Ladivine

by Marie Ndiaye

  Which is why, though resigned to being just barely pretty, to being a very ordinary woman whose careful attention to her clothes, to the cut and color of her hair—shoulder length, warm brown, and wavy—compensated respectably for her homeliness, she was still moved and surprised when, like that man, someone caressed her face with a gaze full of a longing to know her, to touch her.

  But she accepted that there was nothing special about her; she accepted it now, without heartache.

  When, long ago, she stripped off her clothes before the men who were paying her, she always took care to conceal the parts of her body she found unlovely—her ankles, her knees, even her stomach, which she thought bulged more than it should.

  At the time she saw those physical flaws as something like moral failings and thought she could only be despised for not being magnificent.

  Today she felt no shame at those imperfections.

  She even learned to show them off, when summer came, like inventive, slightly quirky accessories she’d chosen precisely for their novelty, and if her knees, which she’d always found pudgy, showed beneath the hem of the dress she was wearing that afternoon, a dark-pink cotton swing dress with two big buttons fastening the straps, it was to suggest that she was as happy with those knees as she was with her curving, golden shoulders, that her shoulders complemented her knees in a harmony both subtle and bold, that this was just how it was supposed to be, that she wasn’t, for instance, supposed to be graced with the shapely, light, dimpled knees of Clarisse Rivière.

  And so she made her way through the streets, not particularly tall but standing very straight, poised on her stout legs, mutely proclaiming: Am I not, all in all, a fine-looking woman?

  She pushed open Karstadt’s glass door and headed straight for the timepiece department.

  She immediately spotted Marko’s tall silhouette. With nothing to do at this hour, he’d risen from the uncomfortable chair where he spent most of his day, repairing watches or, more often, changing their batteries, and now, on his feet behind the counter, he was staring into space, hands in his pockets, with his usual gentle and serious air, which made him seem lost in profound meditation when he was only daydreaming, not a thought in his head.

  She kept her eyes on him as she walked forward, surprised to feel how much she loved him.

  Sometimes she feared she was emotionally cold or numbed, and excessively hardened.

  But she had only to glimpse Marko or the children in their own distinctive poses, or even simply remember those poses, to feel her love for them throbbing inside her, though she now knew such emotions were not without danger, too easily leading her into similarly fond memories of Clarisse Rivière (that way she had of sticking her lower lip out so far that it almost completely covered the other when she had to read something complicated!).

  And thinking of Clarisse Rivière was a very hard thing for her.

  She could, fleetingly, imagine the scene of the murder and Clarisse Rivière’s blood, or perhaps the lawyers and the upcoming trial, but remembering the eloquent details of Clarisse Rivière’s personality drowned her in sorrow.

  Now that she’d lost him, the memory of Richard Rivière was scarcely less painful.

  Would he, she wondered, say that of his daughter Ladivine, that he’d lost her?

  She had no answer. She only knew that she’d forever distanced herself from Richard Rivière not because he’d gone off to embark on a mysterious new life but because, left to her own devices and the hostile world through both of their faults, Clarisse Rivière had been bled dry in her own living room, her throat slashed like a poor quivering rabbit.

  And Ladivine knew she and her father were guilty, but Richard Rivière had shown that he didn’t agree.

  Because he could speak of the events and the trial with no hitch in his voice and no faltering in his gaze, because he could complain of the slow workings of justice and curse the accused; he could think of that man, speak his name, if only with horror and loathing.

  Healthily, he could feel horror and loathing, he could say “that monster” as thousands of readers all across the country must surely have done when Clarisse Rivière’s story, and photographs of her face, her smiling, gullible face, open, modest, and charming, had appeared in the papers with Richard Rivière’s aid, for, raging, distraught, he’d handed over those photos of the wife he’d abandoned, the woman he’d offered up to be preyed on.

  He could, in those same papers, proclaim his desire for vengeance.

  His desire to see the monster spend the rest of his life behind bars.

  He could be effusive and sincere; sometimes he could even feel the tears coming afresh to his eyes when a reporter asked what he’d felt on hearing the awful news.

  This was what convinced Ladivine that Richard Rivière thought himself blameless, that no other possibility ever entered his mind, since he was clearly neither pretending nor lying nor exaggerating when he did these things.

  He was himself, sensitive and open, a touch calculating, but never cynically.

  Whereas Ladivine couldn’t bring herself to speak Clarisse Rivière’s name, or the man’s, or the month and the day it all happened.

  Whenever she thought of the months of the year, the days of the week, a blur blotted out the month and the day she could no longer speak of.

  And if her eye lit on the name Clarisse in a book or an article, her breath came quicker, and she moaned silently to herself.

  As for the man, he inspired in her a sacred terror.

  She’d once dreamed she was kneeling before him, or before a vague form that was unmistakably him, offering her throat to be slashed.

  She couldn’t vent her rage at that man, couldn’t picture him or imagine any real life he might lead, could call down no curse on him.

  She could only tremble in terror and incomprehension.

  By that act, by the murder of Clarisse Rivière, that man had entered Ladivine’s life and emotions, he’d taken root, and she could only submit to it, like, she sometimes told herself, an unwanted pregnancy discovered too late to abort.

  Sometimes she felt that man’s violent spirit kicking inside her, leaving her nauseated and faint.

  Whereas, she sensed, Richard Rivière could think of it all like some horrible news story that curiously just happened to involve him.

  And when he wasn’t thinking about it, it didn’t upset him. His life went on.

  How she resented that, how easily he’d got off!

  She waved to snap Marko out of his daydream before she reached his counter.

  She didn’t like to surprise him at work. Caught idling, even without a customer in sight, he couldn’t hold back an expression of childish shame, as if fearing he’d misbehaved, and that pained her and made her vaguely indignant.

  The fact that this wasn’t Marko’s place, that he was talented and hardworking and perhaps brilliant enough to get through the veterinary studies he once wanted to pursue, was, for as long as she’d known him, so obvious that it saddened her to see him trapped behind a counter in a department store, with his gentle, penetrating gaze and too few occasions to make use of his intelligence.

  But that he had, on top of that, acquired the reflexes of a humble employee, wary of a dressing-down from his boss, and even afraid of him, though at home he mocked that unpleasant man’s dull-wittedness and pretension, that tormented Ladivine with pity for Marko and anger at the elder Bergers, who’d dissuaded their son from going on with his studies, wanting to see him settled and independent as quickly as possible.

  Marko never complained. He was both too proud and too naturally unpresumptuous to dare speak of his situation as anything but a privilege, and even a blessing, having as he did a job not far from home and a job at which, he claimed, though she didn’t believe him, he was almost never bored.

  Oh no, how could she believe such a thing?

  And was he right, she often wondered, to give in like this, to so readily adapt to something so unsuited to him, was it w
isdom or weakness, admirable humility or mere passivity?

  She didn’t know. She was sure of one thing only: whether he admitted it or not, working at Karstadt was a sacrifice Marko had made, and how great a sacrifice she alone knew.

  He spotted her, surprised.

  She’d put on a broad smile to reassure him, so he wouldn’t think something important or terrible had happened, since it was unlike her to come see him at the store.

  Relieved, he smiled back at her, with the shy smile that always gave him a touching, childlike air.

  She loved everything that made Marko who he was, a German she’d known for some ten years, who’d become her husband and the father of her children, for all time and to her great surprise, so utterly did Germany and its people seem, back in her native Gironde, to belong to a distant and exotic world, inspiring too much indifference to leave room for prejudice but at the same time so foreign that no one would ever imagine living there without a dismissive little snort.

  And yet this was how it was, she’d bound her existence to that of a German—and the very word still rang in her perplexed ears with the slightly quaint charm of a mystery into which she’d never been initiated.

  She loved Marko, and he was German—what did that mean, and wasn’t it odd!

