by Marie Ndiaye
A whimper escaped her as she walked under the railway bridge.
Not because of the roar of the train racing by overhead, but because she couldn’t inhale Droysenstrasse’s Maytime scent, richly perfumed with linden flowers, without immediately thinking she was once again smelling Clarisse Rivière’s blood, the innocent but pungent, stifling blood of her mother who didn’t know how to shield herself from malignancy, made suddenly strange and unknowable by her blood spattering the couch, the floor, the curtain—so much blood in so slight, so discreetly fleshly, a body!
And the smell of Clarisse Rivière’s blood in the air, mingling with Charlottenburg’s springtime perfumes, the Langon calamity slowly flooding the faraway, unsullied heart of Berlin, left her quivering in terror—because then what escape could there be?
“The trial will heal us,” Richard Rivière had told her one day.
But would the trial stem the tide of blood, stop it befouling the quiet streets of western Berlin where she and Marko had chosen to live, prudently distancing themselves from both Lüneburg’s virtuous judgments and Langon’s silent, irreparable sadness?
She, Ladivine, Clarisse Rivière’s daughter, had deliberately chosen to turn away from that sadness rather than shoulder her share, and the worst had then happened.
Tears clouded her vision.
But now the smell was gone, the smell of linden and blood, replaced by the faint odor of stale cooking oil borne on the breeze to Stuttgarter Platz, when the weather was fair, from the french-fry stand on Kaiser-Friedrich-Strasse.
She wiped her eyes with her bare arm, skirted the little park where she no longer took Daniel and Annika to play.
How many long, even tedious hours had she spent there, on this bench or that, and yet, and although she felt no desire to relive those days of stiff limbs and backaches, the sight of children at play in that same sandbox always brought a pang to her heart.
That’s all over now, melancholy’s insinuating voice whispered in her ear, they’ll never be little again; that’s over for you.
But, she objected, half aloud, I don’t miss it.
All the same, she looked away from the bustling toddlers in the park and the specter of her carefree, happy, irreproachable self (no one having yet shed Clarisse Rivière’s blood) sitting on a bench watching over her children and letting her thoughts drift unafraid, like the two mild, dreamy-looking women she saw there, whose mothers’ blood no one had spilled in the tranquillity of a provincial house.
Yes, it hurt her to look at them.
That was over for her, the simple life she led in those days, and her children’s first years would forever meld in her memory with the time when Clarisse Rivière was still alive, even if she silently disapproved of what her mother was doing with that life, even if any mention of her mother’s life filled her with apprehension and unease.
Oh, but she’d never secretly wished for an end to that life, only to the way Clarisse Rivière was living it since her husband left, a way not so much chosen as fallen prey to.
And now that the children were too big to take to the park, it was as if they’d been banished from the enchanted wood by Clarisse Rivière’s death itself, as though the awful wave of blood had driven them out, her and the children, stranding them, forever guilty and stained, in the flower-and-blood-scented street.
She stopped by the park’s entrance, laid her hand on the gate.
Her palm knew the feel of the flaking paint, the warmth of the slightly sticky metal, for she’d so often pushed that gate open, sometimes limply cursing the hot sun or the sameness of those afternoons.
She adjusted the strap on her sandal.
My heel’s so dry, she thought, that’s no good for summery shoes.
And again her eyes filled with tears.
She’d had the very same thought about Clarisse Rivière during her last visit to Berlin, when Ladivine, walking behind, spotted her calloused heels, incongruously revealed by elegant sandals with multiple gilded straps.
She was unsettled and moved by that sight, like the unveiling of something slightly sad in her mother’s private existence, but it also irritated her a little, the contrast between those delicate shoes and those yellowed, cracked heels seeming to show once again that Clarisse Rivière could never do anything right.
She hadn’t exactly thought, If you’re going to parade around in such flashy, probably expensive sandals, you should learn to take care of your feet.
She didn’t have it in her to express such a thought, so sharply phrased, not even to herself.
