“Somebody stole our things, didn’t they? Don’t you think we should go to the police?”
“Certainly not!”
Doing her best to stay calm, she added:
“There’s no point, we’d be wasting our time. You know they won’t do anything.”
“That one shouldn’t be here,” said Annika, pointing at the navyblue blouse. “You left it at home.”
“No, no, you’re mistaken, I brought it,” Ladivine hurried to answer.
And this, she realised, was her first lie to her child, a lie with no perceptible reason, not to protect her from some hard truth but only to separate herself from the family she nonetheless so loved, from that husband and those children she couldn’t or wouldn’t let into her new life.
“You left it at home,” Annika muttered stubbornly.
Ladivine shook her head, determined to deny it to the end, and silently saddened by that.
The one thing she refused to let herself do was exploit her motherly authority and order the little girl to say no more about the blouse.
She could only, her heart bleeding, accept Annika’s bewildered insistence and cling to her lie for as long as it took.
A sudden exhaustion seemed to descend over Marko. Righting Daniel before the child could slide off his shoulders, he grumbled:
“Alright, then, let’s get back to the hotel.”
The children spent the afternoon and early evening in the pool, visibly relieved not to have to go out again.
Now and then a few other guests paddled around them, fat old people with quivering, pale flesh and a disgruntled air, sometimes casting quick, wary glances at the children, pre-emptively irked.
At the edge of the pool, the palm trees had died. Their dry, pale brown leaves hung limp against the grey trunks. She reached out and took Marko’s hand, finding it cold as ice. She wanted to tell him, “Nothing’s. .”
But he spoke before her, and, not moving his head, lying stiff on the chaise longue, asked in a distant voice, thickened by the heat:
“That blue blouse, the day before yesterday. . It’s so warm. . Really, you brought that?”
“Of course I did.”
She could feel herself blushing.
“Otherwise it would be impossible,” she murmured, protected by her huge sunglasses, whose lenses almost covered her cheeks.
“Yes,” said Marko, “otherwise it would be impossible, that’s just what was bothering me.”
He squeezed her hand, and she realised the depth of his relief. He sat up, opened the guidebook, and said, more confidently:
“There’s only one thing to see here, the National Museum. It’s supposed to be interesting.”
Marko’s skin had turned precisely the colour of his goldenchestnut hair, luxuriant, wavy, untamed, the locks snaking over his thin, rippling neck. She couldn’t help reaching out to touch it. He bowed his head and gently kissed her fingers.
Fleetingly, foolishly, she prayed that she and Marko wouldn’t be parted, knowing it was unlikely, and certainly not a thing she should be wanting despite all the pain it would cause her.
What was Marko Berger’s place now?
What was his role here, if it turned out she could do without love and tenderness?
That, even more than sex, must have been what Clarisse Rivière couldn’t live without when she was abandoned at fifty, but love hadn’t worked out for her.
Their imagination running low, the children had started to quarrel. Marko stood up and called them out of the water. They shrieked in pain when their feet touched the burning hot paving tiles.
Their faces were red, overheated, their bodies pale and wrinkled and redolent of chlorine.
They looked distinctly unwell, Ladivine abruptly realised, though they had been the picture of health in Berlin.
When, thirty minutes later, the four of them emerged from the hotel to start for the National Museum, the big brown dog across the street rose to its feet, its back a bristling arch.
Watching it from the corner of her eye, Ladivine was sure she heard it growl.
Suddenly she was afraid it might charge across the street and lunge at Marko’s throat, or the children’s, unwilling, perhaps, to see her in the company of people it wasn’t responsible for. And what did that dog care that she had a husband and children, if it was not meant to bind its fate to theirs?
Their plan was to walk to the museum by the corniche road, but instead she herded Daniel and Annika towards a taxi parked before the hotel, waved Marko in with them, and then, after a moment’s hesitation and a glance at the dog, already sick at heart to be hurting and angering it this way, Ladivine too disappeared into the car.
“It’s just too hot to walk, don’t you think?” she said to Marko, slightly breathless and still trembling to think of the dog biting the children or their father to get them out of the way.
And, saying nothing to Marko about the dog, knowing she never would, and not simply because he might not believe her (he’d believe she was sincere, but would set out to show her she was mistaken, to prove that it was impossible to be guarded or spied on by an anonymous dog in the vastness of a poor, foreign city), she already felt accountable for any rash acts the dog might commit, that dog for which she’d broken her tacit accord with Marko never to keep secrets, a rule that Marko had always obeyed, she was sure, because he was a deeply virtuous and conscientious man, even a little vain about his virtue, as had she, she thought, until now, or rather until Clarisse Rivière’s death, whose horror and pointlessness had stranded her, Ladivine, her only daughter, on shores of unspeakable shame. Before the National Museum’s severe, modern façade, a very young man seemed to be waiting for them.
No sooner were they out of the taxi than he came running, lively and good-humoured, friendly as no-one had ever been in this city, which, Ladivine would later reflect, explained why they trusted him at once, something they never would have done at home with an intrusive, slick, ingratiating young man such as this, but that’s how it was, they felt fragile and alone in this place where their mere presence seemed a sound reason to treat them with indifference, even suspicion or cold hostility, and not being used to such things they found it hard to adapt, wanting deep down to be liked, to be recognised and admired as the good people they rightly thought they were.
And the welcoming, intelligently obliging but in no way obsequious look on that boy’s face found them disarmed, eager for human warmth.
He was of average height, muscular, dressed in a pair of jeans cut off at the knees and a long NBA jersey.
His hair was cropped very short, and a little gold ring set with gemstones adorned his right ear.
Oddly, thought Ladivine, he was barefoot, for all the care he took with his appearance, his delicate, hairless, adolescent feet were dirty grey and peppered with scars.
He extended a firm hand first to her, then to Marko, looking at them both with sparkling dark eyes.
Smiling an indefinable little smile, he examined Marko’s new outfit, his tunic and trousers.
Next he shook Annika’s hand with a slight, playful bow, and then Daniel’s.