by Marie Ndiaye
Now and then she heard the children turning over, Daniel moaning in his sleep.
And suddenly it was as if she were hearing them from far, far away, because Freddy Moliger’s name was deafening her, pure, potent, unstoppable.
Had Daniel or Annika cried out to her at that moment, she wouldn’t have found the strength to let their voices silence the pounding syllables of Freddy Moliger’s name, any more than her children’s voices, no matter how pleading, could stop their mother’s heart from beating if her hour hadn’t come.
Her hand moved to her cheek, wiped it dry, then touched her lips. Yes, those were tears, she observed, in detached surprise.
She’d been weeping without knowing it, but was it for young Wellington or Clarisse Rivière, or was it for Marko, whom she knew she could no longer love as ardently and innocently as before, whom she even knew she might never love again?
Now she could hear a dog barking.
She forced Freddy Moliger’s name to mute its roaring drone so she could think back on that big brown dog, and she smiled in the darkness as she recognized its bark, not that she’d ever heard it bark since it began watching over her, but because, as she understood it, whether in her own dream or someone else’s she’d appeared in, she’d met that dog long before they came to this country, just as she’d met the woman who sold mango juice in the market, and that earlier big brown dog had barked, and she’d learned its voice, and so she could recognize it now.
—
The next morning, sitting at their usual breakfast table by the terrace windows, they noticed a long, dark stain where Wellington’s body had landed.
They said nothing about it, and not because of the children, thought Ladivine.
No, they would never speak of Wellington again, never again speak of that awful struggle on the balcony and the revelation of Marko’s calm, deadly resolve.
She saw him glance once at the terrace and quickly turn away, with something hard, aggressive, and unyielding about his chin, as if he were even now fiercely proclaiming his innocence, like a guilty man determined never to confess.
He ate more than usual, he even stuffed himself with buttered rolls, while she pretended to eat so as to arouse no suspicions in Annika, whose watchful eyes darted from her to Marko and sometimes lit on the terrace just where the concrete was stained, Ladivine noticed, nausea rising up inside her.
“I had a dream about Wellington last night,” said Annika in an overly casual voice.
Oh, you’re lying, thought Ladivine, her heart gripped by pity and understanding, you’re lying because you think it might bring you an answer.
“He was looking for us to invite us to a wedding,” Annika went on, “and he said I was the bride, and we didn’t even know.”
Daniel giggled.
“Don’t you think we’ve heard quite enough about weddings lately?” said Marko slowly and coldly, a tone he took with the children only in rare, extreme situations, when one of them had done something reckless, had endangered his or her safety out of heedlessness or a desire for attention.
And although he immediately tempered that severity with a wry smile, butter and crumbs stuck to his lips, Annika wasn’t fooled, and, suddenly turning very red, tears pooling in her eyes, she heard Marko’s words as they were intended, as a threat.
She gave Ladivine a pleading, questioning look, and her mother’s only answer was a meaningless little shrug.
She looked down at her plate, her index finger tapping at a smear of jam.
Ladivine knew she and Marko had just lost everything that was absolute and unwavering in Annika’s trust, she knew Annika now believed or understood her parents to be capable not only of foolishness, which her mature, indulgent mind would eventually have accepted, but above all of cruelty toward her, she who was nonetheless, as surely she’d never doubted, a deeply loved child.
Feeling the sudden tension in the air, Daniel began to sulk very visibly.
“We ought to leave today, and go see your father’s friends,” said Marko.
He’d tried to put on a casual smile, and the gentleness and warmth had returned to his voice, but the lower half of his face was still frozen in a savage, clumsy, belligerent denial, the very mark, thought Ladivine, of the killer.
She heaved a long sigh. She gripped the edge of the table to keep her hands still.
On the phone, she was remembering, Richard Rivière had spoken of a couple he knew who’d moved to this country long before, and she’d briefly mentioned them to Marko, half hoping Richard Rivière would forget to give her their phone number and address.
