The Little French Bistro

by Nina George

  “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?”

  “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 st
one 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 Château 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.

  The tour guide gave a talk about oysters, but Marianne listened with only half an ear; the view out to sea over the river and its gently rocking boats was simply too enticing. She caught snatches of explanations about small larvae and underwater nurseries.

  “Des plates ou des creuses?” said a voice behind her. It was the man in the biker boots. He chatted as he first opened one of the smooth, round oysters and then one of the long variety with a rough, barnacle-encrusted shell. It made a noise like a twig cracking. He held out the rounder, flatter oyster to Marianne. “Calibre numéro un, madame!”

  Her hand trembled as she peered into the shell. She looked up at the young man again. Though he was attractive, he didn’t seem too sure of it. Dark-blue eyes with a glint of tenderness and longing. His gaze spoke of many unfulfilled nights.

  I don’t dare. She’d never eaten an oyster in all her life. She caught the man’s eye again and noticed a smile on his sensuous lips. Go on, he encouraged her with a nod.

  Marianne copied the movements she had seen him make, raising the oyster to her mouth, throwing back her head, and slurping. She caught the subtle tang of seawater; she tasted a nutty flavor and something like shell, and her nose was full of the concentrated aroma of what she imagined when she saw the sea—spray, waves, surf, jellyfish, salt, coral and teeming fish, the wide horizon and infinity.

  “Sea,” she said wistfully. One could eat the sea!

  “Ya. Ar Mor—the sea,” he said with a throaty laugh. He scraped out the remaining gray muscle with the oyster knife and passed her the shell again.

  Ar Mor. Every oyster was like the sea, thought the young man. The same sea, wide and free, wild or gentle, delicate blue or black, that each of us carried inside us. An oyster wasn’t only a delicacy. It held the key to our deepest dreams of the sea. People with no desire to throw themselves into the sea’s embrace, those who feared the breadth of its horizon and its depths, its passion and its unpredictability, would never like oysters. They would feel only disgust, just as they were disgusted by love, passion, life, death and everything the sea represented.

  “Merci,” said Marianne. Their fingertips touched as his hand took the oyster shell from hers.

  You should have been my son, Marianne thought suddenly. I would have loved to have a son like you. I’d have danced to opera with you. I would have given you love, so that you too could love.

  As she sat there eating one oyster after another and drinking a glass of Muscadet under the beeches overlooking the bay, with the sea in the near distance, Marianne’s thoughts turned to death. Was there really nothing absolute about it, as Clara had said? Was it like this side of the world, but with more fairies and demons?

  A sparrow landed on her table and flew off with her butter.

  The closer the coach got to Pont-Aven, the more Marianne wished for it to slow down. She was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from running to the nearest phone booth and begging Lothar to come and pick her up. She wasn’t sure if she trusted herself to remain free.

  When the bus pulled up outside the biscuit factory, she slipped quietly away. She walked through Pont-Aven without fully taking in how charming it was; a village of galleries, crêperies and houses that must have been built in the eighteenth century. Here, the past was the foundation of the present. She followed the meandering river through the village until she passed the Hôtel Les Mimosas and came to the forest on the edge of what she knew was the artists’ haven—that world depicted on the tile.

  A small sign told her that it was four miles to Kerdruc. Another seven thousand yards. Perhaps twelve thousand paces. That was nothing.

  Marianne had walked a lot in her hometown of Celle. She’d felt like a bird that was constantly on the wing, gleaning something here, something there. Lothar never let her take the car. “Not enough driving practice,” he’d said laconically, “and anyway, you wouldn’t find a parking space.”

  He never went shopping, and he’d be lost in the aisles now, she thought—a sergeant major wandering among the tins, tampons and tea bags. Not for the first time, she instinctively clapped her hand to her mouth. What foul thoughts she was having.

  The air smelled of silt and the warm forest floor. Her nose picked up the delicate scent of mushrooms. Maybe she would make it to the sea by sundown and could then go to bed in it with the sun? The only sounds were the hum of insects, the call of a finch, a furtive cracking and a rustling of leaves. Nothing. Her footsteps were the only human noise on the winding forest path along the river Aven, which had now shrunk to the width of a man’s shoulders; it was like the lengthening hallway leading to an unknown room. Foxgloves were in bloom on all sides. Digitalis—the plant that could stop your heart.

  Maybe she should simply chew some of that, thought Marianne, but then it occurred to her that local children might come here to play. No child should have to discover a dead body in the bushes.

  She passed tall old trees that let only a little green-spangled misty daylight filter through onto the path. After a slight rise, she came to a narrow road that led over a straight stone bridge spanning a dry riverbed, in the middle of which stood a windowless house. A moulin à marée—a tidal mill.

  It began to rain, even though the sun was still shining, and the water set the air glittering. She imagined that this golden shimmer was the veil separating the here from the beyond. In the middle of the bridge, she raised her hand and pushed it through the veil. The rain was very soft and very warm. She imagined that fairies and giants were passing her on this bridge and laughing at how she had stretched one hand into the underworld.

  She hadn’t known that the world could be so bewitching and so wild. No tower blocks. No modern buildings. No motorways. Just birds building their nests in the palm trees, and wisterias, peonies and mimosas sprawling over the rocks. There was sky, stones and other worlds beyond the golden cloudbursts.

  A land like this shapes people, thought Marianne, not the other way round. It must make them proud and stubborn, passionate yet restrained. It shapes them like stones and tree trunks.

  She ran, and the deserted land tugged at her limbs. She seemed to hear a whispering from the depths of the wood; she thought of Clara and
how she had said that this land would only tell its stories to those who were willing to listen. She pricked up her ears, but she couldn’t understand what the wind and the grass, the trees and the granite had to say to her.

  —

  The rain stopped as she emerged from the wood, and the footpath ended at a dirty glass-recycling container in the middle of a small graveled car park. She looked around her. A road with no center line. Golden fields. To her left, a village appeared.

  She felt numb from all the fresh air and walking. A rising breeze carried the magnetic, dusty scent of an imminent thunderstorm. Marianne’s knee was throbbing. She passed hydrangeas of all colors. She ignored them, as she did the chaumières, the Breton sandstone cottages with the brightly colored shutters, and their gardens with flowering fig trees, fragrant oleander and sedges whispering in the wind.

  Her whole attention was concentrated on the narrow village lane.

  At the top of a small hill, she curved left around a three-storey white house, and all of a sudden, on a still Sunday in June, she had arrived at Kerdruc harbor.

  Kerdruc harbor had a jetty reaching out into the Aven at a right angle to the quay that ran upstream along the riverbank. Rowing boats were snuggled up against each other on the quayside like bright spoons in a cutlery drawer. Thatched cottages nestled on the slopes leading down to the river like white flowers amid the luscious green of the pine trees and the meadows of sedge. Dozens of motorboats and yachts were moored to an anchor cable between red buoys, and swung in the mouth of the Aven like white moonstones on a handcrafted necklace, dancing on the salty tide as it mingled with the fresh water of the river. Where water and sky, blue and gold, placid woods and rugged cliffs met, the sea began.

  The restaurant on the ground floor of the three-storey white house, named Ar Mor, boasted a wooden deck, a red-and-white awning and a blue wooden gate. The guesthouse next door, Auberge d’Ar Mor, was a romantic, weather-beaten granite building whose entrance was overgrown with creepers and surrounded by faded hydrangeas.