Ladivine (38 page)

Ladivine Sylla remembered catching a glimpse of that man’s face as she turned on her heel 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 favorite, 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, from the way he hunched forward in his chair, 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 coffeemaker 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 realized 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 toward 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 gingerly walked 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 ardor of her joy, the promise of a new light cast over each and every day.

Marie NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, France, in 1967; spent her childhood with her French mother (her father was Senegalese); 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. In 2001, she was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina literary prize for her novel
Rosie Carpe;
in 2009, the Prix Goncourt for
Three Strong Women;
and, in 2015, the Gold Medal for the Arts from the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts.