Off the Wild Coast of Brittany

by Juliet Blackwell

  We liked to proclaim that we relied on the système D, for se débrouiller, which means to get by, to manage. We islanders had always been survivors, and we had no intention of changing now.

  Very early one foggy morning, I sat on the rocks near the cove past the hotel. I liked the fog, relished the mysteriousness of it, the tantalizing promise of something different and new. I placed my hand on my belly, trying to envision what was happening within me, the astonishing life developing where there had been none. I thought of Salvator, wondered what he was doing. Perhaps sailing in the British navy? Did he wear a smart uniform and order men about? Or did he hop to the orders of his superiors? And what of my husband? Was Marc excited to be a father? I hadn’t heard from him in a very long time. Early in the war we had received Red Cross letters from our men in England, but after a while the Germans cut off contact, citing security concerns. A group of women had protested at the mairie, but though the mayor agreed with us, he now worked for the collaborationist Vichy government and his hands were tied. So we were left to wonder about the fate of our men.

  Sitting on the rock, I felt mesmerized by the flashing of the lighthouse, lulled by the mournful sound of the foghorn and the lapping of the waves.

  Not for the first time, I thought about Henri Thomas, tending to the light, polishing the glass, making sure the clockworks were functioning as they must to maintain the constant rhythm of the lamp going round and round and the baritone warning of the foghorn. Ever vigilant, Henri’s lopsided eyes were perpetually fixed on our seas.

  As I gazed into the ocean mist, an object slowly appeared: a small boat.

  I blinked, certain it was unreal, that I was imagining it. I thought of the legends of the Bag-Noz, the phantom boats that sailors spoke of, their ghostly crews forever sailing the high seas.

  But as the boat came closer, I could see it was very real, with people, not ghosts, handling the rigging. What was a boat doing here in the cove?

  Then two men dropped a package overboard and with wooden poles pushed it toward the shore, apparently familiar enough with the tides to know it would drift into the cove rather than out to sea. And just like that, the boat slipped away, swallowed by the fog.

  I remained motionless, wondering if I should try to retrieve the floating package.

  Just then Noëlle appeared on the other side of the cove. She did not see me, did not seem aware of her surroundings at all. She waded into the water with a long hook, pulled the package to her, and lugged it hurriedly down the path that led to old Madame Thérèse’s cottage, and the lighthouse, before also disappearing into the mist.

  * * *

  • • •

  Despite the scarcity of food, my belly started to rise. The growing mound fascinated me, and I liked to loll in bed for a few minutes in the morning, caressing it before getting up.

  One morning, I felt a flutter. And then another.

  “Maman!”

  My tone must have alarmed my mother, because she rushed in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on one of the linen dish towels Mamm-gozh had embroidered with images of tiny mermaids, fish, and shells.

  “What is it, Violette?” she demanded. “Are you all right?”

  I nodded, my eyes full of tears. I sat up in bed, leaning back on one elbow and placing my hand on my belly. “Feel.”

  She set her still-damp hand on the soft lawn of my nightgown.

  “It’s moving,” I said, letting the tears fall. “My baby is moving.”

  My mother smiled. “It is the quickening. It’s a good sign to feel it so early. It means he is a very strong boy.”

  “Or a very strong girl.”

  “Perhaps. But why are you still in bed? Get dressed and help me in the kitchen. We have to set out breakfast for the Germans.”

  The presence of so many officers lodging in our house, for whom we now cooked regularly, meant my mother and I had more to eat than most of our neighbors. Packages of pork chops, horsemeat, chicken, and fish, all meant for the soldiers, arrived on the ferries along with huge sacks of flour and potatoes. Our mouths watering at the smells, we prepared stew and fish pie as well as Breton specialties: kig ha farz, meat with a buckwheat stuffing cooked in a bag in broth, and lipig, a sauce of butter and shallots that made me want to faint. We ate pork with graisse salée, and ragoût dans les mottes, a kind of lamb stew braised for hours over a smoking fire. We were cooking old mutton rather than tender spring lamb, but none of that mattered: We were eating.

  My mother despised having to nourish our enemy, even though it meant we ourselves were fed. So, more and more, I took over her tasks, jotting down my own notes in the cookbook.

  I could not in good conscience eat my fill while so many others went hungry. The families of the men who went to England, and those without homes large enough or nice enough to lodge the Germans, suffered the most. The Île de Feme had a long tradition of sharing. If a fisherman was unlucky, those who had a plentiful haul were expected to share their catch. It was the way it had always been.

  So I began to set aside small quantities of the food we were told to cook for the German officers: a few potatoes, hard heels of bread, a little sugar. Sometimes I would fix an extra plate of food, as though I had forgotten how many we were serving that evening. I would slip the food into my apron pockets, or cover the plate with my shawl, and set out to visit the neighbors. Their faces, lined with worry, were always gruff with suspicion when they answered their doors; they were wary and jealous of the fact that my mother and I had enough to share. But they always accepted the food.

  One night I was slipping out the back door when I heard Rainer’s voice. The officers, Rainer included, rarely ventured into the kitchen, seemingly honoring our feminine domain.