But he didn’t, and a few days later she got an e-mail with complete contact information for her father’s old friends.
However put off by the idea of meeting anyone from Richard Rivière’s new social circle, people Clarisse Rivière hadn’t met, didn’t have the right to meet, people who, if they’d heard anything of her at all, must have pictured only the worn, humiliating image of a tiresome wife abandoned in middle age, however powerful her sense that she was betraying Clarisse Rivière, whose slender body, whose kindly face, whose whole fervent, timid, generous person Richard Rivière’s friends would never know, she nonetheless conscientiously copied down the address and put the slip of paper in her wallet, vaguely, superstitiously fearing that if she didn’t they would end up in desperate need of help from those very people, an expatriate French couple of whose history with Richard Rivière she knew nothing, and who she thought, without knowing just why, would have turned up their noses at Clarisse Rivière like the others, not being the type to like or understand her, and Ladivine preemptively held this against them, just as she felt a baseless but profound anger at her father, who allowed himself to be friends with likely disparagers of Clarisse Rivière’s strange mind and boundless simplicity.
And so Marko’s suggestion found her unwilling, irascible, almost venomous.
“You really think it’s a good idea to look like we’re running away?” she whispered furiously.
“I believe it would be prudent to leave as soon as we can,” said Marko, unruffled.
Not long after, taking the children to the pool, they saw two workers washing away the dark patch left by Wellington’s body.
Ladivine couldn’t hold back an image of the boy’s stomach bursting open as he hit the ground, his healthy young entrails spilling onto the concrete, through Marko’s fault and her own, because, weak willed, unable to bear the solitude of the foreigner, they’d let themselves be talked into accepting the boy’s company for a tour of the National Museum.
Would Wellington’s death be the subject of the museum’s next acquisition, Ladivine wondered, and would it show a sadistically grinning Marko ripping the intestines from Wellington’s living flesh with his bare hands, would it show the woman in nightclothes, half hidden behind a pillar, feasting her eyes, would it go so far as to show the already dissolute children laughing in drooling delight?
Oh, the only thing to think was that Wellington had come back to do them harm, maybe make off with Daniel and demand a ransom.
Only that intuition, only that certainty, could have turned Marko violent, he who’d never raised a hand to a living soul, never screamed in anyone’s face.
The only thing to think was that Wellington had come back to do them harm.
Evidently there were no witnesses to Clarisse Rivière’s murder in her Langon house, but, Ladivine now wondered as she sat at the pool’s edge with her calves in the warm water, if there had been, if some face peering in through the living room window had seen Freddy Moliger’s crime, had watched Clarisse Rivière’s blood pouring out onto the floor, soaking the couch and the needlepoint cushions, would that face then have turned away, would that person have gone home to dinner and then to bed thinking that in any case there was nothing more to be done for Clarisse Rivière, that she was in all likelihood dead, as Ladivine had let Marko convince her that Wellington couldn’t possibly still be alive on the terrace?
W
hat would she feel, Clarisse Rivière’s only child, on learning such a thing, on learning that someone had witnessed her mother’s last moments and not tried to save her?
She would curse him, that’s what; she would want him to die in the same abject aloneness.
Annika and Daniel waded sullenly in the pool, looking bored.
A similarly opaque and unhappy expression marked the faces of the few old people who came to bathe there each morning, who never answered Ladivine’s timid greeting, pretending not to have noticed her.
Successive sunburns had left their fat shoulders stippled.
Fate seemed to have condemned them to spend an infernal eternity in the confines of the hotel and the pool, submerging their weary, pale, fragile flesh in the murky water, then laboriously pulling themselves out again, in an endless, absurd cycle, evidently thinking the hotel’s other guests and employees responsible for their torment, and thus never answering their hellos.
Ladivine was ashamed to be with them. She found them ugly in a way that worried her a little.
