Ladivine (22 page)

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.

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 surprising 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: