“Mine!” she yelled with each kick. “My death was mine and no one else’s. You had no right to steal it from me!”
“Madame!” he said again, encircling Marianne with both arms. He held her tight until she stopped kicking and finally leaned, exhausted, against his shoulder. He brushed the hair from her face with fingertips as rough as straw. He smelled of sleepless nights and the Seine, and of apples lying in the warm sun on a wooden shelf. He began to rock her in his arms. She had never been rocked so softly before. Marianne began to weep. She hid herself in the stranger’s arms, and he continued to hold her as she wept for her life and for her death.
“Mais non, non.” The man pushed her away a little, lifted her chin and said, “Come with me.”
He pulled her after him. Marianne felt unbelievably weak, and the rough stones hurt her bare feet. Refusing to let go of her hand, the man drew her up the slope to the Pont Neuf.
When they reached the bridge, the stranger shooed away a couple of tramps who were inspecting two pairs of shoes: Marianne’s pumps and a mismatched pair of men’s boots. One of the homeless men was clutching Marianne’s coat to his chest, while the other one, who was wearing a woolly hat, pulled a face as he bit her wedding ring. The taller of the two took out a mobile phone, while the smaller one held out the ring to Marianne.
Now Marianne began to tremble. The shivers rose up from the depths of her body and swept through her veins. She knocked the ring out of the tramp’s hand and attempted to climb onto the parapet again, but the three men jumped forward as one to restrain her. In their eyes Marianne saw pity, and a fear of being accused of something.
“Get your hands off me!” she shouted. None of them slackened his grip, and reluctantly she allowed them to guide her to the bench. The taller man laid his heavy coat around her shoulders, and the other scratched his hat and then knelt down to dry her feet with the sleeves of his jacket.
Her savior was making a phone call. The other homeless men sat down on the bench next to Marianne. They held her hands gently as she tried to bite her nails. One of them bent forward and placed her wedding ring in the empty nest formed by her palms.
She stared at the dull golden band. She had worn it for forty-one years. She had only ever removed it once—temporarily—on her fortieth wedding anniversary. That day she had ironed her gray flowery dress and copied a chignon from a three-month-old magazine she had pulled out of a recycling bin. She had dabbed on a little Chanel perfume, a sample from the same discarded magazine. The perfume had a floral fragrance, and she’d wished she had owned a red scarf. Then she opened a bottle of champagne and waited for her husband to come home.
“What do you think you’re doing?” was Lothar’s first question.
She gave him a twirl and handed him a glass. “To us,” she said. “To forty years of marriage.” He had taken a sip and then looked past her to the table where the open bottle stood. “That is an expensive bottle of champagne. Really?”
“It’s our wedding anniversary.”
“That’s still no reason to splash out. You can’t just spend my money like that.”
She hadn’t wept right then. She never wept in front of Lothar, only in the shower where he couldn’t see.
His money. She would have loved to earn her own money. She’d worked hard, though; by God she’d worked hard. Recently she had volunteered at a hospice. Her first job had been on her mother’s farm in Wendland, then as a midwife alongside her grandmother, and finally as a housekeeper, where she had actually earned a small salary, until Lothar had married her and barred her from running other people’s households as she had to run his.
She’d been Lothar’s cleaner, his cook, his gardener and his spouse. She’d nursed her own mother, who had lived with them for many years before the old lady had eventually died on Marianne’s forty-second birthday. Until then, Marianne had almost only ever left the house to go shopping—on foot, because Lothar had banned her from taking the car. Her mother had a number of health issues—she often wet the bed—but she could still insult Marianne every day, and Lothar increasingly spent his evenings at the barracks or went out on his own. He wrote his wife postcards from his holidays and sent his love to his mamushka.
—
Marianne dropped the ring. At the same moment she heard a siren and shut her eyes until the shrill sound drew closer through the city’s winding streets and stopped right in front of her. The homeless men retreated from the pulsing blue light, and when two paramedics and a small woman carrying a case rushed toward them, the man in the striped top stepped forward, pointed to Marianne, motioned to the Seine and tapped his head again.
He thinks I’m mad, thought Marianne.
She tried to force the same smile she had been giving Lothar for decades. “You’re much prettier when you smile,” he had said after their first date. He was the first man ever to call her pretty, in spite of her birthmark and in spite of everything else.
She wasn’t mad, no. And she wasn’t dead.
She gazed over at the man who had pulled her out of the Seine without her consent. He was the madman. He was mad enough to assume that one only had to survive to thrive.
She let the paramedics strap her to the stretcher. As they lifted her up and rolled her toward the open doors of the ambulance, the stranger with the sky-blue eyes clasped Marianne’s hand. His hand felt warm and familiar. Marianne caught a glimpse of herself reflected in his big dark pupils. She saw her pale eyes, which had always struck her as being too big; her nose, which was too small; her heart-shaped face, and her gray-brown hair. When she opened her hand, her wedding ring lay on her palm.
“I’m sorry for all the trouble,” she said, but he shook his head. “Excusez-moi,” she added.
“Il n’y a pas de quoi,” he said earnestly, patting his chest with his palm. “Vous avez compris?” he asked.
Marianne smiled. Whatever he was saying, he must be right.
“Je m’appelle Eric.” He handed Marianne’s bag to the paramedic.
I’m Marianne, she wanted to say, but thought better of it. It was enough that he could tell his friends that he’d fished a madwoman out of the water. What good was a name? Names meant nothing.
She reached for Eric’s hand. “Please. Please keep it,” she said. He stared at the ring as she returned it to him. The doors of the ambulance closed.
“I hate you, Eric,” murmured Marianne, and it was as if she could still feel his rough but gentle fingers caressing her cheek.
Marianne lay on the stretcher; the straps cut into her skin during the drive. The paramedic prepared a syringe and pricked a vein in the crook of her arm. Then he took out a second needle and pushed it into the back of her hand before attaching it to an intravenous drip.