  “Madame, please. Attendez—Violette, wait, s’il vous plaît.”

  It was the “please” that did it. I stopped but did not turn to face him, tightening the shawl around my shoulders as though seeking warmth, while in actuality hiding the plate I was holding.

  “Madame,” he whispered, catching up to me. His eyes glanced at the bulge under my shawl. “You are going to get caught. As I’ve told you, I do what I can, but I am not in charge here.”

  There was no point in denying it. “What would happen if I got caught?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know. Things are a bit different here on the island, but elsewhere . . . things are getting difficult, Violette. You don’t know what is happening.”

  “How could I? You’ve taken our radios and newspapers, even our mail. How are we to know what’s going on?”

  “What you need to know right now is that I’ll do what I can, but I don’t know how far I can protect you.”

  Our eyes held for a long moment. I could feel the plate, intended for Madame Spinec and her four hungry children, growing cold.

  Finally, I nodded, and spoke to him in his language:

  “Ich verstehe.” I understand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Natalie

  Alex announced she would start the repairs on the interior walls since it was storming outside, and Jean-Luc immediately volunteered to give her a hand. Natalie decided she should get some work done as well.

  She thanked Jean-Luc for the coffee and carried it into her office, closing and locking the shutters over the door and window.

  Natalie thought back on the first time a storm took out the electricity and François-Xavier had hauled out the old-fashioned hurricane lamps. The lamps cast a mellow golden glow, softening the hard edges of the Bag-Noz. François-Xavier built a fire in the parlor and they basked in its warmth, drinking a bottle of wine, making plans, telling silly jokes. She had been so glad to be here on the island with him, safe from the awesome power of the storm outside, away from the big-city distractions and François-Xavier’s oh-so-urbane Parisian friends, who always made her feel small, whether they meant to or not.

/>   Natalie shoved those memories aside and took her seat at the desk. She had a couple of hours’ worth of battery at least. She positioned her fingers over the keyboard.

  So. Write, Natalie.

  Nothing. She had nothing to say. This was getting ridiculous. Not to mention frightening. She had written that last piece, about the kite, but she wanted to write something other than more stories from her childhood. Was her odd family history the most interesting—the only interesting—thing about her?

  She realized she was clenching her jaw.

  Back when she was on tour promoting her memoir, Natalie used to declare that there was no such thing as writer’s block. “The muse arrives on the wings of hard work,” she had assured her audience. “You write by sitting your butt in the chair every day, putting in the work. You make your own luck.”

  Where was that confidence now?

  Her mind wandered, and Natalie sat back and gazed at the closed shutters, imagining her windswept garden. She should probably make sure Bobox was okay, had everything she needed. Natalie pulled on her rain slicker and boots, grabbed the can of grain, and hurried out to the shed. Bobox was sitting on her roost and clucked softly at Natalie as she entered.

  “Hey, sweet girl. You’re already tucked in, aren’t you? Pretty smart, for a chicken. Wait. . . . What’s this? You made an egg!”

  The pure tan oval was slightly smaller than an average chicken’s egg. Natalie took it, scratched the hen’s neck, patted her crazy white feathers, shook a little more grain into her trough, and made sure she had fresh water, then shut the shed door tight against the winds.

  Back in her office, she set the egg on her desk and gazed at it for a moment, pondering the fact that chickens laid eggs even without a rooster present to fertilize them. Were they hoping for a miracle?

  Focus on writing, Natalie.

  She could hear voices from the kitchen, a low murmur of conversation barely intelligible over the building storm. Jean-Luc and Alex, one a lifelong French bureaucrat and the other a survivalist and Western ranch hand, nonetheless seemed at ease with each other, as if they had known each other for years instead of two days. What was that about?

  Hearing them talking in the other room was annoying. But it shouldn’t be. When she was writing her memoir, she had met her daily word count no matter where she was: in a crowded café or a busy Parisian park, or in their noisy atelier on the Right Bank, where François-Xavier thought nothing of entertaining friends and acquaintances late into the night. She hadn’t been distracted then; she’d been inspired, whether by the muse or something else entirely, and had felt compelled to write. To be sure, she had sweated over some passages and there had been more than a few frustrating days when the words just didn’t come out the way she wanted them to. But overall it was as if the ideas had been waiting impatiently, eager to be expressed, made into words on paper. And now . . . nothing.

  Finally, she forced herself to write a passage about the Île de Feme. If nothing else, she could always post it on social media:

  The Bag-Noz guesthouse used to be run by two sisters, Violette and Doura. They dressed in black, from their boots to their winged coiffes, in the traditional island garb known as the robes noires and the jibilinnen.

  What must their lives have been like? Today a storm has blown out our power, and I am huddling inside, seeking shelter with my own sister, and we have taken in our first official guest. All we need to do is pull on their jibilinnen to re-create the past—do you suppose we would stir up any ghosts?

