Ladivine (31 page)

But when, with the children beside him, he entered the dining room where Ladivine and the Cagnacs were waiting, he had the face of a man condemned.

Wordlessly, with a wan smile, he pulled out his chair and slid into it.

And Ladivine didn’t need to study the Cagnacs to know that those two, that inflexible man and woman, had just dropped the blade onto Marko’s neck, moved more by disgust than by cruelty.

Gone was the Cagnac woman’s avid pleasure on discovering Marko’s beautiful, glorious face just that morning.

She impatiently tore at her bread, and her lean, flat, clenched person radiated such coldness, such hostility, that Ladivine thought she saw Marko shiver.

She’d never seen him so low, so wretched and uncertain.

Although angry with him for that, although mortally angry, she felt a violent, painful pity.

Yes, Wellington! she wanted to shout in Marko’s face. Be happy for him, and for us, instead of dragging the children into your defeat!

Because with one glance at Annika and Daniel she’d seen everything.

Their poor little bewildered faces, anguished and empty, no longer turned to their father but downcast over their wringing hands, bore witness to a disaster that was already total and, as if already past, beyond all repair.

Just that morning, Ladivine thought in dismay, the children were ready to go over to Marko’s radiant, cruel side, and now his fall had left them as devastated as if they’d learned he was dead.

How furious she was!

Could she not fill them with delight at Wellington’s return?

But what had they known of Wellington?

“Something wrong, kids?” asked Cagnac grumpily.

Annika and Daniel didn’t look up. Ladivine wasn’t sure they’d even heard.

“They must be tired,” Marko whispered.

The Cagnac woman let out a snide, almost contemptuous guffaw.

She shot Marko a look that would be the last she bestowed on him, thought Ladivine, a look heavy with disdain, disappointment, almost torment.

The Cagnac woman could not be wrong.

If Marko were simply tired or ill, she would never have treated him this way.

She could see he was no longer the man she’d met a few hours before, and if she didn’t yet know the reason for his fall (because how could she, about Wellington?), the mere fact that he could let himself slump into melancholy and terror showed quite clearly that he had, in a sense, fooled her—her, the incorruptible Cagnac woman. Wellington, Wellington, Ladivine repeated to herself, in a quiet, singing little voice.

The Cagnac woman called out:

“Wellington!”

She yawned wide, like a wild animal, showing her teeth, her bluish tongue.

Wellington hurried in with a salad bowl full of beef snout in vinaigrette.

He set it on the table, stirred the chopped snout to coat it with dressing, and his gestures were at once expert and slightly perfunctory, as if, however it may seem, he was only playing a role that he could abandon whenever he pleased.

Yes, Ladivine told herself, this was the Wellington they’d met at the National Museum, the young man with the long, slender limbs, the protruding hips, the resourceful, independent, clever, very faintly arrogant manner.

She found herself studying his walk as he circled the table to pour a taste of wine into Cagnac’s glass.

Was he limping?

Perhaps he was dragging one foot a little, or was he just sidestepping a chair leg?

She didn’t yet dare try to catch his eye to learn, from the way he looked back at her, whether she and Marko were guilty of something.

But what would the neutrality of that reserved, professional gaze ever say?

Sitting clenched in his chair, an anguished grimace on his lips, eyes half closed, Marko was beyond even pretending to be simply a tired guest, and in any case the Cagnacs had lost all interest in him.

And when Wellington approached to fill his glass, Marko pressed his fists to his closed eyes and began to moan quietly.

“I can’t take this anymore, I can’t take it,” he stammered.

Wellington broke into a suave, knowing smile.

He nimbly stepped away from Marko and walked out of the room, as if he’d got what he came for and now had only to disappear.

“I want to go home!” cried Daniel.

“Papa, Papa!” howled Annika, eyes wide with terror.

“I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it…”

“This is intolerable!” cried the Cagnac woman.

She hammered at the tabletop with the handle of her knife. Annika stood up and awkwardly put her arms around Marko’s shoulders as he repeated, at once leaden and fervid, perhaps drunk on his own surrender:

“I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it…”

Later that evening, with Marko and the children up in their rooms and the Cagnacs closed away in their office on the pretext of urgent work to be done, Ladivine went out and walked toward the forest in the gathering darkness.

A deep calm slowed her thoughts, freed her footsteps of any imaginary burden.

Never hesitating, and although the forest’s edge was already dark, and remembering, too, that she was not a brave woman, she started down a narrow path.

