So why should she feel so weary, so beset, why this feeling of not being up to the task when she looked on those three trusting, beloved faces, which, even when as now they were not turned her way, seemed to be forever searching her face for lessons, advice, displays of tenderness and guarantees for the future?
She was ashamed, telling herself that this man and these children demanded nothing they did not have every right to expect, that she gave them nothing but what it was only right that she give them, and that, this being how family life was, it was her duty to submit without fear or pointless regret, because after all nothing had forced her to marry or procreate.
Yes, she was sometimes ashamed of her fear and exhaustion, which she had in a sense chosen — and among all the countless possible sources of fear and exhaustion, were that lovable man and those delightful children not the least onerous?
She knew all that. But there were times when she wanted nothing more than to slip away, not so much disappear as withdraw, though without causing anyone the slightest twinge of grief.
Little Daniel was looking at her, slightly anxious.
Resetting her face, adopting the benevolently confident, lighthearted expression that comforted the children as nothing else could, she gave Daniel a wink. The boy’s features relaxed, reminding her how deeply Clarisse Rivière had loved that child, not more than Annika (Clarisse Rivière’s heart was too simple and too just to have a favourite), but more serenely, because passionate love for a little boy reminded her of nothing, whereas, she one day confided to Ladivine, her joy and exhilaration at Ladivine’s birth were so powerful that she couldn’t keep them within endurable limits and, as she put it, she came under a depression.
Thirty years later, she still reproached herself for having, in the first weeks of Ladivine’s life, shown her melancholy’s unsettling face.
And Ladivine, gazing on Daniel’s pretty, loving face, felt a stab of unquellable sorrow — never again would Clarisse Rivière stanch her remorse against that child’s cool, silken neck. Worse, Daniel might have crossed her mind as she poured out her blood in her silent, deserted house, she might even have tried to cry out her grandchildren’s names, in a gargle of blood and phlegm, and realised she would never see them again.
Why should that woman’s only child, Ladivine Rivière, run the risk of hearing her mother’s killer describe her last minutes?
Why should she have to endure that, on top of everything she’d already endured?
“The trial will heal us,” Richard Rivière had said.
But the only thing that could heal her, Ladivine, was protection from the horrific details.
Nor did she want to learn of that man’s difficult childhood, of what, as Richard Rivière had told her, shocked and almost moved in spite of himself by so many failures and miseries, had irresistibly driven him, as they would no doubt say at the trial, to bullying and murder.
She wanted to know none of that, convinced that her sorrow would be even deeper and without end, because she might conceivably pity the murderer were she shown that he was a victimised child.
How not to feel sorrow and pity for all tormented children who turned into lost men?
After he’d hurt her so deeply and unendingly, she had no desire to compound her pain by imagining some part of his.
Whatever he might claim or imagine, Richard Rivière was already healed. But she, Clarisse Rivière’s daughter. .
The bus braked abruptly. Ladivine’s shoulder bumped the chest of a heavily perspiring woman.
Between her breasts, half-covered in bright blue cloth, grew a few tightly curled, longish hairs, glued down by sweat.
Ladivine mumbled an apology.
Very tall and offhand, the woman looked at her closely, then smiled and said, in that brusque, rasping English Marko and Ladivine could scarcely understand without exceptional efforts of concentration:
“Wasn’t that a beautiful wedding? Splendid party, don’t you think?”
“Excuse me?” Ladivine said after a pause.
She too was smiling, full of good will, her brow very slightly knitted.
“A beautiful wedding,” the woman said again. “Lots of money, but it was nice, well worth it. Pretty dress you had on, where did you buy it?”
Ladivine shrugged. She let her gaze drift past the woman, still smiling her polite, uninvolved smile.
The woman turned her back, and Ladivine sensed she’d been rude.
Her face turned red and hot, and she tumbled into a panicked despair, as always when she thought she’d hurt someone without knowing how or why.
What she would not have done in Berlin or Langon she did without a second thought in this packed, sweltering bus, full of people with calm, wide faces that she longed to see turn her way in friendship. She gently clasped the woman’s elbow and said:
“Forgive me, you’re right, it was a beautiful wedding. That dress, you know, I think I bought it in France.”
Swept along by an inspiration that at the time she thought must be sound, she added, her voice a little too eager even to her own ear:
“You’re talking about that yellow gingham dress, with the balloon sleeves and the wide belt that tied at the back? Yes, yes, that’s right, I bought it in Bordeaux, at the Galeries Lafayette.”
Then she remembered that dress was among the things that had disappeared with the luggage. But little matter — if this hairybreasted woman had seen her at a wedding, wearing a memorable dress, that was the only one it could be, the yellow gingham dress from Bordeaux, the nicest she owned, the most flattering to her complexion, and the one she would certainly have chosen for a ceremony of that sort.
“Oh, in France. So I won’t find one here,” the woman said simply.
And from her tone it almost seemed Ladivine herself had brought up this inane subject.
The supermarket was new, empty and frigid, standing alone in a stretch of wasteland where a few blocks of flats seemed to have burst from the red earth through sheer force of will.
They showed no sign of being lived in, nor of work in progress
— no tarpaulins, no piles of breeze blocks, no machinery of any sort. Bits of rubbish, bottles, beer cans, torn cardboard boxes dotted the uneven ground, rutted, hard and dry.
Ladivine noted that the four of them were the only ones getting off the bus, and that nothing marked the stop but a blue plastic barrel, toppled by the wind from the bus as it drove away.
Marko set it upright, his hands now red with dust.
To Ladivine’s great relief, the children were finding fun in this shopping trip beneath the fierce morning sun, in this deserted, sinister neighbourhood not yet shaded by any trace of greenery.
They ran off down the faint path to the supermarket, all glass and blue glinting metal, and soon their legs were red and their sandals dirty and all at once Ladivine’s heart swelled with joy. Her children were happy, they were running in the dirt!