Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

And Malinka had brought her that Freddy Moliger, and now displayed a new face, shimmering with hopefulness, and her clear, quiet gaze, now unafraid to meet her mother’s, told her she had accepted, with joy in her heart, this new order: the introduction of Ladivine Sylla.

Suddenly it was all nearly too much for her.

She’d often tried to picture the life Malinka was leading. Once she thought she saw faint brown patches on her daughter’s cheeks, as if she were pregnant, and then she disappeared for several weeks.

How she used to dream of meeting that child, and how she feared it as well! He or she would be over thirty by now, and Ladivine Sylla was an insignificant woman whose appearance, whose status, whose uninspired conversation might very well, she had no doubt, come as a disappointment.

At the activities centre where she went several times a week to play draughts or knit in the company of other women of the neighbourhood, she generally sat silent, imprisoned in the shameful emptiness of her life, listening distantly as her neighbours talked of their children and grandchildren, of their husbands, living or dead, asking no questions so none would be asked of her.

Who could claim to know Ladivine Sylla? There was nothing to discover in her, there was too little to her.

She bought a two-kilo leg of lamb, a pound of haricots verts, some apricots for a tart. The shopkeepers knew her and greeted her amiably, despite her reserve, her habit of answering their banter with nothing more than a nod, and their observations on the fine weather with a thin smile. But that Saturday she was open, almost cordial. Little by little, her daughter Malinka was acknowledging her!

Leaving the market, she decided to make a detour down a street parallel to her own, where she could enjoy the sunshine.

She was passing by a newsstand when the front page of SudOuest caught her attention after a few seconds’ delay, making her retrace her steps, still pulling her trolley, and then, her legs suddenly weak, her arms limp, as if her limbs had understood before her head, she stared hard at a photograph of a beautiful, serious Malinka, her face slightly sad and uneasy, narrow and delicate like her own and framed by locks that fell in light waves over her slender shoulders, looking into the lens, at the photographer, anxious to please.

That attractive fifty-four-year-old woman was her daughter Malinka. No question about it, that was her.

Ladivine Sylla tried feebly to reach for the newspaper, but her arm refused to move. She clutched the handle of her trolley with both hands and bent down to read the headline: Woman stabbed in her home in Langon .

She stood up with a little cry and, still clasping the handle, scurried off down the sunlit pavement, in the perfumed air rich with anticipations and promises. She realised she was crying out as she lurched along, but her voice was muffled, hoarse, low, and no-one paid her any attention.

:

the dog was there, on the other side of the street, it was there for her now, waiting for Ladivine Rivière to emerge squinting from the dimness of the hotel and stand for a few seconds on the potholed pavement, in the blazing late-morning light, as she did every day, undecided, happy and deeply calm, until some chance happening, a child’s cry, a flight of pigeons, oh even a fly on her cheek, led her to set off to the right or the left.

Never straight ahead, because that’s where the dog was, because it was watching her.

She had no doubt that the dog came for her now, after first coming, perhaps, perhaps, for Marko or the children.

But she so hated the idea of Daniel and Annika being monitored, guarded, or looked after by that dog, the idea that they might need any such protection or oversight, and that the dog might have known it, she so hated that idea that she’d pushed it aside in disgust, and the very notion came to strike her as absurd.

Not because it was, but because even thinking of it was troubling, repellent and hurtful.

The children needed only the vigilance, the deep, anxious love that she gave them, she and Marko, and the big brown dog that in this unknown land had decided to serve as her consort or sentinel had that right alone, for her alone — certainly not the right to take responsibility for her children.

But suppose Marko might have liked to have that dog looking after him?

Still, she was by no means sure that the dog meant her well, she never approached it, never waved at it, never even met its gaze.

Marko could nonetheless have liked that animal’s discreet solicitude, unmistakable or uncertain. It seemed like this trip was bringing them nothing but trouble, he’d complained once again at breakfast, defeated and confused.

If he could believe that some citizen of this strange country had found it natural to express his devotion by temporarily inhabiting the flesh and the skin of a huge scrawny dog, its mission to follow Marko Berger’s every step, if he could believe such a thing as she did, trust in it as she did, he would have found infinite consolation.

But Marko could imagine no such thing.

And so she’d given up thinking the dog might be coming for Marko as well.

It came for her alone. And so, too, she never spoke of the dog around Marko.

He wouldn’t have mocked her, no, would have shown none of the coldness — the irritated scowl, the condescending pursed lips, the shrugged shoulders — that, for example, his father would have.

He would have looked at her closely, his brow furrowed and slightly concerned, gauging her seriousness, and then, once convinced that she wasn’t joking, he would have laid out all the ways in which such a thing was impossible.

But she never said it was possible, never claimed it was conceivable.

It simply seemed to her that it happened, and happened like this: every morning, when she came out of the hotel and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dazzling light, the big brown dog was watching her from the opposite pavement.

She set off with no goal in mind, one way or the other, striding firmly over the dusty, uneven asphalt, joy in her heart.

And the dog followed, always keeping the street’s width between them, and it was from the corner of her eye, her upper body slightly turned, that she saw and tracked it as it weaved its way, disdainful and faithful, through the crowds, the men selling swimming costumes and caps, the women with their displays of fruits and vegetables on a tarpaulin spread over the pavement.

Often it lost sight of her, when a bus passed by or a red light stranded a long line of cars.

And with that she slowed down a little, she couldn’t help it, not that she was afraid she might unintentionally leave it behind, but because the anxiety she imagined invading its canine heart saddened her own.

This was their first time away from Europe as a family, and after three days they couldn’t help feeling that, by an infuriating irony of fate, their troubles were multiplying in direct proportion to the care they’d put into planning their stay, as if in this country earnestness were a thing to be punished, and quiet enthusiasm, simplicity and worthiness generally.

They had spent the previous summers at Marko’s parents’ in Lüneburg and at a campsite on the Baltic, and it seemed to them a reasonable way of going on holiday, perfectly suited to the sort of family they were, and neither ever regretted aloud that it was so dull, over time almost exhaustingly dull, so this summer could have gone by in just the same way, between the elder Bergers’ home, where it was tacitly forbidden to go without slippers, to speak loudly, and to get up after eight (and them, Marko and her, thinking themselves responsible for the children’s obedience to these rules even when they were very small, and struggling to keep them from making noise and always to show them at their very best to the two old people they wanted on their side at all costs, not quite knowing why, maybe because they were plain, simple folk, and their judgement of people and situations seemed grounded in some primal, luminous, indisputable truth, when in fact it was often nothing more than a hodgepodge of hoary received ideas, she now thought with some animosity, pat opinions unthinkingly, unfeelingly parroted), and the campsite at Warnemünde, where the camper van they traditionally rented was in a way their second home, they liked to tell the children, whose happiness at going on holiday was heightened still further by the illusion that they were rich enough to own a summer house, even if she and Marko soon spent the days looking forward to evening, awaiting the aperitif hour, and then dinner, with the slight tension, the feigned, electric insouciance caused by those long hours of forced idleness on the windswept beach, and the crowds, the need to keep constant watch over the children, the feeling of absurdity that regularly ran through them when they caught themselves longing for the end of the holidays and the return to Berlin and to work and the coming of autumn, when in fact they wanted no such thing, they wanted only an escape from the inertia and emptiness of Warnemünde.