Ladivine (18 page)

She almost never spent the money. She stuffed the bills into an old pair of panty hose and shoved it under her bed, nothing more.

Besides, Richard and Clarisse Rivière gave her money and unquestioningly bought her anything she might need.

And yet she went on making appointments with her regulars, meeting them at their place after her parents bought her a scooter, spending nights in suburban houses not unlike her own, with their beige stucco exteriors and interlocking tile roofs, in beds exactly like her parents’, the same model finished in light or dark laminate, and her bare feet trod the same shining, hard floor tiles as at home, white or gray, and the various rooms all looked alike, the little kitchen off the entryway with its fiberboard cabinets, the living/dining room with its puffy leather couch, its oversize armchairs, its giant TV screen, then the hallway to the bedrooms, their square windows veiled by sheer curtains, their orange or yellow imitation color-wash wallpaper.

Never, with those men she knew well, who treated her respectfully, often even thoughtfully, did she have any contact of the sort she saw among the girls and boys in her high school, never did she feel the urge to press herself urgently to them, nor they to her.

She shared their beds with no particular pleasure, but no disgust either.

Riding home on her scooter in the dark or the first light of morning, weary, tired of life, and humiliated by the very absurdity of that sadness, since nothing was forcing her to do what she did, she thought furiously of Richard and Clarisse Rivière peacefully asleep in their bed, hating them fiercely, briefly, for the absolute freedom they’d given her and the high opinion they would always have of her.

The Panky’s heavy steel door opened to let in the woman just as Ladivine walked by.

And the darkness inside, thick with the odor of old cigarettes, stale beer, and filthy carpeting, seemed to take hold of the woman and snatch her away from the sunny world of the street, where the odor of french fries, now stronger, seemed the very essence of innocent freedom.

Ladivine unconsciously picked up her pace, anxious to put the grimy façade of the Panky behind her, and the Blue Hot farther on, presided over with icy indifference by women who could have been her, Ladivine Rivière, since her parents had never cautioned her against anything and would have treated her to their blind, cheerful visits and unconditional love had she ended up turning tricks in one of these very bars.

She crossed Kaiser-Friedrich-Strasse, feeling the sun-baked asphalt stick to the soles of her sandals.

Her chest was heavy with a sudden flood of affection.

How, in spite of everything, how she loved the life she’d made for herself in Berlin, how afraid she was, sometimes, of losing it, out of carelessness or failure to remember what could have been!

She realized that Germany had rescued her from Langon, and that Marko, Annika, Daniel, even the fearsome Bergers of Lüneburg, with their unyielding morality, had extricated her from the flat, dull-witted stupor that Richard and Clarisse Rivière were letting her founder in.

And so she could look on the sooty façades of certain Kaiserstrasse buildings, still pockmarked with bullet holes; in the winter she could endure the long weeks of gray skies and cold weather, the dirty snow; she could even find a melancholy pleasure in the feeling of exile and aloneness when she happened onto an image of the eternal, radiant French countryside on television (and saw herself and her parents pedaling down a sunlit road lined with acacias or plane trees); she could look on the irremediable ugliness of neighborhoods cheaply rebuilt fifty years earlier and in spite of it all feel deeply grateful to be living there, beneath that leaden sky, in that architectural chaos, that absence of sweetness and harmony, she who came from a region where a gentle clemency suffuses all things.

Although, although. Deeply ashamed, she remembered their Warnemünde lapses.

Wasn’t it the summer after Clarisse Rivière died that all that started up?

She turned onto Wilmersdorfer Strasse, headed for Karstadt.

Still no crowd in the pedestrian street, which in two or three hours would fill with a parade of families whom Ladivine, remembering Langon’s one-street business district, always thought oddly provincial in their serene, ambling gait—but now a man had locked eyes with her, and now, as a game, she was returning his stare, a quiet smile on her lips, and the man’s typically German air, she mused, her mood brightening, made that little advance all the more special.

Because people rarely made passes in the streets of Berlin, more rarely even than in Langon, where it was largely the same people crossing paths, day in and day out.