  How that word separated him from her, however delightfully!

  She’d long noted certain habits of his, rooted in his upbringing, different from hers—she knew their tastes in food didn’t always concur, not having loved the same dishes as children—but above all she felt everything that was unknowable in Marko’s heart, in the depths of his inscrutable, simple self, which sometimes surfaced in a glance whose intention she couldn’t decipher, and she sensed, moved, that what it expressed was, more than anything, that he was German.

  Privately, she called that the Secret of Marko, though she knew he had no idea he was inhabited by a secret and couldn’t possibly care less about being German.

  And yet he was—how odd!

  She leaned over the counter and gave him a quick hug.

  He patted her back, a little embarrassed, his pale eyes looking around to be sure no one had seen. Then he pushed up his heavy-framed glasses.

  He was a thin man, tall and bony, who always stood with his weight on one leg, arms crossed and hips forward, in a vaguely feminine pose.

  He had a bass voice, and sang in the Karstadt employee choir.

  “I talked to Richard, he told me where we should go.”

  Marko’s faintly anxious face brightened immediately, not so much, perhaps, because he was happy and relieved to see the matter of their destination decided as because he was thrilled at this confirmation of his long-held, ecstatically favorable opinion of Richard Rivière’s almost superhuman sagacity.

  And all at once he looked so young, his healthy light-chestnut forelock sweeping untamed over his thick lenses, his flat torso beneath his short-sleeved shirt, even, she thought, the way his long waist plunged into his slightly drooping jeans, like a flower’s strong, endless stem bowed ever so slightly against the lip of the vase, still so youthful in his obliviousness to his own gangly charm that it pained Ladivine’s heart and suddenly, though their ages were the same, made her feel much older, she who had always worried so about her appearance.

  She whispered the name of the country Richard Rivière had suggested.

  “He has friends there, apparently. People he sold a car to.”

  “We’d never have thought of that,” Marko cried, “but…Oh yes, it’s perfect!”

  But would he not have applauded any suggestion made by Richard Rivière, that man he’d never met?

  His notion of Richard Rivière’s tragedy, the murder of his ex-wife, was vastly inflated, Ladivine realized uncomfortably, and Richard Rivière felt nothing with the searing intensity Marko imagined; Richard Rivière was in no way the heroic, shattered man dreamed up with a certain self-indulgence and perhaps a long-unmet need for someone to admire by a Marko who himself had been deeply shocked by Clarisse Rivière’s death.

  The blood rushed to Marko’s thin face. Dreamily, leaning against the counter on one hip, he studied the cheap jewelry displayed across the aisle and, not looking at Ladivine, murmured:

  “Who knows? Maybe we’ll decide to stay?”

  A noncommittal snicker escaped her, slightly cross and disapproving, and she immediately chided herself.

  Because she’d noted that habit of hers. She was quick to silence any thought of flight with a sarcastic remark, a prosaic appeal to reason, and yet she hated that attitude, which she thought an envious person’s reflex.

  She glanced at her watch.

  Marko was smiling into space, eyelids fluttering.

  Ladivine very clearly felt herself walking away from the counter, leaving the store, and emerging into the sunlit street, because it was well past time she was on her way.

  And yet she was still there, one arm resting on Marko’s counter, her legs, whose stoutness and damp nudity she could feel beneath her dress, seemingly unable to do as she asked.

  Not knowing what she was about to say, she stammered:

  “Yes…maybe we’ll stay…”

  And she felt as if she was placing a terrible curse on herself.

  And what about Marko? What would become of him, so ill equipped to protect himself?

  And the children?

  Who would come running to protect them, and how to be sure they wouldn’t wander off, alone and unthinking, on paths unknown to their parents?

  Was it really a good idea to listen to Richard Rivière?

