by Marie Ndiaye
Then that fruitless wait at the baggage claim, the hours of irritation and fatigue when they’d so long looked forward to this moment, and having to deal with grumbling, indifferent employees whose bizarre English neither of them could understand, and that demeaning sense of ridiculousness she tried to fight off, all the while holding a whimpering Daniel whose sixty pounds gave her sharp pains in the back—nothing was forcing us to put ourselves through this, why did we ever get ourselves into this, and at such enormous expense, too, stupid, stupid.
And then, as she was putting her lips to Daniel’s hot, damp little cheek for a kiss, he raised his arm and slapped her.
Oh, nothing one couldn’t pretend not to notice, perhaps only a hungry and exhausted child’s erratic, unintentional gesture.
And yet, and yet.
She was sure Daniel knew just what he was doing—him, the gentlest, most loving little boy there ever was.
But she pretended not to have felt it, even as tears of surprise and dismay sprang up in her eyes.
When they’d finally reached the hotel, very late at night, with no other luggage than Ladivine’s bag, they were too tired to dwell on their disappointment at the shabbiness of the room and the inadequacy of their reception, the children’s beds having been forgotten.
For dinner they shared the half box of butter cookies in Ladivine’s purse, then they waited ages for the closemouthed man in slippers and a stained T-shirt who’d been assigned to bring in the folding beds, a task he performed with a sullen, resentful, proud air, as if, Ladivine thought, he’d been punished or reprimanded on their account.
Blankly, like a feeble old man, Marko watched him unfold the beds.
Much to Ladivine’s surprise, he made no move to help as the worker wrestled with the recalcitrant, rusting metal.
Because it was Marko’s habit, founded in discomfort and guilt, always to step forward and lend a hand, sometimes even to prevent any act whose aim was to serve him.
Marko couldn’t stand to see people working for him.
But now he sat motionless on the bed, his gaze distant and vaguely empty, watching the man toil away.
In the doorway, Ladivine pressed a few coins into the worker’s hand. He jiggled them in his open palm, sorted through them with his index finger, then dropped them wordlessly into his pocket.
She felt a surge of anger, though so brief that she couldn’t grasp its cause.
She was so rarely angry.
Like Clarisse Rivière, who was incapable of anger.
Clarisse Rivière had helped out the man who would end up murdering her; she’d given him money, sometimes large sums, sometimes just a bill or two for the shopping.
Did her killer display that same disdainful sneer as he dropped the money into his pocket? Did he look down on Clarisse Rivière for her generosity?
And why should she, Ladivine, Clarisse Rivière’s only child, have to hear such a person’s explanations and rationales?
Why should she have to hear every detail of what he’d done to that woman, Clarisse Rivière, who was once Ladivine’s mother?
“The trial will heal us,” Richard Rivière had said.
Ladivine came back into the room, exhausted, briefly furious again.
“Here we are,” she said tersely to Marko.
Then, more gently:
“Here we are at last.”
—
Was it the sun pouring into the room at dawn, was it a few hours of sleep, which always restores things to their proper proportions, was it simply the daytime, which, unlike night, makes every drama more modest, Ladivine didn’t know—but when they walked out of the hotel the next morning, after a copious, serviceable breakfast, she sensed that Marko and the children had recovered a little of their enthusiasm, and it was even becoming imaginable to think of the loss of their luggage as a piquant detail in the story they’d one day tell of their stay.
It later seemed to Ladivine that the dog wasn’t there for this first stroll.
She would never know for sure. It might have appeared without her knowing; it might even still have had the face and the look of a human being she would have no reason to distinguish from the rest of the crowd.
But she would always like to think it was looking after her from the very first day.
They got on a bus that would stop near the supermarket, where, they’d been told at the hotel, they would find clothes to buy.
Ladivine was deeply disturbed by Marko’s fragile air when her eyes landed on him in the bus and she realized she was seeing him, from a few yards away, as he appeared to strangers—a slender, pale man with a slightly lost look, a deeply temperate and vulnerable man whom any violence would find trusting and defenseless.
Annika and Daniel stood on either side of him, clutching his pockets.
But how, thought Ladivine, her heart aching, how could such a man ever hope to protect two little children from even the mildest aggression, and what about him fueled their illusion that such a father could be their rampart?
Really, what was it about that impressionable, overly sentimental man?
Oh, she loved them all, but not without torment.
Sometimes she yearned to run far away from them, to know nothing more, ever again, of their existence and so shed all responsibility for them, those three who so completely depended on her, so fragile where she was strong and hard.
But not so strong or so hard that she could shoulder such a heavy burden of love and demands—and yet that’s just what she did, so clearly she could, and it was in part thanks to her that her husband and children had so far led a happy life in which love and its demands were never questioned, in which love and its needs fell on their heads like a gentle spring rain, life giving, always welcome.
She never doubted that she was loved back by husband and children alike. She had no grounds to complain about any of them, no, she had nothing but perfectly justified contentment and pride.
So…? she wondered as she stood in the bus, clutching the aged, grimy, cracked leather handles, smelling the slightly fetid but comfortably familiar odor rising up from her exposed armpit, under the cotton of her T-shirt, unchanged for two days.
