Marianne sat down on a bench next to the newspaper kiosk on the concourse of the Gare de Montparnasse and stared at the departures board, which showed the 10.05 TGV Atlantique 8715 for Quimper. She was trembling with joy and apprehension. When the letters began to spin on the board and her train was announced on Platform 7, she stood up. Her knee was hurting again.
She had put down most of her cash on the ticket counter and studied the painting on the tile. Her money would only take her as far as Auray. She would somehow have to make her way to Pont-Aven and Kerdruc under her own steam.
She looked around as she walked alongside the snaking high-speed train. With every step she had the impression that something was taking over her body, as if a foreign creature were determined to enter, fill her and shape her anew. A sense of irritation stopped her in her tracks. What was it?
She caught hold of the handrail and tried to pull herself up the steep steps into the carriage. She could still climb back down, look for a telephone and call Lothar to ask him to come and fetch her, to prevent her from putting her plan into action. But wherever I go, I’m already dead.
She hauled herself doggedly up onto the next step and searched for her seat, which was by the window. She sank into it, closed her eyes and waited for the train to roll out of the station at last. No one took the seat next to hers.
When she glanced up, her eyes met a smiling face. This woman could bounce back from failure, that much was clear; her big bright eyes sparkled. Their gazes met, and Marianne snapped her eyelids shut again. She couldn’t understand why the woman was staring at her like this. But she also wanted to store it away in her memory—the faint glimmer in her eye, the mauve cheeks, the sun playing in her hair.
When Marianne got off the train three hours later in Auray, she took a deep, long breath. The air was smoother and clearer here than in Paris, less oppressive. She decided to buy a map and a bottle of water and then hitchhike. She would make it to Kerdruc somehow, even if she had to walk the whole way.
As she emerged from the other side of the station building, she spied a nun on the only bench in the shade. The woman was sitting in a curiously lopsided position with her head thrown back. It looked as if she’d left the world for a better place. Marianne glanced around, but no one was taking any notice of the woman. Very slowly she walked over to her.
“Bonjour?”
The nun said nothing. Marianne tapped her lightly on the shoulder. The nun gave a loud snore, and spit trickled from her open mouth onto her habit. Marianne sat down next to her, took out a tissue and gently patted the nun’s chin with it.
“So now we’ve got to know each other, what do we do next?”
The nun let out a quiet groan.
“What a delightful conversation,” murmured Marianne.
The nun’s eyelids fluttered and she woke up. Her head twisted mechanically from left to right, and her eyes eventually settled on Marianne.
“You know,” lied Marianne, “this occasionally happens to me too. I often sleep better away from home. Do you sometimes come to the station to enjoy a nap?”
The nun slumped to one side with a faint sigh, leaned her head on Marianne’s shoulder and dozed off again. Marianne didn’t dare to move for fear of waking the nun, who blew warm air into her ear every time she breathed out. The shadows shifted in time with the sun’s progress across the sky. Marianne closed her eyes too. It was nice simply to sit there and let life and the shadows pass her by.
Some time later, a minibus screeched to a halt outside the station, startling Marianne from her torpor. A man in a cassock got out, followed by one, two, three, four…four nuns. They all gawped at Marianne and the sister, still slumbering on Marianne’s shoulder.
“Mon Dieu!” called the father. They surrounded Marianne and helped the two women to their feet.
The nun looked well rested now, Marianne noticed. The man in the white-and-green cassock turned to her. She listened to him politely without understanding a word. She gathered her breath and said, “Je suis allemande. Pardon. Au revoir.”
“Allemande?” the priest repeated, before grinning to reveal teeth that were as crooked as the headstones in an abandoned forest graveyard. “Ah! Allemagne! Le football! Ballack! Tu connais Ballack? Et Schweinsteiger!” He held up his hands as if he were clutching a ball.
“Ballack!” he said again, and pretended to kick something.
“Yes, Ballack,” Marianne repeated with some irritation, but she raised a clenched fist as he had and gave a halfhearted smile. The priest beamed back, and the nuns began to lead Marianne and their still slightly disorientated sister toward the minibus.
“No, no, no,” said Marianne hastily. “Our ways part here. You go with God, I’ll go…Oh, forget it. Au revoir, au revoir.” She waved one last time and made to leave.
A young nun tugged at her sleeve. “They call me Clara. My grandmother was German. Do you understand me?”
Marianne nodded.
“We wanted to thank you,” explained the nun. “Please come with us to the convent.”
Marianne noticed how the other nuns were stealing glances at her and giggling.
“But…I have to keep traveling. I want to reach Kerdruc today,” said Marianne. She pulled out the map and tapped on the hamlet at the mouth of the river Aven.
