Low blocks of bare-cement flats succeeded the little dirt houses roofed with mismatched sheets of corrugated tin, in front of which slim-hipped women with diminutive breasts underneath oversized T-shirts disapprovingly watched the four-wheel drive go by.
Sometimes the wheels sprayed little pebbles at the houses, built close by the road.
With this Marko would slow down, just as Ladivine was about to ask him to, then little by little he’d speed up again, his features relaxing, as if he feared that some peril might pounce on them if he drove any slower.
He cast Ladivine glances whose tenderness she could plainly see, as well as their longing to draw her into the sphere of licence and vitality forming around his new, unbridled nature, but she turned away, looked out of the window, her heart heavy with resentment.
But suppose Wellington had come back to harm them?
Wasn’t that the most likely thing?
Had she not in fact sensed the boy’s hatred, his feigned friendship mere groundwork for carefully calculated misdeeds?
Marko was seeking out the children’s attention as well, wiggling his fingers at them or smiling broadly towards the back seat in the rear-view mirror.
It seemed to Ladivine that, without being aware of it, by his emanations alone, he was stirring up an odd frenzy in the children, especially Annika, an excitement at once teasing and frustrated, denied a conclusion that Marko’s provocative manner seemed to promise.
Daniel squirmed in his seatbelt, giggling as if he’d been tickled, something questioning and faintly anxious in his piercing voice, his baby voice, which he’d playfully reverted to.
Annika was screaming with laughter as she might scream in pain, spurred on by the goad of a scandalous sexual appeal that she couldn’t understand but perceived all the same.
This was what Marko was bringing about, this was how far he was willing to go to absolve himself — drawing the children into his miserable, guilty conscience, then corrupting them with their desperately delighted consent.
Or was it she, Ladivine Rivière, who was looking at all this with an unwholesome eye?
She closed her eyes, hunched forward in her seat.
She often feared, having once been that teenaged girl who slept with the uncomplicated men of her little city for money, and unable ever since to look back on those days without a shudder of dismay, almost disbelief, that she wouldn’t be able to keep a cool head with her children when the subject of their bodies came up, that she might betray her unease by a stiffness they would interpret as an odd prudishness, that she might find it hard to make clear what was perfectly acceptable and what to steer clear of, and so she’d always found Marko’s casualness and simplicity about sex reassuring, and she’d always counted on him to fill in the children when the time came.
But what she felt in that car, that indecent, toxic, hopeless excitement, could not be good for the children, she thought, and she knew the old Marko would never have allowed it, could never even have imagined behaving in a way that might encourage it.
Or was she imagining things?
Oh no, she could feel it, as plainly as she could smell Marko’s tunic’s harsh, oily scent.
He’d decided to turn Daniel and Annika into hard, perpetually inflamed creatures, either, she thought, because he couldn’t bear to be alone in his wickedness or because he believed they might find protection in that debasement.
And here she felt Marko had betrayed her, Marko whose uprightness and modesty and even, yes, whose cowardice she loved more than anything, not because she might somehow turn it to her advantage but because she thought it meant he would never hurt anyone, and he never had, gentle and good as Clarisse Rivière, until (at her urging?) he one day resolved to tell Lüneburg that he would rather never set foot there again.
Ladivine had met him after two aimless years at the University of Bordeaux, which, on a whim and a friend of a friend’s vague promise of lodging, she’d left for Berlin, with no great enthusiasm, under the illusion that time and life would go by more quickly if she moved on, stupidly, because she had no plans, no hopes, because at twenty-one she felt tired and worn, and she saw Marko at the watch counter of the Hermannplatz Karstadt, where he’d recently found work, and realised that a young man like him, with his long hair, his big glasses, his delicate, kindly, calm, endlessly patient face would never feel the need to hurt anyone at all, that there was a kind of glory about him that he didn’t work at and didn’t believe in, though that word would have made him laugh, as he was a practical man, and this serene scepticism was an element of his grace, since he had no knowledge of that grace, since he had no access to it.
She came back to the Hermannplatz Karstadt every day, and every day she pretended she was trying to decide on a watch to give Richard Rivière, who hadn’t yet left Clarisse Rivière behind in their Langon house.
Eventually she invited Marko for a cup of coffee over his midday break, a step that, by his own admission, he would never have dared take, and the next day she moved her things into Marko’s room.
He was living in a shared flat on the Mehringdamm, and his little room at the end of the passage served as their marital home for two years, while Ladivine earned her diploma as a French teacher.
And that mannerly young man, resigned to the sameness of life and the docile abandonment of his ambitions, submitting without rancour, placidly accepting the way of things, requested a transfer to the Karstadt on Wilmersdorfer Strasse when they decided to leave the little room in Kreuzberg for the Charlottenburg apartment.
And so their life had gone by, thought Ladivine in the four-wheel drive, a good life, easy and serene, made perfectly happy, for a time, by the birth of the children.
Sometimes back then she woke late at night, not to find Marko locked in battle on the balcony, not to flee the torrent of blood pouring in from Langon, carrying Clarisse Rivière’s silent cries, but simply for the immeasurable joy of gazing on Marko, Daniel and Annika’s sleeping faces, one by one, it was the anticipation of that matchless joy that pulled her from her slumbers, that made her get up and walk soundlessly through the apartment, her blood throbbing in her neck, not her mother’s blood but her own, neatly contained in vessels that no loser would ever set out to slash with a knife.
And it was Marko’s face that she looked at the longest, sometimes drowsing, then waking again with a start, but never slipping out of that ecstatic, surprised, almost incredulous meditation on a man who meant far more to her than her own life, who inspired in her an inextinguishable gratitude, whose discreet, childlike breath she greedily inhaled from his nuzzling mouth, trying to solve the mystery of Marko’s love for her, he who in his clarity seemed so much more honourable than she.
Nothing could possibly be more disturbing, she thought in the four-wheel drive, than the hard flame now burning in Marko, with which he was trying to consume Daniel and Annika.
Such a man would never again make her long to inhale his breath, she wouldn’t even want him to love her.
But was she not the cause of all this? Was it not her idea to call Richard Rivière and ask for advice, knowing that Marko would take anything her father said as an absolute truth?