So why should she feel so weary, so beset, why this feeling of not being up to the task when she looked on those three trusting, beloved faces, which, even when as now they weren’t turned her way, seemed to be forever searching her face for lessons, advice, displays of tenderness, and guarantees for the future?
She was ashamed, telling herself that this man and these children demanded nothing they didn’t have every right to expect, that she gave them nothing but what it was only right that she give them, and that, this being how family life was, it was her duty to submit without fear or pointless regret, because after all nothing had forced her to marry or procreate.
Yes, she was sometimes ashamed of her fear and exhaustion, which she had in a sense chosen—and among all the countless possible sources of fear and exhaustion, were that lovable man and those delightful children not the least onerous?
She knew all that. But there were times when she wanted nothing more than to slip away, not so much disappear as withdraw, though without causing anyone the slightest twinge of grief.
Little Daniel was looking at her, slightly anxious.
Resetting her face, adopting the benevolently confident, lighthearted expression that comforted the children as nothing else could, she gave Daniel a wink. The boy’s features relaxed, reminding her how deeply Clarisse Rivière had loved that child, not more than Annika (Clarisse Rivière’s heart was too simple and too just to have a favorite), but more serenely, because passionate love for a little boy reminded her of nothing, whereas, she one day confided to Ladivine, her joy and exhilaration at Ladivine’s birth were so powerful that she couldn’t keep them within endurable limits and, as she put it, she came under a depression.
Nearly thirty years later, she still reproached herself for having, in the first weeks of Ladivine’s life, shown her
melancholy’s unsettling face.
And Ladivine, gazing on Daniel’s pretty, loving face, felt a stab of unquellable sorrow—never again would Clarisse Rivière stanch her remorse against that child’s cool, silken neck. Worse, Daniel might have crossed her mind as she poured out her blood in her silent, deserted house; she might even have tried to cry out her grandchildren’s names, in a gargle of blood and phlegm, and realized she would never see them again.
Why should that woman’s only child, Ladivine Rivière, run the risk of hearing her mother’s killer describe her last minutes?
Why should she have to endure that, on top of everything she’d already endured?
“The trial will heal us,” Richard Rivière had said.
But the only thing that could heal her, Ladivine, was protection from the horrific details.
Nor did she want to learn of that man’s difficult childhood, of what, as Richard Rivière had told her, shocked and almost moved in spite of himself by so many failures and miseries, had irresistibly driven him, as they would no doubt say at the trial, to bullying and murder.
She wanted to know none of that, convinced that her sorrow would be even deeper and without end, because she might conceivably pity the murderer were she shown that he was a victimized child.
How not to feel sorrow and pity for all tormented children who turned into lost men?
After he’d hurt her so deeply and unendingly, she had no desire to compound her pain by imagining some part of his own.
Whatever he might claim or imagine, Richard Rivière was already healed. But she, Clarisse Rivière’s daughter…
The bus braked abruptly. Ladivine’s shoulder bumped the chest of a heavily perspiring woman.
Between her breasts, half covered in bright-blue cloth, grew a few tightly curled, longish hairs, glued down by sweat.
Ladivine mumbled an apology.
Very tall and offhand, the woman looked at her closely, then smiled and said, in that brusque, rasping English Marko and Ladivine could scarcely understand without exceptional efforts of concentration:
“Wasn’t that a beautiful wedding? Magnificent party, don’t you think?”
“Excuse me?” Ladivine said after a pause.
She, too, was smiling, full of goodwill, her brow very slightly knitted.
“A beautiful wedding,” the woman said again. “Lots of money, but it was nice, well worth it. Pretty dress you had on, where did you buy it?”
Ladivine shrugged. She let her gaze drift past the woman, still smiling her polite, uninvolved smile.
The woman turned her back, and Ladivine sensed she’d been rude.
Her face turned red and hot, and she tumbled into a panicked despair, as always when she thought she’d hurt someone without knowing how or why.
What she wouldn’t have done in Berlin or Langon she did without a second thought in this packed, sweltering bus, full of people with calm, wide faces that she longed to see turn her way in friendship. She gently clasped the woman’s elbow and said:
“Forgive me, you’re right, it was a beautiful wedding. That dress, you know, I think I bought it in France.”
Swept along by an inspiration that at the time she thought must be sound, she added, her voice a little too eager even to her own ear:
“You’re talking about that yellow gingham dress, with the balloon sleeves and the wide belt that tied in back? Yes, yes, that’s right, I bought it in Bordeaux, at the Galeries Lafayette.”
Then she remembered that dress was among the things that had disappeared with the luggage. But little matter—if this hairy-breasted woman had seen her at a wedding, wearing a memorable dress, that was the only one it could be, the yellow gingham dress from Bordeaux, the nicest she owned, the most flattering to her complexion, and the one she would certainly have chosen for a ceremony of that sort.
“Oh, in France. So I won’t find one here,” the woman said simply.
And from her tone it almost seemed Ladivine herself had brought up this inane subject.
The supermarket was new, empty, and frigid, standing alone in a wasteland of vacant lots from which a clutch of apartment buildings seemed to have burst from the red earth through sheer force of will.
They showed no sign of being lived in, nor of work in progress—no tarps, no piled cinder blocks, no machines of any sort. Bits of trash dotted the uneven ground, rutted, hard, and dry: bottles, beer cans, torn cardboard boxes.
Ladivine noted that the four of them were the only ones getting off the bus, and that nothing marked the stop but a blue plastic barrel, toppled by the wind from the bus as it drove away.
Marko set it upright, his hands now red with dust.
To Ladivine’s great relief, the children were finding fun in this shopping trip beneath the fierce morning sun, in this deserted, sinister neighborhood not yet shaded by any trace of greenery.
They ran off down the faint path to the supermarket, all glass and blue glinting metal, and soon their legs were red and their sandals dirty and all at once Ladivine’s heart swelled with joy. Her children were happy, they were running in the dirt!
She thought nothing else mattered at this moment, she thought life was easy, straightforward, and good.
She took Marko’s hand, and he squeezed hers back, smiling.
“So that woman in the bus knew you?”
“She thought she recognized me, she was confusing me with somebody else,” Ladivine hurried to answer, suddenly uncomfortable but not knowing why.
Marko gave a little laugh and let go of her hand.
“Well, you’re right, you don’t have to tell me,” he cried, amused or pretending to be.
Then:
“I’ve seen several women who look like you since we came here.”
He pointed with one finger at a figure in pale blue, just emerged from the supermarket and heading toward an apartment building, pulling a cart behind her.
A voluminous cotton drape hid her body and hair. Ladivine could scarcely see her face from that distance.
Annika and Daniel were waiting patiently at the supermarket’s front door.
There was a dog standing guard, a large, muscular dog, chained to a ring sunk into the ground. It looked at them with its big, black, gentle eyes, and Ladivine was stunned to see herself in those dark pupils.
She was tempted to let them swallow her up and never come out again, imprisoned, untouchable.
How could Marko think she looked like a woman whose face he couldn’t see?
No, she had the eyes and the gaze of that dog scrutinizing the customers, and had Marko more closely studied the animal’s manner he would have reached out to pet it, perhaps moved by something he didn’t at first recognize but which he would soon see was Ladivine’s soul.
Later, she would be unable to say with any certainty that the dog at the supermarket and the dog unfailingly waiting outside the hotel were the same.
It was possible, it was probable. But she would never be sure.
Given the prices charged at the supermarket—the only one of its kind in the city, they’d been proudly assured at the hotel—there was no question of reconstituting the whole family’s summer wardrobe. Ladivine picked out a pair of shorts, two T-shirts, a cap, and a bathing suit for each of the children, and for herself a beige linen skirt with a matching blouse. The absurdly high prices gnawed at her.
She and Marko had budgeted twelve hundred euros in spending money for their three weeks in this place, and already these clothes had cost them almost three hundred.
She joined Marko as he was emerging from a dressing room, the menswear department’s sole customer.
She stifled an anxious little laugh.
“What have you found there, darling?”
He examined himself in the mirror, pleased at what he was seeing. His face had a closed, aggressive, brazen look she hadn’t seen before, and it immediately alarmed her.
Not that it wasn’t attractive, but only in the manner of a masculine type she found
slightly frightening, crude and confident in a way that nothing seemed to justify.
He was wearing an outfit composed of a long pink tunic with purple floral motifs and a pair of pants that came down just to the very top of his athletic shoes.
“Perfect for the climate,” he said. “And it suits me, don’t you think?”
She could only concur, at first reticent, almost hostile (like, she wondered, a dog baring its fangs because it doesn’t recognize its master?), and then fascinated, the longer she looked at him, by Marko’s undeniable beauty, his high waist, slender neck, and well-defined shoulders seeming to have found in that curiously feminine getup just what they needed to show themselves to their fullest advantage.
Never before had she seen Marko admire his own image, or take even the most meager interest in his reflection.
And here he was finding in that mirror a man who surprised and delighted him, and he made no attempt to hide his naïve pleasure at realizing he was that man—why should that bother her?
Was she afraid that, like Richard Rivière who in the prime of his life realized that nothing, neither law nor morality, obligated him to go on living alongside a woman for whom he would always feel a deep tenderness but whose peculiarities wearied and bored him, a Marko suddenly aware of his beauty could only end up abandoning her, Ladivine Rivière, stained forever by her mother’s blood pouring out in a provincial suburban house, streaming into the Berlin apartment, spattering their neighborhood’s sidewalks, sullying even the springtime sky?
But Richard Rivière and Marko Berger had nothing in common, save, perhaps, their love for her, Ladivine.
As for the obscenity of that murder, as for Ladivine’s feeling that, as that woman’s daughter, she’d been diminished, disgraced by the event’s squalid horror, she was sure no such thought would ever cross Marko’s mind.
Why should a new confidence suddenly make him want to abandon her?
“Yes, it’s perfect for you,” she said softly.
Leaving the store, she stopped before the chained dog.