  Her hands hovered above the keyboard, and she wondered whether to simply spill the beans: to post on her website that her sister had arrived and that, like the sisters Violette and Doura before them, they would work together on the Bag-Noz. And to confess that François-Xavier had left.

  But she chickened out and focused instead on the storm:

  The islanders fear the storms; of course they do—they have an innate respect for the sea, and realize they might yet be inundated, their land and homes taken over by the ocean as they were in 1896 and 1927, when they were forced into their boats, fleeing for the safety of the mainland. But they came back, and by and large they celebrate when the dark clouds arrive. They welcome the rain with the deep passion of a people with no other natural water source. The deluge feeds the gardens, fills the cisterns with the fresh, clean water that sustains life itself. Sure, in the modern day a water tanker can bring over potable water from the mainland, but as Tonton Michou would say, “Nothing tastes sweeter than rainwater.”

  Natalie shivered. Although it was August, the cold winds and rain seemed to permeate the old stone of the house, and the air carried a frigid chill.

  The kitchen had been nice and toasty. Maybe she should move her computer to the kitchen table, try writing there. Maybe the problem was that it was too quiet in her study, too isolated. But Alex and Jean-Luc might ask questions, wonder why she was joining them, ask to read what she had written. She didn’t want to have them notice that she wasn’t writing much at all. She kept thinking about that scene from The Shining: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” She shivered again. If it was this chilly already, and the storm hadn’t even hit with full force yet . . .

  She should light the fire in the parlor so they would have another warm room to hang out in. That was the least she could do.

  Natalie got up and went into the parlor, where she found Alex kneeling in front of the hearth.

  “Hope this is okay,” Alex said as she began crumpling newspaper and setting it on the fireplace grate. “I inspected the chimney yesterday; it’s a little sooty but otherwise good to go.”

  “That’s great. Thank you. I was coming in here to do that myself.”

  “This should take the chill off,” Alex said, reaching for some kindling. “Soon as I’m done here, I’ll go up and check the attic. The rain’s just starting. We should make sure the tarps and the pails are well placed so as to minimize the damage.”

  “Where’s Jean-Luc?” Natalie asked.

  “In his room, I think,” Alex said. “We’ll get started on the walls soon.”

  The room was lit with candles and an oil lamp, and Natalie noticed the two black dresses hanging, specterlike, from the bookshelf.

  “Can you imagine wearing a uniform like that every day of your life?” Natalie asked.

  “I was thinking about that,” said Alex as she placed small pieces of lumber atop the kindling in the form of a tepee. “I mean, you know I’m not partial to dresses. But I pretty much wear the same thing every day anyway.”

  “But that’s your choice. Imagine if you had to wear just one thing.”

  “At what age did they start wearing the jibilinnen? Was it a rite of passage, or something along those lines? I saw a photograph of two girls in the album and they’re not wearing them.”

  “I really don’t know. We could ask the curator at the museum.”

  “And when did they stop wearing them altogether?” Alex took a wooden match from the box on the mantel, lit the newspaper, and watched the fire spring to life. She repositioned the metal fireplace screen and stood, wiping her hands on her jeans.

  “Agnès told us her aunts wore them until they passed, which was a few decades ago,” said Natalie. “But I think World War Two brought a lot of changes. Some of the old women continued to wear the dresses, but you only see the coiffes in regional festivals now.”

  “This one’s about my size,” said Alex, holding one of the dresses against herself. “What do you think?”

  Natalie smiled. “I never figured you for a fan of vintage clothing.”

  “I’m not. But I keep thinking of the woman who wore it and what her life must have been like. Tante Agnès mentioned that the sisters lived here together. Were they widows?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Wasn’t it unusual at the time for women not to marry?”<
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  “Probably in some places, but a lot of men died in the war, and they lived on an island. There may not have been many eligible bachelors to begin with. Or maybe they were inspired by the Gallizenae and simply took the occasional sailor as a lover.”

  “Maybe so. Oh, hey, I looked through the rest of that box—the one that had the photo album? Check this out.” Alex handed Natalie a small journal marked Livret de famille. “It’s like a genealogical chart listing the family members.”

  “Yes, just about every French family has one,” Natalie said as she flipped it open. “Cool. I knew it was around here somewhere. I should keep you around just to find things, Alex. You’re amazing.”

  “All I did was unpack a box.”

  “Still. More than I’ve done in a while. But look—according to this, the Fouquet family had one boy and two girls, named Rachelle and Violette. But there’s no Doura listed.”

  “That’s weird,” said Alex. “Agnès said she used to come here to beg for cookies from Violette and Doura, right?”

  “Maybe . . . Could they have been together? Back then same-sex partners were sometimes referred to as sisters. Or . . . people here talk a lot about castaways being taken into families, that sort of thing. Maybe—”

  They were startled by a loud banging on the door.

  “I hope no one’s looking for a room at the inn,” murmured Natalie as she went to open the door.

  On the porch stood Christine in a dripping rain slicker, holding up a plastic bag.

  “I bring you fish! A beautiful fish!” She leaned to the side to look past Natalie. “Hello, Alex! In English, this is my favorite fish name: You call it John Dory.”