She thought nothing else mattered at this moment, she thought life was easy, straightforward and good.
She took Marko’s hand, and he squeezed hers back, smiling.
“So that woman in the bus knew you?”
“She thought she recognised me; she was confusing me with somebody else,” Ladivine hurried to answer, suddenly uncomfortable but not knowing why.
Marko gave a little laugh and let go of her hand.
“Well, you’re right, you don’t have to tell me,” he cried, amused or pretending to be.
Then:
“I’ve seen several women who look like you since we came here.”
He pointed with one finger at a figure in pale blue, just emerged from the supermarket and heading towards a block of flats, pulling a cart behind her.
A voluminous cotton drape hid her body and hair. Ladivine could scarcely see her face from that distance.
Annika and Daniel were waiting patiently at the supermarket’s front door.
There was a dog standing guard, a large, muscular dog, chained to a ring sunk into the ground. It looked at them with its big, black, gentle eyes, and Ladivine was stunned to see herself in those dark pupils.
She was tempted to let them swallow her up and never come out again, imprisoned, untouchable.
How could Marko think she looked like a woman whose face he couldn’t see?
No, she had the eyes and the gaze of that dog scrutinising the customers, and had Marko more closely studied the animal’s manner he would have reached out to pet it, perhaps moved by something he did not at first recognise but which he would soon see was Ladivine’s soul.
Later, she would be unable to say with any certainty that the dog at the supermarket and the dog unfailingly waiting outside the hotel were the same.
It was possible, it was probable. But she would never be sure.
Given the prices charged at the supermarket — the only one of its kind in the city, they’d been proudly assured at the hotel — there was no question of reconstituting the whole family’s summer wardrobe. Ladivine picked out a pair of shorts, two T-shirts, a cap and a swimming costume for each of the children, and for herself a beige linen skirt with a matching blouse. The absurdly high prices gnawed at her.
She and Marko had budgeted twelve hundred euros in spending money for their three weeks in this place, and already these clothes had cost them almost three hundred.
She joined Marko as he was emerging from a dressing room, the menswear department’s sole customer.
She stifled an anxious little laugh.
“What have you found there, darling?”
He examined himself in the mirror, pleased at what he was seeing. His face had a closed, aggressive, brazen look she hadn’t seen before, and which immediately troubled her.
Not that it wasn’t attractive, but only in the manner of a masculine type she found slightly frightening, crude and confident in a way that nothing seemed to justify.
He was wearing an outfit composed of a long pink tunic with purple floral motifs and a pair of trousers that came down just to the very top of his athletic shoes.
“Perfect for the climate,” he said. “And it suits me, don’t you think?”
She could only concur, at first reticent, almost hostile (like, she wondered, a dog baring its fangs because it doesn’t recognise its master?), and then fascinated, the longer she looked at him, by Marko’s undeniable beauty, his height, slender neck and well-defined shoulders seeming to have found in that curiously feminine get-up just what they needed to show themselves to their fullest advantage.
Never before had she seen Marko admire his own image, or take even the most meagre interest in his reflection.
And here he was finding in that mirror a man who surprised and delighted him, and he made no attempt to hide his naive pleasure at realising he was that man — why should that bother her?
Was she afraid that, like Richard Rivière who in the prime of his life realised that nothing, neither law nor morality, obligated him to go on living alongside a woman for whom he would always feel a deep tenderness but whose peculiarities wearied and bored him, a Marko suddenly aware of his beauty could only end up abandoning her, Ladivine Rivière, stained forever by her mother’s blood pouring out in a provincial suburban house, streaming into the Berlin apartment, spattering their neighbourhood’s pavements, sullying even the springtime sky?
But Richard Rivière and Marko Berger had nothing in common, save, perhaps, their love for her, Ladivine.
As for the obscenity of that murder, as for Ladivine’s feeling that, as that woman’s daughter, she’d been diminished, disgraced by the event’s squalid horror, she was sure no such thought would ever cross Marko’s mind.
Why should a new confidence suddenly make him want to abandon her?
“Yes, it’s perfect for you,” she said softly.
Leaving the store, she stopped before the chained dog.
Marko and the children had passed by without seeming to notice it, and now they were walking on to the bus stop, cheerful and happy in their new clothes, as proud as if they’d put on a remarkable performance in some contest, earning unhoped-for honours and discovering unexpected but incontrovertible reasons to be pleased with themselves.
The dog raised its big, matted head towards her.
Fearing vermin, she stayed her outstretched hand.
She looked deep into the quietly doleful, quietly imploring gaze, and that docile animal’s humanity and unconditional goodness filled her eyes with tears, she yearned to be it, and realised that this would come naturally and in its own time, not, as it had for Clarisse Rivière adrift on a life that had lost all direction and coherence, at the detestable whim of a man bent on avenging who knows what wretched childhood.
No animal had stared into Clarisse Rivière’s dying eyes with its friendly, compassionate gaze.
She might perhaps have glimpsed the crazed eyes of the man she’d taken in, the man she’d rescued, who killed her not like a dog but like the vacant woman she’d become after Richard Rivière went away, easily manipulated and perhaps, perhaps, in her own way, begging for the knife, the attack, begging to lose herself and be done with it.
It was a long wait for the bus by the blue plastic barrel in the blazing sun.
Even though Daniel and Annika had their new long-visored caps shading them, one red, the other green, Marko worried aloud that they might be in danger of sunstroke.
Ladivine felt the same fear, but she was irritated with Marko for mentioning it in front of the children. Daniel awoke from a daydream and immediately began to whine, while Annika groaned that she was dreadfully hot and it was too much to bear.
Ladivine then noticed that Marko seemed in a bad way. His scarlet face was dripping with sweat, his glasses had slipped almost to the end of his nose, and he seemed too exhausted to push them back up.
She herself had never felt better, her mind clear and alert. Her cheeks were scarcely damp.
But she wondered how they would fill up the many days to come in this country with nothing to see, and the tediousness of holidays, shot through with impatience, regret, almost despair, appeared to her in all its bleak truth, even more worrying here, where they were on their own to come up with activities and distractions, than in Warnemünde, where the boredom was familiar, orderly, mapped out in advance.