Ladivine (19 page)

Oh no, how could she believe such a thing?

And was he right, she often wondered, to give in like this, to so readily adapt to something so unsuited to him, was it wisdom or weakness, admirable humility or mere passivity?

She didn’t know. She was sure of one thing only: whether he admitted it or not, working at Karstadt was a sacrifice Marko had made, and how great a sacrifice she alone knew.

He spotted her, surprised.

She’d put on a broad smile to reassure him, so he wouldn’t think something important or terrible had happened, since it was unlike her to come see him at the store.

Relieved, he smiled back at her, with the shy smile that always gave him a touching, childlike air.

She loved everything that made Marko who he was, a German she’d known for some ten years, who’d become her husband and the father of her children, for all time and to her great surprise, so utterly did Germany and its people seem, back in her native Gironde, to belong to a distant and exotic world, inspiring too much indifference to leave room for prejudice but at the same time so foreign that no one would ever imagine living there without a dismissive little snort.

And yet this was how it was, she’d bound her existence to that of a German—and the very word still rang in her perplexed ears with the slightly quaint charm of a mystery into which she’d never been initiated.

She loved Marko, and he was German—what did that mean, and wasn’t it odd!

How that word separated him from her, however delightfully!

She’d long noted certain habits of his, rooted in his upbringing, different from hers—she knew their tastes in food didn’t always concur, not having loved the same dishes as children—but above all she felt everything that was unknowable in Marko’s heart, in the depths of his inscrutable, simple self, which sometimes surfaced in a glance whose intention she couldn’t decipher, and she sensed, moved, that what it expressed was, more than anything, that he was German.

Privately, she called that the Secret of Marko, though she knew he had no idea he was inhabited by a secret and couldn’t possibly care less about being German.

And yet he was—how odd!

She leaned over the counter and gave him a quick hug.

He patted her back, a little embarrassed, his pale eyes looking around to be sure no one had seen. Then he pushed up his heavy-framed glasses.

He was a thin man, tall and bony, who always stood with his weight on one leg, arms crossed and hips forward, in a vaguely feminine pose.

He had a bass voice, and sang in the Karstadt employee choir.

“I talked to Richard, he told me where we should go.”

Marko’s faintly anxious face brightened immediately, not so much, perhaps, because he was happy and relieved to see the matter of their destination decided as because he was thrilled at this confirmation of his long-held, ecstatically favorable opinion of Richard Rivière’s almost superhuman sagacity.

And all at once he looked so young, his healthy light-chestnut forelock sweeping untamed over his thick lenses, his flat torso beneath his short-sleeved shirt, even, she thought, the way his long waist plunged into his slightly drooping jeans, like a flower’s strong, endless stem bowed ever so slightly against the lip of the vase, still so youthful in his obliviousness to his own gangly charm that it pained Ladivine’s heart and suddenly, though their ages were the same, made her feel much older, she who had always worried so about her appearance.

She whispered the name of the country Richard Rivière had suggested.

“He has friends there, apparently. People he sold a car to.”

“We’d never have thought of that,” Marko cried, “but…Oh yes, it’s perfect!”

But would he not have applauded any suggestion made by Richard Rivière, that man he’d never met?

His notion of Richard Rivière’s tragedy, the murder of his ex-wife, was vastly inflated, Ladivine realized uncomfortably, and Richard Rivière felt nothing with the searing intensity Marko imagined; Richard Rivière was in no way the heroic, shattered man dreamed up with a certain self-indulgence and perhaps a long-unmet need for someone to admire by a Marko who himself had been deeply shocked by Clarisse Rivière’s death.

The blood rushed to Marko’s thin face. Dreamily, leaning against the counter on one hip, he studied the cheap jewelry displayed across the aisle and, not looking at Ladivine, murmured:

“Who knows? Maybe we’ll decide to stay?”

A noncommittal snicker escaped her, slightly cross and disapproving, and she immediately chided herself.

Because she’d noted that habit of hers. She was quick to silence any thought of flight with a sarcastic remark, a prosaic appeal to reason, and yet she hated that attitude, which she thought an envious person’s reflex.

She glanced at her watch.

