Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

She’d felt deeply defeated herself. It had been a long trip, with a stopover in Amsterdam because flying non-stop cost far more, and Daniel was whining and snivelling when they got off the plane, so much so that Ladivine wondered if he was ill.

Then that fruitless wait at the baggage claim, the hours of irritation and fatigue when they’d so long looked forward to this moment, and having to deal with grumbling, indifferent employees whose bizarre English neither of them could understand, and that demeaning sense of ridiculousness she tried to fight off, all the while holding a whimpering Daniel whose thirty kilos gave her sharp pains in the back — nothing was forcing us to put ourselves through this, why did we ever get ourselves into this, and at such enormous expense too, stupid, stupid.

As she was putting her lips to Daniel’s hot, damp little cheek for a kiss, he raised his arm and slapped her.

Oh, nothing one couldn’t pretend not to notice, perhaps only a hungry and exhausted child’s erratic, unintentional gesture.

And yet, and yet.

She was sure Daniel knew just what he was doing — him, the gentlest, most loving little boy there ever was.

But she pretended not to have felt it, even as tears of surprise and dismay sprang up in her eyes.

When they finally reached the hotel, very late at night, with no other luggage than Ladivine’s bag, they were too tired to dwell on their disappointment at the shabbiness of the room and the inadequacy of their reception, the children’s beds having been forgotten.

For dinner they shared the half-box of butter cookies in Ladivine’s bag, then they waited forever for the close-mouthed man in slippers and a stained T-shirt who’d been assigned to bring in the folding beds, a task he performed with a sullen, resentful, proud air, as if, Ladivine thought, he’d been punished or reprimanded on their account.

Marko watched him unfold the beds, blankly, like a feeble old man.

Much to Ladivine’s surprise, he made no move to help as the worker wrestled with the recalcitrant, rusting metal.

Because it was Marko’s habit, founded in discomfort and guilt, always to step forward and lend a hand, sometimes even to prevent any act whose aim was to serve him.

Marko could not stand to see people working for him.

But now he sat motionless on the bed, watching the man toil away, his gaze distant and vaguely empty.

In the doorway, Ladivine pressed a few coins into the worker’s hand. He jiggled them in his open palm, sorted through them with his index finger, then dropped them wordlessly into his pocket.

She felt a surge of anger, though so brief that she couldn’t grasp its cause.

She was so rarely angry.

Like Clarisse Rivière, who was incapable of anger.

Clarisse Rivière had helped out the man who would end up murdering her, she’d given him money, sometimes large sums, sometimes just a note or two for the shopping.

Did her killer display that same disdainful sneer as he dropped the money into his pocket? Did he look down on Clarisse Rivière for her generosity?

And why should she, Ladivine, Clarisse Rivière’s only child, have to hear such a person’s explanations and rationales?

Why should she have to hear every detail of what he’d done to that woman, Clarisse Rivière, who was once Ladivine’s mother?

“The trial will heal us,” Richard Rivière had said.

Ladivine came back into the room, exhausted, briefly furious again.

“Here we are,” she said tersely to Marko.

Then, more gently:

“Here we are at last.”

Was it the sun pouring into the room at dawn, was it a few hours of sleep, which restores everything to its proper proportions, was it simply the daytime, which, unlike night, makes every drama more modest, Ladivine didn’t know — but when they walked out of the hotel the next morning, after a copious, serviceable breakfast, she sensed that Marko and the children had recovered a little of their enthusiasm, and it was even becoming imaginable to think of the loss of their luggage as a piquant detail in the story they’d one day tell of their stay.

It later seemed to Ladivine that the dog wasn’t there for this first stroll.

She would never know for sure. It might have appeared without her knowing, it might even still have had the face and the look of a human being she would have no reason to distinguish from the rest of the crowd.

But she would always like to think it was looking after her from the very first day.

They got on a bus that would stop near the supermarket, where, they’d been told at the hotel, they could buy clothes.

Ladivine was deeply disturbed by Marko’s fragile air when her eye landed on him in the bus and she realised she was seeing him, from a few metres away, as he appeared to strangers — a slender, pale man with a slightly lost look, a deeply temperate and vulnerable man whom any violence would find trusting and defenceless.

Annika and Daniel stood on either side of him, clutching his pockets.

But how, thought Ladivine, her heart aching, how could such a man ever hope to protect two little children from even the mildest aggression, and what about him fuelled their illusion that such a father could be their rampart?

Really, what was it, about that impressionable, over-sentimental man?

Oh, she loved them all three, but not without torment.

Sometimes she yearned to run far away from them, to know nothing more, ever again, of their existence and so shed all responsibility for them, those three who so completely depended on her, so fragile where she was strong and hard.

But not so strong or so hard that she could shoulder such a heavy burden of love and demands — and yet that’s just what she did, so clearly she could, and it was in part thanks to her that her husband and children had so far led a happy life in which love and its demands were never questioned, in which love and its needs fell on their heads like a gentle spring rain, life-giving, always welcome.

She never doubted that she was loved back, by husband and children alike. She had no grounds to complain about any of them, no, she had nothing but perfectly justified contentment and pride.

So. .? she wondered as she stood in the bus, clutching the aged, grimy, cracked leather handles, smelling the slightly fetid but comfortably familiar odour rising up from her exposed armpit, under the cotton of her T-shirt, unchanged for two days.

So why should she feel so weary, so beset, why this feeling of not being up to the task when she looked on those three trusting, beloved faces, which, even when as now they were not turned her way, seemed to be forever searching her face for lessons, advice, displays of tenderness and guarantees for the future?

She was ashamed, telling herself that this man and these children demanded nothing they did not have every right to expect, that she gave them nothing but what it was only right that she give them, and that, this being how family life was, it was her duty to submit without fear or pointless regret, because after all nothing had forced her to marry or procreate.

Yes, she was sometimes ashamed of her fear and exhaustion, which she had in a sense chosen — and among all the countless possible sources of fear and exhaustion, were that lovable man and those delightful children not the least onerous?

She knew all that. But there were times when she wanted nothing more than to slip away, not so much disappear as withdraw, though without causing anyone the slightest twinge of grief.

Little Daniel was looking at her, slightly anxious.

Resetting her face, adopting the benevolently confident, lighthearted expression that comforted the children as nothing else could, she gave Daniel a wink. The boy’s features relaxed, reminding her how deeply Clarisse Rivière had loved that child, not more than Annika (Clarisse Rivière’s heart was too simple and too just to have a favourite), but more serenely, because passionate love for a little boy reminded her of nothing, whereas, she one day confided to Ladivine, her joy and exhilaration at Ladivine’s birth were so powerful that she couldn’t keep them within endurable limits and, as she put it, she came under a depression.