Marianne brushed aside the hands that tried to catch hold of her in the guesthouse, on the breakwater and on the way to the car. Yann’s hands, Lothar’s hands, the nuns’ hands. The hands of fest-noz guests wanting to thank her, wondering why her wolf-like eyes seemed so dim, and why she hurried off into the night without a word.
Colette tried to object during the quick journey, insisting that they had to respect Sidonie’s decision, as one should any last wish.
Without looking at her, Marianne blurted out, “I’ve seen four hundred and thirty-eight people die, and not a single one wanted to be alone when the moment came.”
They found Sidonie in her studio. Her hand was clutching a pebble she had picked up in Malta, near temples that were older than the Pyramids. Her breathing was visibly strained, but she kept her eyes open for as long as she could, and stared at Colette—at her eyes, her mouth, her soul.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for not listening to me.”
This woman’s face was the sight that Sidonie had wanted to see on this last of all days, and on every previous day. Always, ever since she had first laid eyes on the gallery owner. And Colette had come back after she had let her go.
“One’s whole life is actually dying. From the first breath it goes in one direction, toward…death,” Sidonie said in a voice that seemed to come from very far away.
Now Marianne held Sidonie’s other hand. She was not scared by the cold current she felt in her arms and her neck and even in her heart. She recognized this chill: it was the icy stream of death.
Sidonie’s eyelids fluttered and she sat up. “The stones,” she whispered weakly to Colette. “They’re singing.”
Colette couldn’t cope. She despaired, she wept and she groped for Sidonie’s hand, but Sidonie tried to draw her fingers away to close them once more around the pebble. So Colette gripped her hand, the stone clenched between their two palms. Marianne reached for Colette’s free hand, and together the three women went part of the way toward the frontier from where Sidonie would have to continue alone, as everyone before her had, and everyone after her would too.
They listened to Sidonie’s shallow breathing. Suddenly, as if she could already see the mists of the other world, she whispered her late husband’s name in surprise. “Hervé?” She smiled happily, as if she had caught a glimpse of eternity and what she had seen there held no fear.
The icy, prickling sensation under Marianne’s hand where she was holding Sidonie’s fingers broke off as suddenly. The pebble clattered to the floor.
Sidonie was gone.
It was long after four o’clock in the morning when Marianne left Colette alone with her friend’s peaceful body, and set off back to Kerdruc on foot. She was cold in the sleeveless blue evening dress, and in her hand she held Sidonie’s pebble.
She stumbled toward the black horizon. Streaks of lightning flickered in the sky, but without the usual thunderclaps that followed; only a distant rumbling came from the dark clouds. A ghostly calm hung over the land, and the silent lightning illuminated the noiseless meadows, the gray streets and the unlit houses. Only from Kerdruc harbor came a red glow.
You cannot tell love to come and stay forever. You can only welcome it when it comes, like the summer or the autumn, and when its time is up and it’s gone, then it’s gone.
The lightning flashed, striking out around her. The sky was ablaze.
Like life. It comes, and when its time is up, it goes. Like happiness. Everything has its own time.
Marianne had had what was due to her, and that would have to suffice. She tried to imagine in whose arms she might find peace, but discovered that she couldn’t do it. Lothar? Yann?
Lothar had looked at her in the way she had been hoping for years that he might. He was her husband, after all!
Oh Yann, what should I do?
Just as she was reaching the outskirts of Kerdruc, a small shadow detached itself from a tree, jumped down onto the road and stared at her. It was Max, the cat—he had been waiting for her. He rubbed against her legs, but before she could pick him up, he slipped from her grasp and ran off. Glancing back, he stared at her again and then trotted away, as if to say, Come along now! Quickly, or else we’ll miss everything!
The cat scampered toward the car park—the site of Marianne’s first impression of Kerdruc, the place with the glass-recycling container. Under the trees was a raspberry-colored Renault, and Marianne spotted a lifeless figure on the reclined front seat—Marie-Claude’s daughter Claudine!
The young woman’s face was pale and bathed in sweat, and a damp patch had formed underneath her. She was holding a mobile phone, but the battery was dead. Marianne grabbed her hands and felt her racing pulse with her middle finger. It was beating like mad. She was having contractions!
With all her might, Marianne pushed back the seat and sat down between Claudine’s spread legs. She reached for the cat and set it down on the passenger seat beside her, then started the car and drove off with a screech of tires.
