Love me. I want your love!
The red shadow faded into the swirling black and gray, and Alain was left alone on the current. He paused for breath in the middle of the river. Now he had become a smudge and he kept shouting the same words, hoarsely, desperately. “Genoveva, je t’aime. Je t’aime, Genoveva. Love me back!”
—
Geneviève didn’t move, staring wordlessly out over the river. She barely reacted when Marianne touched her on the arm. Her eyes were full of despair and fear.
Marianne turned to the priest from Auray, Father Ballack, who had joined her. “Father, can you row?”
He looked at her in disbelief. “Of course I can.”
“Then please take Madame to her beloved. She has been waiting for thirty-five years to offer him her love again.”
The priest tried to hide his shocked surprise. Marianne gently laid her left hand on Geneviève’s shoulder. “It is time.”
The older woman took the priest’s hand, and he led her to a small red boat whose sails were ready to fill on command. Geneviève didn’t move as the clergyman began to row them out into the middle of the river, where Alain was waiting. Her body was like a candle riding on the water.
Unnoticed by the dancing throng on the breakwater, the two boats glided toward each other. Alain quickened his strokes. Geneviève didn’t let him out of her sight as he drew closer with every pull of the oars. With a gentle jolt the two prows met, and Geneviève stretched out her hand to him.
Meanwhile, Yann had stepped up behind Marianne and put his arms around her. She pressed herself against him. “Look,” she said softly, as Alain leaned forward and his fingers touched Geneviève’s. But as they watched, a current pulled the boat from under him with a jerk and their hands separated.
Geneviève screamed, “Alain!”
Not now. Oh please, not now!
Before her very eyes, her beloved toppled to one side, into the deep.
Oh please, no! He couldn’t swim! If he drowned, she knew she would follow him, and with the same certainty she knew that her hate would all have been in vain. She would have grown old without him. Her fingertips burned with the memory of her one and only lover. Alain!
She leaped into the water.
Marianne squirmed out of Yann’s arms and ran along the quayside.
Geneviève’s red dress billowed on the dark water, but she swam toward Alain until she had caught hold of him. Clinging tightly to each other, they spun in the current.
As Marianne turned to fetch help, she ran into a gray wall. Lothar?! She pushed past him to the harbormaster’s office, ripped the life buoy from its holder on the wall and sprinted back along the breakwater until she had reached the end. Where were they? There! Two bright faces inches above the waves. It was low tide, and if they kept drifting downstream, the sea would suck them out of the estuary and carry them far from the shore.
Lothar grabbed the ring from her hands. “Let me do it,” he said. “You won’t be able to.”
Their eyes met for a split second, then Marianne hissed, “You have no idea of all the things I can do,” and seized back the life buoy. She hurled it far out into the Aven, along with her overwhelming ice-cold fury. It sailed almost ten yards through the air and landed right next to the shimmering patch of red. She had attached the rope tightly around her waist. She felt her strength waning as the river tugged at the life buoy and she staggered.
Lothar stepped in front of her and began to reel in the rope, inch by inch. She stood next to him, at a loss to explain why she was becoming stiffer and more numb with every minute she spent in his presence.
Geneviève and Alain clung to the buoy until Father Ballack had rowed up and helped them to clamber over the boat’s low gunwale to safety. Only then did they toss the buoy back over the side, and Lothar pulled it to the bank.
“Thank you,” Marianne said to her husband, brushing his arm with her fingers. It was an effort even to raise her hand.
Lothar replied with a terse nod—the light touch had sent an electric charge through him—and then smiled tenderly at her. “You played absolutely beautifully,” he said.
His wife had a lover. She looked ravishing, and she was liked, even loved—that much he had seen in the faces that had turned toward her like flowers to the sun. She belonged to this land as if she had been born here, he thought, as if the people here had been waiting for her. Something began to crumble inside him. He raised his hand and ran his thumb over Marianne’s lips. He bent forward and, leaving her no time to evade him, gave her a peck on the mouth.
Over his shoulder, Marianne glimpsed Yann, a mixture of pain and hope in his eyes. “Lothar,” she said to her husband. “Can we talk later?”
“Whatever you want,” said Lothar. “I’ve taken three days off work.” He turned and looked with narrowed eyes at the man who had been embracing his wife so tenderly and familiarly on the breakwater a few minutes earlier.
He gazed after Marianne as she walked along the breakwater, and felt as if he were looking at a familiar stranger who had kept herself hidden from him jealously for many decades. Yann stepped up beside him.
“We should probably talk now,” the painter began tentatively, “or would you prefer a duel?”
Lothar shook his head. No, he wanted his wife back. He couldn’t figure out how Marianne had concealed her beauty from him.
Father Ballack walked toward them along the quayside on his own. “They wanted to be alone,” he remarked apologetically. “A near-death experience usually arouses, um, the flesh.” He grinned.
Marianne watched the rowing boat as it faded into the darkness downstream. It was as if Geneviève and Alain were looking for the source of the river that had given birth to their love. She had no doubt that between now and daybreak they would find it.
The red dot was swallowed up by the night.
—
Marianne wished that she too could become invisible. Whereas half an hour earlier she had felt sure about every aspect of her life—playing the accordion, staying in Kerdruc, loving Yann—now that had been reduced to a thick ash, blocking her nose and ears and mouth, and all in the space of those few seconds when Lothar had taken the life buoy from her hand. It was as if he had unmasked her, revealing what really lay beneath the dress, the makeup and this whole sham.
A hand in a leather glove gripped her upper arm. Colette! Their embrace was tight but tender. Marianne’s eyes searched for someone behind the gallery owner.
“Sidonie isn’t here anymore,” said Colette quietly. “She knows she will find peace tonight. She sent me away, saying that I should celebrate life.”
The world stood still inside Marianne, and her soul cowered.