Sympathy and shamefaced devotion often tamped down her bursts of annoyance with Clarisse Rivière.
But she couldn’t help seeing her mother’s rough heels, and now, as she pulled up her own sandal strap, she recalled the many times she’d been infuriated by some display of Clarisse Rivière’s careless or absurdly trusting nature, when, confident of her judgment, her reason, Ladivine had taken cover behind disapproval, forbidding herself to see that no fault could be found with Clarisse Rivière, that she could only be watched over, because, like a cat, like a bird, Clarisse Rivière lacked all discernment.
Had she been willing to see that, Clarisse Rivière would no doubt still be alive, she told herself. Had she only been willing.
She went on past the park, started down the sidewalk overlooked by the tracks of the S-Bahn.
Stuttgarter Platz’s pickup bars were still closed at this slow, vacant afternoon hour, but a woman was heading into the Panky, a woman Ladivine knew, having regularly crossed paths with her for years, and she gave her a wave, and that woman was more or less Clarisse Rivière’s age when she died, and her body was similarly long limbed, taut, compact, but her hard, jaded, impassive face, the set of her lips, not bitter but tired and scornful, were nothing like Clarisse Rivière’s, who’d kept her full, gentle features, almost untouched by time, well into middle age.
The woman’s only reply was a quick twitch of the lips, making a rudimentary “Hello” while an almost irritated and untrusting look crossed her face, as if, though long used to seeing Ladivine around the neighborhood, she suspected her of unspoken judgments and didn’t think her greeting sincere.
Does she think I’m only saying hello because I know she works in that bar and don’t want her to get the idea I look down on her? Ladivine asked herself.
But I say hello to everyone I run into around here. Although, oh.
She also knew that by raising one hand in the sunshine and waving it at that aging woman’s coldly disenchanted face, that woman who, Ladivine had learned, got the evening off to a start at the Panky by dancing on a table (in gold sandals, her cracked gray heels showing beneath the thin straps?), she knew she was greeting an image of herself, Ladivine Rivière, as she could easily have become.
For her upbringing by Richard and Clarisse Rivière had done nothing to protect her from a life of that kind.
They’d raised their only child Ladivine in accordance with a neutral morality, or unstable, or infinitely relative.
That was their outlook on life, so utterly nonjudgmental that Ladivine learned as a child to find it deeply indecent to express a firm opinion on anything at all, or simply to think it, even if you would never speak it aloud, to consider the only honorable attitude an unwavering tolerance for every aspect of the private life and public behavior of all those around us.
Never could Ladivine, caught up in girlish ardor and sometimes forgetting the house rules, rage against some act perpetrated on the playground without Richard Rivière or Clarisse Rivière, so alike in this way that she could rarely remember which one had spoken, asking benignly, almost smilingly reproachful: “But, little girl, who are you to judge?”
Very unkind things were sometimes done in that crowd of children, words were sometimes spoken with the clear intention of doing damage or hurting feelings, and sometimes those acts or words were Ladivine’s, and she told her parents of them without hiding their source, and although she knew how they saw thin
gs, she was always a little surprised, confused, at the way they shrugged their shoulders and vaguely ascribed these things she found so appalling to the unchanging nature of the human race, to the necessarily legitimate reasons (necessarily because all of them were) motivating this or that person or even their own daughter Ladivine, who shouldn’t try to be perfect.
Richard Rivière and Clarisse Rivière never forgave: they never saw any wrong.
Especially Clarisse Rivière, blind to all misdeed, committing none herself.
Once she was a teenager, Ladivine stopped telling them what went on at school, knowing it would bring her no guidance, no lessons in right and wrong, and instinctively fearing, as she labored to establish the precepts of her personal morality, that in her parents’ infinite indulgence she might lose her way forever.
Then, when she started at the lycée, with her sexual awakening and her wonderment at the purity of her fresh, young body, with the fascinated discovery that a pretty girl’s fresh, young body is a most precious currency, she gradually forgot the unbending principles of propriety and frugality that her ardent, virtuous prepubescence had convinced her were necessary.
