and slightly concerned, gauging her seriousness, and then, once convinced that she wasn’t joking, he would have laid out all the ways in which such a thing was impossible.
But she never said it was possible, never claimed it was conceivable.
It simply seemed to her that it happened, and happened like this: every morning, when she came out of the hotel and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dazzling light, the big brown dog was watching her from the opposite sidewalk.
She set off with no goal in mind, one way or the other, striding firmly over the dusty, uneven asphalt, joy in her heart.
And the dog followed, always keeping the street’s width between them, and it was from the corner of her eye, her upper body slightly turned, that she watched it weave its way, superior and faithful, through the crowds, the men selling swimsuits and caps, the women with their displays of fruits and vegetables on a tarp spread over the sidewalk.
Often it lost sight of her, when a bus passed by or a red light stranded a long line of cars.
And with that she slowed down a little, she couldn’t help it, not that she was afraid she might unintentionally leave it behind, but because the anxiety she imagined invading its canine heart saddened her own.
—
This was their first time away from Europe as a family, and after three days they couldn’t help feeling that, by an infuriating irony of fate, their troubles were multiplying in direct proportion to the care they’d put into planning their stay, as if in this country earnestness were a thing to be punished, and quiet enthusiasm, and simplicity, and worthiness generally.
They’d spent the previous summers at Marko’s parents’ in Lüneburg and a campground on the Baltic, and they found that a reasonable way of going on holiday, perfectly suited to the sort of family they were, and neither ever regretted aloud that it was so dull, over time almost exhaustingly dull, so this summer could have gone by in just the same way, between the elder Bergers’ home, where it was tacitly forbidden to go without slippers, to speak loudly, and to get up after eight (and them, Marko and her, thinking themselves responsible for the children’s obedience to these rules, even when they were very small, and struggling to keep them from making noise and always to show them at their very best to the two old people they wanted on their side at all costs, not quite knowing why, maybe because they were plain, simple folk, and their judgment of people and situations seemed grounded in some primal, luminous, indisputable truth, when in fact it was often nothing more than a hodgepodge of hoary received ideas, she now thought with some animosity, pat opinions unthinkingly, unfeelingly parroted), and the campground at Warnemünde, where the camper they traditionally rented was in a way their second home, they liked to tell the children, whose happiness at going on vacation was heightened still further by the illusion that they were rich enough to own a summer house, even if she and Marko soon spent the days looking forward to evening, awaiting the aperitif hour, and then dinner, with the slight tension, the feigned, electric insouciance caused by those long hours of forced idleness on the windswept beach, and the crowds, the need to keep constant watch over the children, the feeling of absurdity that regularly ran through them when they caught themselves longing for the end of the holidays and the return to Berlin and to work and the coming of fall, when in fact they wanted no such thing, they wanted only an escape from the inertia and emptiness of Warnemünde.
And there they found themselves drinking to excess.
Early in the afternoon, when the children were napping in the camper and they themselves were sitting under the canvas awning, inattentively reading, often glancing up at the threatening skies (and what to do if it rains, if there’s no going to the beach?), their thoughts turned to alcohol, to the type of wine they would happily uncork when the day came to an end, and not infrequently, especially if the gray clouds appeared and the cold little wind of Warnemünde came up, one of them went off for a bottle and two glasses, on the pretext of acquainting themselves with a new varietal.
Back home in Berlin, they remembered Warnemünde with bewildered shame and faint terror.
They discussed it together and agreed that they’d drunk more than was sensible.
They scarcely recognized themselves when they thought of the people they’d turned into in Warnemünde.
Because could they now guarantee that they would have been able to make the proper decisions had something serious befallen one of the children, that they were in any state, even before evening, to keep a vigilant eye on the children in Warnemünde?
Was it not by sheer luck, far more than mindful attention to their responsibilities, that they hadn’t had to drive Annika or Daniel to the emergency room in Rostock, and if they had, would it not have been immediately apparent to all that they were drunk? That they were, both of them, unable to care for their children and deserved only one thing, in Warnemünde at least: the immediate removal of their children whom they nonetheless so desperately doted on?
What had happened in Warnemünde?
It would have been nice to think that the spirit of the place had exerted some force on their souls and secretly estranged them from their own nature, but she and Marko prided themselves on their unflinching realism.
And even if their memory of Warnemünde was vague and gap riddled, even if it sometimes seemed they never left that windy, dull-white beach, or perhaps precisely because blurred images were all they remembered of Warnemünde, they confessed to themselves that they’d spent their time tippling not because the spirit of the Baltic had refashioned their nature but out of weakness, out of boredom and laziness.
And this left them shocked, unhappy, concerned.
The thought that the children were now big enough to see a connection between what they might learn about alcoholism on television or at school and their parents’ behavior in Warnemünde deeply demoralized them.
Because all year long she and Marko strove to be ideal parents.
But the alcohol had clouded their memory, and now they couldn’t entirely recall what they’d said and done in Warnemünde, or the nature of their possible excesses in front of the children.
They fought back the urge to question them.
Nothing could be more foolish, they told themselves, nothing more inept, than forcing the children to remember upsetting details or even, if they’d noticed nothing, filling their heads with the idea that their parents hadn’t been quite themselves in Warnemün
de and were now feeling guilty about it.
They observed the children closely, watching for the word, the gesture, that would reveal a discomfort around their parents.
But the children seemed to harbor no unspoken thoughts on the subject of Warnemünde.
Eventually she and Marko forgot their concerns, forgot to reflect on the dissipations of Warnemünde, and the year went by, not without happy moments or sound reasons for joy, and when the summer holidays came back they innocently set off for Lüneburg and Warnemünde once again, and what happened to them there, what seemed inevitably to recur as soon as they found themselves in the dull, windy idleness of Warnemünde, came as a surprise, and they were angry with themselves for being surprised, for having been cowardly enough to drape themselves in their innocence and succumb once again to surprise.
That, their Warnemünde dissolution, happened three years in a row.
And so they’d decided to spend their holiday far from Europe, far from Lüneburg and Warnemünde, from Marko’s parents and the camper where the howling night wind often woke them with a start.
“They’re not going to be happy,” Marko had said, referring to Lüneburg.
Although he was smiling his little sly smile and raising his eyebrows, adopting a comical air, she sensed and understood his fear, because she felt it, too.
She put her arms around him, whispered that she could call his parents herself, if he liked, to let them know that they wouldn’t be coming to Lüneburg this year, but she was hoping he’d say no, so fearful was she of Marko’s parents and their opinion of her.
He was in her arms, trembling and tall, abandoned, hesitant.
And no doubt he understood the fear that, like him, she felt.
