Had she found the words, Ladivine would have screamed at them:
“I never wanted this, I never wanted my first time to be with a paying customer! That’s not what I wanted at all!”
Also holding her back was the slightly desperate devotion she felt for her parents, fervent but worn and exhausted, which compelled her to protect them from her own attacks.
Would Clarisse Rivière not have answered, with her tremulous, hesitant little smile:
“But you said they were just guys, a girl can have sex with all kinds of guys nowadays, isn’t that right?”
She almost never spent the money. She stuffed the notes into an old pair of tights 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 plaster exteriors and roofs of interlocking tiles, 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 grey, and the various rooms all looked alike, the little kitchen off the entrance with its fibreboard cabinets, the living/ dining room with its puffy leather couch, its oversized armchairs, its giant TV screen, then the passage to the bedrooms with their square windows veiled by sheer curtains, their orange or yellow imitation colour-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, and neither did they.
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 odour 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 smell of chips, 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 further 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 had 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 realised that Germany had rescued her from Langon, and that Marko, Annika, Daniel, even the fearsome Bergers of Lüneburg, with their implacable 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 grey skies and cold, 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 pedalling down a sunlit road lined with acacias or plane trees), she could look on the irremediable ugliness of neighbourhoods 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, signalling that the game was over.
She immediately confessed to herself, with unusual candour — her habit was to sidestep upsetting thoughts, or shove them away with a violent mental thrust — she confessed to herself, then, as she turned towards Karstadt’s front door, that she was exceedingly grateful to men such as this, genteel, not the womanising 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 had 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, and 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 as though 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 longstanding, naive dreams of breathtaking beauty, or simply of 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.