Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

He was himself, sensitive and open, a touch calculating, but never cynically.

Whereas Ladivine couldn’t bring herself to speak Clarisse Rivière’s name, or the man’s, or the month and the day it all happened.

Whenever she thought of the months of the year, the days of the week, a blur blotted out the month and day she could no longer speak of.

And if her eye lit on the name Clarisse in a book or an article, her breath came quicker, and she moaned silently to herself.

As for the man, he inspired in her a sacred terror.

She’d once dreamt she was kneeling before him, or before a vague form that was unmistakably him, offering her throat to be slashed.

She could not vent her rage at that man, could not picture him or imagine any real life he might lead, could call down no curse on him.

She could only tremble in terror and incomprehension.

By that act, by the murder of Clarisse Rivière, that man had entered Ladivine’s life and emotions, he’d taken root, and she could only submit to it, like, she sometimes told herself, an unwanted pregnancy discovered too late to abort.

Sometimes she felt that man’s violent spirit kicking inside her, leaving her nauseous and faint.

Whereas, she sensed, Richard Rivière could think of it all like some horrible news story that curiously just happened to involve him.

And when he was not thinking about it, it did not upset him. His life went on.

How she resented that, how easily he’d got off!

She waved to snap Marko out of his daydream before she reached his counter.

She didn’t like to surprise him at work. Caught idling, even without a customer in sight, he couldn’t hold back an expression of childish shame, as if fearing he’d misbehaved, and that pained her, and made her vaguely indignant.

The fact that this wasn’t Marko’s place, that he was talented and hardworking and perhaps brilliant enough to get through the veterinary studies he once wanted to pursue was, for as long as she’d known him, so obvious that it tormented her to see him trapped behind a counter in a department store, with his gentle, penetrating gaze and too few occasions to make use of his intelligence.

But that he had, on top of that, acquired the reflexes of a humble employee, wary of a dressing-down from his boss, and even afraid of him, though at home he mocked that unpleasant man’s dullwittedness and pretention, that tormented Ladivine with pity for Marko and anger at the elder Bergers, who’d dissuaded their son from going on with his studies, wanting to see him settled and independent as quickly as possible.

Marko never complained. He was both too proud and too naturally discreet to dare speak of his situation as anything but a privilege, and even a blessing, having as he did a job not far from home, and a job at which, he claimed, though she didn’t believe him, he was almost never bored.

Oh, no, how could she believe such a thing?

And was he right, she often wondered, to give in like this, to adapt so readily to something so unsuited to him, was it wisdom or weakness, admirable humility or mere passivity?

She didn’t know. She was sure of one thing only: whether he admitted it or not, working at Karstadt was a sacrifice Marko had made, and how great a sacrifice she alone knew.

He spotted her, surprised.

She’d put on a broad smile to reassure him, so he wouldn’t think something important or terrible had happened, since it was unlike her to come to see him at the store.

Relieved, he smiled back at her, with the shy smile that always gave him a touching, childlike air.

She loved everything that made Marko who he was, a German she’d known for some ten years, who’d become her husband and the father of her children, for all time and to her great surprise, so utterly did Germany and its people seem, back in her native Gironde, to belong to a distant and exotic world, inspiring too much indifference to leave room for prejudice, but at the same time so foreign that noone would ever imagine living there without a dismissive little snort.

And yet this was how it was, she’d bound her existence to that of a German — and the very word still rang in her perplexed ear with the slightly quaint charm of a mystery into which she’d never been initiated.

She loved Marko, and he was German — what did that mean, and wasn’t it odd!

How that word separated him from her, however delightfully!

She’d long noted certain habits of his, rooted in his upbringing, different from hers, she knew their tastes in food did not always concur, not having loved the same dishes as children — but above all she felt everything that was unknowable in Marko’s heart, in the depths of his enigmatic, simple self, which sometimes surfaced in a glance whose intention she couldn’t decipher, and she sensed, moved, that what it expressed was, more than anything, that he was German.

Privately, she called that the Secret of Marko, though she knew he had no idea he was inhabited by a secret, and couldn’t possibly care less about being German.

And yet he was — how odd!

She leaned over the counter and gave him a quick hug.

He patted her back, a little embarrassed, his pale eyes looking around to be sure no-one had seen. Then he pushed up his heavyframed glasses.

He was a thin man, tall and bony, who always stood with his weight on one leg, arms crossed and hips forward, in a vaguely feminine pose.

He had a bass voice, and belonged to the Karstadt staff choir.

“I talked to Richard, he told me where we should go.”

Marko’s faintly anxious face brightened at once, not so much, perhaps, because he was happy and relieved to see the matter of their destination decided as because he was thrilled at this confirmation of his long-held, ecstatically favourable opinion of Richard Rivière’s almost superhuman sagacity.

And all at once he looked so young, his healthy light chestnut forelock sweeping untamed over his thick lenses, his flat torso beneath his short-sleeved shirt, even, she thought, the way his long waist plunged into his slightly drooping jeans, like a flower’s strong, endless stem bowed ever so slightly against the lip of the vase, still so youthful in his obliviousness to his own gangly charm that it pained Ladivine’s heart and suddenly, though their ages were the same, made her feel much older, she who had always worried so about her appearance.

She whispered the name of the country Richard Rivière had suggested.

“He has friends there, apparently. People he sold a car to.”

“We’d never have thought of that,” Marko cried, “but. . Oh yes, it’s perfect!”

But would he not have applauded any suggestion made by Richard Rivière, that man he’d never met?

His notion of Richard Rivière’s tragedy, the murder of his ex-wife, was vastly inflated, Ladivine realised uncomfortably, and Richard Rivière felt nothing with the searing intensity Marko imagined, Richard Rivière was in no way the heroic, shattered man dreamt up with a certain self-indulgence and perhaps a long unmet need for someone to admire by a Marko who himself had been deeply shocked by Clarisse Rivière’s death.

The blood rushed to Marko’s thin face. Dreamily, leaning against the counter on one hip, he studied the cheap jewellery displayed across the aisle, and, not looking at Ladivine, murmured:

“Who knows? Maybe we’ll decide to stay?”

A noncommittal snicker escaped her, slightly cross and disapproving, and she immediately chided herself.

Because she’d noted that habit of hers. She was quick to silence any thought of flight with a sarcastic remark, a prosaic appeal to reason, and yet she hated that attitude, which she thought an envious person’s reflex.

She glanced at her watch.