Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Caringly, Marko took Ladivine’s arm as Annika spun around and around on the slowly drying stain.

She was pivoting on one foot and propelling herself with the other, her arms arched around her hips.

Ladivine was convinced her bare feet were absorbing the damp of the concrete, soaking up everything that had spilled there.

“We have a very talented daughter,” said Marko. “She should start dance lessons when we get home.”

Couldn’t he see that Annika was dancing with Wellington’s death, that Wellington’s death had invited her to dance and now she couldn’t push it away?

Marko had a dreamy smile on his face. He was already thinking of going home, of Berlin, of the life quietly waiting for them there, ready to be put on again like a freshly cleaned and pressed garment.

She wished she could tell him that nothing was waiting for them to come home anymore, that their whole life, and their real life, was here, that they would never escape it, except with their death.

Or was Marko right about himself and the children, and she alone, Ladivine Rivière, had no life to go back to in Berlin, because she’d brought it with her, at its most essential, to this place?

She reflexively reached out to take Daniel’s hand and start up to their room, but the boy recoiled in something not far from terror.

“I can walk by myself!” he shrieked.

“Annika, we’re going,” said Marko, in a clear, firm voice.

The girl stopped spinning at once. She collapsed on the ground and lay prostrate, waiting, thought Ladivine, to recover her spirits and drive Wellington’s away. The four-wheel drive Marko had rented was already outside the hotel when they came down with the purse that was their only luggage.

Ladivine paid the bill, avoiding the clerk’s gaze, but as she turned to leave her eyes met the manager’s, standing in the lobby with his back to the light.

She thought she saw deep revulsion curling that usually distant, inexpressive man’s lips.

She nodded at him, as any departing guest would have done, and she felt as if her huge, heavy head was about to tumble off onto the carpet.

Making no reply, he stepped to one side and disappeared into the shadows.

She wanted to scream at him, “What of Wellington?”

Nothing came out but a sob that might well have passed for a sneeze. Marko and the children were already settled into the car, waiting.

She didn’t have to look around to find the big brown dog, across the street as always.

It was sitting up very straight on its haunches, its front legs proud and firm, the rust-coloured fur on its belly showing between them.

She held the dog’s gaze and gestured apologetically towards the four-wheel drive — but wouldn’t the dog know full well she had no wish to leave?

Wouldn’t it know, couldn’t it decipher her sentiments better than she herself, and didn’t it inhabit Ladivine Rivière’s skin more intimately than she herself, who sometimes felt she’d become nothing more than Clarisse Rivière’s bereaved daughter?

Marko gave a quick honk. She steeled herself and climbed in beside him, stunned at the coolness of the air-conditioned cabin, its appealing scent of new leather and jasmine air-freshener.

“This must have cost a lot of money,” she murmured, just to say something, caring little now for their financial condition.

“It’s not cheap,” said Marko, “but there’s no way around it, we can’t get there without a four-wheel drive. When you don’t have a choice, you just go along, right?”

She sensed Marko’s body quivering with a merry, childlike, vaguely malign excitement, not, as anyone else might have thought, because he was relishing the prospect of driving such a vehicle but because, Ladivine noted uneasily, his body, his face, even his hair, everything about him seemed different, more intense and more glowing, cruel, strong and fiery, as well as — strangely, given his usual sweetness and seriousness — far more gleeful, a hard, gemlike glee without cheer or merriment.

That fierce ardour filled the car with something cynical, and, Ladivine thought, something sensual.

How stifling it was, how disturbing!

She was sure Marko would laugh out loud if she spoke Wellington’s name, a new laugh, aggressive and sarcastic.

And the children? Would they laugh along with him?

Oh yes, they would, they were following Marko’s lead now, and who could blame them, since she herself was so uncertain, inspired so little confidence, since Wellington’s mere name made her tremble and gasp?

She could hardly expect the children to take trembling anxiety’s side, to embrace foolishness and pointless shame.

In all sincerity, she couldn’t even want them to.

On the GPS’s instructions, Marko drove down a narrow, potholed road through endless suburbs.

Low blocks of bare-cement flats succeeded the little dirt houses roofed with mismatched sheets of corrugated tin, in front of which slim-hipped women with diminutive breasts underneath oversized T-shirts disapprovingly watched the four-wheel drive go by.

Sometimes the wheels sprayed little pebbles at the houses, built close by the road.

With this Marko would slow down, just as Ladivine was about to ask him to, then little by little he’d speed up again, his features relaxing, as if he feared that some peril might pounce on them if he drove any slower.

He cast Ladivine glances whose tenderness she could plainly see, as well as their longing to draw her into the sphere of licence and vitality forming around his new, unbridled nature, but she turned away, looked out of the window, her heart heavy with resentment.

But suppose Wellington had come back to harm them?

Wasn’t that the most likely thing?

Had she not in fact sensed the boy’s hatred, his feigned friendship mere groundwork for carefully calculated misdeeds?

Marko was seeking out the children’s attention as well, wiggling his fingers at them or smiling broadly towards the back seat in the rear-view mirror.

It seemed to Ladivine that, without being aware of it, by his emanations alone, he was stirring up an odd frenzy in the children, especially Annika, an excitement at once teasing and frustrated, denied a conclusion that Marko’s provocative manner seemed to promise.

Daniel squirmed in his seatbelt, giggling as if he’d been tickled, something questioning and faintly anxious in his piercing voice, his baby voice, which he’d playfully reverted to.

Annika was screaming with laughter as she might scream in pain, spurred on by the goad of a scandalous sexual appeal that she couldn’t understand but perceived all the same.

This was what Marko was bringing about, this was how far he was willing to go to absolve himself — drawing the children into his miserable, guilty conscience, then corrupting them with their desperately delighted consent.

Or was it she, Ladivine Rivière, who was looking at all this with an unwholesome eye?

She closed her eyes, hunched forward in her seat.

She often feared, having once been that teenaged girl who slept with the uncomplicated men of her little city for money, and unable ever since to look back on those days without a shudder of dismay, almost disbelief, that she wouldn’t be able to keep a cool head with her children when the subject of their bodies came up, that she might betray her unease by a stiffness they would interpret as an odd prudishness, that she might find it hard to make clear what was perfectly acceptable and what to steer clear of, and so she’d always found Marko’s casualness and simplicity about sex reassuring, and she’d always counted on him to fill in the children when the time came.

But what she felt in that car, that indecent, toxic, hopeless excitement, could not be good for the children, she thought, and she knew the old Marko would never have allowed it, could never even have imagined behaving in a way that might encourage it.