The path snaked through the tall trees with their alien perfumes, through the thorny bushes, the big blood-red flowers bursting out on their stout stems, sprouting like mushrooms from the roots.
How far was she supposed to go? she wondered, half-aloud, simply curious, as if to someone responsible for guiding her, someone who might conceivably answer.
Growing tired, she sat down at the foot of a tree and pressed her back to the smooth, warm trunk.
Behind her she heard footsteps lightly treading the leaves and twigs.
Guessing who it was coming to join her, if not why, but her faith was blind, she didn’t turn her head as it came to her side and lay down against her legs.
It stank of humus, sweat and exertion.
Once that smell would have bothered her, but knowing how far it had come to find her, and what fidelity, what courage lay behind it, she inhaled it with pleasure and gratitude.
Her eyes closing, she lay on her side, one arm under her head, the other draped over her friend, as she did in the bed she shared with Marko.
The night was warm and peaceful, stirred only by Clarisse Rivière’s unrelenting sigh.
And Ladivine felt herself falling asleep, violently aware that she was sinking, tumbling into a world she might well find unpleasant or paralysingly frightening.
She tried to break free, struggling to open her eyes, but it was as if a will more powerful and assured than her own was holding her back, and forbidding her to make a sound, to voice an objection.
She felt herself suffocating, stifled by a light, implacable hand.
She wanted to struggle, but her legs wouldn’t answer her frantic commands, as if lethargy were winning out over panic even though panic was obviously right.
Now she could clearly see the new-paved road, glistening from recent rainfall, that she was being forced to follow by this will that wasn’t her own, and she knew she didn’t want to go that way, not yet, and would have to struggle against her soul, not her body, which had no part in all this.
But she’d never been trained in that sort of combat, lacked the weapons, the spirit.
And that smooth new road was pulling her along, and she felt herself giving in, surrendering in anguish, weeping without tears for Marko and the children, who she knew would not be waiting at the end of that road, which had been laid out for her alone.
And then off to one side, she caught sight of a path — a mere fleeting glimpse from the corner of her eye — she wasn’t meant to see it but did.
She threw herself towards it, dealing a terrible blow to her soul.
And her lost, hurting soul, not yet relieved, heard the path’s little pebbles crunch under the soles of her wonderful sandals, which were as one with her feet.
And with this she could open her eyes, stretch her limbs.
Now she was hearing all sorts of sounds, from Clarisse Rivière’s growling moans to the insects’ tiny cheeps, from Clarisse Rivière’s howls to faint creaks from the branches far overhead.
It was still dark, but the darkness was sharply detailed, alive with tiny forms, clearly outlined.
Ladivine turned her head.
She saw her own face beside her — the curve of a full, damp cheek, a mass of strong-smelling brown hair, the scents familiar but sharper.
She stood up and began to trot through the forest, and then, her breast swelling with pleasure, to run on her strong, slender legs.
She thought she could go on and on running this way, without respite or fatigue.
She emerged from the forest just as day was breaking.
In front of the Cagnacs’ house, Marko, Daniel and Annika were climbing into the rental car.
Once the four-wheel drive had started up and gone on its way through the clearing, Ladivine set off running again.
Joyful and proud that she’d found them and could thus place them under her care, she let out little cries she alone could hear, immediately swept off by the rushing wind.
:
the dog was there, on the other side of the street, it was there for her now, waiting for her to come out of the building each morning and head off to school, accompanied by her father and the invariably whining Daniel.
Annika looked deep into the dog’s black eyes, unafraid. I know who you are, she thought, and the dog stared back with an austere, steady tenderness that Annika found infuriating. It seemed to be saying that it would always be watching over her, and perhaps over them, should Marko and Daniel one day take note of its presence, but Annika felt no need to be protected, and she was offended that the dog had presumed to make of itself her guardian.
She slipped her hand into her father’s, trying to infuse in him some of her overflowing strength and rebelliousness.
She didn’t dare admit it, but she was also afraid Marko would end up spotting the dog, and she delicately squeezed his hand and spoke any words that came to mind to keep Marko’s attention on her, his daughter Annika, who, though only eight, thought herself seasoned enough to accept calmly that her mother had chosen to look after them from inside the skin of a dog on the Droysenstrasse’s icy pavement, whereas her father, she thought, her poor distraught father, should he ever realise such a thing, could never accept it without even more grief than he already felt.
Annika was unhappy with her mother for choosing this way of leaving them.
It was November. The pavements were covered with packed, frozen snow, the dog’s fur was thin and sparse on its flanks.
Nevertheless, Annika was sure nothing and no-one had forced her mother to live with them in this distant, uncomfortable way, that she’d willingly chosen to shelter herself in the skin of a dog, which, though it did little to protect her from the cold, suited her better than the skin of a woman. That was how it was, Annika knew.
She saw no sorrow in the dog’s eyes, only a serene, stern resolve.
The dead must have that kind of face, she thought.
Annika was a sturdy girl, and nothing she’d realised about her mother kept her from succeeding in school or proving unfailingly happy and calm before her father, who, for his part, had to be protected from certain difficult truths.
Which is why, when they set off for her school, she refused to cross the street outside the building, so they wouldn’t come face to face with the dog. Because if her father’s eyes met the dog’s, might he not recognise them, even in spite of himself, and in spite of his little capacity for believing in such things?
Since their return from holiday, three months before, Marko was spending all his free time on the Internet, and he explained to Daniel and Annika that wherever their mother may be she would someday appear, one way or another, in the Web’s inescapable universe, either in person or through someone with news of her. No-one could vanish completely and forever these days, their father assured them in his weary voice.
Her father’s sadness and fatigue pained Annika’s heart.
But she thought he was better off thinking their mother adrift in the wide world than withdrawn into the skin of a dog, guarding her truncated, lost, unhappy family from the Droysenstrasse pavement. He was better off this way, he who suffered so.