What did they care that the B. family thought they’d booked a room in a four-star Majorca hotel and ended up in a cubbyhole looking onto a malodorous airshaft? Or that the F.s, having paid for a full-board week’s stay in Djerba, found themselves shelling out for breakfasts and bus excursions?
She longed to reach out and turn Marko’s anxious face towards her own — that sharp-featured face she so loved, inevitably summoning up memories, faint or vivid depending on the circumstances (and sometimes only stirring up a very gentle melancholy in her heart), of the handsome Teddy Ted, the thin-cheeked, yellow-haired cowboy who in her childhood had inspired a love so passionate that she had to force herself to forget, lest she sink helplessly into despair, that he was only a character in a comic strip — and remind him that their goal with this trip was not relaxation or entertainment or an introduction to some new sport.
Let some unscrupulous hotelier put them in a windowless room; their wish for a more clear-eyed existence would come true all the same — and maybe even more fully?
“Oh, this stuff doesn’t matter that much,” she would say, cautiously.
He said nothing, his thin lips frozen in a cheerless smile.
This fierce determination not to be hoodwinked, now Marko’s obsession, was heightened by his resentment of Lüneburg, and, imagining his parents darkly exulting on learning that they’d had a dreary time in a disappointing and venal land, its charms long since faded, he raced frantically from site to site, unwilling to place his faith in any, pretending to linger over an offer only to observe, in a sudden paroxysm of spite, that the prices were well beyond their means.
Towards midnight they would go to bed, their eyes weary, their minds dulled. Marko’s cheeks were so hollow that Ladivine could clearly see the outline of his jawbone.
To convince themselves that their spirit was positive all the same, they’d picked out a few possible destinations, a handful of packages that the next day they saw as the preposterous or suspect things that they were, to which their exhaustion had nearly blinded them.
How could they ever reconcile the choice of a “Tour of the Magical Maghreb — bargain casbahs — Berber feasts — colourful folklore” with the only ambition that could justify such a trip, which was precisely to take them away from banality, from bleakness and inertia?
Not to mention, said Marko, that his parents probably found that very same sort of flyer in their letter box, and while there was little danger of bumping into the elder Bergers in the streets of Agadir, since they never left their own part of Germany, there were Lüneburg neighbours, people Marko had known since childhood, who might well, like them, end up at the Hôtel Igoudar, chosen for further consideration the night before because of its discounted rooms.
He spoke with an exaggerated composure, an only faintly sarcastic detachment. His arms hung at his sides, hands slightly raised, palms up, resigned. But Ladivine saw the lids of his blue eyes twitching.
Unthinking, she blurted out:
“I’ll call Richard and ask what he thinks.”
“Richard?” said Marko after a pause. “That’s a good idea, give him a call.”
And from his relief Ladivine, slightly taken aback, realised the depth of Marko’s admiration for Richard Rivière, even though he’d never met him and knew of him, Ladivine’s father, only what Ladivine happened to tell him, tentative, reticent and terrified.
But it isn’t Richard that fascinates him, she thought, it’s Richard’s tragedy, it’s what Richard’s been through.
And what about me, she then wondered, wasn’t my loss even more terrible than Richard’s?
She felt herself growing heavy and numb, she felt her heart go cold, as it always did when she thought of her parents, and she was grateful to the part of her mind that controlled her emotions for protecting her in this way, because with her faculties alert and her heart afire she could never have withstood the incomprehension and grief.
And yet “I’ll call Richard,” she’d said, and those words had come to her spontaneously and for a very simple reason, which was that Richard Rivière had done some travelling, of course, but above all that he was the most sensible man she’d ever known, who, without to-do or any real desire to triumph, always calmly and quietly turned out to be right.
She’d never described him to Marko in exactly those terms, not wanting him to think she was boasting of her father, and yet the portrait she’d painted of Richard Rivière over the years, through her hesitations and reticences, in her terror and sadness, had firmly planted in Marko a fascination with Richard Rivière, whom he hadn’t met before the tragedy and of whom, afterwards, Ladivine always told him, in the breathless, gasping voice that took hold of her when the talk turned to her parents, “You’ll see him after the trial, we’ll all breathe easier then”, though she found those words unconvincing even as she spoke them, seeing no logical connection between the trial and the long-delayed meeting of her father and her husband, and sensing that Marko knew it and could have easily, gently disputed what she was saying, held back only by his good manners.
And what was, in the early days of their marriage and then the birth of the children, an odd and slightly embarrassing situation — since even the elder Bergers, indifferent to everything about Ladivine, had expressed their surprise that neither their son nor the children knew Richard Rivière — gradually took on the almost sacred status of just how it is.
Clarisse Rivière, Ladivine’s mother, had come to Berlin for the wedding, and lived long enough to see the birth of Annika and then Daniel, but not, thought Ladivine with an aching, mournful relief, to be loved by them, meaning that the children felt no pain at suddenly never seeing her again, and had even completely forgotten that she once held them in her delicate arms, delighting in their smell, their satiny skin.
Clarisse Rivière and Marko hit it off at once. They smiled at each other profusely, and sometimes, in the evening, when fatigue put a pinched look on their faces, their smiles turned slightly excessive and fanatical, so deeply did they fear some misunderstanding, one of them thinking the other bored or annoyed for some mysterious reason.
As for Richard Rivière’s absence from the wedding, while Ladivine apologised on his behalf to Marko, to their friends, to the elder Bergers, citing her father’s many responsibilities as an import car dealer, she knew, just as Clarisse Rivière cruelly knew, that Richard Rivière would have postponed any meeting to be at Ladivine’s wedding, were it not for his insurmountable fear of a face-to-face meeting with Clarisse, his ex-wife, who’d kept the name Rivière, his name, fiercely, militantly insisting that she had every right.
The mere thought of seeing her again made him quake, and Ladivine and Clarisse knew it, felt it.
Not that there was any real danger of an incident.
But, thought Ladivine, was he not far less afraid of a scene than of the naked, devouring, silent sorrow he would surely see in the eyes of that woman he’d left so long ago, who refused to give up the name Rivière, his name, keeping and displaying it like the emblem of her distress, like the one miserable treasure she’d been allowed to hold on to?
Clarisse Rivière had never complained, would never cause any trouble. Clarisse Rivière had never reproached her husband or anyone else for leaving her, for going away, had in fact helped Richard Rivière pack up his things, intent as always on sparing herself no labour, no fatigue, if her labour and fatigue could be of some use to someone.