Ladivine

by Marie Ndiaye

  Marko and the children had passed by without seeming to notice it, and now they were walking on to the bus stop, cheerful and happy in their new clothes, as proud as if they’d put in a remarkable performance in some contest, earning unhoped-for honors and discovering unexpected but incontrovertible reasons to be pleased with themselves.

  The dog raised its big, matted head toward her.

  Fearing vermin, she stayed her outstretched hand.

  She looked deep into the quietly doleful, quietly imploring gaze, and that docile animal’s humanity and unconditional goodness filled her eyes with tears, she yearned to be it, and realized that this would come naturally and in its own time, not, as it had for Clarisse Rivière, adrift on a life that had lost all direction and coherence, at the detestable whim of a man bent on avenging who knows what wretched childhood.

  No animal had stared into Clarisse Rivière’s dying eyes with its friendly, compassionate gaze.

  She might perhaps have glimpsed the crazed eyes of the man she’d taken in, the man she’d rescued, who killed her not like a dog but like the vacant woman she’d become after Richard Rivière went away, easily manipulated and perhaps, perhaps, in her own way, begging for the knife, the attack, begging to lose herself and be done with it.

  It was a long wait for the bus by the blue plastic barrel in the blazing sun.

  Even though Daniel and Annika had their new visored caps shading them, one red, the other green, Marko worried aloud that they might be in danger of sunstroke.

  Ladivine felt the same fear, but she was irritated with Marko for mentioning it in front of the children. Daniel awoke from a daydream and immediately began to whine, while Annika groaned that she was dreadfully hot and it was too much to bear.

  Ladivine then noticed that Marko seemed in a bad way. His scarlet face was dripping with sweat, his glasses had slipped almost to the end of his nose, and he seemed too exhausted to push them back up.

  She herself had never felt better, her mind clear and alert. Her cheeks were scarcely damp.

  But she wondered how they would fill the many days to come in this country with nothing to see, and the tediousness of vacations, shot through with impatience, regret, almost despair, appeared to her in all its bleak truth, even more worrisome here, where they were on their own to come up with activities and distractions, than in Warnemünde, where the boredom was familiar, orderly, mapped out in advance.

  She and Marko had thought that, once free of Lüneburg and Warnemünde, they would have only to be—but that was impossible with the children, they also had to do, and how could Marko, more sensitive than she to the rigors of the climate, to the little ordeals each day holds for a tourist, be expected to find in this holiday something preferable to inexpensive, trouble-free boredom on a windy Warnemünde beach?

  His new outfit, his delighted discovery of his own comeliness, none of that seemed like enough, she reflected, to convince him he was something other at heart than the man with the crushed ambitions who sold watches at the Wilmersdorfer Strasse Karstadt.

  How she dreamed, sometimes, of being alone in the world! No weight on her back, no family or parents at all!

  Obligated nonetheless to protect them all from a potentially jealous fate, she took a step toward Daniel, enfolded him in her arms, kissed his damp forehead, then turned and hugged Annika, who stiffened a little, with all the proud impassivity of her eight years.

  This battle between love for her children and fevered longing for aloneness had been going on in her only since Clarisse Rivière’s murder—why should that be?

  They climbed aboard a packed bus and rode back downtown. A thick fog dimmed the sunlight, the sky now gray but the heat still every bit as stifling.

  They ate slices of pizza standing up across from the bus stop, then set out to tour the neighborhood, entrusting their route to the recommendations, at once enthusiastic and vague, of the one guide to this city they’d found in Berlin, which as it turned out described, and seemed to know, nothing of what they saw before them, detailing only what clearly no longer existed, or never had, evoking both an ambience of decadent prosperity and a quaintly carefree indigence when they could see only a very contemporary poverty, all plastic and sheet metal, surmounted by satellite dishes, and an apathy almost wholly without spirit, smiles, or hope, which seemed to leave Marko gloomier on every corner, not so much, she told herself, because he’d naïvely conjured up an illusory image of a city that was in reality cold, unmysterious, threadbare, as because, an insignificant intruder in this hard, closed place, he was wondering why he’d come, how he’d ever hoped he might find himself encountering a different, more complete man who would nonetheless, fantastically, be him, Marko Berger.

