Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

“I have to be going now,” said Ladivine, “but I’ll be back, and I’ll bring my husband and children with me.”

Didn’t that last sentence sound more like a threat than a promise?

Again she laughed her deliberately superficial little laugh, but she sensed at once that this triviality was no less out of place than that longing for a connection founded in a wondrous hallucination, on the incarnation of shadows she alone had perceived.

Reluctantly, she walked away, and now her enchantment was dimmed by the feeling she’d done something wrong, shown a lack of discretion.

It would soon be eleven o’clock. The market was gradually emptying out, the hubbub receding in the thick heat.

She realised there was no point in trying to make anyone understand the strangeness of what she was feeling, or the vastness and harmoniousness of her joy, or how natural she found it to see her anxious life dissolving here in the big brown dog’s watchful gaze.

And it wasn’t because she was on holiday. How misplaced that word seemed, given the rash of mishaps they’d endured since their arrival, and if they compared these past three days to their weekslong holidays in Warnemünde and Lüneburg, they clearly should have been sorry they hadn’t gone once more to Warnemünde, sorry they’d so dreaded the tedium of Warnemünde that they dared to believe there was another way.

But not for anything in the world would she have wanted to be waking up in the Warnemünde camper van at this moment, and she was sure Marko felt the same, even if for now he seemed unable to find any palpable pleasure in their holiday here, perhaps, she told herself, because no-one had seen fit to lodge his or her consciousness in the skin of a dog and become Marko Berger’s guardian.

She smiled as she walked, a vague and ingenuous smile.

She never doubted that Marko would rather be suffering here than stewing in his discomfort and anxiousness at his parents’, and even that he would sooner die here than surrender to Lüneburg and lay at his parents’ feet the weapons he’d just discovered he had.

He was so angry with Lüneburg for making him spineless and vulnerable.

But he’d granted himself the freedom to change. He woke every morning energised by a new sense of himself, able to make decisions, whether weighty or trivial, undaunted by Lüneburg’s judgement, and even defying it.

Would his humiliated parents’ distraught faces never rise up before him, hurt and uncomprehending, Ladivine worried, would pity not one day end up crushing his attempts at liberation, his necessary initiation into hard-heartedness?

Having realised that they could not safely return, summer after summer, to the creeping misery of Warnemünde or the restless stupor of Lüneburg, they had still had no idea where to spend their holiday — as they put it, out of habit, knowing perfectly well that what they needed was nothing less than an escape from a quagmire.

They would not necessarily have to go far away to find that new lucidity.

It only had to be someplace utterly apart from the world of Lüneburg.

The ideal, thought Ladivine, would almost be to make sure that the elder Bergers had never heard or spoken the name of the country they’d call home for three weeks, would almost be for that country not to appear on the illuminated globe in Marko’s parents’ living room.

Every year she set aside three thousand euros from her Frenchteacher salary, while Marko, who repaired watches and alarm clocks in the timepiece department at the Karstadt on Wilmersdorfer Strasse, managed to save up two thousand, and though that sum was more than enough to rent the camper van and buy low-end wine at the Warnemünde minimarket, they soon discovered it wouldn’t go far for a family of four holidaying in any spot unknown to the elder Bergers and to Lüneburg in general.

Night after night, they put the children to bed and sat down at the computer to compare not only the prices of flights and hotels the world over but also the hundreds of comments posted by Internetwise travellers, because more than anything Marko feared that their trip, that mighty step towards emancipation, might turn into just one more example of the horrible ways the most gullible and least well-heeled tourists could be fleeced, and yet, far from reassuring him with their potential preventative effect, these testimonials only further inflamed his anxiety and suspicion, sometimes pushing him to the brink of despair.

How, he asked Ladivine with a sort of dour satisfaction, when so many experienced people, far savvier than they, fell for the same old scams (and here he made as if to tap at the screen, to point out yet another grim, edifying tale), how could the two of them, who’d travelled so little, who had never even been on an aeroplane, hope to escape fraud and deception?

“Just listen to this,” he would say.

And, although she was sitting there beside him, eyes fixed on the screen like his own, he read out the monotonous tales of swindles endured by strangers of whom an uncomfortable Ladivine would have preferred to know nothing.

What did they have to do with these people, she thought, who sought only ordinary amusement from their holidays abroad?

What did they care that the B. family thought they’d booked a room in a four-star Majorca hotel and ended up in a cubbyhole looking onto a malodorous airshaft? Or that the F.s, having paid for a full-board week’s stay in Djerba, found themselves shelling out for breakfasts and bus excursions?

She longed to reach out and turn Marko’s anxious face towards her own — that sharp-featured face she so loved, inevitably summoning up memories, faint or vivid depending on the circumstances (and sometimes only stirring up a very gentle melancholy in her heart), of the handsome Teddy Ted, the thin-cheeked, yellow-haired cowboy who in her childhood had inspired a love so passionate that she had to force herself to forget, lest she sink helplessly into despair, that he was only a character in a comic strip — and remind him that their goal with this trip was not relaxation or entertainment or an introduction to some new sport.

Let some unscrupulous hotelier put them in a windowless room; their wish for a more clear-eyed existence would come true all the same — and maybe even more fully?

“Oh, this stuff doesn’t matter that much,” she would say, cautiously.

He said nothing, his thin lips frozen in a cheerless smile.

This fierce determination not to be hoodwinked, now Marko’s obsession, was heightened by his resentment of Lüneburg, and, imagining his parents darkly exulting on learning that they’d had a dreary time in a disappointing and venal land, its charms long since faded, he raced frantically from site to site, unwilling to place his faith in any, pretending to linger over an offer only to observe, in a sudden paroxysm of spite, that the prices were well beyond their means.

Towards midnight they would go to bed, their eyes weary, their minds dulled. Marko’s cheeks were so hollow that Ladivine could clearly see the outline of his jawbone.

To convince themselves that their spirit was positive all the same, they’d picked out a few possible destinations, a handful of packages that the next day they saw as the preposterous or suspect things that they were, to which their exhaustion had nearly blinded them.

How could they ever reconcile the choice of a “Tour of the Magical Maghreb — bargain casbahs — Berber feasts — colourful folklore” with the only ambition that could justify such a trip, which was precisely to take them away from banality, from bleakness and inertia?

Not to mention, said Marko, that his parents probably found that very same sort of flyer in their letter box, and while there was little danger of bumping into the elder Bergers in the streets of Agadir, since they never left their own part of Germany, there were Lüneburg neighbours, people Marko had known since childhood, who might well, like them, end up at the Hôtel Igoudar, chosen for further consideration the night before because of its discounted rooms.