“Pas de problème! Lots of tourists visit the convent, and their buses take them to many other places, including here,” said Clara, pointing to the town of Pont-Aven to the north of Kerdruc. “Paul Gauguin lived there. Many painters.”
The other nuns were already sitting in the minibus. Marianne hesitated for a second, but maybe it would be better to travel with the nuns than stand on the side of the road. She got in.
Inside the minibus, the old nun leaned forward from one of the tattered leather-upholstered seats. “Merci,” she said, squeezing Marianne’s arm. Clara turned around in her seat to look at Marianne. “Dominique is…ill. She disappeared from the convent yesterday and she can’t get by on her own. She has no idea who she is, where she is or how to get home. Vous avez compris, madame? Thanks to your help, all good now, yes?”
Marianne guessed that Dominique might have Alzheimer’s.
Clara turned around again. “What is your name?”
“My name is—”
“Je m’appelle…” the nun corrected her gently.
“Je m’appelle Marianne.”
“Marie-Anne?! Nous sommes du couvent de Sainte-Anne-d’Auray! Oh, the Lord moves in mysterious ways!” The nun crossed herself.
“What’s wrong?” Marianne asked in fright, but the nun cheerfully announced, “Your name is the same as our convent’s! Marie and Anne. We pray to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. We are the Filles du Saint-Esprit Ker Anna, and for us Anna is the source of all female holiness. You were sent by heaven, Marie-Anne!”
And I’m going back there, my dear, thought Marianne. Oh no, I’m going to the other place.
“Voilà!” the priest called from the front. “Sainte-Anne-d’Auray!”
There was no need for him to add anything: the sight spoke for itself. Stretching out in front of them was a wide square, flanked by towering hedges, bushes and hydrangeas in full bloom. A magnificent cathedral stood sharply outlined against the deep-blue sky. The red leaves of the trees swayed, and Marianne saw fountains and caught a glimpse of a stepped bridge, which reminded her of some pictures of the Rialto Bridge in Venice that her neighbor Grete Köster had sent her. Grete was one of the few women who had never succumbed to Lothar’s charms.
“La Santa Scala,” said Clara, pointing here and there. “L’oratoire, le mémorial, la Chapelle de l’Immaculée.”
The minibus drove through a gateway toward a plain three-storey building. The Ker Anna convent. Clara and Father Ballack, as Marianne had nicknamed the monk, took her to the parlor, had some peppermint tea brought for her and then hurried off to the messe des pélerins—the pilgrims’ mass, as Clara hurriedly explained.
On her way into the convent’s plain central courtyard, Marianne met a priest who appeared more dignified than Ballack. He opened his arms wide. “Ich bin Pater Andreas. Willkommen. I spent a term studying theology at Heidelberg,” he added, noting Marianne’s astonished reaction to his German. “I would like to thank you in the name of the whole convent for taking such devoted care of a member of our community. It was announced to me that your further travels are in peril due to a lapse in the service of the French transport company.”
“Yes, you could put it like that,” she said, slightly taken aback by his formal tone.
“May I enquire as to the destination and purpose of your travels?”
“Kerdruc. I wanted to…I have…”
“Are you visiting friends? Or do you live there?”
Marianne hadn’t prepared an excuse for this kind of question. She was going to Kerdruc because it was the place in which she wanted to end it all.
“Do forgive me—how impolite. Your further travels are your affair, not mine. I would be delighted if you would stay overnight. The meals in the convent are delicious, and we also have accommodation for pilgrims and guests. You probably saved Sister Dominique’s life, but it is not my gratitude you have earned, but that of the French Church.”
You mean the Pope doesn’t care?
“I’d like to continue my journey,” said Marianne.
The priest considered this. “At the end of the convent driveway you will find the public car park. Present my greetings to one of the coach drivers there and ask him to give you a lift! Au revoir, madame.” He blessed her with an outstretched hand and strode off toward St. Anne’s Basilica.
“Thank you,” mumbled Marianne.
She thought of her father as the bells struck eleven o’clock. All at once she realized clearly that her desire to stand by him had stopped her from rebelling against her mother’s moral castigations. She hadn’t wanted to undermine his meek acceptance with her protests.
She strolled across the convent courtyard, lost in reminiscences about her father. How much they had had in common, how similar they had been! They had both loved the natural world and music, and had often invented stories to tell each other.