When the heat grew too much to bear, she called Daniel and Annika out of the water, and they gratefully hurried to obey, as if, for them, too, swimming was now an element of some ritual torture.
Slightly dazed, painfully aware of her own haggard appearance, Ladivine caught sight of Marko coming toward her through the glimmering light, dressed in his pink tunic, whose radiant color bathed him in a rosy glow.
She realized he’d gone off without her noticing, and now he was back, crossing the terrace, enveloped in the bleeding aura of his deed, giving himself away, thought Ladivine, drunk with anguish, as surely as if he’d cried out, It was I who killed Wellington, that sweet boy, so full of life, who opened his door to us!—now his athletic shoes were trampling the still-damp spot where Wellington had lain in repose, now he was coming to her with his head high and a bright, pleased look on his face, an impatient, excited little smile at the corners of his mouth, as if chafing to report wonderful news.
Annika saw him, too, and she ran toward her father, forgetting that she usually thought such impetuous effusions unworthy of her age.
Did that vulnerable little girl believe she needed forgiveness for something? Ladivine wondered. Did she, in the tortuous ways of her childish logic, believe she was guilty of thinking, or perhaps vaguely seeing, that something terrible had happened with Wellington?
She pressed herself to Marko, her arms encircling his waist, in a demonstration of tenderness utterly unlike the reserved child she usually was.
As if it were she who’d done something wrong, thought Ladivine.
And she wanted to run to Marko, rip him from the child’s arms, horrified to think of Annika lingering one moment longer in that apotheosis of guilt, to think of that guilt impregnating and infecting her while perhaps Marko was delivered of it forever, not that he’d planned or wanted anything of the sort.
But she stayed where she was.
A misgiving raced through her mind: Maybe I’m the one who’s infecting her? Maybe she’s picking up that guilt and remorse from me?
She walked slowly and heavily toward Marko, holding Daniel’s hand, the boy scratching her palm with his nails, like a little trapped rodent.
“Let go, Mama, let go!” he was whining.
Will we be ordered to give up Daniel as a replacement for Wellington, will we have to sacrifice Daniel to be washed clean of Wellington’s murder?
When her bare feet touched the damp concrete just cleansed of Wellington’s blood, her legs—her big, fat, solid, earthy legs, their flesh dense and firm—buckled beneath her. She fell to her knees on the concrete, and Daniel, now freed, sped off to join Marko and Annika.
Marko hurried to her side and helped her up, his arm no longer trembling.
He held her close, and his tunic’s strong, tallowy smell, Marko’s manly new smell, filled her nostrils till it choked her.
“We’re leaving,” he said triumphantly. “I reserved a car, it’ll be here in thirty minutes. We’re going to spend the rest of our stay with your father’s friends.”
“We have to call them first,” she protested weakly.
“Out of the question. We’ll show up, and they’ll have to take us in. Suppose we called and they said it was impossible, what would we do? We’ve got to back them into a corner, there’s no other way.”
“We’re leaving, we’re leaving!” cried Annika in a burst of wild joy.
She began leaping about, stamping on the damp spot, her big, limpid blue eyes almost popping out.
Ladivine was troubled to see that the little girl’s shorts had slipped down, her bottom partly exposed.
More disturbing still, the fiercely modest Annika didn’t seem to care, and Marko himself was watching the child’s frenzied capers on the concrete with an amused, lighthearted, happy eye.
Then a bitter taste filled her mouth.
How could the big brown dog ever follow her into the bush, where Richard Rivière’s friends lived? How could the car not leave it far behind, and even if it did manage to follow her trail, wouldn’t it come to her dangerously depleted?
Now she was certain she didn’t want to leave, not the city or the hotel, and she wouldn’t care if she was doomed to be imprisoned there forever, and she would blame no one but herself and her perfectly lucid choices, and would thus resist the temptation to go to the trial and harangue the judges: Will the time come to judge Marko Berger, the murderer of a minor named Wellington, and myself, here before you, I who made no attempt to rescue that poor boy?
