Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

“What have you found there, darling?”

He examined himself in the mirror, pleased at what he was seeing. His face had a closed, aggressive, brazen look she hadn’t seen before, and which immediately troubled her.

Not that it wasn’t attractive, but only in the manner of a masculine type she found slightly frightening, crude and confident in a way that nothing seemed to justify.

He was wearing an outfit composed of a long pink tunic with purple floral motifs and a pair of trousers that came down just to the very top of his athletic shoes.

“Perfect for the climate,” he said. “And it suits me, don’t you think?”

She could only concur, at first reticent, almost hostile (like, she wondered, a dog baring its fangs because it doesn’t recognise its master?), and then fascinated, the longer she looked at him, by Marko’s undeniable beauty, his height, slender neck and well-defined shoulders seeming to have found in that curiously feminine get-up just what they needed to show themselves to their fullest advantage.

Never before had she seen Marko admire his own image, or take even the most meagre interest in his reflection.

And here he was finding in that mirror a man who surprised and delighted him, and he made no attempt to hide his naive pleasure at realising he was that man — why should that bother her?

Was she afraid that, like Richard Rivière who in the prime of his life realised that nothing, neither law nor morality, obligated him to go on living alongside a woman for whom he would always feel a deep tenderness but whose peculiarities wearied and bored him, a Marko suddenly aware of his beauty could only end up abandoning her, Ladivine Rivière, stained forever by her mother’s blood pouring out in a provincial suburban house, streaming into the Berlin apartment, spattering their neighbourhood’s pavements, sullying even the springtime sky?

But Richard Rivière and Marko Berger had nothing in common, save, perhaps, their love for her, Ladivine.

As for the obscenity of that murder, as for Ladivine’s feeling that, as that woman’s daughter, she’d been diminished, disgraced by the event’s squalid horror, she was sure no such thought would ever cross Marko’s mind.

Why should a new confidence suddenly make him want to abandon her?

“Yes, it’s perfect for you,” she said softly.

Leaving the store, she stopped before the chained dog.

Marko and the children had passed by without seeming to notice it, and now they were walking on to the bus stop, cheerful and happy in their new clothes, as proud as if they’d put on a remarkable performance in some contest, earning unhoped-for honours and discovering unexpected but incontrovertible reasons to be pleased with themselves.

The dog raised its big, matted head towards her.

Fearing vermin, she stayed her outstretched hand.

She looked deep into the quietly doleful, quietly imploring gaze, and that docile animal’s humanity and unconditional goodness filled her eyes with tears, she yearned to be it, and realised that this would come naturally and in its own time, not, as it had for Clarisse Rivière adrift on a life that had lost all direction and coherence, at the detestable whim of a man bent on avenging who knows what wretched childhood.

No animal had stared into Clarisse Rivière’s dying eyes with its friendly, compassionate gaze.

She might perhaps have glimpsed the crazed eyes of the man she’d taken in, the man she’d rescued, who killed her not like a dog but like the vacant woman she’d become after Richard Rivière went away, easily manipulated and perhaps, perhaps, in her own way, begging for the knife, the attack, begging to lose herself and be done with it.

It was a long wait for the bus by the blue plastic barrel in the blazing sun.

Even though Daniel and Annika had their new long-visored caps shading them, one red, the other green, Marko worried aloud that they might be in danger of sunstroke.

Ladivine felt the same fear, but she was irritated with Marko for mentioning it in front of the children. Daniel awoke from a daydream and immediately began to whine, while Annika groaned that she was dreadfully hot and it was too much to bear.

Ladivine then noticed that Marko seemed in a bad way. His scarlet face was dripping with sweat, his glasses had slipped almost to the end of his nose, and he seemed too exhausted to push them back up.

She herself had never felt better, her mind clear and alert. Her cheeks were scarcely damp.

But she wondered how they would fill up the many days to come in this country with nothing to see, and the tediousness of holidays, shot through with impatience, regret, almost despair, appeared to her in all its bleak truth, even more worrying here, where they were on their own to come up with activities and distractions, than in Warnemünde, where the boredom was familiar, orderly, mapped out in advance.

She and Marko had thought that, once free of Lüneburg and Warnemünde, they would have only to be — but that was impossible with the children, they also had to do, and how could Marko, more sensitive than she to the rigours of the climate, to the little ordeals each day holds for a tourist, be expected to find in this holiday something preferable to inexpensive, trouble-free boredom on a windy Warnemünde beach?

His new outfit, his delighted discovery of his own comeliness, none of that seemed like enough, she reflected, to convince him he was something other at heart than the man with the crushed ambitions who sold watches at the Wilmersdorfer Strasse Karstadt.

How she dreamed, sometimes, of being alone in the world! No weight on her back, no family or parents at all!

Obligated nonetheless to protect them all from a potentially jealous fate, she took a step towards Daniel, enfolded him in her arms, kissed his damp forehead, then turned and hugged Annika, who stiffened a little, with all the proud impassivity of her eight years.

This battle between love for her children and fevered longing for aloneness had been going on in her only since Clarisse Rivière’s murder — why should that be?

They climbed aboard a packed bus and rode back into town. A thick fog dimmed the sunlight, the air now grey but still every bit as stifling.

They ate slices of pizza standing up across from the bus stop, then set out to tour the neighbourhood, entrusting their route to the recommendations, at once enthusiastic and vague, of the one guidebook to this city they’d found in Berlin, which as it turned out described, and seemed to know, nothing of what they saw before them, detailing only what clearly no longer existed, or never had, evoking both an ambience of decadent prosperity and a quaintly carefree indigence when they could see only a very contemporary poverty, all plastic and sheet metal, surmounted by satellite dishes, and an apathy almost wholly without spirit, smiles or hope, which seemed to leave Marko gloomier on every corner, not so much, she told herself, because he’d naively conjured up an illusory image of a city that was in reality cold, unmysterious, threadbare, as because, an insignificant intruder in this hard, closed place, he was wondering why he’d come here, how he’d ever hoped he might find himself encountering a different, more complete man who would nonetheless, fantastically, be him, Marko Berger.

Or rather, she thought, studying Marko’s cringing face, the face of the man she so loved, whom she couldn’t stand to see frightened or sad, because such narcissistic hopes seemed obscene in these destitute streets.

Because no-one had murdered Marko’s mother in her Lüneburg house, no-one had punctured his mother’s body to set her blood flowing to distant Charlottenburg, forever reddening the pavement’s paving stones, the blooms on the lindens.