Marko was smiling into space, eyelids fluttering.

Ladivine very clearly felt herself walking away from the counter, leaving the store, and emerging into the sunlit street, because it was well past time she was on her way.

And yet she was still there, one arm resting on Marko’s counter, her legs, whose stoutness and damp nudity she could feel beneath her dress, seemingly unable to do as she asked.

Not knowing what she was about to say, she stammered:

“Yes…maybe we’ll stay…”

And she felt as if she was placing a terrible curse on herself.

And what about Marko? What would become of him, so ill equipped to protect himself?

And the children?

Who would come running to protect them, and how to be sure they wouldn’t wander off, alone and unthinking, on paths unknown to their parents?

Was it really a good idea to listen to Richard Rivière?

He’d already shown that he could unwittingly sow desolation all around him, yes, even as he doled out nothing but love and tenderness—yes, Ladivine knew, he went on making long, frequent phone calls to Clarisse Rivière after he went away, so that even though he’d left her no one could accuse him of abandoning her, certainly not, and had in fact enveloped her from afar in a solicitude that, Clarisse Rivière told Ladivine with pitiful pride, few long-gone spouses ever displayed, yes, to be sure, that’s how Richard Rivière was, generous with his attentions and overflowing with love, none of which had prevented him from delivering his wife into the hands of brutality, of blind, fatal chance.

Suppose that with this advice Richard Rivière was doing misery’s bidding?

Suppose that deep down what Richard Rivière wanted was to keep her away from the trial?

But one thing at least was beyond question, which was that she herself wanted nothing more than to be kept away from the trial, and Richard Rivière must have seen it.

With great effort and a quiet suction-cup sound, she unstuck her legs.

Now she was walking up Wilmersdorfer Strasse toward Otto-Suhr-Allee, only vaguely glancing at the bazaars, their cheap wares cheerily spilling out onto the sidewalk.

Oh look, Jenny’s Eis has closed down.

Storewide discounts at Heimwerker.

The water rippling over the huge, polished stone balls recently installed as an ornament for the pedestrian street, a sort of Zen fountain, sluiced toward her feet with its flotsam of cigarette butts and beer-can tabs.

She knew every shop, every sign, and nearly every one was connected to some moment of her life in this neighborhood, from when she’d recently met Marko and they used to come for a kebab or a box of Asian noodles that they ate on a Pestalozzistrasse bench, to the time she’d gone into that pharmacy on the corner and asked for a pregnancy test, to that December when she took the children to watch the Christmas market being set up and eat grilled sausages and drink not-very-good hot wine or cream punch, and that graceless Wilmersdorfer Strasse with its provincial air and its reminders of Langon was so dear to her heart that, though Marko had often found less-expensive apartments in livelier neighborhoods of Berlin, she’d always refused to move away from Charlottenburg.

Dear old Charlottenburg—her attachment to the place had at least something to do with the charming name and the equally enchanting and desirable figure of Sophie Charlotte in her château, her oval face, pale complexion, and abundant hair reminding her of Clarisse Rivière.

But didn’t every woman who died too young remind her of Clarisse Rivière?

Every woman who died tragically, leaving behind a little crowd of inconsolable, eternally guilty people, and wasn’t Clarisse Rivière herself, in her own humble way, a lonely queen in her oversize house?

Dear old Charlottenburg, unfashionable, sleepy—how she loved it!

Even the awful, morbid Rathaus she was now nearing, where she held her French courses four times a week, even that grim edifice, with its blackened walls, its outsize, graceless proportions, its overblown majesty, ridiculous but intimidating, even that ugly town hall whose dark-green, too-high-ceilinged hallways, she couldn’t help thinking, had seen their share of terrified, unknowingly doomed people pass by, she’d learned to love even that, to feel at home even there.

She climbed to the top floor, walked toward the room used for French classes, a brown door, sea-green walls.

A few of her students were already waiting inside.

Knowing the answer, she asked:

“Who let you in?”

“Madame Sargent,” one answered.

She looked at her watch to make sure she wasn’t late—oh, two minutes at most.

