Читать онлайн «Ladivine»
Автор Мари Ндьяй
Marie NDiaye
Ladivine
Ladivine
She was malinka again the moment she got on the train, and she found it neither a pleasure nor a burden, having long since stopped noticing.
But it happened, she could tell, for no more could she answer without a second thought to Clarisse when, rarely, someone she knew took that same train and called to or greeted her as Clarisse, only to see her stare back in puzzled surprise, a hesitant smile on her lips, creating a mutual discomfort that the slightly flustered Clarisse never thought to dispel by simply echoing that hello, that how are you, offhandedly as she could.
It was this, her inability to answer to Clarisse, that told her she was Malinka the moment she got on the train to Bordeaux.
Had that been the name she was hailed by, she knew, she would immediately turn her head — had someone spotted her face or recognised from afar her slender form, her always slightly unsteady walk, and called out: “Hey there, Malinka, hello. ”
Which couldn’t possibly happen — but was she sure?
There was a time, now long gone, when, in another city, another part of France, girls and boys called her Malinka because they knew her by no other name, and she had yet to invent one.
It was not out of the question that a woman her age might one day accost her and ask in delighted surprise if she wasn’t that Malinka from her past, from that school and that city whose name and look she, Clarisse, had forgotten.
And a smile would come to Clarisse’s lips, not hesitant but bold and assured, and she would be neither puzzled nor surprised, though she would most certainly not recognise that woman who claimed to have known her when she was Malinka.
But she would recognise her own name, and the way the last syllable hung in the air, trailing a wake of promises, of happy anticipations and unspoiled youth, which is why, at first, she would think there was no reason to allow any awkwardness between her and this old schoolfriend she couldn’t recall, and why she would do her best to match her joyful expression, until she remembered the danger that came with consenting to be Malinka again, if only now and again.
What she would have to do then, she didn’t dare even think.
The brusquely turned back, the scowl of feigned incomprehension, these went far beyond the timid violations of civility and good manners that a resolutely inoffensive Clarisse Rivière could even consider.
She sat in the train, eyes fixed on the window, on the specks and tiny scratches she never saw past — such that she would have been hard put to describe this countryside she’d been travelling through for years, once a month, one way in the morning, the other in the evening — and trembled uneasily as she imagined having to hold herself back should someone call her Malinka.
Then her thoughts wandered, little by little she forgot why she was trembling, though her trembling went on and she couldn’t think how to still it, in the end vaguely putting it down to the vibrations of the train, which, beneath her feet, in her muscles, in her weary head, chanted the name that she loved and despised, the name that filled her with both fear and compassion, Malinka, Malinka, Malinka.
