Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Marko was smiling into space, eyelids quivering.

Ladivine very clearly felt herself walking away from the counter, leaving the store and emerging into the sunlit street, because it was well past time she was on her way.

And yet she was still there, one arm resting on Marko’s counter, her legs, whose stoutness and damp nudity she could feel beneath her dress, seemingly unable to do as she asked.

Not knowing what she was about to say, she stammered:

“Yes. . maybe we’ll stay. .”

And she felt as if she were placing a terrible curse on herself.

And what about Marko? What would become of him, so illequipped to protect himself?

And the children?

Who would come running to protect them, and how to be sure they wouldn’t wander off, alone and unthinking, on paths unknown to their parents?

Was it really a good idea to listen to Richard Rivière?

He’d already shown that he could unwittingly sow desolation all around him, yes, even as he doled out nothing but love and tenderness — yes, Ladivine knew, he went on making long, frequent phone calls to Clarisse Rivière after he went away, so that even though he’d left her no-one could accuse him of abandoning her, certainly not, and had in fact enveloped her from afar in a solicitude that, Clarisse Rivière told Ladivine with pitiful pride, few long-gone spouses ever displayed, yes, to be sure, that’s how Richard Rivière was, generous with his attentions and overflowing with love, none of which had prevented him from delivering his wife into the hands of brutality, of blind, fatal chance.

Suppose that with this advice Richard Rivière was doing misery’s bidding?

Suppose that deep down what Richard Rivière wanted was to keep her away from the trial?

But one thing at least was beyond question, which was that she herself wanted nothing more than to be kept away from the trial, and Richard Rivière must have seen it.

With great effort and a faint suction-pad sound, she unstuck her legs.

Now she was walking up Wilmersdorfer Strasse towards OttoSuhr-Allee, only vaguely glancing at the bazaars, their cheap wares cheerily spilling out onto the pavement.

Oh look, Jenny’s Eis has closed down.

Storewide discounts at Heimwerker.

The water rippling over the huge, polished stone balls recently installed as an ornament for the pedestrian street, a sort of Zen fountain, sluiced towards her feet with its flotsam of cigarette butts and beer-can tabs.

She knew every shop, every sign, and nearly every one was connected to some moment of her life in this neighbourhood, from when she’d recently met Marko and they used to come for a kebab or a box of Asian noodles that they ate on a Pestalozzistrasse bench, to the time she’d gone into that pharmacy on the corner and asked for a pregnancy test, to that December when she took the children to watch the Christmas market being set up and drink not-very-good hot wine or cream punch and eat grilled sausages, and that graceless Wilmersdorfer Strasse with its provincial air and its reminders of Langon was so dear to her heart that, though Marko had often found less expensive apartments in livelier neighbourhoods of Berlin, she’d always refused to move away from Charlottenburg.

Dear old Charlottenburg — her attachment to the place had at least something to do with the charming name and the equally enchanting and desirable figure of Sophie Charlotte in her château, her oval face, pale complexion and abundant hair reminding her of Clarisse Rivière.

But didn’t every woman who died too young remind her of Clarisse Rivière?

Every woman who died tragically, leaving behind a little crowd of inconsolable, eternally guilty people, and wasn’t Clarisse Rivière herself, in her own humble way, a lonely queen in her oversized house?

Dear old Charlottenburg, unfashionable, sleepy — how she loved it!

Even the awful, morbid Rathaus she was now nearing, where she taught French four times a week, even that grim edifice, with its blackened walls, its outsize, graceless proportions, its overblown majesty, ridiculous but intimidating, even that ugly town hall whose dark green, too high-ceilinged corridors, she couldn’t help thinking, had seen their share of terrified, unknowingly doomed people pass through, she’d learned to love even that, to feel at home even there.

She climbed to the top floor, walked towards the room used for French classes, a brown door, sea-green walls.

A few of her students were already waiting inside.

Knowing the answer, she asked:

“Who let you in?”

“Madame Sargent,” one answered.

She looked at her watch to make sure she wasn’t late — oh, two minutes at most.

Sargent, the other French teacher, a native of Caen, always watched for Ladivine’s students and unlocked the door for them early, not so they wouldn’t have to stand in the corridor but simply, thought Ladivine, to plant the idea in their heads that Ladivine Rivière was never on time.

Why on earth did Sargent not like her? Ladivine wondered, troubled.

It could not be rivalry.

Ladivine’s students were in their first year of French, Sargent’s in their second and third.

But Sargent did not like her, and subtly strove to undermine her. Why should that be?

Ladivine couldn’t understand it.

To her shame, she also recalled that when she first came to the Volkshochschule, a few years before, she did all she could to ingratiate herself to Sargent, who had been teaching there for years and intimidated her with her authority, her severe poise, her adamant slenderness.

Sargent answered her every attempt to charm with a deflating brusqueness, the thought of which still made Ladivine’s cheeks burn in humiliation.

She began taking worksheets and a collection of pencils from her bag.

Her students, some fifteen adults of all ages, looked on in silence.

Suddenly Sargent was there, on the other side of the desk.

Still peering into the depths of her bag, searching for the copy of Les vacances du petit Nicolas she was sure she’d brought with her, Ladivine recognised the smell of Sargent’s clothes before she was aware of her presence — a nauseating blend of mildew and expensive perfume, as if every morning Sargent extracted her very chic person from a crypt.

“Ladivine. . This is your mother, isn’t it?”

“My. . my mother?”

She looked up at Sargent’s thin, excited, eager face, finding it deeply repellent.

A dull-white foam clung to the corners of Sargent’s mouth. The wings of her nose shone beneath her thick, orange-tinted make-up.

Sargent was staring at her with fascinated yearning, and Ladivine half thought she was fighting off the urge to clasp the back of her head and pull her face to her crotch.

“It’s this week’s Le Point , have you read it?”

In her hands was a magazine open to a photograph and a long article.

She tried to thrust it into Ladivine’s face, but Ladivine stopped her with one raised, bent arm, her movement so unintentionally violent that the magazine flew from Sargent’s startled hands and fell to the floor by the table, open onto Clarisse Rivière’s gentle, slightly frightened, hesitant face, her white cotton collar chastely and tidily poking out of the beige cardigan she’d got for her last birthday.

Oh yes, she herself, Ladivine, had picked out that fine-knit sweater at Karstadt, then posted it to Clarisse Rivière for her fiftyfourth birthday.

Who took the picture? she wondered, her head spinning. Was it Clarisse Rivière’s killer himself?

Ladivine never saw her mother in that cardigan, since she died four or five days after she got it.

Had she put it on for him so he could take her picture, and because she thought it looked nice on her?