Sargent, the other French teacher, a native of Caen, always watched for Ladivine’s students and unlocked the door for them early, not so they wouldn’t have to stand in the hallway but simply, thought Ladivine, to plant the idea in their heads that Ladivine Rivière was never on time.

Why on earth did Sargent not like her? Ladivine wondered, troubled.

It couldn’t be rivalry.

Ladivine’s students were in their first year of French, Sargent’s in their second and third.

But Sargent didn’t like her, and subtly strove to undermine her. Why should that be?

Ladivine couldn’t understand it.

To her shame, she also recalled that when she first came to the Volkshochschule, a few years before, she did all she could to ingratiate herself with Sargent, who’d been teaching there for years and intimidated her with her authority, her severe poise, her adamant slenderness.

Sargent answered her every attempt to charm with a deflating brusqueness, the thought of which still made Ladivine’s cheeks burn in humiliation.

She began taking worksheets and a collection of pencils from her satchel.

Her students, some fifteen adults of all ages, looked on in silence.

Suddenly Sargent was there, on the other side of the desk.

Still peering into the depths of her satchel, searching for the copy of
Les vacances du petit Nicolas
she was sure she’d brought with her, Ladivine recognized the smell of Sargent’s clothes before she was aware of her presence—a nauseating blend of mildew and expensive perfume, as if every morning Sargent extracted her very chic person from a crypt.

“Ladivine…This is your mother, isn’t it?”

“My…my mother?”

She looked up at Sargent’s thin, excited, eager face, finding it deeply repellent.

A dull-white foam clung to the corners of Sargent’s mouth. The wings of her nose shone beneath her thick, orange-tinted makeup.

Sargent was staring at her with fascinated yearning, and Ladivine half thought she was fighting off the urge to clasp the back of her head and pull her face to her crotch.

“It’s this week’s
Le Point,
have you read it?”

In her hands was a magazine open to a photograph and a long article.

She tried to thrust it into Ladivine’s face, but Ladivine stopped her with one raised, bent arm, her movement so unintentionally violent that the magazine flew from Sargent’s startled hands and fell to the floor by the table, open onto Clarisse Rivière’s gentle, slightly frightened, hesitant face, her white cotton collar chastely and tidily poking out of the beige cardigan she’d got for her last birthday.

Oh yes, she herself, Ladivine, had picked out that fine-knit sweater at Karstadt, then mailed it to Clarisse Rivière for her fifty-fourth birthday.

Who took the picture? she wondered, her head spinning. Was it Clarisse Rivière’s killer himself?

Ladivine never saw her mother in that cardigan, since she died four or five days after she got it.

Had she put it on for him so he could take her picture, and because she thought it looked nice on her?

Had she told him, My daughter sent me this cardigan from Berlin for my birthday?

Sargent stiffly bent down and picked up the magazine, while Ladivine, sitting perfectly still, feeling the sudden scowl on her face, vowed not to apologize.

Sargent tapped on the crumpled page.

“It says here the trial’s starting soon. Your poor mother. I had no idea. They mention you, too, the victim’s daughter.”

Ladivine felt herself blushing. Sweat was flowing from beneath her bare arms, dampening her pink dress.

Her students didn’t yet understand French well enough to follow Sargent’s words, but Ladivine felt dishonored before them.

Because who but a thoughtless daughter and a blameworthy family deserved to be exposed in the sordid true-crime pages for all the world to see?

“I suppose you’ll have to go,” Sargent went on in her breathy, lachrymose voice. “To the trial. Don’t worry, I’ll take your students.”

“No, no,” said Ladivine briskly. “This is none of your business. I’m not going.”

She’d spoken angrily in spite of herself, her sharp tone sending a ripple of unease, she realized, through her intrigued, watchful students.

To her great surprise, Sargent backed away, vaguely raising two conciliatory hands to Ladivine and giving her a glance unmistakably tinged with almost fearful respect, which, superimposed on her excitement but not concealing it, gave her the dewy-eyed air of a woman in love.

At the same time, she displayed the magazine once again.

And Ladivine looked deep into Clarisse Rivière’s astonished eyes, achingly contemplating the little white rounded collar, the cardigan buttoned up to the top, picturing the knife plunging into the fine skin over her jawbone, just under her ear.