She and Marko had thought that, once free of Lüneburg and Warnemünde, they would have only to be — but that was impossible with the children, they also had to do, and how could Marko, more sensitive than she to the rigours of the climate, to the little ordeals each day holds for a tourist, be expected to find in this holiday something preferable to inexpensive, trouble-free boredom on a windy Warnemünde beach?
His new outfit, his delighted discovery of his own comeliness, none of that seemed like enough, she reflected, to convince him he was something other at heart than the man with the crushed ambitions who sold watches at the Wilmersdorfer Strasse Karstadt.
How she dreamed, sometimes, of being alone in the world! No weight on her back, no family or parents at all!
Obligated nonetheless to protect them all from a potentially jealous fate, she took a step towards Daniel, enfolded him in her arms, kissed his damp forehead, then turned and hugged Annika, who stiffened a little, with all the proud impassivity of her eight years.
This battle between love for her children and fevered longing for aloneness had been going on in her only since Clarisse Rivière’s murder — why should that be?
They climbed aboard a packed bus and rode back into town. A thick fog dimmed the sunlight, the air now grey but still every bit as stifling.
They ate slices of pizza standing up across from the bus stop, then set out to tour the neighbourhood, entrusting their route to the recommendations, at once enthusiastic and vague, of the one guidebook to this city they’d found in Berlin, which as it turned out described, and seemed to know, nothing of what they saw before them, detailing only what clearly no longer existed, or never had, evoking both an ambience of decadent prosperity and a quaintly carefree indigence when they could see only a very contemporary poverty, all plastic and sheet metal, surmounted by satellite dishes, and an apathy almost wholly without spirit, smiles or hope, which seemed to leave Marko gloomier on every corner, not so much, she told herself, because he’d naively conjured up an illusory image of a city that was in reality cold, unmysterious, threadbare, as because, an insignificant intruder in this hard, closed place, he was wondering why he’d come here, how he’d ever hoped he might find himself encountering a different, more complete man who would nonetheless, fantastically, be him, Marko Berger.
Or rather, she thought, studying Marko’s cringing face, the face of the man she so loved, whom she couldn’t stand to see frightened or sad, because such narcissistic hopes seemed obscene in these destitute streets.
Because no-one had murdered Marko’s mother in her Lüneburg house, no-one had punctured his mother’s body to set her blood flowing to distant Charlottenburg, forever reddening the pavement’s paving stones, the blooms on the lindens.
Whereas she, Ladivine Rivière, had earned the right to want anything at all — hadn’t she? she thought, feeling her face going dry in the dusty, baking heat.
Given all she had been through, what self-centred wish of hers could ever be thought indecent? She could only be pitied, for the rest of her life.
Your poor mother, people said to her, afterwards, in Langon.
Oh yes, poor, poor Clarisse Rivière, and poor Ladivine, having to deal with all that.
Which is why she felt no inhibition, but rather a savage, cheerless joy as she walked through the ramshackle streets of a city she was hoping would let her forget, let her stop caring.
Clarisse Rivière’s blood hadn’t flowed this far.
“Look,” Annika suddenly said, touching her arm. “Look!” she shouted to Marko and Daniel, who were walking ahead, the child now perched on his father’s shoulders.
On a folding chair sat a woman wearing the yellow gingham dress Ladivine had bought in Bordeaux.
Before her, on an enormous piece of cloth spread out on the pavement, were all their clothes, carefully folded and laid out in an elegant tonal array.
Marko turned around and came back. He seemed to be clasping Daniel’s calves not so much to support the child as to keep himself from collapsing.
He stared dully at his T-shirts, his old jeans, his blue-and-red striped bathing suit.
The woman had lowered the magazine she was reading, and now she eyed them expectantly, a stern look on her face. The yellow dress’s bodice hung slightly loose over her skinny chest.
“That was mine, and so was that, and that,” said Annika, pointing at her things, her delicate, pale face intent as she catalogued her former possessions, but at the same time detached, almost unsurprised, accepting that the clothes on display were hers no more.
“Something interest you?” the woman asked haughtily.
Marko let out a low laugh. He shook his head, chuckling in silence.
That dress didn’t really fit me anyway, thought Ladivine.
She then spotted a pair of white trousers and a long-sleeved navy-blue blouse that she knew she hadn’t brought with her, but which were beyond all doubt hers.
For example, she recognised a very faint yellowed spot on the front panel of the pants, caused, she remembered, by spattering bleach.
But she knew she’d left those two garments in her chest of drawers in Berlin, the trousers because they showed dirt, the blouse because it was corduroy, and unsuitably warm.
She felt her cheeks and brow redden in embarrassment, in perplexity, and also, oddly even to her, in fear, in the fear that Marko or Annika might observe that she’d never placed those trousers and that blouse into her suitcase — but how would they know?
And why did she feel guilty about all this? Was it because, unable to explain it, she nonetheless found it neither surprising nor frightening?
Marko had stopped laughing.
But the corners of his mouth were still turned up in a taunting smile.
“Lovely dress you’ve got on!” he threw out at the woman, in his slightly posh, supercilious English.
She answered simply:
“Thank you. I sewed it myself.”
“Did you? My wife here has one just like it. She bought it in France.”
He began to chuckle again, now menacingly, thought Ladivine in alarm.
She turned to walk away, hoping Marko would follow. But he held his ground before the display, vigorously tugging at Daniel’s calves, the one then the other, like the teats of a cow.
Numb with heat and exhaustion, the child winced but didn’t complain.
“Those French are always copying us,” said the woman, in that tone of austere rectitude that inspired in Ladivine only a fervent urge to nod along.
“Isn’t that dress a little big for you?” said Marko, starting in again.
“Stop it!” cried Ladivine. “What do you want from her, anyway?”
He gave her a surprised, reproachful, deeply suspicious glance.