Hearing him confide in her with that mixture of pride and embarrassment, she thought he needed her support, her assurance that she would not judge him, and she gave it to him, her heart pound- ing, bleeding, she gave it to him not as the daughter stunned and shocked by that man once so perfectly stable and faithful in his well-ordered life, but as the twenty-eight-year-old adult that she was, tolerant and capable of understanding the hunger for adventure (he talked like that now, that dwindling man, that weary, diffident man whose one extravagance was his passion for four-wheel drives!) that might come over a father who’d irreproachably acquitted himself of his every duty and wanted to devote the last phase of his life to himself alone.
Would she not have done better to rush straight to Clarisse Rivière, drag her out of her deserted house, bring her back to Berlin and look after her until her vast, rudderless goodness found others to take on?
She had not. It never even occurred to her.
And that, she thought, is why her anger at Richard Rivière was misplaced.
“We’re looking for somewhere to go on our next holiday,” she said in a stolid, almost blank voice. “Somewhere south. Do you. . do you have any suggestions?”
He let a moment of surprised silence go by. He was expecting me to talk about the trial, she told herself, he was thinking we’d finally talk about that damned trial, and all I want to talk about is our holiday.
But when he spoke, it was in the gentle, light-hearted, warm, infinitely fatherly voice that Richard Rivière always used with his daughter Ladivine, which, a little more than ten years before, had led her, almost forced her, to absolve him (was leaving Clarisse Rivière a misdeed, a crime, a mistake? or was it nothing of the sort?).
Because she was powerless to resist the love in her father’s voice, for her and her alone, because she was powerless to snap herself out of that enchantment and consider how to go about rescuing Clarisse Rivière, because she preferred to think he was the one who needed support.
Oh, for that she would never, ever forgive herself.
He fell silent. He let out a loud sigh, and Ladivine sensed that he wanted to bring up the trial.
A twinge of panic set her trembling again, and she was desperately looking for an excuse to hang up when she heard, behind him, distant, piercing, beguiling, a woman’s voice calling out.
“That’s Clarisse,” he whispered, “but don’t worry, she’ll never be Clarisse Rivière. Talk to you soon, sweetie.”
Ladivine just caught the echo of a fluting, cascading laugh, then Richard Rivière abruptly hung up, as if given away.
She picked up her bag and walked out into the warm, golden May street, the yellow-walled Droysenstrasse, their home since Annika’s birth eight years before, almost running in the shade of the lime trees whose dripping sap left the pavement sticky beneath her sandals.
The cloying smell of the fallen, crushed lime flowers rose up from the pavement, stronger than the scent of the clusters still hanging — cloyingly sweet, too, she thought as she raced along, was the odour of Clarisse Rivière’s spilled blood, or perhaps rank and overpowering in her tidy house, but why, she thought, feeling her own blood throbbing in her temples, why did the honeyed perfume of light, frothy, yellow-white lime flowers always remind her of what she had not seen but had a thousand times imagined, her mother’s blood brutally, abundantly spilled in the living room of her Langon house, untouched until then by anything violent or out of place?
A whimper escaped her as she walked under the railway bridge.
Not because of the roar of the train racing by overhead, but because she couldn’t inhale Doysenstrasse’s Maytime scent, richly perfumed with lime flowers, without immediately thinking she was once again smelling Clarisse Rivière’s blood, the innocent but pungent, stifling blood of her mother who didn’t know how to shield herself from malignancy, made suddenly strange and unknowable by her blood spattering the couch, the floor, the curtain — so much blood in so slight, so discreetly fleshly a body!
And smelling Clarisse Rivière’s blood in the air, mingling with Charlottenburg’s springtime perfumes, the Langon calamity slowly flooding the faraway, unsullied heart of Berlin, left her quivering in terror — because then what escape could there be?
“The trial will heal us,” Richard Rivière had told her one day.
But would the trial stem the tide of blood, stop it befouling the quiet streets of western Berlin where she and Marko had chosen to live, prudently distancing themselves from both Lüneburg’s virtuous judgements and Langon’s silent, irreparable sadness?
She, Ladivine, Clarisse Rivière’s daughter, had chosen to turn away from that sadness rather than shoulder her share, and the worst had then happened.
Tears clouded her vision.
But now the smell was gone, the smell of lime blossom and blood, replaced by the faint odour of stale cooking oil borne on the breeze to Stuttgarter Platz, when the weather was fair, from the chip stall on Kaiser-Friedrich Strasse.
She wiped her eyes with her bare arm, skirted the little park where she no longer took Daniel and Annika to play.
How many long, even tedious hours had she spent there, on this bench or that, and yet, and although she felt no desire to relive those days of stiff limbs and backaches, the sight of children at play in that same sandbox always brought an ache to her heart.
That’s all over now, melancholy’s insinuating voice whispered in her ear, they’ll never be little again, that’s over for you.
But, she objected, half aloud, I don’t miss it.
All the same, she looked away from the bustling toddlers in the park, and the spectre of her carefree, happy, irreproachable self (no-one having yet shed Clarisse Rivière’s blood) sitting on a bench watching over her children and letting her thoughts drift unafraid, like the two mild, dreamy-looking women she saw there, whose mothers’ blood no-one had spilled in the tranquillity of a provincial house.
Yes, it hurt her to look at them.
That was over for her, the simple life she led in those days, and her children’s first years would forever meld in her memory with the time when Clarisse Rivière was still alive, even if she silently disapproved of what her mother was doing with that life, even if any mention of her mother’s life filled her with apprehension and unease.
Oh, but she had never secretly wished for an end to that life, only to the way Clarisse Rivière was living it since her husband left, a way not so much chosen as fallen prey to.
And now that the children were too big to take to the park, it was as if they’d been banished from the enchanted wood by Clarisse Rivière’s death itself, as though the awful wave of blood had driven them out, her and the children, stranding them, forever guilty and stained, in the flower-and-blood-scented street.
She stopped by the park’s entrance, laid her hand on the gate.
Her palm knew the feel of the flaking paint, the warmth of the slightly sticky metal, for she’d so often pushed that gate open, sometimes limply cursing the hot sun or the sameness of those afternoons.
She adjusted the strap on her sandal.
My heel’s so dry, she thought, that’s no good for summery shoes.