Alain sat down next to Laurine on the bright stone parapet that ran along the river on the approach to the bar tabac. The sturdy sandstone blocks had been installed to prevent vehicles from taking an unplanned dip in the river, as had happened all too often in the past.
Laurine gazed toward Kerdruc.
“Homesick?” Alain asked. She nodded. He followed her gaze across the water to the far bank. It was a harbor that Alain was condemned to see, but where he wasn’t welcome. Yet something was different over there today.
It was tempting him. It seemed to be quivering. In the blue-tinged light of dusk, sparks were dancing—though in actual fact they were merely the lights of a host of swaying red lanterns. Among them shadows shifted, gathering for the night’s festivities. Suddenly Alain caught sight of a red shadow. He recognized that red. From his breast pocket he took a pair of opera glasses, through which he had spent so many nights peering desperately for a glimpse of Geneviève.
“Genoveva,” he whispered. She was wearing her engagement dress, the dress in which they had fallen in love with each other.
Was that the sign he had been waiting for these thirty-five years? Or was it merely mockery. Look, I’ve managed to forget you, Alain, and who I was when I loved you.
Laurine observed her new boss. He was good to her, gentle and clever, but the view through those binoculars had brought out something in his face that only a woman in love could comprehend: Alain Poitier was no more at home on this side of the Aven than she was. She took his hand, but it wasn’t clear who was clinging to whom—Alain to Laurine, or she to him. He belonged over there in Kerdruc, where two things were happening at that moment. Through his binoculars he could see that a van was rolling down the slope to the port and letting out four nuns and a priest; and from a taxi stepped a gray-suited man, who looked around with an expression of disbelief that he had washed up in this place at the end of the world.
“Is it normal to feel so sick?” asked Marianne, glancing from the gavotte players to Grete and back again with a pained expression.
“It’s called stage fright, and it’s completely normal. Everyone gets it.” Grete burst out laughing. “Come on, Marianne. There’s no water lily in your lungs, stealing your breath. Breathe out. All of us should breathe out more often anyway.”
They were sitting in the guesthouse dining room. The bandleader beckoned to Marianne. Her knees felt like jelly as she listed the pieces she was intending to play. Right then, a flock of nuns came swarming through the door.
“Sister Clara!” Marianne cried happily. Behind her were Sister Dominique and Father Ballack. They walked toward Marianne, their robes swirling, and clustered around her. They had come to Kerdruc to thank her for rescuing Sister Dominique and had planned their trip to coincide with the fest-noz party.
“I’m so pleased,” Sister Clara whispered as she hugged her. “So pleased that your journey has had a happy ending.”
Alain didn’t know what to do. The vibes on the other side of the river appeared to have intensified. That was no ordinary Breton port hosting just another fest-noz: it looked like an enchanted forest.
Laurine was looking through the opera glasses. Alain had fetched his jacket and hung it around her shoulders. “That’s Madame Geneviève. She’s bringing out the racks to support the casks of wine. And that’s Padrig helping her. And that’s…” She paused and cleared her throat. “Monsieur Paul is dressed up to the nines. Claudine: dear me, she’s so pregnant, she’s going to burst soon! Ah, they’re pointing to Marianne!” Laurine was ecstatic now. “She looks so beautiful!”
“Can you see Jean-Rémy as well?” asked Alain.
“I don’t want to see him,” said Laurine, passing Alain the glasses.
He scanned the far shore, and suddenly caught sight of Geneviève leading the man in the gray suit up the stairs to the guesthouse.
It was when the man had written his name on the guest form and passed it to Madame Geneviève that she started to tremble. She read his name a second time. She hadn’t recognized him in the lift, and even the creases stabbing down sharply from the corners of his mouth to his chin bore little resemblance to the man who had appeared on French television searching for his lost wife. It was Lothar Messmann.
“Where’s my wife?” he asked in French, or what he believed to be French. For the first time in her life, Geneviève Ecollier decided to adopt the default French attitude: never understand anyone who wasn’t French.
“Pardon?” she said in a blasé tone of voice.
How I would love to chuck you in the river, you little gray rabbit. You booked under your own name, of course, not Marianne’s maiden name, and stupidly I only realized too late.
“My wife, Marianne Messmann,” he said, raising his voice.
Geneviève shrugged and walked around the reception desk to guide him up to his room, giving the dining room a wide berth.
