Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

And who would take note of his efforts, and so spare him any further unpleasantness?

She didn’t dare tell herself outright, but she was disappointed by Marko’s cowardice, and hadn’t expected him to give up so easily on making the absolute most of this trip, as, she thought, she was already doing.

She had the dog to help her, of course. But if no dog was bothering to cling to Marko’s heels, wasn’t that his fault?

Coming into the room to find him sitting up with that lost, weary look, she almost told him of the dog, as an encouragement to bring about that same phenomenon for himself, that blessing or that calamity, she wasn’t sure which, but in any case that antidote to anxiety and suspicion.

But she didn’t. Was she afraid Marko might divert the big brown dog’s attentions to himself?

I can’t tell him in front of the children.

Was she afraid she might be jealous of Marko, should the dog choose a new master or prey?

The children mustn’t know, for the moment.

She’d never even spoken to them of the trial, she’d never found the strength to tell them, even in the most cursory way, how their grandmother died.

Where to seek the words to tell such a thing, and didn’t it sometimes seem wiser to forgo having children, and so not run the risk of one day having to tell them of such horrors?

Daniel and Annika seemed downhearted that morning, though when they saw her they did their best to put on a childish enthusiasm — exactly as if they were playing at being children, simply for politeness’ sake, and so as not to worry their parents.

They carefully climbed out of their squeaking beds, dressed only in their underwear, and Ladivine knelt down before them and put one arm around each.

“Are we going to the pool?” asked Daniel.

“Oh yes, the pool!” cried Annika, with what struck Ladivine as affected enthusiasm.

“How about a walk first?” said Ladivine in her gentlest, most re- assuring voice.

Daniel energetically shook his head. A pall of anxiety veiled Annika’s pale eyes.

“They’re afraid to go out,” murmured Marko, rubbing his cheeks with a weary hand.

“Oh, so you’re afraid to go out, are you?”

She’d adopted a mocking, affectionate tone, choosing to pretend she couldn’t understand their trepidations.

But suddenly she found herself feeling defeated, almost conquered by an absurd, humiliating, unwarranted panic at the thought that their holiday was only beginning and that, if this kept up, the failure would be so pathetic that she and Marko would never recover.

She was equally disturbed that Marko had just spoken in German. It was their custom to speak French at home, and Marko forgot it only in moments of deep distress.

“And just what is there to be so afraid of outside?” she asked in her artificially playful and teasing voice, wishing at once that she hadn’t, since the question might give a shape and a solidity to what must not be allowed to exist.

Daniel shrugged, unsure what to say. Annika compressed her delicate, thin little face into a horrible grimace. Daniel let out a small cry and covered his eyes.

Unrecognisable, Annika was clenching her fists to go with the hideous face she was making, and suddenly Ladivine was alarmed.

“Stop it,” she said, a little sharply.

She grasped her daughter’s hands, forced her fingers apart.

Tears were streaming from Annika’s closed eyelids. She began to shake her head back and forth with a desperate violence.

Terrified by her contorted face, Daniel turned away.

“Come on now, stop it,” said Ladivine, “that’s not funny.” “She can’t, she’s stuck!”

Marko jumped up from the bed, bounded towards Annika.

He was in his underwear, he was thin and lanky, neutral and perfect, an exemplary image, for Ladivine, of a masculine body in its prime, in all its vigorous health and unconscious grace.

He squatted down beside Annika and began gently massaging the girl’s distorted face, now wet with tears.

“There, there, my beauty,” he was murmuring, “everything’s going to be alright, Daddy will give you your face back.”

And he forced his lips into a reassuring smile. Little by little Annika calmed down, her features freed themselves from their horrible expression.

Ladivine went to the hermetically sealed window.

She glanced out and saw that the dog was downstairs, not far from the entrance, lying in the ragged shadow of a dusty palm tree.

It looked up at her with its big, placid eye.

And she found her serenity flooding back, she who had lost all confidence on entering this room.

The children were splashing around in the deserted little pool behind the hotel, jumping and frolicking in a water so heavily chlorinated that it seemed to give off a sort of vapour. At first, Ladivine had taken that dull white mist for a mirage.

She and Marko were stretched out on chaises longues, the smell of bleach coming to them in waves.

Sunglasses hiding their eyes, they lay motionless, sour and still.

Two days before, on discovering the mediocrity of the pool, they’d made a vow not to so much as sit on the edge and dabble their feet in the water, deciding as one that it would be humiliating to seem to find this little bean-shaped basin good enough after all. It struck Ladivine that they were displaying their anger and disappointment in a way all too like them, muted and indecipherable.

She told herself they should have gone straight to the manager and complained of the scandalous difference between the pool’s photos on the website and the pool as it actually was.

“It’s all in the focal length,” Marko had spat out, bitter and resigned.

It was this same pool on the website, but photographed at night, lit from within, and shot from above, from one of the rooms, making it appear fairly substantial and concealing its surroundings, missing tiles, battered dustbins, dirty concrete.

No-one ever seemed to use it but Annika and Daniel.

“All that chlorine can’t be good for them,” murmured Ladivine, groggy with heat.

Marko grunted in agreement.

But what could they do? If they forbade them to use the pool, how to entertain two children sick with fear at the idea of leaving the hotel?

Why not let them stay till it gets dark, that would be nice, she caught herself thinking.

How exasperated she was by the children’s incuriosity! But weren’t they simply taking their cue from Marko?

She turned her head to look at him, his mouth closed tight, his face tense behind his sunglasses, lying stiffly on his deck chair, like a prisoner on the rack, accepting his fate.

She reached out, took his hand, and found it cold as ice. She wanted to tell him, “Nothing’s ruined, nothing so terrible has happened that suddenly we. .”

But so grey, so stricken had she seen Marko’s face two days earlier, when after more than two hours’ wait at the airport they realised that they wouldn’t be retrieving their bags, that their bags had in all probability been stolen from the carrousel before their passports were stamped, that they would have to go and fill out a stack of useless papers and draw up a pointless list of their two suitcases’ contents, now gone forever.

It was just clothes, after all, she’d immediately told herself, but it seemed like some vital part of Marko’s self was being excised, or his oldest, most ardent expectations betrayed.

She’d seen his harmonious face crumble, no longer held together by a certain optimistic and light-hearted vigour.

The cracks in his face went deep, the bones as if shattered with a hammer, and two days later he still had that same face, here by the pool where the children were bathing, tense, tortured and haggard.