She made out a hum of voices and movements around her, and the room seemed enormous and packed. A roaring filled her ears, she staggered on her high heels. Someone caught her by the elbow and asked, she thought she made out, if she was alright.
“Yes, yes,” she mumbled, embarrassed.
Nonetheless, the person kept a grip on her until she reached the stand, where Ladivine Sylla grasped the rail in relief.
Then she dared to look up, and found only friendly, attentive gazes.
She wondered if she should turn her head to look for that Freddy Moliger, then decided against it, vaguely afraid that this act might have the same force as speech, and remembering that she wanted nothing she said to have any meaning beyond what she hoped was the perfectly neutral sense of each word.
She gave them her name, as they’d asked. Then, when they asked her to verify that she was Clarisse Rivière’s mother, and although she’d tried hard to get used to the name Malinka had chosen, an old pride flickered to life, and she couldn’t help correcting:
“My daughter’s name was Malinka.”
The lawyer she’d met with, the one who introduced himself as Bertin, representing that Freddy Moliger, asked if she’d ever met his client.
“Yes,” she answered.
He asked if she enjoyed that Freddy Moliger’s company. “Yes,” she answered.
He asked if she’d even felt some affection for him.
“Yes,” she answered.
He asked if her daughter Malinka seemed happy with that Freddy Moliger.
“Yes,” she answered.
It took her a few seconds to grasp why her mind was desperately summoning up the image of her weeping figurines, and how they might help her now. Were they not called to suffer in her stead?
She swallowed, once again heard a dim, piercing plaint deep inside her ears.
Her figurines were meant to do the weeping, a frantic little voice was saying over and over in her head, so her own eyes would stay dry and no-one would know what she was going through. A thousand needles pricked her lower eyelids. She squeezed the rail with all her might, almost resigned, in her exhaustion, to let all her misery spill out.
But as it happened they had no further questions.
:
ladivine sylla remembered catching a glimpse of that man’s face as she turned on her heels to walk out of the courtroom. The anguish she’d read on his features, the dumbstruck stare he fixed on her without seeming to see her, as if, through her skin and her flesh, through her old porcelain-shepherdess face, he was probing a mystery that brought him no joy, all that made her think, curious and apprehensive, that she’d be seeing him again.
And now he’d knocked at her door, now she’d offered him the velvet armchair that was Malinka’s favourite, which she could no longer bring herself to use, now they were sitting face to face, without awkwardness, in no hurry to speak, knowing that what had to be said would be said, and perhaps, thought Ladivine Sylla, reflecting that there was no real need to say anything.
She needed only to know that he was Richard Rivière. Anything he might say to her of Malinka seemed beside the point now.
But she doubted, from his questioning, feverish air, bent forward in his chair and studying her, Ladivine Sylla, as if his searching gaze would eventually distract or wear down whatever it was in her that was refusing him, she doubted that he felt the same.
To put him at his ease, she’d sat down, their knees almost touching.
A pale winter light filtered into the cluttered little room. She offered him a cup of coffee, and he accepted reflexively, not even understanding what she was saying, she sensed, merely guessing that it was an offer of that kind.
And she could hear the water gurgling through the machine in her kitchen, she could hear it and look forward to the good coffee they’d soon be drinking, whereas Richard Rivière, absorbed in his quest or his wait, heard nothing, saw nothing, and never dropped that perfervid air, which she was almost tempted to mock, gently, so he would relax.
But no, that wouldn’t relax him at all. He might, she told herself, even see it as an answer.
And then Ladivine Sylla was taken by surprise, whether because she was paying too close and too proud an attention to her burbling coffee maker or because she was having too much fun picturing the look on Richard Rivière’s face if she began poking fun at him, and she heard the scratching at the door even as she realised it must have been going on for several seconds already.
She knew at once who it was. She jumped up, startling Richard Rivière.
“It’s the dog,” she whispered.
“The dog?”
He looked towards the door, lost. The scratching had stopped. The dog was patiently waiting, knowing it had been heard, thought Ladivine Sylla.
“You didn’t see it in front of the courthouse?”
“No, I didn’t see anything,” Richard Rivière stammered.
Ladivine Sylla gently opened the door, and the big brown dog padded in on its thin, trembling legs.
She stroked the coarse fur between its small, upright ears, and the dog turned to look at her with its knowing eyes, its chaste eyes.
She felt a dizzying rush of happiness.
She was sure it had come here to tell them everything it knew, that it had endured many torments and exhaustions for no other purpose.
It was bringing Malinka’s throbbing heart back to them, and maybe too, she thought in the ardour of her joy, the promise of a new light cast over each and every day.
About the Author and the Translator
Marie NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, France, in 1967 and studied linguistics at the Sorbonne. She started writing when she was twelve or thirteen years old and was only eighteen when her first work was published. She won the Prix Femina for Rosie Carpe in 2001, the Prix Goncourt in 2009 for Three Strong Women, and in 2015 she was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for outstanding literary contributions to the promotion of understanding between peoples, and the Gold Medal for the Arts from the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts. In 2007, after the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, NDiaye left France with her family to live in Berlin.
Jordan Stump is a professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has translated many authors from the French including Marie Redonnet, Eric Chevillard, and Honoré de Balzac. His translation of Jardin des Plantes by Claude Simon won the 2001 French-American Foundation translation prize, and he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006.