She soon made a name for herself, in the little world of Langon’s upper-middle class, as a sort of well-bred call girl, driven on Saturday evenings to a restaurant and a hotel in Bordeaux by divorced shopkeepers or unmarried bank clerks, who dropped her off at her door Sunday morning in their white or gunmetal-gray minivans, one or two child’s car seats sometimes in the back.
They honked goodbye as they drove off, and, her key in the lock, she turned around to blow them a kiss.
She didn’t lie to her parents. She didn’t tell them she was babysitting or spending the night at a friend’s.
She said:
“I’m going out with a guy I know.”
She showed them the money she got, and while she sometimes saw Richard Rivière’s alert, cheerful eyes briefly dimmed by a faint veil of discomfort and hesitation, Clarisse Rivière never intimated that she found anything untoward about someone paying her daughter to go to bed with him.
And her daughter Ladivine was convinced that Clarisse Rivière sincerely saw no harm in it, that she was incapable of judging such a thing, because that was how it was, and whatever was had to be accepted.
Clarisse Rivière’s eyes widened in admiring surprise at the fifty-franc notes Ladivine casually pulled from her little purse, as if Ladivine had won them in the lottery or found them on the sidewalk, not that she pretended to believe this, but because to her mind it was much the same—if her daughter Ladivine was earning some pocket money and seemed to enjoy her work, little matter that it was by prostituting her fresh, young body, the body of a beautiful, vigorous girl.
And Ladivine did enjoy her work, on the whole.
But she couldn’t shake off a dark unease when she caught sight of a loving young couple, boys and girls her age pressed close together, as if seeking to erase the tiniest gap between their two bodies, and, surprised and unsettled, reflected that they were doing all this for free, and her disquiet expressed itself at home in sudden bursts of unfocused hostility stoically endured by Richard and Clarisse Rivière, who were unused to conflict, who neither enjoyed it nor knew how to quell it.
Had she found the words, Ladivine would have screamed at them:
I never wanted this, I never wanted my first time to be with a paying customer! That’s not what I wanted at all!
Also holding her back was the slightly desperate devotion she felt for her parents, fervent but worn and exhausted, which compelled her to protect them from her own attacks.
Would Clarisse Rivière not have answered, with her tremulous, hesitant little smile:
But you said they were just guys, a girl can have sex with all kinds of guys nowadays, isn’t that right?
She almost never spent the money. She stuffed the bills into an old pair of panty hose and shoved it under her bed, nothing more.
Besides, Richard and Clarisse Rivière gave her money and unquestioningly bought her anything she might need.
And yet she went on making appointments with her regulars, meeting them at their place after her parents bought her a scooter, spending nights in suburban houses not unlike her own, with their beige stucco exteriors and interlocking tile roofs, in beds exactly like her parents’, the same model finished in light or dark laminate, and her bare feet trod the same shining, hard floor tiles as at home, white or gray, and the various rooms all looked alike, the little kitchen off the entryway with its fiberboard cabinets, the living/dining room with its puffy leather couch, its oversize armchairs, its giant TV screen, then the hallway to the bedrooms, their square windows veiled by sheer curtains, their orange or yellow imitation color-wash wallpaper.
Never, with those men she knew well, who treated her respectfully, often even thoughtfully, did she have any contact of the sort she saw among the girls and boys in her high school, never did she feel the urge to press herself urgently to them, nor they to her.
She shared their beds with no particular pleasure, but no disgust either.
Riding home on her scooter in the dark or the first light of morning, weary, tired of life, and humiliated by the very absurdity of that sadness, since nothing was forcing her to do what she did, she thought furiously of Richard and Clarisse Rivière peacefully asleep in their bed, hating them fiercely, briefly, for the absolute freedom they’d given her and the high opinion they would always have of her.
The Panky’s heavy steel door opened to let in the woman just as Ladivine walked by.