These French people, thought Lothar. Such an arrogant lot. Throughout his journey to the tip of Brittany, they had all refused to understand him. He had been forced to eat things he hadn’t ordered. In the bus from Rennes to Quimper, two toothless old men had spat on his German army sticker; and in Quimper he had repeatedly been sent in the wrong direction as he searched for a taxi. He had several times passed a crime bookshop, whose saleswoman had observed him distrustfully.
He remembered the letter he had received ten days ago from a teacher called Adela Brelivet, who had informed him in turgid school German that she regarded it as her civic duty to respond to his TV appeal for information and notify him that she had picked up the aforementioned Marianne on a minor road outside Kerdruc and given her a lift to Concarneau. She had immediately realized that the woman had given her a false identity. Despite this, she was absolutely certain of her identity, and Monsieur Messmann should enquire at Ar Mor in Kerdruc, because she had heard that there was a foreign woman working in the kitchen there.
He wanted to find out how Marianne could prefer life without him. Why was she so unwilling to put up with him any longer? Oh, and how annoying it was that this women in the tantalizing red dress should refuse to tell him where Marianne was! She must be at the party, at which he would bet that they didn’t even serve beer, only champagne and frogs’ legs. Lothar hated this country. At least the room was all right, and he could look out of his window onto the lively quayside below.
Out of the corner of his eye, he had spotted a woman in a blue dress, with an amber bob, shielded by a group of nuns. No, that couldn’t be Marianne. Marianne was smaller and not as…attractive.
He left his room and took some Breton lager that a gloomy-looking young man with black hair and a red bandanna passed him across the counter of the bar outside. The breakwater had filled with excited women, laughing men, teenagers, and children chasing each other underneath the tables around the dance floor.
Lothar began to push his way through the crowd, ignoring the looks that people shot at his formal suit with its six gold buttons. He was following the woman in the blue dress, which seemed to be constantly changing color and reflecting people’s laughter and the stars overhead. As she turned slightly toward him, reacting to a call from an urbanely dressed woman with a cigarette holder in her black-gloved hand, he knew that the woman in the blue dress was indeed Marianne.
She looked taller. More beautiful. Inaccessible. He took a long swig of lager, and when he lowered his glass, he had lost sight of his wife, his view blocked by a phalanx of black backs. Those damn nuns again!
Geneviève elegantly climbed the steps onto the stage, lifting the hem of her red dress a touch. One of the gavotte musicians gallantly led Marianne by the hand to the stool on which she was to sit. Geneviève reached for the microphone and announced, “Let the fest-noz begin!”
“E flat,” Marianne whispered to the musicians. She let her eyes wander over the crowd, and there, next to Jean-Rémy, she saw Yann with a sketchpad in his hand. Beside him was Grete, who gave her a double thumbs-up, and beside her was Simon, although his eyes were glued to his neighbor rather than to the stage.
Paul had stepped into the center of the dance floor with Rozenn, as if the musicians were playing for them alone. The nuns were looking kindly and affectionately at Marianne. Father Ballack’s grin revealed his jagged teeth. Marianne felt herself relax under their benevolent gazes, and she saw the glow in Geneviève’s eyes and the desire in Yann’s. She saw Pascale and Emile, who was standing there with his hands folded, as if he were praying that his monstrous accordion might produce a decent sound; and she saw Colette hand in hand with Paul’s granddaughters. She thanked the goddesses of time past for this instant when she could bathe in such warmth.
The drums struck up an urgent, intense beat, and Marianne shut her eyes, imagined she was by the sea and began to play the first chords of Libertango. The bass took up her notes, and she opened her eyes. The drums picked up the tempo, and Piazzolla’s best-known tango grew in power and depth. Like waves surging higher and higher. Like fire leaping from one heart to another, kindling flames in each. Like an avalanche of singing stones.
The dance floor was already packed with spinning couples, and as the violin took up the melody, the waves of sound hit those who were sitting at the tables over mussels and wine. They swayed back and forth as the concertina captured the passionate accents and syncopation.
Paul and Rozenn crisscrossed the floor with heads held high and precise tango steps. Marianne’s fingers flew accurately and easily over the keys, and the sea rocked before her. A sea of bodies—everyone was moving, and beneath the red lanterns it seemed as if imps and fairies were celebrating their departure for Avalon. Even Claudine was twisting her belly as if in a trance. Everyone was dancing, happy to be alive at the same time.
Everyone except for one man, whose silhouette seemed rooted to the ground.