  Or rather, she thought, studying Marko’s cringing face, the face of the man she so loved, whom she couldn’t stand to see frightened or sad, because such narcissistic hopes seemed obscene in these destitute streets.

  Because no one had murdered Marko’s mother in her Lüneburg house, no one had punctured his mother’s body to set her blood flowing to distant Charlottenburg, forever reddening the sidewalk’s paving stones, the blooms on the lindens.

  Whereas she, Ladivine Rivière, had earned the right to want anything at all—hadn’t she? she thought, feeling her face going dry in the dusty, baking heat.

  Given all she’d been through, what self-centered wish of hers could ever be thought indecent? She could only be pitied, for the rest of her life.

  Your poor mother, people said to her, afterward, in Langon.

  Oh yes, poor, poor Clarisse Rivière, and poor Ladivine, having to deal with all that.

  Which is why she felt no inhibition, but rather a savage, cheerless joy as she walked through the ramshackle streets of a city she was hoping would let her forget, let her stop caring.

  Clarisse Rivière’s blood hadn’t flowed this far.

  “Look,” Annika suddenly said, touching her arm. “Look!” she shouted toward Marko and Daniel, who were walking ahead, the child now perched on his father’s shoulders.

  On a folding chair sat a woman wearing the yellow gingham dress Ladivine had bought in Bordeaux.

  Before her, on an enormous piece of cloth spread out on the sidewalk, were all their clothes, carefully folded and laid out in an elegant tonal array.

  Marko turned around and came back. He seemed to be clasping Daniel’s calves not so much to support the child as to keep himself from collapsing.

  He stared dully at his T-shirts, his old jeans, his blue-and-red-striped bathing suit.

  The woman had lowered the magazine she was reading, and now she eyed them expectantly, a stern look on her face. The yellow dress’s bodice hung slightly loose over her skinny chest.

  “That was mine, and so was that, and that,” said Annika, pointing at her things, her delicate, pale face intent as she cataloged her former possessions, but at the same time detached, almost unsurprised, accepting that the clothes on display were hers no more.

  “Something interest you?” the woman asked haughtily.

  Marko let out a low laugh. He shook his head, chuckling in silence.

  That dress didn’t really fit me anyway, thought Ladivine.

  She then spotted a pair of white pants and a long-sleeved navy blouse that she knew she hadn’t brought with her, but which were beyond all doubt hers.

  For example, she recognized a very faint yellowed spot on the front panel of the pants, caused, she remembered, by spattering bleach.

  But she knew she’d left those two things in her dresser in Berlin, the pants because they showed dirt, the blouse because it was corduroy, and unsuitably warm.

  She felt her cheeks and brow redden in embarrassment, in perplexity, and also, odd even to her, in fear, the fear that Marko or Annika might observe that she’d never laid those pants and that blouse into her suitcase—but how would they know?

  And why did she feel guilty about all this? Was it because, unable to explain it, she nonetheless found it neither su
rprising nor frightening?

  Marko had stopped laughing.

  But the corners of his mouth were still turned up in a taunting smile.

  “Lovely dress you’ve got on!” he threw out at the woman, in his slightly posh, supercilious English.

  She answered simply:

  “Thank you. I sewed it myself.”

  “Did you? My wife here has one just like it. She bought it in France.”

  He began to chuckle again, now menacingly, thought Ladivine in alarm.

  She turned to walk away, hoping Marko would follow. But he held his ground before the display, vigorously tugging at Daniel’s calves, the one, then the other, like the teats of a cow.

  Numb with heat and exhaustion, the child winced but didn’t complain.

  “Those French are always copying us,” said the woman, in that tone of austere rectitude that inspired in Ladivine only a fervent urge to nod along.

  “Isn’t that dress a little big for you?” said Marko, starting in again.