And the darkness inside, thick with the odor of old cigarettes, stale beer, and filthy carpeting, seemed to take hold of the woman and snatch her away from the sunny world of the street, where the odor of french fries, now stronger, seemed the very essence of innocent freedom.
Ladivine unconsciously picked up her pace, anxious to put the grimy façade of the Panky behind her, and the Blue Hot farther on, presided over with icy indifference by women who could have been her, Ladivine Rivière, since her parents had never cautioned her against anything and would have treated her to their blind, cheerful visits and unconditional love had she ended up turning tricks in one of these very bars.
She crossed Kaiser-Friedrich-Strasse, feeling the sun-baked asphalt stick to the soles of her sandals.
Her chest was heavy with a sudden flood of affection.
How, in spite of everything, how she loved the life she’d made for herself in Berlin, how afraid she was, sometimes, of losing it, out of carelessness or failure to remember what could have been!
She realized that Germany had rescued her from Langon, and that Marko, Annika, Daniel, even the fearsome Bergers of Lüneburg, with their unyielding morality, had extricated her from the flat, dull-witted stupor that Richard and Clarisse Rivière were letting her founder in.
And so she could look on the sooty façades of certain Kaiserstrasse buildings, still pockmarked with bullet holes; in the winter she could endure the long weeks of gray skies and cold weather, the dirty snow; she could even find a melancholy pleasure in the feeling of exile and aloneness when she happened onto an image of the eternal, radiant French countryside on television (and saw herself and her parents pedaling down a sunlit road lined with acacias or plane trees); she could look on the irremediable ugliness of neighborhoods cheaply rebuilt fifty years earlier and in spite of it all feel deeply grateful to be living there, beneath that leaden sky, in that architectural chaos, that absence of sweetness and harmony, she who came from a region where a gentle clemency suffuses all things.
Although, although. Deeply ashamed, she remembered their Warnemünde lapses.
Wasn’t it the summer after Clarisse Rivière died that all that started up?
She turned onto Wilmersdorfer Strasse, headed for Karstadt.
Still no crowd in the pedestrian street, which in two or three hours would fill with a parade of families whom Ladivine, remembering Langon’s one-street business district, always thought
oddly provincial in their serene, ambling gait—but now a man had locked eyes with her, and now, as a game, she was returning his stare, a quiet smile on her lips, and the man’s typically German air, she mused, her mood brightening, made that little advance all the more special.
Because people rarely made passes in the streets of Berlin, more rarely even than in Langon, where it was largely the same people crossing paths, day in and day out.
Their elbows brushed and she looked away, her lips very slightly pinched, signaling that the game was over.
She immediately confessed to herself, with unusual candor—her habit was to sidestep upsetting thoughts or shove them away with a violent mental thrust—she confessed to herself, then, as she turned toward Karstadt’s front door, that she was exceedingly grateful to men such as this, genteel, not the womanizing type, who paid her the homage of an interested and even relishing glance, who met her own surprised or playful gaze with the look of a wistful and elegant Why not?
Once a shapely young girl, though not so tall, not so slender as Clarisse Rivière (how she used to envy her mother’s fine bones, willowy figure, and slim legs, she who seemed stuck to the ground by a more powerful gravity, thanks to the ungainliness of her slightly thick ankles and short calves), she’d become a woman of some heft, with a round, full face that made her eyes, mouth, and nose seem almost incongruously delicate, as if out of proportion.
That was less apparent, she thought, when she was young, since she was thinner, her face narrower.
But now that she’d done some living, as Clarisse Rivière sweetly put it, and filled out a bit, her little mouth and nose looked like they’d been stolen from some other woman and glued onto her broad face as a joke.
Oh no, she took no pride in her physique, even as she looked on such questions with a scornful detachment, a disdain unfeigned even if belatedly acquired, at the cost of great struggles against long-standing, naïve dreams of breathtaking beauty or simply piquant Parisian charm—she would have loved to be a mere slip of a girl, here in Berlin, as svelte as she was distinguished, refined and sporty, her glamorous French accent the ideal finishing touch.