Their elbows brushed and she looked away, her lips very slightly pinched, signaling that the game was over.

She immediately confessed to herself, with unusual candor—her habit was to sidestep upsetting thoughts or shove them away with a violent mental thrust—she confessed to herself, then, as she turned toward Karstadt’s front door, that she was exceedingly grateful to men such as this, genteel, not the womanizing type, who paid her the homage of an interested and even relishing glance, who met her own surprised or playful gaze with the look of a wistful and elegant Why not?

Once a shapely young girl, though not so tall, not so slender as Clarisse Rivière (how she used to envy her mother’s fine bones, willowy figure, and slim legs, she who seemed stuck to the ground by a more powerful gravity, thanks to the ungainliness of her slightly thick ankles and short calves), she’d become a woman of some heft, with a round, full face that made her eyes, mouth, and nose seem almost incongruously delicate, as if out of proportion.

That was less apparent, she thought, when she was young, since she was thinner, her face narrower.

But now that she’d done some living, as Clarisse Rivière sweetly put it, and filled out a bit, her little mouth and nose looked like they’d been stolen from some other woman and glued onto her broad face as a joke.

Oh no, she took no pride in her physique, even as she looked on such questions with a scornful detachment, a disdain unfeigned even if belatedly acquired, at the cost of great struggles against long-standing, naïve dreams of breathtaking beauty or simply piquant Parisian charm—she would have loved to be a mere slip of a girl, here in Berlin, as svelte as she was distinguished, refined and sporty, her glamorous French accent the ideal finishing touch.

Which is why, though resigned to being just barely pretty, to being a very ordinary woman whose careful attention to her clothes, to the cut and color of her hair—shoulder length, warm brown, and wavy—compensated respectably for her homeliness, she was still moved and surprised when, like that man, someone caressed her face with a gaze full of a longing to know her, to touch her.

But she accepted that there was nothing special about her; she accepted it now, without heartache.

When, long ago, she stripped off her clothes before the men who were paying her, she always took care to conceal the parts of her body she found unlovely—her ankles, her knees, even her stomach, which she thought bulged more than it should.

At the time she saw those physical flaws as something like moral failings and thought she could only be despised for not being magnificent.

Today she felt no shame at those imperfections.

She even learned to show them off, when summer came, like inventive, slightly quirky accessories she’d chosen precisely for their novelty, and if her knees, which she’d always found pudgy, showed beneath the hem of the dress she was wearing that afternoon, a dark-pink cotton swing dress with two big buttons fastening the straps, it was to suggest that she was as happy with those knees as she was with her curving, golden shoulders, that her shoulders complemented her knees in a harmony both subtle and bold, that this was just how it was supposed to be, that she wasn’t, for instance, supposed to be graced with the shapely, light, dimpled knees of Clarisse Rivière.

And so she made her way through the streets, not particularly tall but standing very straight, poised on her stout legs, mutely proclaiming: Am I not, all in all, a fine-looking woman?

She pushed open Karstadt’s glass door and headed straight for the timepiece department.

She immediately spotted Marko’s tall silhouette. With nothing to do at this hour, he’d risen from the uncomfortable chair where he spent most of his day, repairing watches or, more often, changing their batteries, and now, on his feet behind the counter, he was staring into space, hands in his pockets, with his usual gentle and serious air, which made him seem lost in profound meditation when he was only daydreaming, not a thought in his head.

She kept her eyes on him as she walked forward, surprised to feel how much she loved him.

Sometimes she feared she was emotionally cold or numbed, and excessively hardened.

But she had only to glimpse Marko or the children in their own distinctive poses, or even simply remember those poses, to feel her love for them throbbing inside her, though she now knew such emotions were not without danger, too easily leading her into similarly fond memories of Clarisse Rivière (that way she had of sticking her lower lip out so far that it almost completely covered the other when she had to read something complicated!).

And thinking of Clarisse Rivière was a very hard thing for her.

She could, fleetingly, imagine the scene of the murder and Clarisse Rivière’s blood, or perhaps the lawyers and the upcoming trial, but remembering the eloquent details of Clarisse Rivière’s personality drowned her in sorrow.

