Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

A whimper escaped her as she walked under the railway bridge.

Not because of the roar of the train racing by overhead, but because she couldn’t inhale Doysenstrasse’s Maytime scent, richly perfumed with lime flowers, without immediately thinking she was once again smelling Clarisse Rivière’s blood, the innocent but pungent, stifling blood of her mother who didn’t know how to shield herself from malignancy, made suddenly strange and unknowable by her blood spattering the couch, the floor, the curtain — so much blood in so slight, so discreetly fleshly a body!

And smelling Clarisse Rivière’s blood in the air, mingling with Charlottenburg’s springtime perfumes, the Langon calamity slowly flooding the faraway, unsullied heart of Berlin, left her quivering in terror — because then what escape could there be?

“The trial will heal us,” Richard Rivière had told her one day.

But would the trial stem the tide of blood, stop it befouling the quiet streets of western Berlin where she and Marko had chosen to live, prudently distancing themselves from both Lüneburg’s virtuous judgements and Langon’s silent, irreparable sadness?

She, Ladivine, Clarisse Rivière’s daughter, had chosen to turn away from that sadness rather than shoulder her share, and the worst had then happened.

Tears clouded her vision.

But now the smell was gone, the smell of lime blossom and blood, replaced by the faint odour of stale cooking oil borne on the breeze to Stuttgarter Platz, when the weather was fair, from the chip stall on Kaiser-Friedrich Strasse.

She wiped her eyes with her bare arm, skirted the little park where she no longer took Daniel and Annika to play.

How many long, even tedious hours had she spent there, on this bench or that, and yet, and although she felt no desire to relive those days of stiff limbs and backaches, the sight of children at play in that same sandbox always brought an ache to her heart.

That’s all over now, melancholy’s insinuating voice whispered in her ear, they’ll never be little again, that’s over for you.

But, she objected, half aloud, I don’t miss it.

All the same, she looked away from the bustling toddlers in the park, and the spectre of her carefree, happy, irreproachable self (no-one having yet shed Clarisse Rivière’s blood) sitting on a bench watching over her children and letting her thoughts drift unafraid, like the two mild, dreamy-looking women she saw there, whose mothers’ blood no-one had spilled in the tranquillity of a provincial house.

Yes, it hurt her to look at them.

That was over for her, the simple life she led in those days, and her children’s first years would forever meld in her memory with the time when Clarisse Rivière was still alive, even if she silently disapproved of what her mother was doing with that life, even if any mention of her mother’s life filled her with apprehension and unease.

Oh, but she had never secretly wished for an end to that life, only to the way Clarisse Rivière was living it since her husband left, a way not so much chosen as fallen prey to.

And now that the children were too big to take to the park, it was as if they’d been banished from the enchanted wood by Clarisse Rivière’s death itself, as though the awful wave of blood had driven them out, her and the children, stranding them, forever guilty and stained, in the flower-and-blood-scented street.

She stopped by the park’s entrance, laid her hand on the gate.

Her palm knew the feel of the flaking paint, the warmth of the slightly sticky metal, for she’d so often pushed that gate open, sometimes limply cursing the hot sun or the sameness of those afternoons.

She adjusted the strap on her sandal.

My heel’s so dry, she thought, that’s no good for summery shoes.

And again her eyes filled with tears.

She’d had the very same thought about Clarisse Rivière when she last came to visit in Berlin, when Ladivine, walking behind, spotted her callused heels, incongruously revealed by elegant sandals with multiple gilded straps.

She was unsettled and moved by that sight, like the unveiling of something slightly sad in her mother’s private existence, but it also irritated her a little, the contrast between those delicate shoes and those yellowed, cracked heels seeming to show once again that Clarisse Rivière could never do anything right.

She hadn’t exactly thought: “If you’re going to parade around in such flashy, probably expensive sandals, you should learn to take care of your feet.”

She didn’t have it in her to express such a thought, so sharply phrased, not even to herself.

Sympathy and shamefaced devotion often tamped down her bursts of annoyance with Clarisse Rivière.

But she couldn’t help seeing her mother’s rough heels, and now, as she pulled up her own sandal strap, she recalled the many times she’d been infuriated by some display of Clarisse Rivière’s careless or absurdly trusting nature, when, confident of her judgement, her reason, she’d taken cover behind disapproval, forbidding herself to see that no fault could be found with Clarisse Rivière, that she could only be watched over, because, like a cat, like a bird, Clarisse Rivière lacked all discernment.

Had she been willing to see that, Clarisse Rivière would no doubt still be alive, she told herself. Had she only been willing.

She went on past the park, started down the pavement overlooked by the tracks of the S-Bahn.

Stuttgarter Platz’s pick-up bars were still closed at this slow, vacant afternoon hour, but a woman was heading into the Panky, a woman Ladivine knew, having regularly crossed paths with her for years, and she gave her a wave, and that woman was more or less Clarisse Rivière’s age when she died, and her body was similarly long-limbed, taut, compact, but her hard, jaded, impassive face, the set of her lips, not bitter but tired and scornful, were nothing like Clarisse Rivière’s, who’d kept her full, gentle features, almost untouched by time, well into middle age.

The woman’s only reply was a quick twitch of the lips, making a rudimentary “hello”, while an almost irritated and untrusting look crossed her face, as if, though long used to seeing Ladivine around the neighbourhood, she suspected her of unspoken judgements and didn’t think her greeting sincere.

Does she think I’m only saying hello because I know she works in that bar and don’t want her to get the idea I look down on her? Ladivine asked herself.

But I say hello to everyone I run into around here. Although, oh. .

She also knew that by raising one hand in the sunshine and waving it at that ageing woman’s coldly disenchanted face, that woman who, Ladivine had learned, got the evening off to a start at the Panky by dancing on a table (in gold sandals, her cracked, grey heels showing beneath the thin straps?), she knew she was greeting an image of herself, Ladivine Rivière as she could easily have become.

For her upbringing by Richard and Clarisse Rivière had done nothing to protect her from a life of that kind.

They had raised their only child Ladivine in accordance with a neutral morality, or unstable, or infinitely relative.

That was their outlook on life, so utterly unjudgemental that Ladivine learned as a child to find it deeply indecent to express a firm opinion on anything at all, or simply to think it, even if you would never speak it aloud, to consider the only honourable attitude an unwavering tolerance for every aspect of the private life and public behaviour of all those around us.

Never could Ladivine, caught up in girlish ardour and sometimes forgetting the house rules, rage against some act perpetrated on the playground without Richard Rivière or Clarisse Rivière, so alike in this way that she could rarely remember which had spoken, asking benignly, almost smilingly reproachful: “But, little girl, who are you to judge?”