Ladivine (20 page)

Gripped by a sudden nausea, she caught herself with one hand on the table, then fainted at Sargent’s feet.

She never doubted that the dog would follow her when she came out of the market and started serenely back for the hotel, and so it did, that big, emaciated, grave-eyed brown dog, and she took care not to walk too quickly, because she thought it must be hungry and thirsty, though she had yet to see it display any need to eat or drink, urinate or defecate.

The dog seemed to be bound to her, committed to protecting or tracking her, body and soul.

Whom or what should she thank or curse for this she didn’t know.

But never once, from the start, had she felt the slightest fear or unease, though she realized early on that the dog was following her every step and she knew nothing of its intentions.

She abandoned herself, perhaps more entirely than she should, she told herself now and then, to the trust it inspired in her.

But she was tired of wariness, tired of expecting the worst, of fearing the future on her children’s behalf, of fearing, on her children’s behalf, life itself.

Sometimes she wished that by some miracle they could already be old, so she could stop being afraid for them, so she could be sure they’d get by in one way or another.

Now such thoughts never came to her. Was it the dog, was it the place?

And yet they’d got off to such a rough start in this country so warmly recommended by Richard Rivière, as if Ladivine’s vanished father had resolved to counter Marko’s admiration with a cold, sardonic, definitive rebuttal, or as if, she told herself, contemplatively and without rancor, her father had to grasp at and make use of anything that might keep Ladivine from the trial.

Was he secretly hoping she’d never come home?

Not, for there was no question he loved her, because of some unimaginable catastrophe but, on the contrary, because she’d found such happiness and serenity here that she would gratefully make herself a prisoner of the place?

Was that him, Richard Rivière, cloaked in the skin of that dog, was that him trying to hold her spellbound?

But I’m not set on going to the trial, not in the least, I’m not sure I can bear it, and shouldn’t he know that?

Keeping her head down, she slinked into the Plaza’s air-conditioned lobby and hurried to the elevators.

She preferred not to be seen by the staff or the manager, who sometimes stood at the front desk and looked at her, she thought, with a mix of irritation and contempt.

Everyone in the hotel knew the Berger family had lost their bags at the airport. Ladivine sensed that this misadventure had earned them no sympathy, that it aroused only stern disapproval, untrusting and disdainful, particularly in the manager, so obsequious with the other guests, either, she thought, because he suspected her and Marko of hoping to get out of paying the bill with the claim that they’d lost everything or because he took them for a couple of rubes who didn’t know enough to keep an eye on their things.

She silently entered the room, immediately enveloped by stifling warmth and a musty smell.

She pressed a button by the door to start up the clamorous air conditioner, and it was as if she’d set off the alarm clock—Marko springing up in the bed, startled, exhausted (what new sources of fatigue had he gone to find in sleep’s depths?), the children recoiling in their cots, two rusty, squeaking old things hastily assembled by an employee in one corner of the room the night they arrived, when they’d found no sign of the promised second king-size bed (so they were no different from the disgruntled tourists whose recriminations Marko had so ravenously absorbed from the Internet, so they, too, would soon be venting their spleen on the travel sites, so they were, oh, neither more nor less than a couple of suckers who could be counted on not to stand up for themselves even when they knew they’d been had?).

She came in, lively and fresh, still jubilant from her morning outing.

How could they lie there macerating in their nighttime sweat, sticky with heat and troubled sleep?

“It’s eleven thirty already,” she cried in her vivacious voice.

Actually, they’d all woken sometime around seven, stifling and sweating in the room’s hellish humidity.

The air conditioner made such a racket that on the first night they’d decided to make do without it. But it was hard to fall asleep in the heat, and they all woke up early.

They waited for eight o’clock to come and then went down to breakfast, after which Ladivine went out while Marko and the children headed back to bed, not so much, thought Ladivine, to sleep as to fill up a daunting expanse of vacant time.

