The Little French Bistro Page 3
No, there was nothing proud about this face. Nothing dignified.
I’m older now than my grandmother was when she died. I’ve always hoped that there’d be a wise old lady lurking inside me, waiting patiently for the outer layers to peel off. First her body, then her face.
Marianne lowered her eyes. There was no wise old lady looking at her now, just an old woman with the face of a wrinkled girl, a little wife, not much taller than she’d been at fourteen. And still just as chubby. She gave a bitter laugh.
Her grandmother Nane, a midwife, whom she had admired enormously, had died on a cold January night in 1961. She had slipped and fallen into a ditch on the way back from the Von Haags’ estate, where she had just delivered a home birth. She hadn’t had enough strength to crawl out again by herself, and it was Marianne who had found her grandmother’s body. An expression of annoyance and astonishment at this freak occurrence was frozen on Nane’s face. Marianne still felt a vague sense of guilt, for that evening she hadn’t assisted her grandmother with the delivery as she usually did; she was caught up elsewhere.
She studied her own features. The longer she looked at herself, the harder she found it to breathe. Horror seeped into her, and she soaked it up with her whole being, as a garden does a devastating downpour.
What am I to do?
The woman in the mirror had no answer. She was as white as a ghost.
Morning came quickly. The patients were woken shortly after six, and when Marianne had dressed, she was led into an office on the first floor of the hospital. It looked as if it belonged to a doctor with two kids; it contained children’s drawings, family photos and a map of France with little pins stuck in it.
Marianne got up from her chair and ran her finger along the coastline in search of Kerdruc. She could find no place by that name, but her finger stopped at an abbreviation: Fin. It stood for Finistère, an area of western France that bulged out into the Atlantic—Brittany.
She sat down again and stared at the tips of her shoes. After an hour, the psychologist turned up, a tall, slender Frenchman with wavy black hair who reeked of aftershave. Marianne thought he looked terribly nervous; he chewed his lower lip as he darted glances at her, avoiding her gaze. He flicked through the few sheets of paper on his clipboard, then removed his glasses and, perching on the edge of the desk, looked intently at Marianne for the first time.
“Suicide isn’t an illness,” he began in German.
“It isn’t?” replied Marianne.
“No. It’s simply the culmination of a pathological tendency. It’s a sign of desperation. Deep desperation.” His voice was soft, and he looked at her with his gray eyes as if his only purpose in life was to understand her.
Marianne felt a tingle in the back of her neck. This was strange. She was sitting here with a man who harbored the extravagant illusion that he might understand and help her merely by looking at her and talking to her as if he were the anointed one.
“And suicide is acceptable too. It has meaning for those who seek it. It isn’t wrong to want to kill oneself.”
“And that’s scientifically proven?” she couldn’t help herself asking.
The psychologist stared at her.
“Sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing?” he asked.
“I…don’t know.”
“Did you know that seriously depressed people are easily hurt, yet they continually apologize, directing their aggression inward at themselves rather than at the person who provoked it?”
Marianne peered at the man. He must have been in his mid-forties, and she spotted a wedding ring on his finger. How she would have loved to believe that she could simply let herself go, pour it all out and allow him to console her, then read her life in his facial expressions. He would give her courage and medication, and she would be cured of her silly desire.
Suicide isn’t an illness. Nice.
“Did you know that most church bells have clappers that are too big?” she answered. “Most bell ringers pull too hard, and within a few years the bells sound like empty salad bowls clanging together. They’re worn out.”
“Do you feel like one of those bells?”
“A bell?”
I feel as though I was never here.
“You no longer wanted to live as you’d been living. Why did you choose Paris of all places to kill yourself?”
The way he says that. Like a reprimand. No one comes to Paris to die. Everyone wants to live and love here; I’m the only one who’s dumb enough to think you might be able to die here.
“It seemed appropriate,” she eventually answered. She’d done it: she had finally faced up to her urgent desire to speak the truth.
“Fine.” He got to his feet. “I’d like to do a few tests with you before you go home. Come with me.” He held the door open for her.
Marianne stared at her gray shoes as one foot came down in front of the other. Out of the room, across the corridor, through a swing door, into the next corridor, and so on.
Her father had been a bell tuner before he fell from the roof timbers of a church and broke almost every bone in his body. Marianne’s mother had resented him for that accident for the rest of his life. It wasn’t manly to land a woman in such trouble in those days.
Her father had explained the nature of church bells thus: “The clapper has to kiss the bell, very softly, and entice it to ring, never force it.” His character had been like such a bell. If someone tried to force her father to react, he would grin and grit it out in silence until they left him alone.
After her grandmother’s death, he had moved out of their shared house and from then on had slept in the work shed. Until Marianne married Lothar, she had been her parents’ go-between, carrying her father’s food out to the workshop, where he spent his time building miniature glockenspiels. Marianne often felt his affection for her as she sat beside him at his workbench. His daughter’s affection touched him, as did her whispered confessions about the life of her dreams. One moment she wanted to be an archaeologist, the next a music teacher. She also wanted to build children’s bicycles and live in a house by the sea. Both father and daughter were dreamers.
“You take too much after your father,” Marianne’s mother had said.
For decades Marianne had been unable to think of her father. She missed him. That was perhaps one of her secrets.
“Please excuse me for a moment,” said the psychologist and waved to another doctor—Marianne recognized him from the previous night at the hospital. They spoke to each other in French and kept glancing over at their patient. Marianne walked to the window, turning away from them both so that she could slip the small tile from her handbag and admire it.
Kerdruc. Touching the picture, she felt such a tug in her breast that she could barely breathe.
Suicide is meaningful. She looked at the floor again. I really don’t like these shoes.
Then she just upped and left. She pushed open the nearest swing door, found a flight of stairs, scampered down it and turned right at the bottom. She hurried along a corridor where patients were lounging on benches, and at the end of the corridor she saw a wide-open door that led outside. Fresh air at last! The thunderstorm had rinsed the dirt out of the day, and the air was mild and balmy. Marianne ignored the arthritic pains in her knee and began to run.
Her heart was in her mouth as she raced across the cobbled street into an alleyway, dived through a gateway and dashed across a courtyard and out the other side. She ran without thinking, veering from one side of the street to the other. She didn’t know how long she would need to keep this up, but when the stitch in her side became unbearable, she slumped down by a small fountain. She let the water run over her wrists and stared at her reflection in the pool.
Didn’t they say that beauty was a state of soul? And if her soul was loved, a woman would be transformed into a wondrous creature, however ordinary her looks. Love changed a woman’s soul, and she became beautiful, for a few minutes or forever.
She got up. It wasn’t too late: she could still do what she wanted, and she wanted to do it in Kerdruc.
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, po
inting 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.