Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

And as for breath, oh the air Marko and that man were inhaling swelled with the air neither Wellington nor Ladivine’s mother could any longer breathe.

She shook Marko awake by one shoulder.

“What if he’s not dead?” she whispered. “We have to call an ambulance. He might still be breathing.”

“That’s impossible, did you see how far down it was?”

His voice was flat and irritable.

“I don’t want to save that guy’s life,” he went on. “I don’t want any problems because of someone who came here to harm my children. I don’t want to hear another word about him, you understand, I don’t care if he’s dying or dead down there.”

He choked up on those words, and Ladivine realised that the thought of the boy slowly expiring on the concrete weighed on him all the same.

“He could have been coming to warn us, to save us. .” she murmured miserably.

“Save us? From what?”

“That’s just it, we don’t know. Maybe he was the only one who did. .”

She thought she could feel him shrugging in the dark.

“People around here,” he said after a moment, “well, you’ve seen how they are. If we call an ambulance, if we tell them what happened. . they could kill us, you know that. Darling, I’m so tired.”

He drew closer, but she gingerly pushed him away, her mind still on Clarisse Rivière’s killer, who was very likely asleep at this moment, his moist, warm skin faintly pulsating, his breath tranquil and gentle, his nostrils and mouth blithely inhaling and exhaling the air he’d robbed Ladivine’s mother of forever.

So, she reflected, shivering in dismay, Marko had to disgust her for the first time in their lives, she had to feel this tormented revulsion at his pulsing, living skin for her to dare turn her mind to the man who’d killed Clarisse Rivière in the Langon house three years before, her cautious, frightened mind, which until tonight fled that man’s very name, and which now, beside a Marko whose skin had been sullied, whose breath was corrupted, consented to remember it.

The man who killed Clarisse Rivière was named Freddy Moliger.

She repeated that name to herself until it stopped hurting.

Because until now any hint of a similar string of syllables had left her breathless, and tortured her brain like a searing migraine.

And now, next to a sleeping, untouchable Marko, she could let her lips form Freddy Moliger’s name, let it reverberate in her head like a grimly tolling bell, sombre as the knell that rang in the modest church on the Carrefour de Libération, amid the noise of the passing cars, on the day of Clarisse Rivière’s funeral.

She lay quiet and still, taking care not to touch Marko’s skin, her fingers mechanically smoothing the sheet over her stomach as Freddy Moliger’s name slowly sounded its lugubrious, clear tones in her head.

Now and then she heard the children turning over, Daniel moaning in his sleep.

And suddenly it was as if she was hearing them from far, far away, because Freddy Moliger’s name was deafening her, pure, potent, unstoppable.

Had Daniel or Annika cried out to her at that moment, she would not have found the strength to let their voices silence the pounding syllables of Freddy Moliger’s name, any more than her children’s voices, no matter how pleading, could stop their mother’s heart beating if her hour hadn’t come.

Her hand moved to her cheek, wiped it dry, then touched her lips. Yes, those were tears, she observed, in detached surprise.

She’d been weeping without knowing it, but was it for young Wellington or Clarisse Rivière, or was it for Marko, whom she knew she could no longer love as ardently and innocently as before, whom she even knew she might never love again?

Now she could hear a dog barking.

She forced Freddy Moliger’s name to mute its deafening drone so she could think back on that big brown dog, and she smiled in the darkness as she recognised its bark, not that she’d ever heard it bark since it began watching over her, but because, as she understood it, whether in her own dream or someone else’s she’d appeared in, she had met that dog long before they came to this country, just as she had met the woman who sold mango juice in the market, and that earlier big brown dog had barked, and she’d learned its voice, and so she could recognise it now.

The next morning, sitting at their usual breakfast table by the terrace windows, they noticed a long, dark stain where Wellington’s body had landed.

They said nothing about it, and not because of the children, thought Ladivine.

No, they would never speak of Wellington again, never again speak of that awful struggle on the balcony and the revelation of Marko’s calm, deadly resolve.

She saw him glance once at the terrace and quickly turn away, with something hard, aggressive and unyielding about his chin, as if he were even now fiercely proclaiming his innocence, like a guilty man determined never to confess.

He ate more than usual, he even stuffed himself with buttered rolls while she pretended to eat so as to arouse no suspicions in Annika, whose watchful eyes darted from her to Marko and sometimes lit on the terrace just where the concrete was stained, Ladivine noticed, nausea rising up inside her.

“I had a dream about Wellington last night,” said Annika in an overly casual voice.

Oh, you’re lying, thought Ladivine, her heart gripped by pity and understanding, you’re lying because you think it might bring you an answer.

“He was looking for us to invite us to a wedding,” Annika went on, “and he said I was the bride, and we didn’t even know.”

Daniel giggled.

“Don’t you think we’ve heard quite enough about weddings lately?” said Marko slowly and coldly, a tone he took with the children only in rare, extreme situations, when one of them had done something reckless, had endangered his or her safety out of heedlessness or a desire for attention.

And although he immediately tempered that severity with a wry smile, butter and crumbs stuck to his lips, Annika wasn’t fooled, and, suddenly turning very red, tears pooling in her eyes, she heard Marko’s words as they were intended, as a threat.

She gave Ladivine a pleading, questioning look, and her mother’s only answer was a meaningless little shrug.

She looked down at her plate, her index finger tapping at a smear of jam.

Ladivine knew she and Marko had just lost everything that was absolute and unwavering in Annika’s trust, she knew Annika now believed or knew her parents to be capable not only of foolishness, which her mature, indulgent mind would eventually have accepted, but above all of cruelty towards her, she who was nonetheless, as surely she’d never doubted, a deeply loved child.

Feeling the sudden tension in the air, Daniel began to sulk very visibly.

“We ought to leave today, and go and see your father’s friends,” said Marko.

He’d tried to put on a casual smile, and the gentleness and warmth had returned to his voice, but the lower half of his face was still frozen in a savage, inept, belligerent denial, the very mark, thought Ladivine, of the killer.

She heaved a long sigh. She gripped the edge of the table to keep her hands still.

On the phone, she was remembering, Richard Rivière had spoken of a couple he knew who’d moved to this country long before, and she’d briefly mentioned them to Marko, half hoping Richard Rivière would forget to give her their phone number and address.

But he didn’t, and a few days later she got an e-mail with complete contact information for her father’s old friends.

However put off by the idea of meeting anyone from Richard Rivière’s new social circle, people Clarisse Rivière had not met, did not have the right to meet, people who, if they’d heard anything of her at all, must have pictured only the worn, humiliating image of a tiresome wife abandoned in middle age, however powerful her sense that she was betraying Clarisse Rivière, whose slender body, whose kindly face, whose whole fervent, timid, generous person Richard Rivière’s friends would never know, she nonetheless conscientiously copied down the address and put the slip of paper in her wallet, vaguely, superstitiously fearing that if she didn’t they would end up in desperate need of help from those very people, an expatriate French couple of whose history with Richard Rivière she knew nothing, and who she thought, without knowing just why, would have turned up their noses at Clarisse Rivière like the others, not being the type to like or understand her, and Ladivine pre-emptively held this against them, just as she felt a baseless but profound anger towards her father, who allowed himself to be friends with likely disparagers of Clarisse Rivière’s strange mind and boundless simplicity.