Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

And then off to one side, she caught sight of a path — a mere fleeting glimpse from the corner of her eye — she wasn’t meant to see it but did.

She threw herself towards it, dealing a terrible blow to her soul.

And her lost, hurting soul, not yet relieved, heard the path’s little pebbles crunch under the soles of her wonderful sandals, which were as one with her feet.

And with this she could open her eyes, stretch her limbs.

Now she was hearing all sorts of sounds, from Clarisse Rivière’s growling moans to the insects’ tiny cheeps, from Clarisse Rivière’s howls to faint creaks from the branches far overhead.

It was still dark, but the darkness was sharply detailed, alive with tiny forms, clearly outlined.

Ladivine turned her head.

She saw her own face beside her — the curve of a full, damp cheek, a mass of strong-smelling brown hair, the scents familiar but sharper.

She stood up and began to trot through the forest, and then, her breast swelling with pleasure, to run on her strong, slender legs.

She thought she could go on and on running this way, without respite or fatigue.

She emerged from the forest just as day was breaking.

In front of the Cagnacs’ house, Marko, Daniel and Annika were climbing into the rental car.

Once the four-wheel drive had started up and gone on its way through the clearing, Ladivine set off running again.

Joyful and proud that she’d found them and could thus place them under her care, she let out little cries she alone could hear, immediately swept off by the rushing wind.

:

the dog was there, on the other side of the street, it was there for her now, waiting for her to come out of the building each morning and head off to school, accompanied by her father and the invariably whining Daniel.

Annika looked deep into the dog’s black eyes, unafraid. I know who you are, she thought, and the dog stared back with an austere, steady tenderness that Annika found infuriating. It seemed to be saying that it would always be watching over her, and perhaps over them, should Marko and Daniel one day take note of its presence, but Annika felt no need to be protected, and she was offended that the dog had presumed to make of itself her guardian.

She slipped her hand into her father’s, trying to infuse in him some of her overflowing strength and rebelliousness.

She didn’t dare admit it, but she was also afraid Marko would end up spotting the dog, and she delicately squeezed his hand and spoke any words that came to mind to keep Marko’s attention on her, his daughter Annika, who, though only eight, thought herself seasoned enough to accept calmly that her mother had chosen to look after them from inside the skin of a dog on the Droysenstrasse’s icy pavement, whereas her father, she thought, her poor distraught father, should he ever realise such a thing, could never accept it without even more grief than he already felt.

Annika was unhappy with her mother for choosing this way of leaving them.

It was November. The pavements were covered with packed, frozen snow, the dog’s fur was thin and sparse on its flanks.

Nevertheless, Annika was sure nothing and no-one had forced her mother to live with them in this distant, uncomfortable way, that she’d willingly chosen to shelter herself in the skin of a dog, which, though it did little to protect her from the cold, suited her better than the skin of a woman. That was how it was, Annika knew.

She saw no sorrow in the dog’s eyes, only a serene, stern resolve.

The dead must have that kind of face, she thought.

Annika was a sturdy girl, and nothing she’d realised about her mother kept her from succeeding in school or proving unfailingly happy and calm before her father, who, for his part, had to be protected from certain difficult truths.

Which is why, when they set off for her school, she refused to cross the street outside the building, so they wouldn’t come face to face with the dog. Because if her father’s eyes met the dog’s, might he not recognise them, even in spite of himself, and in spite of his little capacity for believing in such things?

Since their return from holiday, three months before, Marko was spending all his free time on the Internet, and he explained to Daniel and Annika that wherever their mother may be she would someday appear, one way or another, in the Web’s inescapable universe, either in person or through someone with news of her. No-one could vanish completely and forever these days, their father assured them in his weary voice.

Her father’s sadness and fatigue pained Annika’s heart.

But she thought he was better off thinking their mother adrift in the wide world than withdrawn into the skin of a dog, guarding her truncated, lost, unhappy family from the Droysenstrasse pavement. He was better off this way, he who suffered so.

He tried to put on a good face with the children, but his sadness never left him, and Annika preferred him disconsolate to falsely light-hearted.

He was the nicest, most thoughtful father she knew, and the best-looking too, she thought, with his lush hair, tousled because he paid it no attention, and his tanned face and pale eyes and carelessness about his appearance, like some magnificent animal with no notion that anyone might think it beautiful, and no understanding of people’s admiring stares.

Often Annika was angry with Daniel, who, rather than shield their father as she did, continually nagged at him with his whining and whims, and tried to pull him away from the computer, to which Marko consented with an infallible patience and a gentleness so wistful and sad that Annika would later take Daniel aside to lecture and shame him — why try to take their father away from the one thing he thought brought him nearer their mother, that endless, painstaking search through the wilds of cyberspace?

He was in touch now with people all over the world, always asking this single question: Have you seen Ladivine?

And those strangers, he told them, put all their ingenuity and good will into the search for Ladivine Rivière, or, if they could do nothing else, into the attempt to console Marko Berger, which made Marko’s pain a little easier to bear, he added, wanting to be honest, but with a certain reluctance, Annika sensed, since his children could do nothing to unburden him of his grief, even a little.

How furious Annika was at their mother!

Every morning she stared at the dog with all the rage she could muster, then ignored it as it kept pace with them on the opposite pavement.

And in the afternoon, when their father escaped from Karstadt for thirty minutes to pick them up from school and hurry them back to the apartment, where they would stay on their own until his workday was done, the dog was still there, shivering, eternal, faithful to its charge and perfectly indifferent to Annika’s withering stare.

Young though she was, and aware of her youth, of her ignorance, she believed she understood that their mother had tired of them, the children, their energy and their needs, their inevitable, daily company, their moods and their chatter. She herself, Annika, often wearied of Daniel. She felt largely responsible for her brother, and she found the burden heavy and oppressive.

But she couldn’t forgive their mother for leaving Marko in such distress and despair.

Some freezing mornings, when they had to set off for school in the dark and the leaden sky foretold yet another grey day, Daniel would stamp his feet on the front step, find some pretext for refusing to go on. Bundled up stiff in his snowsuit, he would shriek:

“I want Mummy!”

Seeing Marko’s defeated face, and feeling herself at the end of her tether, she wanted to cry out:

“Let’s bring that dog with us, let’s take it home!”