“I hope so,” whispered Marianne.
“Here on the Brittany coast we believe something different. Death is not something that is coming, but rather something that is all around us. Here.” Clara pointed at the air. “There.” She gestured toward the trees. Then she bent forward and took a little white sand in her hands. “Death is like this.” She let the sand trickle from her left hand into her right. “One life goes in and takes a break in death.” Now she let the sand run out of her right hand onto the ground. “Another life comes out. It makes a journey, oui? Like flowing water. Water in a moulin. In a mill. Death is that short break.”
“I remember being told a different story at church,” Marianne remarked.
“Brittany is older than the Church. This is Armorica! This is where the land meets the sea; this is the end of the world, as old as death itself.”
Marianne glanced up at the sky. “So there’s no hell, and no heaven somewhere up there?”
“Here we have a lot of different names for fear, for living, for dying. Sometimes the same word. Sometimes heaven and earth are the same. Hell and heaven too. We read the land, and in it we see that everything is equal. Death. Life. We are merely on a journey between the two.”
“And does the land tell you where the journey is heading? Like a guidebook?”
Clara didn’t laugh. “Tiens. You have to listen when the land speaks to you. The stones tell of souls that wept as they passed, the grass whispers of the people who have walked on it, the wind brings you the voices of those you have loved. And the sea knows the name of every person who has ever died.”
Marianne wondered whether the sand under her feet would one day say, “Marianne was here, and soon afterward she died.”
“I’m scared of death,” she whispered.
“Don’t be scared,” said Clara, her voice full of sympathy. “Don’t be scared! L’autre monde…the other world, oui, is like this world. It is in the middle of our world and looks the same; it is just that we cannot see those who are walking in it. There are fairies in the beyond, and wizards. Gods, demons and korrigans—trolls. And the dead who are no longer with us. And yet they are…here, next to us on this bench perhaps. All our sisters…” said Clara, pointing to the graves. “All our sisters are here and can see us. But we cannot see them. Don’t be scared. Please.”
Marianne raised her eyes. No ghosts, only roses.
“I have to travel on. I must complete my journey,” she gasped. She pulled her hand gently from Clara’s and walked away, every step making a crunch on the gravel beneath her feet. She found a tiny gate leading out of the convent garden and squeezed through it.
Marianne caught a mouth-watering aroma of freshly baked pizza as she watched a group of tourists poke around in the religious souvenir shop next to the pizzeria. When the group had passed her, the tour guide turned to her and said, “Allez, allez! Hurry up. Don’t lag too far behind, madame! Salida!” Marianne looked around, but the woman had indeed been talking to her. “We have to get a move on if we want to visit Pont-Aven in daylight!”
Pont-Aven! Marianne cleared her throat. “Of course! I’m coming,” she said, and hid her face as she boarded the coach. Her heart was almost leaping out of her mouth: someone was bound to unmask her soon.
As the coach pulled out onto the main road, Marianne sat down quickly behind a couple wearing matching rustling red anoraks. She spied a brochure on the seat beside her and held it up in front of her face. Dolmen et Dégustation, translated into English as “Stones and Scones.” The program included a tour of the Penven biscuit factory in Pont-Aven; before that they were to visit the Carnac stones and do some oyster tasting in Belon.
Marianne unfolded her map. Carnac was on the coast at least, and thus not completely in the wrong direction. She tried to make herself invisible. She felt like a fare dodger—which was precisely what she was.
After half an hour’s drive, the burgundy-colored coach swung to a halt before a field of stones. “The Ménec alignments near Carnac,” the woman in the seat in front read out from her guidebook. “Eight thousand years old, maybe more. In any case, the stones were already standing when the Celts arrived from the Dark Land. Legend has it that this was an enemy army, and the fairies of Armorica turned its warriors into stone.”
Marianne stared at the strange noses of granite as if she’d been hypnotized. Some people looked like this under their skin, she thought. Brittany granite made man.
—
The coach drove on from the stone armies toward Lorient. It took the motorway and left it again at the Quimperlé exit, then headed toward Riec-sur-Belon. Marianne unfolded the map again. A tongue of land separated the river Belon from the river Aven. Kerdruc lay on the gradually widening Aven before the two rivers flowed into the Atlantic together at Port Manec’h.
She pulled the tile from her jacket. Please, she thought, please let it be even half as beautiful as this.
The coach was now driving along a meandering road under a roof of deep-green foliage hanging from ivy-clad trees. It wound its way ever deeper through rows of trees and fields, and here and there one saw a granite house with colorful shutters and pink and blue hydrangeas outside. The coach eventually stopped in a downward-sloping wood-bordered lane, at the end of which Marianne spotted the front of a manor house and beyond it water and boats.
“This is the Chateau de Belon, the most famous name in oysters since 1864!” the tour guide explained.
Marianne slipped to the back of the group. To her right, long wooden tables stood on a shady grass terrace that offered a magnificent view of a wooded bend in the river. And beyond the final bend she saw…the sea! It sparkled, tiny stars dancing on the waves. It was so gorgeous.
Two young blond men in aprons were waiting for the guests, and a third man stood alongside them. He had an earring and was wearing leather bracelets and biker boots. He stuck something like a giant tin-opener blade into a flat oyster and divided it into two halves with a twist of his wrist. He raised it to his lips and, turning to the men on either side of him, said, “C’est bon.” Then he began to select further oysters from a gray crate, tapping two together as if he were listening for something before tossing them into a woven chipboard basket lined with gleaming wet seaweed that looked like fresh young spinach leaves.