Her first thought was that she was entering the domain of a silence so full and so thick that it hurt her ears like a deafening roar, and she almost gave up, almost turned back.

But then she made out the gentle, secret, insinuating appeal she’d heard from the newlyweds’ SUV, that dark sigh, like a heavy beast dying or in labor, calling Clarisse Rivière to her mind just as clearly as if her mother’s face had suddenly appeared on the half-moon above her.

That afternoon’s happy, sprightly little voices had gone silent.

There remained only that fearsome plaint, that breath exhaled by a breast at once anguished and resigned, but resolute, quietly unyielding in its determination to convince her.

Ladivine walked onward, with no fear in her gait.

The path snaked through the tall trees with their alien perfumes, through the brambles, the big bloodred flowers bursting out on their stout stems, sprouting like mushrooms from the roots.

How far am I supposed to go? she wondered half aloud, simply curious, as if to someone responsible for guiding her, someone who might conceivably answer.

Tiring, she sat down at the foot of a tree and pressed her back to the smooth, warm trunk.

Behind her she heard footsteps lightly treading the leaves and twigs.

Guessing who it was coming to join her, if not why—but her faith was blind—she didn’t turn her head as it came to her side and lay down against her legs.

It stank of humus, sweat, and exertion.

Once that smell would have disgusted her, but knowing how far it had come to find her, and what fidelity, what courage, lay behind it, she inhaled it with pleasure and gratitude.

Her eyes closing, she lay on her side, one arm under her head, the other draped over her friend, as she did in the bed she shared with Marko.

The night was warm and peaceful, stirred only by Clarisse Rivière’s unrelenting sigh.

And Ladivine felt herself falling asleep, violently aware that she was sinking, tumbling into a world she might well find unpleasant or paralyzingly frightening.

She tried to break free, struggling to open her eyes, but it was as if a will more powerful and assured than her own was holding her back and forbidding her to make a sound, to voice an objection.

She felt herself suffocating, stifled by a light, inexorable hand.

She wanted to struggle, but her legs wouldn’t answer her frantic commands, as if lethargy were winning out over panic even though panic was obviously right.

Now she could clearly see the new-paved road, glistening from recent rainfall, that she was being forced to follow by this will that wasn’t her own, and she knew she didn’t want to go that way, not yet, and would have to struggle against her soul, not her body, which had no part in all this.

But she’d never been trained in that sort of combat, lacked the weapons, the spirit.

And that smooth new road was pulling her along, and she felt herself giving in, surrendering in anguish, weeping without tears for Marko and the children, who she knew wouldn’t be waiting at the end of that road, which had been laid out for her alone.

And then off to one side, she caught sight of a path—a mere fleeting glimpse from the corner of her eye, she wasn’t meant to see it, but she did.

She threw herself toward it, dealing a terrible blow to her soul.

And her lost, hurting soul, not yet relieved, heard the path’s little pebbles crunch under the soles of her wonderful sandals, which were as one with her feet.

And with this she could open her eyes, stretch her limbs.

Now she was hearing all sorts of sounds, from Clarisse Rivière’s growling moans to the insects’ tiny cheeps, from Clarisse Rivière’s howls to faint creaks from the branches far above.

It was still dark, but the darkness was sharply detailed, alive with tiny forms, clearly outlined.

Ladivine turned her head.

She saw her own face beside her—the curve of a full, damp cheek, a mass of strong-smelling brown hair, the scents familiar but sharper.

She stood up and began to trot through the forest, and then, her breast swelling with pleasure, to run on her strong, slender legs.

She thought she could go on and on running this way, without respite or fatigue.

She emerged from the forest just as day was breaking.

Before the Cagnacs’ house, Marko, Daniel, and Annika were climbing into the rental car.

Once the SUV had started up and gone on its way through the clearing, Ladivine set off running again.

Joyful and proud that she’d found them and could thus place them under her care, she let out little cries she alone could hear, immediately swept off by the rushing wind.

The dog was there, on the other side of the street, it was there for her now, waiting for her to come out of the building each morning and head off to school, accompanied by her father and the invariably whining Daniel.

Annika looked deep into the dog’s black eyes, unafraid. I know who you are, she thought, and the dog stared back with an austere, steady tenderness that Annika found infuriating. It seemed to be saying that it would always be watching over her, and perhaps over them, should Marko and Daniel one day take note of its presence, but Annika felt no need to be protected, and she was offended that the dog had presumed to make of itself her guardian.