“The baby…” Claudine groaned. “The baby’s coming! Too early. Two weeks early!” She was hit by another wave of contractions. “Did you call it? When you put your hand on my tummy?” She gasped with pain again.
“Stop your nonsense,” Marianne ordered. She kept her hand on the horn as she sped down the ramp to the harbor and raced across the dance floor, braking directly in front of the entrance to Ar Mor. Then she gave three short, three long and another three short blasts of the horn—the international SOS signal.
Three people hurried out of the restaurant: Yann, Jean-Rémy and Lothar. They were all a bit drunk.
Marianne instructed them to lift Claudine, who had almost passed out from the pain, out of the car. “Take her into the kitchen and lay her on the table!” she called, curling her fingers around Sidonie’s pebble in a reflex. It felt warm, as if it had soaked up and preserved Sidonie’s living heat. Marianne closed her eyes and sought to conjure up her memories of helping her grandmother Nane with home births. This time, though, she wouldn’t be helping someone; she would have to do it all on her own. She hoped that her hands would recall the movements. She pushed the button that opened the car’s trunk and found the first-aid kit.
The three men’s faces turned to expressionless masks when they had laid the moaning Claudine on the cool stainless-steel table. Jean-Rémy rushed to the telephone and asked the operator for an ambulance. “We need to get her to the clinic in Concarneau,” he whispered, waiting for Marianne to give the final command.
She turned over a large cooking pot and arranged bandages, scissors, compresses and the pebble on it. Then she held her hands under hot water to warm them up, and pulled on sterile latex gloves.
“Support her, Lothar,” she said as she pushed her fingers into Claudine.
Claudine shrieked. “Oh my God! Bloody hell!”
“Her cervix is open, her perineum is bulging and she’s cursing like a trooper!”
Jean-Rémy passed on this information to the emergency services. “They say we shouldn’t drive her in that state.”
The contractions came at ever shorter intervals, and Claudine screamed ever more loudly. “Bleeding son of a bitch!”
“Now they’re saying that they’re going to come to us.” Jean-Rémy ran away.
“Men! They always want to be there at the beginning, but never for the outcome,” mumbled Marianne. “She needs to breathe regularly,” she instructed Yann, who was standing there watching her with inscrutable eyes. “Tell her everything’s normal, everything’s fine.”
“Don’t you need hot water?” the painter asked.
“The only reason midwives need hot water is for making coffee and keeping the men busy,” growled Marianne. “Bring me a glass of brandy and some towels—clean tea towels. And the electric heater. Lothar, stop rubbing the woman. It’ll drive her crazy, all that pushing and shoving. Move her nearer to the edge.”
Yann bent over Claudine and urged her to breathe regularly.
“Fuck your mother, you bastard!”
When Yann had gone out to fetch the towels, Lothar asked, “Why did you leave me?”
“Do you really want to talk about that now, Lothar?”
“I just want to understand!”
Yann came back into the room and directed the heater at Claudine.
“Jean-Rémy!” called Marianne. “Where’s Grete?”
“She’s in her room. With the fisherman. Simon.”
“He can stay put, but fetch Grete. Are there any other women in the house?”
“A few fest-noz guests who’ve stayed on, and…Oh my God!” The top of a little head had appeared between Claudine’s legs. Jean-Rémy turned away and threw up into the sink.
“Shut up!” roared Claudine.
“Don’t push anymore!” Marianne said loudly. “Pant! Jean-Rémy! Grete!”
She panted to demonstrate to Claudine what she wanted her to do, then sat down on a second pot, pushed a few towels under Claudine’s thighs and gently laid her hand on the advancing head, applying pressure to guide it. Claudine braced her feet against Marianne’s shoulders, leaving dirty marks on the skin. Jean-Rémy staggered out of the kitchen.
“What did I do wrong, Marianne?”
“Lothar! Everything. Nothing. You are who you are, I am who I am, and we don’t go together—that’s all there is to it.”
“We don’t go together? What are you talking about?”
Claudine screamed and pushed, but the baby didn’t want to come out any farther. Marianne let her hands do what they needed to do, without thinking. She steered the little head downward using both hands until a shoulder appeared. The perineum seemed to tear, and she glanced up at Lothar, who shut his eyes in shock, and Yann, who was holding the brandy with a strangely enraptured expression. Then she looked back down to the tiny body as it forced its way entirely out of the womb.
She supported the child’s chest so that its head didn’t hang upside down. The remaining amniotic fluid splashed onto the floor.
“Take off your shirt, Yann,” she said calmly.
