“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 K?ster had sent her. Grete was one of the few women who had never succumbed to Lothar’s charms.
“La Santa Scala,” said Clara, pointing 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.
“Thank you,” mumbled Marianne.
She thought of her father as the bells struck eleven o’clock. All at once she realized clearly that her desire to stand by him had stopped her from rebelling against her mother’s moral castigations. She hadn’t wanted to undermine his meek acceptance with her protests.
She strolled across the convent courtyard, lost in reminiscences about her father. How much they had had in common, how similar they had been! They had both loved the natural world and music, and had often invented stories to tell each other.
She listened to the buzzing of a bee that had become caught in the hydrangeas. She walked around the corner of the gray building, past the sandstone chapel, and caught her breath with joy and amazement. What a garden! Mighty pine trees, lilacs, bamboo groves, palm trees, roses. A secret flower-filled idyll. She came to a stone bench at the back of the high-walled garden. How beautiful it was here, and how peaceful. She breathed out, and for a moment she felt she might stay here forever.
Oh Lothar. The realization hit her like a train: it was the unsatisfied longing for something to share that had eaten away at her. She and her husband shared nothing, neither the same wishes nor the same dreams. All that mattered were his desires.
A delicate, barely visible cloud floated many miles above her head, a mere streak of white foam against the deep blue sky.
“Cumulus clouds are the dancers of the heavens,” Marianne heard her father say, “and their brothers the stratocumuli are the elevators of the skies. Neither of them likes the nimbostratus, the big fat crusher. He barely moves and all he does is spread a bad mood.” Her father had paused for thought and then said, “Like your mother!” Marianne had laughed, but she had felt terribly guilty afterward. The children in the hospice kindergarten had giggled at the comparisons and went outside with Marianne to scour the skies for elevators and dancing clouds.
The warmth made her knee feel better and the burning sensation was now subsiding. She slipped off her shoes and walked barefoot across the soft, damp grass.
An hour passed and she felt that she really might stay here and count clouds and stems of grass forever, but instead she sighed and put on her shoes again. She advanced into the depths of the lush scented garden until she came to a small graveyard enclosed by white walls. White grains of sand covered everything, the paths and the graves, like a glittering bedsheet, and the grave mounds looked like plumped-up eiderdowns. A fragrant red rosebush flowered on each and every white sandy bed. How lovingly the graveyard had been laid out. It was as if the nuns had put their sisters to bed. They were merely sleeping. They were dreaming, and their dreams were as sweet as rose petals.
Marianne sat down on a weathered stone bench.
Where would my place for dreaming have been? Which gap might have been mine, the one only I could have filled? All the children I didn’t bear because I wasn’t in the right place. All the missing love. All the absent laughter. There are too many things I haven’t done, and now it’s too late.
She looked up to find Clara standing at the cemetery gate. The young nun walked slowly toward her.
“May I?” she asked, waiting until Marianne nodded and signaled for her to sit down next to her on the bench. Clara folded her hands on her lap and, like Marianne, gazed at the white sandy graves.
“Your journey is hard.” It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. Marianne stared at her fingernails.
“Do you think death is the end of everything, Marie-Anne?”