She slipped her hand into her father’s, trying to infuse in him some of her overflowing strength and rebelliousness.

She didn’t dare admit it, but she was also afraid Marko would end up spotting the dog, and she delicately squeezed his hand and spoke any words that came to mind to keep Marko’s attention on her, his daughter Annika, who, though only eight, thought herself seasoned enough to calmly accept that her mother had chosen to look after them from inside the skin of a dog on the Droysenstrasse’s icy sidewalk, whereas her father, she thought, her poor distraught father, should he ever realize such a thing, could never accept it without even more grief than he already felt.

Annika was unhappy with her mother for choosing this way of leaving them.

It was November. The sidewalks were covered with packed, frozen snow, the dog’s fur was thin and sparse on its flanks.

Nevertheless, Annika was sure nothing and no one had forced her mother to live with them in this distant, uncomfortable way, that she’d willingly chosen to shelter herself in the skin of a dog, which, though it did little to protect her from the cold, suited her better than the skin of a woman. That was how it was, Annika knew it.

She saw no sorrow in the dog’s eyes, only a serene, stern resolve.

The dead must have that kind of face, she thought.

Annika was a sturdy girl, and nothing she’d realized about her mother kept her from succeeding in school or proving unfailingly happy and calm before her father, who, for his part, had to be protected from certain difficult truths.

Which is why, when they set off for her school, she refused to cross the street outside the building, so they wouldn’t come face-to-face with the dog. Because if her father’s eyes met the dog’s, might he not recognize them, as if in spite of himself, and in spite of his little capacity for believing in such things?

Ever since their return from vacation, three months before, Marko spent all his free time on the Internet, and he explained to Daniel and Annika that wherever their mother might be she would someday appear, one way or another, in the web’s inescapable universe, either in person or through someone with news of her. No one could vanish completely and forever these days, their father assured them in his weary voice.

Her father’s sadness and fatigue pained Annika’s heart.

But she thought he was better off thinking their mother adrift in the wide world than withdrawn into the skin of a dog, guarding her truncated, lost, unhappy family from the Droysenstrasse sidewalk. He was better off this way, he who suffered so.

He tried to put on a good face with the children, but his sadness never left him, and Annika preferred him disconsolate to falsely lighthearted.

He was the nicest, most thoughtful father she knew, and the best looking, too, she thought, with his lush hair, tousled because he paid it no mind, and his tan face and pale eyes and carelessness about his appearance, like some magnificent animal with no notion that anyone might think it beautiful, and no understanding of people’s admiring stares.

Often Annika was angry with Daniel, who, rather than shield their father as she did, continually nagged at him with his whining and whims and tried to pull him away from the computer, to which Marko consented with an infallible patience and a gentleness so wistful and sad that Annika would later take Daniel aside to lecture and shame him—why try to take their father away from the one thing he thought brought him nearer their mother, that endless, painstaking search through the wilds of cyberspace?

He was in touch now with people all over the world, always asking this single question: Have you seen Ladivine?

And those strangers, he told them, put all their ingenuity and goodwill into the search for Ladivine Rivière, or, if they could do nothing else, into the attempt to console Marko Berger, which made Marko’s pain a little easier to bear, he added, wanting to be honest, but with a certain reluctance, Annika sensed, since his children could do nothing to unburden him of his grief, even a little.

How furious Annika was at their mother!

Every morning she stared at the dog with all the rage she could muster, then ignored it as it kept pace with them on the opposite sidewalk.

And in the afternoon, when their father escaped from Karstadt for thirty minutes to come pick them up at school and hurry them back to the apartment, where they would stay on their own until his workday was done, the dog was still there, shivering, eternal, faithful to its charge and perfectly indifferent to Annika’s withering stare.

Young though she was, and aware of her youth, of her ignorance, she believed she understood that their mother had tired of them, the children, their energy and their needs, their inevitable, daily company, their moods and their chatter. She herself, Annika, often wearied of Daniel. She felt largely responsible for her brother, and she found the burden heavy and oppressive.

But she couldn’t forgive their mother for leaving Marko in such distress and despair.

Certain frigid mornings, when they had to set off for school in the dark and the leaden sky foretold yet another gray day, Daniel stamped his feet on the front step, found some pretext for refusing to go on. Bundled up stiff in his snowsuit, he would shriek:

“I want Mama!”

Seeing Marko’s defeated face, and feeling no less enraged, she wanted to cry out:

Let’s bring that dog with us, let’s take it home!

But she held back, out of pity and love for her father.