Because that, incredibly, was what was happening: it seemed Marko would rather pretend to be resting than leave the hotel, even though the hotel turned out to be far less pleasant and comfortable than they’d been led to believe by a plethora of photos and comments.

And—Ladivine wasn’t quite sure, so dimly did she remember her phone call with Richard Rivière—it might have been her father himself who’d recommended the Plaza.

But the room was small and cramped, and the window couldn’t be opened, guests being expected to endure the air conditioner’s unholy din.

A once pale-green carpet, now dull gray and mottled with stains, covered the floor even in the bathroom, where it stank from spattering water.

And what else? Ladivine was reluctant to count off all the hotel’s many deficiencies, finding in that mentality something small-minded and subtly demeaning.

But she couldn’t entirely shake the feeling of dereliction, of ambient, vainly concealed filth, that the Plaza had given her from the first day—nothing specific to complain of, she told herself, only an atmosphere of decrepitude, exacerbated or ineptly camouflaged by slovenly half measures.

And that, among other things, was what surprised her about Marko’s insistence on going back to the room after breakfast, as if the disasters that greeted their arrival had convinced him there were still-graver troubles to be feared if he ventured into the street, as if, disheartened, he’d decided to take no chances and hole up in the hotel until the time came to leave—but, she wondered, who or what was he afraid of?

And who would take note of his efforts, and so spare him any further unpleasantness?

She didn’t dare tell herself outright, but she was disappointed by Marko’s cowardice and hadn’t expected him to give up so easily on making the absolute most of this trip, as, she thought, she was already doing.

She had the dog to help her, of course. But if no dog was bothering to cling to Marko’s heels, wasn’t that his fault?

Coming into the room to find him sitting up with that lost, weary look, she almost told him of the dog, as an encouragement to bring about that same phenomenon for himself, that blessing or that calamity, she wasn’t sure which, but in any case that antidote to anxiety and suspicion.

But she didn’t. Was she afraid Marko might divert the big brown dog’s attentions to himself?

I can’t tell him in front of the children.

Was she afraid she might be jealous of Marko, should the dog choose a new master or prey?

The children mustn’t know, for the moment.

She’d never even spoken to them of the trial, she’d never found the strength to tell them, even in the most cursory way, how their grandmother died.

Where to seek the words to tell such a thing, and didn’t it sometimes seem wiser to forgo having children and so not run the risk of one day having to tell them of such horrors?

Daniel and Annika seemed downhearted that morning, though when they saw her they did their best to put on a childish enthusiasm—exactly as if they were playing at being children, simply for politeness’ sake, and so as not to worry their parents.

They carefully climbed out of their squeaking beds, dressed only in their underwear, and Ladivine knelt down before them and put one arm around each.

“Are we going to the pool?” asked Daniel.

“Oh yes, the pool!” cried Annika, with what struck Ladivine as affected enthusiasm.

“How about a walk first?” said Ladivine in her gentlest, most reassuring voice.

Daniel energetically shook his head. A pall of anxiety veiled Annika’s pale eyes.

“They’re afraid to go out,” murmured Marko, rubbing his cheeks with a weary hand.

“Oh, so you’re afraid to go out, are you?”

She’d adopted a mocking, affectionate tone, choosing to pretend she couldn’t understand their trepidations.

But suddenly she found herself feeling slightly defeated, almost conquered by an absurd, humiliating, unwarranted panic at the thought that their vacation was only beginning and that, if this kept up, the failure would be so pathetic that she and Marko would never recover.

She was equally disturbed that Marko had just spoken in German. It was their custom to speak French at home, and Marko forgot it only in moments of deep distress.

“And just what is there to be so afraid of outside?” she asked in her artificially playful and teasing voice, wishing at once that she hadn’t, since the question might give a shape and a solidity to what must not be allowed to exist.

Daniel shrugged, unsure what to say. Annika compressed her delicate, thin little face into a horrible grimace. Daniel let out a small cry and covered his eyes.

Unrecognizable, Annika was clenching her fists to go with the hideous face she was making, and suddenly Ladivine was alarmed.