  He’d already shown that he could unwittingly sow desolation all around him, yes, even as he doled out nothing but love and tenderness—yes, Ladivine knew, he went on making long, frequent phone calls to Clarisse Rivière after he went away, so that even though he’d left her no one could accuse him of abandoning her, certainly not, and had in fact enveloped her from afar in a solicitude that, Clarisse Rivière told Ladivine with pitiful pride, few long-gone spouses ever displayed, yes, to be sure, that’s how Richard Rivière was, generous with his attentions and overflowing with love, none of which had prevented him from delivering his wife into the hands of brutality, of blind, fatal chance.

  Suppose that with this advice Richard Rivière was doing misery’s bidding?

  Suppose that deep down what Richard Rivière wanted was to keep her away from the trial?

  But one thing at least was beyond question, which was that she herself wanted nothing more than to be kept away from the trial, and Richard Rivière must have seen it.

  With great effort and a quiet suction-cup sound, she unstuck her legs.

  Now she was walking up Wilmersdorfer Strasse toward Otto-Suhr-Allee, only vaguely glancing at the bazaars, their cheap wares cheerily spilling out onto the sidewalk.

  Oh look, Jenny’s Eis has closed down.

  Storewide discounts at Heimwerker.

  The water rippling over the huge, polished stone balls recently installed as an ornament for the pedestrian street, a sort of Zen fountain, sluiced toward her feet with its flotsam of cigarette butts and beer-can tabs.

  She knew every shop, every sign, and nearly every one was connected to some moment of her life in this neighborhood, from when she’d recently met Marko and they used to come for a kebab or a box of Asian noodles that they ate on a Pestalozzistrasse bench, to the time she’d gone into that pharmacy on the corner and asked for a pregnancy test, to that December when she took the children to watch the Christmas market being set up and eat grilled sausages and drink not-very-good hot wine or cream punch, and that graceless Wilmersdorfer Strasse with its provincial air and its reminders of Langon was so dear to her heart that, though Marko had often found less-expensive apartments in livelier neighborhoods of Berlin, she’d always refused to move away from Charlottenburg.

  Dear old Charlottenburg—her attachment to the place had at least something to do with the charming name and the equally enchanting and desirable figure of Sophie Cha
rlotte in her château, her oval face, pale complexion, and abundant hair reminding her of Clarisse Rivière.

  But didn’t every woman who died too young remind her of Clarisse Rivière?

  Every woman who died tragically, leaving behind a little crowd of inconsolable, eternally guilty people, and wasn’t Clarisse Rivière herself, in her own humble way, a lonely queen in her oversize house?

  Dear old Charlottenburg, unfashionable, sleepy—how she loved it!

  Even the awful, morbid Rathaus she was now nearing, where she held her French courses four times a week, even that grim edifice, with its blackened walls, its outsize, graceless proportions, its overblown majesty, ridiculous but intimidating, even that ugly town hall whose dark-green, too-high-ceilinged hallways, she couldn’t help thinking, had seen their share of terrified, unknowingly doomed people pass by, she’d learned to love even that, to feel at home even there.

  She climbed to the top floor, walked toward the room used for French classes, a brown door, sea-green walls.

  A few of her students were already waiting inside.

  Knowing the answer, she asked:

  “Who let you in?”

  “Madame Sargent,” one answered.

  She looked at her watch to make sure she wasn’t late—oh, two minutes at most.

  Sargent, the other French teacher, a native of Caen, always watched for Ladivine’s students and unlocked the door for them early, not so they wouldn’t have to stand in the hallway but simply, thought Ladivine, to plant the idea in their heads that Ladivine Rivière was never on time.

  Why on earth did Sargent not like her? Ladivine wondered, troubled.

  It couldn’t be rivalry.

  Ladivine’s students were in their first year of French, Sargent’s in their second and third.

  But Sargent didn’t like her, and subtly strove to undermine her. Why should that be?

  Ladivine couldn’t understand it.

  To her shame, she also recalled that when she first came to the Volkshochschule, a few years before, she did all she could to ingratiate herself with Sargent, who’d been teaching there for years and intimidated her with her authority, her severe poise, her adamant slenderness.