Ladivine (26 page)

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.

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?

She could hardly expect the children to take trembling anxiety’s side, to embrace foolishness and pointless shame.

In all sincerity, she couldn’t even want them to.

On the GPS’s instructions, Marko drove down a narrow, potholed road through endless suburbs.

Low apartment buildings of bare cement succeeded the little dirt houses roofed with mismatched sheets of corrugated tin, before which slim-hipped women with diminutive breasts beneath oversize T-shirts disapprovingly watched the SUV go by.

Sometimes the wheels sprayed little pebbles at the houses, built close by the road.

With this Marko slowed down, just as Ladivine was about to ask, then little by little he sped up again, his features relaxing, as if he feared that some peril might pounce on them if he drove any slower.

He cast Ladivine glances whose tenderness she could plainly see, as well as their longing to draw her into the sphere of license and vitality forming around his new unbridled nature, but she turned away, looked out the window, her heart heavy with resentment.

But suppose Wellington had come back to do them harm?

Wasn’t that the most likely thing?

Had she not in fact sensed the boy’s hatred, his feigned friendship mere groundwork for carefully calculated misdeeds?

Marko was seeking out the children’s attention as well, wiggling his fingers at them or smiling broadly toward the backseat in the rearview mirror.

Not trying to, by his emanations alone, Ladivine sensed, he was stirring up an odd frenzy in the children, especially Annika, an excitement at once teasing and frustrated, denied a conclusion that Marko’s provocative manner seemed to promise.

Daniel squirmed in his seat belt, giggling as if he’d been tickled, something questioning and faintly anxious in his piercing voice, his baby voice, which he’d playfully reverted to.

Annika was screaming with laughter as she might scream in pain, spurred on by the goad of a scandalous sexual appeal that she couldn’t understand but perceived all the same.

This was what Marko was bringing about, this was how far he was willing to go to absolve himself—drawing the children into his miserable, guilty conscience, then corrupting them with their desperately delighted consent.

Or was it she, Ladivine Rivière, who was looking at all this with an unwholesome eye?

She closed her eyes, hunched forward in her seat.

She often feared, having once been that teenage girl who slept with the uncomplicated men of her little city for money, and unable ever since to look back on those days without a shudder of dismay, almost disbelief, that she wouldn’t be able to keep a cool head with her children when the subject of their bodies came up, that she might betray her unease by a stiffness they would interpret as an odd prudishness, that she might find it hard to make clear what was perfectly fine and what to stay away from, and so she’d always found Marko’s casualness and simplicity about sex reassuring, and she’d always counted on him to fill in the children when the time came.

But the indecent, toxic, hopeless excitement she felt in that car couldn’t be good for the children, she thought, and she knew the old Marko would never have allowed it, could never even have imagined behaving in a way that might encourage it.

Or was she imagining things?

Oh no, she could feel it, as plainly as she could smell Marko’s tunic’s harsh, oily scent.

He’d decided to turn Daniel and Annika into hard, perpetually inflamed creatures, either, she thought, because he couldn’t bear to be alone in his wickedness or because he believed they might find protection in that debasement.

And here she felt Marko had betrayed her, Marko whose uprightness and modesty and even, yes, whose cowardice she loved more than anything, not because she might somehow turn it to her advantage but because she thought it meant he would never hurt anyone, and he never had, gentle and good as Clarisse Rivière, until (at her urging?) he one day resolved to tell Lüneburg that he would rather never set foot there again.

Ladivine had met him after two aimless years at the University of Bordeaux, which, on a whim and a friend of a friend’s vague promise of lodging, she’d left for Berlin, with no great enthusiasm, under the illusion that time and life would go by more quickly if she moved on, stupidly, because she had no plans, no hopes, because at twenty-one she felt tired and worn, and she saw Marko at the watch counter of the Hermannplatz Karstadt, where he’d recently found work, and realized that a young man like him, with his long hair, his big glasses, his delicate, kindly, calm, endlessly patient face, would never feel the need to hurt anyone at all, that there was a kind of glory about him that he didn’t work at and didn’t believe in, though that word would have made him laugh, as he was a practical man, and this serene skepticism was an element of his grace, since he had no knowledge of that grace, since he had no way of seeing it.

She came back to the Hermannplatz Karstadt every day, and every day she pretended she was trying to decide on a watch to give Richard Rivière, who hadn’t yet left Clarisse Rivière behind in their Langon house.

Eventually she invited Marko for a cup of coffee over his midday break, a step that, by his own admission, he would never have dared take, and the next day she moved her things into Marko’s room.

He was living in a group apartment on the Mehringdamm, and his little room at the end of the hall served as their marital home for two years, while Ladivine earned her diploma as a French teacher.

And that mannerly young man, resigned to the sameness of life and the docile abandonment of his ambitions, submitting without rancor, placidly accepting the way of things, requested a transfer to the Karstadt on Wilmersdorfer Strasse when they decided to leave the little room in Kreuzberg for the Charlottenburg apartment.

And so their life had gone by, thought Ladivine in the SUV, a good life, easy and serene, made perfectly happy, for a time, by the birth of the children.

Sometimes back then she woke late at night, not to find Marko locked in battle on the balcony, not to flee the torrent of blood pouring in from Langon, carrying Clarisse Rivière’s silent cries, but simply for the immeasurable joy of gazing on Marko’s, Daniel’s, and Annika’s sleeping faces, one by one; it was the anticipation of that matchless joy that pulled her from her slumbers, that made her get up and walk soundlessly through the apartment, her blood throbbing in her neck, not her mother’s blood but her own, neatly contained in vessels that no loser would ever set out to slash with a knife.

And it was Marko’s face that she looked at the longest, sometimes drowsing, then waking again with a start, but never slipping out of that ecstatic, surprised, almost incredulous meditation on a man who meant far more to her than her own life, who inspired in her an inextinguishable gratitude, whose discreet, childlike breath she greedily inhaled from his nuzzling mouth, trying to solve the mystery of Marko’s love for her, he who in his clarity seemed so much more honorable than she.

Nothing could possibly be more disturbing, she thought in the SUV, than the hard flame now burning in Marko, with which he was trying to consume Daniel and Annika.

Such a man would never again make her long to inhale his breath. She wouldn’t even want him to love her.

But was she not the cause of all this? Was it not her idea to call Richard Rivière and ask for advice, knowing that Marko would take anything her father said as an absolute truth?

And suppose, thought Ladivine in the SUV, suppose Marko wanted to be a little like Richard Rivière, suppose he was striving to attain what he saw as Richard Rivière’s marvelous force, his alluring authority, the perfect certitude of his word?

Wasn’t she to blame for that, too?

Without trying to, had she not, in the first years of her life with Marko, spoken of Richard Rivière in such terms that Marko could only feel crushed by the weight of his own insignificance?