“Stop it,” she said, a little sharply.

She grasped her daughter’s hands, forced her fingers apart.

Tears were streaming from Annika’s closed eyelids. She began to shake her head back and forth with a desperate violence.

Terrified by her contorted face, Daniel turned away.

“Come on now, stop it,” said Ladivine, “that’s not funny.”

“She can’t, she’s stuck that way!”

Marko jumped up from the bed, bounded toward Annika.

He was in his underwear, he was thin and lanky, neutral and perfect, an exemplary image, for Ladivine, of a masculine body in its prime, in all its vigorous health and unconscious grace.

He squatted down beside Annika and began gently massaging the girl’s distorted face, now wet with tears.

“There, there, my beauty,” he was murmuring, “everything’s going to be all right, Daddy will give you your face back.”

And he forced his lips into a reassuring smile. Little by little Annika calmed down, her features freed themselves from their horrible expression.

Ladivine went to the hermetically sealed window.

She glanced out and saw that the dog was downstairs, not far from the entryway, lying in the ragged shadow of a dusty palm tree.

It looked up at her with its big, placid eyes.

And she found her serenity flooding back, she who had lost all confidence on entering this room.

The children were splashing around in the deserted little pool behind the hotel, jumping and frolicking in a water so heavily chlorinated that it seemed to give off a sort of vapor.

At first, Ladivine had taken that dull-white mist for a mirage.

She and Marko were stretched out on chaise longues, the smell of bleach coming to them in waves.

Sunglasses hiding their eyes, they lay motionless, sour and still.

Two days before, on discovering the mediocrity of the pool, they’d made a vow not to so much as sit on the edge and dabble their feet in the water, deciding as one that it would be humiliating to seem to find this little bean-shaped basin good enough after all.

It struck Ladivine that they were displaying their anger and disappointment in a way all too like them, muted and indecipherable.

She told herself they should have gone straight to the manager and complained of the scandalous difference between the pool’s photos on the website and the pool as it actually was.

“It’s all in the focal length,” Marko had spat out, bitter and resigned.

It was this same pool on the website, but photographed at night, lit from within, and shot from above, from one of the rooms, making it appear fairly substantial and concealing its surroundings: missing tiles, battered trash cans, dirty concrete.

No one ever seemed to use it but Annika and Daniel.

“All that chlorine can’t be good for them,” murmured Ladivine, groggy with heat.

Marko grunted in agreement.

But what could they do? If they forbade them to use the pool, how to entertain two children sick with fear at the idea of leaving the hotel?

Why not let them stay till it gets dark, that would be nice, she caught herself thinking.

How exasperated she was by the children’s incuriosity! But weren’t they simply taking their cue from Marko?

She turned her head to look at him, his mouth closed tight, his face tense behind his sunglasses, lying stiffly on his deck chair, like a prisoner on the rack, accepting his fate.

She reached out, took his hand, and found it cold as ice. She wanted to tell him, Nothing’s ruined, nothing so terrible has happened that suddenly we…

But how gray, how stricken, had she seen Marko’s face two days before, when after more than two hours’ wait at the airport they realized that they wouldn’t be retrieving their bags, that their bags had in all probability been stolen from the carousel before their passports were stamped, that they would have to go fill out a stack of useless papers and draw up a pointless list of their two suitcases’ contents, now gone forever.

It was just clothes, after all, she’d immediately told herself, but it seemed like some vital part of Marko’s self was being excised, or his oldest, most ardent expectations betrayed.

She’d seen his harmonious face crumble, no longer held together by a certain optimistic and lighthearted vigor.

The cracks in his face went deep, the bones as if shattered with a hammer, and two days later he still had that same face—tense, tortured, and haggard—here by the pool where the children were bathing.

She’d felt deeply defeated herself. It was a long trip, with a layover in Amsterdam because nonstop cost far more, and Daniel was whining and sniveling when they got off the plane, so much so that Ladivine wondered if he was ill.