Now that she’d lost him, the memory of Richard Rivière was scarcely less painful.

Would he, she wondered, say that of his daughter Ladivine, that he’d lost her?

She had no answer. She only knew that she’d forever distanced herself from Richard Rivière not because he’d gone off to embark on a mysterious new life but because, left to her own devices and the hostile world through both of their faults, Clarisse Rivière had been bled dry in her own living room, her throat slashed like a poor quivering rabbit.

And Ladivine knew she and her father were guilty, but Richard Rivière had shown that he didn’t agree.

Because he could speak of the events and the trial with no hitch in his voice and no faltering in his gaze, because he could complain of the slow workings of justice and curse the accused; he could think of that man, speak his name, if only with horror and loathing.

Healthily, he could feel horror and loathing, he could say “that monster” as thousands of readers all across the country must surely have done when Clarisse Rivière’s story, and photographs of her face, her smiling, gullible face, open, modest, and charming, had appeared in the papers with Richard Rivière’s aid, for, raging, distraught, he’d handed over those photos of the wife he’d abandoned, the woman he’d offered up to be preyed on.

He could, in those same papers, proclaim his desire for vengeance.

His desire to see the monster spend the rest of his life behind bars.

He could be effusive and sincere; sometimes he could even feel the tears coming afresh to his eyes when a reporter asked what he’d felt on hearing the awful news.

This was what convinced Ladivine that Richard Rivière thought himself blameless, that no other possibility ever entered his mind, since he was clearly neither pretending nor lying nor exaggerating when he did these things.

He was himself, sensitive and open, a touch calculating, but never cynically.

Whereas Ladivine couldn’t bring herself to speak Clarisse Rivière’s name, or the man’s, or the month and the day it all happened.

Whenever she thought of the months of the year, the days of the week, a blur blotted out the month and the day she could no longer speak of.

And if her eye lit on the name Clarisse in a book or an article, her breath came quicker, and she moaned silently to herself.

As for the man, he inspired in her a sacred terror.

She’d once dreamed she was kneeling before him, or before a vague form that was unmistakably him, offering her throat to be slashed.

She couldn’t vent her rage at that man, couldn’t picture him or imagine any real life he might lead, could call down no curse on him.

She could only tremble in terror and incomprehension.

By that act, by the murder of Clarisse Rivière, that man had entered Ladivine’s life and emotions, he’d taken root, and she could only submit to it, like, she sometimes told herself, an unwanted pregnancy discovered too late to abort.

Sometimes she felt that man’s violent spirit kicking inside her, leaving her nauseated and faint.

Whereas, she sensed, Richard Rivière could think of it all like some horrible news story that curiously just happened to involve him.

And when he wasn’t thinking about it, it didn’t upset him. His life went on.

How she resented that, how easily he’d got off!

She waved to snap Marko out of his daydream before she reached his counter.

She didn’t like to surprise him at work. Caught idling, even without a customer in sight, he couldn’t hold back an expression of childish shame, as if fearing he’d misbehaved, and that pained her and made her vaguely indignant.

The fact that this wasn’t Marko’s place, that he was talented and hardworking and perhaps brilliant enough to get through the veterinary studies he once wanted to pursue, was, for as long as she’d known him, so obvious that it saddened her to see him trapped behind a counter in a department store, with his gentle, penetrating gaze and too few occasions to make use of his intelligence.

But that he had, on top of that, acquired the reflexes of a humble employee, wary of a dressing-down from his boss, and even afraid of him, though at home he mocked that unpleasant man’s dull-wittedness and pretension, that tormented Ladivine with pity for Marko and anger at the elder Bergers, who’d dissuaded their son from going on with his studies, wanting to see him settled and independent as quickly as possible.

Marko never complained. He was both too proud and too naturally unpresumptuous to dare speak of his situation as anything but a privilege, and even a blessing, having as he did a job not far from home and a job at which, he claimed, though she didn’t believe him, he was almost never bored.