Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

And so Marko’s suggestion found her unwilling, irascible, almost venomous.

“You really think it’s a good idea to look like we’re running away?” she hissed.

“I believe it would be prudent to leave as soon as we can,” said Marko, unruffled.

Not long after, taking the children to the pool, they saw two workers washing away the dark patch left by Wellington’s body.

Ladivine could not hold back an image of the boy’s stomach bursting open as he hit the ground, his healthy young entrails spilling onto the concrete, through Marko’s fault and her own, because, weak-willed, unable to bear the solitude of the foreigner, they’d let themselves be talked into accepting the boy’s company for a tour of the National Museum.

Would Wellington’s death be the subject of the museum’s next acquisition, Ladivine wondered, and would it show a sadistically grinning Marko ripping the intestines from Wellingon’s living flesh with his bare hands, would it show the woman in nightclothes, half hidden behind a pillar, feasting her eyes, would it go so far as to show the already dissolute children laughing in drooling delight?

Oh, the only thing to think was that Wellington had come back to harm them, maybe make off with Daniel and demand a ransom.

Only that intuition, only that certainty could have turned Marko violent, he who’d never raised a hand to a living soul, never screamed in anyone’s face.

The only thing to think was that Wellington had come back to harm them.

Evidently there were no witnesses to Clarisse Rivière’s murder in her Langon house, but, Ladivine now wondered as she sat at the pool’s edge with her calves in the warm water, if there had been, if some face peering in through the living room window had seen Freddy Moliger’s crime, had watched Clarisse Rivière’s blood pouring out onto the floor, soaking the sofa and the needlepoint cushions, would that face then have turned away, would that person have gone home to dinner and then to bed thinking that in any case there was nothing more to be done for Clarisse Rivière, that she was in all likelihood dead, as Ladivine had let Marko convince her that Wellington could not possibly still be alive on the terrace?

What would she feel, Clarisse Rivière’s only child, on learning such a thing, on learning that someone had witnessed her mother’s last moments and not tried to save her?

She would curse him, that’s what, she would want him to die in the same abject aloneness.

Annika and Daniel waded sullenly in the pool, looking bored.

A similarly opaque and unhappy expression marked the faces of the few old people who came to bathe there each morning, who never answered Ladivine’s timid greeting, pretending not to have noticed her.

Successive sunburns had left their fat shoulders stippled.

Fate seemed to have condemned them to spend an infernal eternity in the confines of the hotel and the pool, submerging their weary, pale, fragile flesh in the murky water, then laboriously pulling themselves out again, in an endless, absurd cycle, evidently thinking the hotel’s other guests and employees responsible for their torment, and thus never answering their hellos.

Ladivine was ashamed to be with them. She found them ugly in a way that worried her just a little.

When the heat grew too much to bear she called Daniel and Annika out of the water, and they gratefully hurried to obey, as if, for them too, swimming was now an element of some ritual torture.

Slightly dazed, painfully aware of her own haggard appearance, Ladivine caught sight of Marko coming towards her through the glimmering light, dressed in his pink tunic, whose radiant colour bathed him in a rosy glow.

She realised he’d gone off without her noticing, and now he was back, crossing the terrace, enveloped in the bleeding aura of his deed, giving himself away, thought Ladivine, drunk with anguish, as surely as if he’d cried out, “It was I who killed Wellington, that sweet boy, so full of life, who opened his door to us!” — now his athletic shoes were trampling the still-damp spot where Wellington had laid in repose, now he was coming to her with his head high and a bright, pleased look on his face, an impatient, excited little smile at the corners of his mouth, as if chafing to report wonderful news.

Annika saw him too, and she ran towards her father, forgetting that she usually thought such impetuous effusions unworthy of her age.

Did that vulnerable little girl believe she needed forgiveness for something? Ladivine wondered. Did she, in the tortuous ways of her childish logic, believe she was guilty of thinking, or perhaps vaguely seeing, that something terrible had happened with Wellington?

She pressed herself to Marko, her arms encircling his waist, in a demonstration of tenderness utterly unlike the reserved child she usually was.

As if it were she who’d done something wrong, thought Ladivine.

And she wanted to run to Marko, rip him from the child’s arms, horrified to think of Annika lingering one moment longer in that apotheosis of guilt, to think of that guilt impregnating and infecting her while perhaps Marko was delivered of it forever, not that he’d planned or wanted anything of the sort.

But she stayed where she was.

A misgiving raced through her mind: Maybe I’m the one who’s infecting her? Maybe she’s picking up that guilt and remorse from me?

She walked slowly and heavily towards Marko, holding Daniel’s hand, the boy scratching her palm with his nails, like a little trapped rodent.

“Let go, Mummy, let go!” he was whining.

Will we be ordered to give up Daniel as a replacement for Wellington, will we have to sacrifice Daniel to be washed clean of Wellington’s murder?

When her bare feet touched the damp concrete just cleansed of Wellington’s blood, her legs — her big, fat, solid, earthy legs, their flesh dense and firm — buckled beneath her. She fell to her knees on the concrete, and Daniel, now freed, sped off to join Marko and Annika.

Marko hurried to her side and helped her up, his arm no longer trembling.

He held her close, and his tunic’s strong, tallowy smell, Marko’s manly new smell, filled her nostrils till it choked her.

“We’re leaving,” he said triumphantly. “I reserved a car, it’ll be here in thirty minutes. We’re going to spend the rest of our stay with your father’s friends.”

“We have to call them first,” she protested weakly.

“Out of the question. We’ll show up, and they’ll have to take us in. Suppose we called and they said it was impossible, what would we do? We’ve got to back them into a corner, there’s no other way.”

“We’re leaving, we’re leaving!” cried Annika in a burst of wild joy.

She began leaping about, stamping on the damp spot, her big, limpid, blue eyes almost popping out.

Ladivine was troubled to see that the little girl’s shorts had slipped down, her bottom partly exposed.

More disturbingly still, the fiercely modest Annika didn’t seem to care, and Marko himself was watching the child’s frenzied capers on the concrete with an amused, light-hearted, happy eye.

Then a bitter taste filled her mouth.

How could the big brown dog ever follow her into the bush, where Richard Rivière’s friends lived? How could the car not leave it far behind, and even if it did manage to follow her trail, wouldn’t it come to her dangerously depleted?

Now she was certain she didn’t want to leave, not the city nor the hotel, and she wouldn’t care if she was doomed to be imprisoned there forever, and she would blame no-one but herself and her perfectly lucid choices, and would thus resist the temptation to go to the trial and harangue the judges: Will the time come to judge Marko Berger, the murderer of a minor named Wellington, and myself, here before you, I who made no attempt to rescue that poor boy?