  “Stop it!” cried Ladivine. “What do you want from her, anyway?”

  He gave her a surprised, reproachful, deeply suspicious glance.

  “Somebody stole our things, didn’t they? Don’t you think we should go to the police?”

  “Certainly not!”

  Doing her best to stay calm, she added:

  “There’s no point, we’d be wasting our time. You know they won’t do anything.”

  “That one shouldn’t be here,” said Annika, pointing at the navy-blue blouse. “You left it at home.”

  “No, no, you’re wrong, I brought it,” Ladivine hurried to answer.

  And this, she realized, was her first lie to her child, a lie with no perceptible reason, not to protect her from some hard truth but only to separate herself from the family she nonetheless so loved, from that husband and those children she couldn’t or wouldn’t let into her new life.

  “You left it at home,” Annika muttered stubbornly.

  Ladivine shook her head, determined to deny it to the end, and silently saddened by that.

  The one thing she refused to let herself do was exploit her motherly authority and order the little girl to say no more about the blouse.

  She could only, her heart bleeding, accept Annika’s bewildered insistence and cling to her lie for as long as it took.

  A sudden exhaustion seemed to descend over Marko. Righting Daniel before the child could slide off his shoulders, he grumbled:

  “All right, then, let’s get back to the hotel.”

  The children spent the afternoon and early evening in the pool, visibly relieved not to have to go out again.

  Now and then a few other guests paddled around them, fat old people with quivering, pale flesh and a disgruntled air, sometimes casting quick, wary glances at the children, preemptively irked.

  At the edge of the pool, the palm trees had died. Their dry pale-brown leaves hung limp against the gray trunks.

  —

  She reached out and took Marko’s hand, finding it cold as ice. She wanted to tell him, “Nothing’s…”

  But he spoke before her, and, not moving his head, lying stiff on the chaise longue, asked in a distant voice, thickened by the heat:

  “That blue blouse, the day before yesterday…It’s so warm…Really, you brought that?”

  “Of course I did.”

  She could feel herself blushing.

  “Otherwise it would be impossible,” she murmured, protected by her huge sunglasses, whose lenses almost covered her cheeks.

  “Yes,” said Marko, “otherwise it would be impossible, that’s just what was bothering me.”

  He squeezed her hand, and she realized the depth of his relief. He sat up, opened the guidebook, and said, more confidently:

  “There’s only one thing to see here, the National Museum. It’s supposed to be interesting.”

  Marko’s skin had turned precisely the color of his golden chestnut hair, luxuriant, wavy, untamed, the locks snaking over his thin, rippling neck. She couldn’t help reaching out to touch it. He bowed his head and gently kissed her fingers.

  Fleetingly, foolishly, she prayed that she and Marko wouldn’t be parted, knowing it was unlikely, and certainly not a thing she should be wanting despite all the pain it would cause her.

  What was Marko Berger’s place now?

  What was his role here, if it turned out she could do without love and tenderness?

  That, even more than sex, must have been what Clarisse Rivière couldn’t live without when she was abandoned at fifty, but love hadn’t worked out for her.

  Their imagination running low, the children had started to quarrel. Marko stood up and called them out of the water. They shrieked in pain when their feet touched the burning-hot paving tiles.

  Their faces were red, overheated, their bodies pale and wrinkled and redolent of chlorine.

  They looked distinctly unwell, Ladivine abruptly realized, though they were the picture of health in Berlin.

  When, thirty minutes later, the four of them emerged from the hotel to start for the National Museum, the big brown dog across the street rose to its feet, its back a bristling arch.

  Watching it from the corner of her eye, Ladivine was sure she heard it growl.

  Suddenly she was afraid it might charge across the street and lunge at Marko’s throat, or the children’s, unwilling, perhaps, to see her in the company of people it wasn’t responsible for. And what did that dog care that she had a husband and children if it wasn’t meant to bind its fate to theirs?