Marko affectionately took Ladivine’s arm as Annika spun around and around on the slowly drying stain.
She was pivoting on one foot and propelling herself with the other, her arms arched around her hips.
Ladivine was convinced her bare feet were absorbing the damp of the concrete, soaking up everything that had spilled there.
“We have a very talented daughter,” said Marko. “She should start dance lessons when we get home.”
Couldn’t he see that Annika was dancing with Wellington’s death, that Wellington’s death had invited her to dance and now she couldn’t push it away?
Marko had a dreamy smile on his face. He was already thinking of going home, of Berlin, of the life quietly waiting for them there, ready to be put on again like a freshly cleaned and pressed garment.
She wished she could tell him that nothing was waiting for them to come home anymore, that their whole life, their real life, was here, that they’d never escape it, except with their death.
Or was Marko right about himself and the children, and she alone, Ladivine Rivière, had no life to go back to in Berlin, because she’d brought it with her, at its most essential, to this place?
She reflexively reached out to take Daniel’s hand and start up to their room, but the boy recoiled in something not far from terror.
“I can walk by myself!” he shrieked.
“Annika, we’re going,” said Marko, in a clear, firm voice.
The girl stopped spinning at once. She collapsed on the ground and lay prostrate, waiting, thought Ladivine, to recover her spirits and drive Wellington’s away.
—
The SUV Marko had rented was already outside the hotel when they came down with the purse that was their only luggage.
Ladivine paid the bill, avoiding the clerk’s gaze, but as she turned to leave her eyes met the manager’s, standing in the lobby with his back to the light.
She thought she saw deep revulsion curling that usually distant, inexpressive man’s lips.
She nodded at him, as any departing guest would have done, and she felt as if her huge, heavy head was about to tumble off onto the carpet.
Making no reply, he stepped to one side and disappeared into the shadows.
She wanted to scream at him, What of Wellington?
Nothing came out but a sob that might well have passed for a sneeze. Marko and the children were already settled into the car, waiting.
&nb
sp; She didn’t have to look around to find the big brown dog, across the street as always.
It was sitting up very straight on its haunches, its front legs proud and firm, the rust-colored fur on its belly showing between them.
She held the dog’s gaze and gestured apologetically toward the SUV—but wouldn’t the dog know full well she had no wish to leave?
Wouldn’t it know, couldn’t it decipher her sentiments better than she herself, and didn’t it inhabit Ladivine Rivière’s skin more intimately than she herself, who sometimes felt she’d become nothing more than Clarisse Rivière’s bereaved daughter?
Marko gave a quick honk. She steeled herself and climbed in beside him, stunned at the coolness of the air-conditioned cabin, its appealing scent of new leather and jasmine air freshener.
“This must have cost a lot of money,” she murmured, just to say something, caring little now for their financial condition.
“It’s not cheap,” said Marko, “but there’s no way around it, we can’t get there without an SUV. When you don’t have a choice, you just go along, right?”
She sensed Marko’s body quivering with a carefree, childlike, vaguely malign excitement, not, as anyone else might have thought, because he was relishing the prospect of driving such a vehicle but because, Ladivine noted uneasily, his body, his face, even his hair, everything about him, seemed different, more intense and more glowing, cruel, strong, and fiery, as well as—strangely, given his usual sweetness and seriousness—far more gleeful, a hard, gemlike glee without cheer or merriment.
That fierce ardor filled the car with something cynical and, Ladivine thought, something sensual.
How stifling it was, how disturbing!
She was sure Marko would laugh out loud if she spoke Wellington’s name, a new laugh, aggressive and sarcastic.
And the children? Would they laugh along with him?
Oh yes, they would, they were following Marko’s lead now, and who could blame them, since she herself was so uncertain, inspired so little confidence, since Wellington’s mere name made her tremble and gasp?