She listened to the buzzing of a bee that had become caught in the hydrangeas. She walked around the corner of the gray building, past the sandstone chapel, and caught her breath with joy and amazement. What a garden! Mighty pine trees, lilacs, bamboo groves, palm trees, roses. A secret flower-filled idyll. She came to a stone bench at the back of the high-walled garden. How beautiful it was here, and how peaceful. She breathed out, and for a moment she felt she might stay here forever.
Oh Lothar. The realization hit her like a train: it was the unsatisfied longing for something to share that had eaten away at her. She and her husband shared nothing, neither the same wishes nor the same dreams. All that mattered were his desires.
A delicate, barely visible cloud floated many miles above her head, a mere streak of white foam against the deep blue sky.
“Cumulus clouds are the dancers of the heavens,” Marianne heard her father say, “and their brothers the stratocumuli are the elevators of the skies. Neither of them likes the nimbostratus, the big fat crusher. He barely moves and all he does is spread a bad mood.” Her father had paused for thought and then said, “Like your mother!” Marianne had laughed, but she had felt terribly guilty afterward. The children in the hospice kindergarten had giggled at the comparisons and went outside with Marianne to scour the skies for elevators and dancing clouds.
The warmth made her knee feel better and the burning sensation was now subsiding. She slipped off her shoes and walked barefoot across the soft, damp grass.
An hour passed and she felt that she really might stay here and count clouds and stems of grass forever, but instead she sighed and put on her shoes again. She advanced into the depths of the lush scented garden until she came to a small graveyard enclosed by white walls. White grains of sand covered everything, the paths and the graves, like a glittering bedsheet, and the grave mounds looked like plumped-up eiderdowns. A fragrant red rosebush flowered on each and every white sandy bed. How lovingly the graveyard had been laid out. It was as if the nuns had put their sisters to bed. They were merely sleeping. They were dreaming, and their dreams were as sweet as rose petals.
Marianne sat down on a weathered stone bench.
Where would my place for dreaming have been? Which gap might have been mine, the one only I could have filled? All the children I didn’t bear because I wasn’t in the right place. All the missing love. All the absent laughter. There are too many things I haven’t done, and now it’s too late.
She looked up to find Clara standing at the cemetery gate. The young nun walked slowly toward her.
“May I?” she asked, waiting until Marianne nodded and signaled for her to sit down next to her on the bench. Clara folded her hands on her lap and, like Marianne, gazed at the white sandy graves.
“Your journey is hard.” It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. Marianne stared at her fingernails.
“Do you think death is the end of everything, Marie-Anne?”
“I hope so,” whispered Marianne.
“Here on the Brittany coast we believe something different. Death is not something that is coming, but rather something that is all around us. Here.” Clara pointed at the air. “There.” She gestured toward the trees. Then she bent forward and took a little white sand in her hands. “Death is like this.” She let the sand trickle from her left hand into her right. “One life goes in and takes a break in death.” Now she let the sand run out of her right hand onto the ground. “Another life comes out. It makes a journey, oui? Like flowing water. Water in a moulin. In a mill. Death is that short break.”
“I remember being told a different story at church,” Marianne remarked.
“Brittany is older than the Church. This is Armorica! This is where the land meets the sea; this is the end of the world, as old as death itself.”
Marianne glanced up at the sky. “So there’s no hell, and no heaven somewhere up there?”
“Here we have a lot of different names for fear, for living, for dying. Sometimes the same word. Sometimes heaven and earth are the same. Hell and heaven too. We read the land, and in it we see that everything is equal. Death. Life. We are merely on a journey between the two.”
“And does the land tell you where the journey is heading? Like a guidebook?”
Clara didn’t laugh. “Tiens. You have to listen when the land speaks to you. The stones tell of souls that wept as they passed, the grass whispers of the people who have walked on it, the wind brings you the voices of those you have loved. And the sea knows the name of every person who has ever died.”
Marianne wondered whether the sand under her feet would one day say, “Marianne was here, and soon afterward she died.”
“I’m scared of death,” she whispered.
“Don’t be scared,” said Clara, her voice full of sympathy. “Don’t be scared! L’autre monde…the other world, oui, is like this world. It is in the middle of our world and looks the same; it is just that we cannot see those who are walking in it. There are fairies in the beyond, and wizards. Gods, demons and korrigans—trolls. And the dead who are no longer with us. And yet they are…here, next to us on this bench perhaps. All our sisters…” said Clara, pointing to the graves. “All our sisters are here and can see us. But we cannot see them. Don’t be scared. Please.”
Marianne raised her eyes. No ghosts, only roses.
“I have to travel on. I must complete my journey,” she gasped. She pulled her hand gently from Clara’s and walked away, every step making a crunch on the gravel beneath her feet. She found a tiny gate leading out of the convent garden and squeezed through it.