  Their plan was to walk to the museum by the corniche road, but instead she herded Daniel and Annika toward a taxi parked before the hotel, waved Marko in with them, and then, after a moment’s hesitation and a glance at the dog, already sick at heart to be hurting and angering it this way, Ladivine, too, disappeared into the car.

  “It’s just too hot to walk, don’t you think?” she said to Marko, slightly breathless and still trembling to think of the dog biting the children or their father to get them out of the way.

  And, saying nothing to Marko about the dog, knowing she never would, and not simply because he might not believe her (he’d believe she was sincere but would set out to show her she was mistaken, to prove that it was impossible to be guarded or spied on by an anonymous dog in the enormity of a poor, foreign city), she already felt accountable for any rash acts the dog might commit, that dog for which she’d broken her tacit accord with Marko never to keep secrets, a rule that Marko had always obeyed, she was sure, because he was a deeply virtuous and conscientious man, even a little vain about his virtue, as had she, she thought, until now, or rather until Clarisse Rivière’s death, whose horror and pointlessness had stranded her, Ladivine, her only daughter, on the shores of an inexpressible shame.

  —

  Before the National Museum’s severe, modern façade, a very young man seemed to be waiting for them.

  No sooner were they out of the taxi than he came running, lively and good-humored, friendly as no one had ever been in this city, which, Ladivine would later reflect, explained why they’d trusted him at once, something they never would have done at home with an intrusive, slick, ingratiating young man such as this, but that’s how it was, they felt fragile and alone in this place where their mere presence seemed a sound reason to treat them with indifference, even suspicion or cold hostility, and not being used to such things they found it hard to adapt, wanting deep down to be liked, to be recognized and admired as the good people they rightly thought they were.

  And the welcoming, intelligently obliging but in no way obsequious look on that boy’s face found them disarmed, eager for human warmth.

  He was of average height, muscular, dressed in a pair of jeans cut off at the knees and a long NBA jersey.

  His hair was cropped very short, and a little gold ring set with gemstones adorned his right ear.

  Oddly, thought Ladivine, he was barefoot, for all the care he took with his appearance, and
his delicate, hairless, adolescent feet were dirty gray and peppered with scars.

  He extended a firm hand first to her, then to Marko, looking at them both with sparkling dark eyes.

  Smiling an indefinable little smile, he examined Marko’s new outfit, his tunic and trousers.

  Next he shook Annika’s hand with a slight, playful bow, and then Daniel’s.

  “I’m Wellington,” he said in his languid accent, “as you might already know.”

  Ladivine let out a little laugh.

  “Why no, how could we?”

  He laughed along with her, as if delighting in her repartee.

  “Come with me, I’ll show you around the museum.”

  “We don’t need a guide,” she exclaimed, just as Marko was avidly accepting.

  She raised one hand to take back what she’d said, and she saw Marko’s relief, his eagerness to let himself be taken in hand and entertained by a spirit of congeniality.

  The boy started off with the children, and she held Marko back, whispering:

  “We’ll have to give him money, you know.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  Suddenly he turned anxious again, and a little lost:

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know, we’ll see.”

  Annika and Daniel were usually reserved children, not difficult or capricious but private and hard to charm. And yet they were already laughing with Wellington when their parents caught up with them in the entryway, and, Ladivine observed with a tiny premonitory twinge in her heart, particularly Annika, usually so restrained and aloof, who was looking up at the boy with a gaze of complete, almost lovestruck trust, pushing up her hair and clasping it to the back of her head with one hand.

  Suddenly she was a ravishing eight-year-old girl.

  “Now, you go get the tickets, and I’ll wait right here,” said Wellington in his unctuous voice.

  Past the ticket takers, he led them into a deserted first gallery, where huge canvases very realistically depicted various massacres—here a squadron of soldiers armed with bayonets skewering wild-eyed rioters, here three men slicing intently into the belly of a living woman pathetically endeavoring with blood-soaked hands to protect the fetus inside, there a man in an elegant suit bearing an expression of boundless disgust as he whipped the back, now a hash of flesh and blood, of an adolescent boy who must have been his servant, as the scene was set in a book-lined drawing room.