Down to the tiniest moment, she’d experienced all this before, though she’d never been to this market — how she raised the glass to her lips and saw that the rim wasn’t clean, saw the lingering trace of other lips, slightly sticky, perhaps crusted with sugar, and how she deliberately placed her own lips on that residue and found no distaste in her untroubled heart.
In what dream had she as it were made a date with this woman and this glass and this thick juice, whose sweetness in her throat was exactly what she’d already known, though she’d never before drunk the juice of a freshly-puréed mango?
With a frivolous little laugh that she did her best to make re- assuring, she asked:
“Have you seen me before?”
“Where? Here?”
“Here or somewhere else.”
The woman looked at her, slowly shook her head, then at once turned away, as if dreading another idiotic question and embarrassed in advance for them both.
“Well, I’ve seen you before, but I can’t recall when.”
And with good reason, she thought, if it was in one of those dreams that seem so perfectly real you wake up convinced that you really did travel somewhere, that there are no such things as oneiric visions, only realities you assume to be dreams, even though you see yourself with no age, and the seasons have no tang.
Suddenly eager to strike up a friendship, to confide in this woman and rouse her curiosity, she nearly added:
You were wearing this same pale red T-shirt, and I could see the shape of your breasts underneath it. I drank this same mango juice, which you served me in just the same way. Isn’t that incredible? I have a husband and two children, a girl and a boy, and I went out this morning and left them sleeping at the hotel. We have troubles, but in a way we’re very lucky too.
Instead, she only gave her an insistent smile.
And the woman was still stubbornly looking down, refusing that dubious alliance.
“I have to be going now,” said Ladivine, “but I’ll be back, and I’ll bring my husband and children with me.”
Didn’t that last sentence sound more like a threat than a promise?
Again she laughed her deliberately superficial little laugh, but she sensed at once that this triviality was no less out of place than that longing for a connection founded in a wondrous hallucination, on the incarnation of shadows she alone had perceived.
Reluctantly, she walked away, and now her enchantment was dimmed by the feeling she’d done something wrong, shown a lack of discretion.
It would soon be eleven o’clock. The market was gradually emptying out, the hubbub receding in the thick heat.
She realised there was no point in trying to make anyone understand the strangeness of what she was feeling, or the vastness and harmoniousness of her joy, or how natural she found it to see her anxious life dissolving here in the big brown dog’s watchful gaze.
And it wasn’t because she was on holiday. How misplaced that word seemed, given the rash of mishaps they’d endured since their arrival, and if they compared these past three days to their weekslong holidays in Warnemünde and Lüneburg, they clearly should have been sorry they hadn’t gone once more to Warnemünde, sorry they’d so dreaded the tedium of Warnemünde that they dared to believe there was another way.
But not for anything in the world would she have wanted to be waking up in the Warnemünde camper van at this moment, and she was sure Marko felt the same, even if for now he seemed unable to find any palpable pleasure in their holiday here, perhaps, she told herself, because no-one had seen fit to lodge his or her consciousness in the skin of a dog and become Marko Berger’s guardian.
She smiled as she walked, a vague and ingenuous smile.
She never doubted that Marko would rather be suffering here than stewing in his discomfort and anxiousness at his parents’, and even that he would sooner die here than surrender to Lüneburg and lay at his parents’ feet the weapons he’d just discovered he had.
He was so angry with Lüneburg for making him spineless and vulnerable.
But he’d granted himself the freedom to change. He woke every morning energised by a new sense of himself, able to make decisions, whether weighty or trivial, undaunted by Lüneburg’s judgement, and even defying it.
Would his humiliated parents’ distraught faces never rise up before him, hurt and uncomprehending, Ladivine worried, would pity not one day end up crushing his attempts at liberation, his necessary initiation into hard-heartedness?
Having realised that they could not safely return, summer after summer, to the creeping misery of Warnemünde or the restless stupor of Lüneburg, they had still had no idea where to spend their holiday — as they put it, out of habit, knowing perfectly well that what they needed was nothing less than an escape from a quagmire.
They would not necessarily have to go far away to find that new lucidity.
It only had to be someplace utterly apart from the world of Lüneburg.
The ideal, thought Ladivine, would almost be to make sure that the elder Bergers had never heard or spoken the name of the country they’d call home for three weeks, would almost be for that country not to appear on the illuminated globe in Marko’s parents’ living room.
Every year she set aside three thousand euros from her Frenchteacher salary, while Marko, who repaired watches and alarm clocks in the timepiece department at the Karstadt on Wilmersdorfer Strasse, managed to save up two thousand, and though that sum was more than enough to rent the camper van and buy low-end wine at the Warnemünde minimarket, they soon discovered it wouldn’t go far for a family of four holidaying in any spot unknown to the elder Bergers and to Lüneburg in general.
Night after night, they put the children to bed and sat down at the computer to compare not only the prices of flights and hotels the world over but also the hundreds of comments posted by Internetwise travellers, because more than anything Marko feared that their trip, that mighty step towards emancipation, might turn into just one more example of the horrible ways the most gullible and least well-heeled tourists could be fleeced, and yet, far from reassuring him with their potential preventative effect, these testimonials only further inflamed his anxiety and suspicion, sometimes pushing him to the brink of despair.
How, he asked Ladivine with a sort of dour satisfaction, when so many experienced people, far savvier than they, fell for the same old scams (and here he made as if to tap at the screen, to point out yet another grim, edifying tale), how could the two of them, who’d travelled so little, who had never even been on an aeroplane, hope to escape fraud and deception?
“Just listen to this,” he would say.
And, although she was sitting there beside him, eyes fixed on the screen like his own, he read out the monotonous tales of swindles endured by strangers of whom an uncomfortable Ladivine would have preferred to know nothing.
What did they have to do with these people, she thought, who sought only ordinary amusement from their holidays abroad?