“Victor!” cried Claudine, then again, “Vi-ic-tor!” She sank back onto the table and all her muscles slackened.
It was here. Marianne was holding the infant in her hands. She took a quick look at the clock: five past five. The baby was bloody, slippery and covered with yellow grease. She dabbed it with the sterile compresses, then took Yann’s body-warmed shirt and wrapped the baby in it.
“It’s a girl,” she whispered into Claudine’s ear, as the young woman slumped back heavily into Lothar’s arms.
“It isn’t crying,” murmured Yann.
Marianne ran her hand along the little girl’s spine and rubbed her feet. Nothing. Not a sound.
Come on. Cry! Breathe!
“What’s wrong?” She asked the baby softly. “Don’t you want to? You’ll have a wonderful life. You’ll love, be loved, laugh—”
“Am I too late?” asked Grete as she rushed into the kitchen in a negligee over which she had thrown on Simon’s fisherman’s shirt and jacket.
“The baby isn’t crying, and I don’t have a free hand to cut the umbilical cord.”
“What’s wrong with my baby? WHAT’S WRONG WITH MY BABY?” Claudine bit Lothar’s hand, and he let go of her in surprise.
“What a couple of heroes we have here!” whispered Grete, gently pinching the baby’s ear. The child didn’t cry.
Claudine looked at Marianne, wild-eyed, and reared up. Grete held the umbilical cord higher and pressed down on Claudine’s abdomen with the other hand. Marianne’s gaze fell on Sidonie’s pebble. She picked it up, prized open one of the newborn’s tiny fists and gently pushed the stone between its fingers. Marianne felt a slight discharge from the small body similar to the lightning in the sky a little earlier. Silent, but mighty.
Sidonie? she asked wordlessly. Is that you?
The baby filled her lungs, her cheeks turned red and all of a sudden she let out a cry of affirmation. There was a huge clap of thunder outside. The men laughed with relief, and Marianne laid the child on Claudine’s chest. The young mother gently embraced her daughter, her eyes full of astonishment, gratitude and shame.
Grete tore the straps off her nightdress and tied them around the umbilical cord in two places, while Marianne cut it with the sterile scissors. Tomorrow she would bury it under a rosebush, as sure as sure could be.
Claudine’s face had regained some of its color, and Marianne got up to fetch her a glass of cold water, as Grete continued to staunch the bleeding from the umbilical cord. Marianne suddenly felt exhausted. The day’s events could easily have filled a few years. The goddesses had demonstrated to her that life and death could take place within a single day, and sometimes it was impossible to distinguish between them.
A team of paramedics came running into the kitchen. At last!
Marianne reached for the brandy, drank half of it and passed the glass to Grete, who drained the rest. She looked at Lothar, and from him to Yann. They were both standing there as if they expected something of her.
Yann was the first to move, pulling on his jacket over his vest, kissing Marianne softly on the forehead and whispering, “Je t’aime.” Lothar took off his tie, unbuttoned his collar and asked, “Should I go too? And never come back?”
“As if that wasn’t completely beside the point at this particular moment,” Grete muttered almost inaudibly.
“Just go to bed, Lothar,” Marianne said wearily.
“I don’t know you anymore,” he replied.
Nor do I, she thought.
“But I’d like to,” he added softly, beseechingly. When Marianne said nothing, he delicately touched her cheek and left.
“I wonder who Victor is,” said Marianne after a while. At this name, Claudine gave a start, and Marianne registered the silent request in her eyes.
Once the doctor had tended to Claudine, he came over to Marianne and shook her hand, saying “Nice work, Madame,” before taking a sheet of paper on which he needed to fill out the relevant details: birthplace and time, people in attendance, father.
“Unknown,” Marianne said to this last question.
The doctor turned to Claudine. “Is that correct?”
She nodded with wide-open eyes.
“Have you already chosen a name, Mademoiselle?”
“Anna-Marie,” whispered Claudine, smiling at Marianne.
Sidonie’s pebble was resting near the girl’s face between Claudine’s full breasts. It was the first thing Anna-Marie saw when she opened her eyes.
Over in Rozbras, a young woman was still standing beside the stone wall. Laurine felt alone, but not lonely. She realized that she would never be lonely as long as she was capable of taking even a single step. Yet she was saving this step until she found out toward whom she should take it. Life might often decide for her, but it would not completely rule her movements.
She was still gazing over at Kerdruc when Padrig brought the Peugeot to a halt beside her. He made her get in and drove her to a place filled with unbestowed flowers and unread letters.