The doorbell rang. Julia set her comic book down on her lap. Over on the sofa, Hugo was asleep, a book lying on his chest – The Hidden Reality – which told of the potential parallel universes that he was probably dreaming about. The house was hushed: that particular silence that fell when parents were away, when the space and time of children was not interrupted. Again, the doorbell rang. Her brother didn’t wake. Julia closed her comic and wandered out of the living room.
She immediately regretted opening the door. Her parents had told her over and over again not to open the door to anyone while they were gone; she could have woken her brother, told him that someone was ringing the doorbell, but despite the countless warnings, Julia had come alone, opened the door, and felt a wave of fear. Standing on the threshold was Sister Anne – at least, it looked like her: the same blue habit, the wimple covering her hair, the Miraculous Medal around her neck. Yet there was something about her that Julia did not recognize. Perhaps it was that strange smile contorting her face, her eyes that seemed to be a slightly different shade of green, piercing like those of a snake; or perhaps it was the tense, nervous way she was holding her body, as if ready to pounce on her, because everything about Sister Anne seemed threatening. Yes, Julia felt it so keenly that she was unable to move.
‘Are your parents not in?’
‘They’re in town … They had to get something …’
She should have lied, of course, should have said her parents were home, but the Citroën was not parked outside the gate, and Sister Anne had already realized that Julia was alone in this house. She crouched down and took the girl’s hands in hers. She stroked and squeezed them, which only added to the child’s unease.
‘Do you want to go for a walk? Just you and me?’
The little girl looked behind her, hoping her brother might appear at the far end of the hall, but he was still asleep. In that moment, Julia was alone, her hands gripped by this woman who kindly, deviously, insisted, until she finally managed to drag the little girl from the house she was never supposed to leave.
The sky, spitting its fine rain. The washed-out coastline; the drab shore; the black, charred cypresses; the mottled brown earth. Everywhere seemed grey, the mist and drizzle; everything looked as though it were dying. The child had no choice now – she was tethered to Sister Anne, who was hauling her faster and faster up the steep escarpment towards the headland. She panted for breath, slipped on the muddy path, stumbled over branches, unable to cry out, like those nightmares in which she longed to scream but could not.
The shrubs grew sparser here and the path widened out: the two were now moving across the heights, traversing the vast, vertiginous abyss where the sea kissed the sky, a boundless grey world.
On they ran, Sister Anne leading the way, never letting go of the child’s hand, striding blindly through the rain. The Heavens she had come to defy, this child she was determined to prove wrong, it was a fever, an overwhelming, uncontrollable obsession, a madness Sister Anne only half glimpsed; it was evil, and she too was capable of evil.
‘No!’
A terrifying, heart-rending cry petrified Sister Anne; they were a few steps from the cliff edge that plunged down to rocks like giant gravestones. This whole island was a cemetery. Sailors lost at sea, bodies washed up on the shore, those treacherous rocks – the curse of every boat – that were visible only at the last moment, a last memory before death.
Sister Anne felt something squirming – the little girl was wriggling her hand free, wresting herself from her rain-wet fingers. Sister Anne turned and saw that she had sinned. She had not wanted to. It was grief that had brought her to this place, she who had never hurt a soul in all her life. She looked into the innocent face distorted by pain as the girl struggled to catch her breath, wheezing every time she inhaled, the wheezing that everyone said had been cured.
Sister Anne clapped her hands over her mouth in horror, as the girl turned and ran back to her house through the driving rain.
The skylight was half open, allowing in a breath of damp, salty air. Lying under the duvet with the photo of his mother on his chest, Isaac smelled the scent of the sea. From time to time, he closed his eyes but could not seem to sleep. Time dragged slowly once night had fallen, when he was forced to wait. Mankind can live only through faith. I promise a miracle that shall be visible to all. After that, you will not see me again. This would be the last visit; the wonder of the past days, of everything he had experienced so far. From now on, there would be no absence: everywhere, at every moment, even in emptiness, even in silence, he would have this certainty. Nor would there be loneliness; this was something he might have learned much later, or never learned at all, but he had been lucky.
At the end of the road, outside the Bourdieu house, the Citroën’s engine revved in the darkness. Isaac listened as it sped along the dirt track and up the hill. The sound faded. He thought about Hugo, wondered whether he would be there tomorrow among the ruins where, a few days earlier, they had been pulled apart and told never to see each other again. He thought of Hugo’s gentle face, the friendship he offered without expecting anything in return. Until this moment, he had not realized that he felt the same way.
The first rays of dawn sent shadows scurrying across the empty room, and it was as though the end had already begun.
That morning, the island looked almost as it did on the last Sunday of July, when pilgrims, islanders and children processed along this very road – the women wearing white lace mantillas and traditional dress; the men, black wide-brimmed hats and embroidered waistcoats over white linen shirts – all heading towards the ruined chapel on the east of the island. This was the Pardon of Saint Anne, a pilgrimage that, like thousands of others across Brittany, took place when the fine weather returned: the abundant light of summer; the stirring music of the bombardesfn3 and the Breton bagpipes; the fluttering pennants of the saints; the statue of Saint Anne held aloft above the crowd; the fervent, festive atmosphere that continued into the ruins of the old chapel where the priest performed the Pardon, drawing from those fallen stones the vibrations of an earlier age.
This was almost like the Pardon of Saint Anne – the crowd of people moving along the path, the chapel already filled to capacity – but today there were no bagpipes, no bombardes, no pennants, no traditional dress, not even a square of white lace or a black hat; no, this was a silent procession of people dressed in winter coats, braving the stiff westerly wind, walking across the island in the gloomy light. In the ancient chapel, there were no psalms or hymns, only anxious muttered conversations as people noted that time was passing and Isaac had still not arrived.
‘Where on earth is the lad?’
‘He’s making us wait …’
‘I told you, he’s been lying all this time!’
‘Shh!’
‘Calm down. It’s not noon yet.’
‘We’ve swallowed his story hook, line and sinker; we’ve only got ourselves to blame.’
In the distance, the peeling facade of Alan’s house. They could imagine the boy hiding behind the closed shutters, peering through the crack at the gullible crowd gathered in these Roman ruins simply because he had told them to. In and around the chapel there were whispers as people reacted to the slightest sound, the merest change in the light, though they did not seem to know what they were waiting for. Noon had struck and still nothing was happening; there was no break in the clouds, no halo of light. Nothing but emptiness. The cold seeped into the marrow of their bones. Still the boy did not appear. The west wind whistled through the arches and the gable windows, mocking the crowd gathered in this venerable ruin.
Suddenly from the top of the hill came a roar – a Citroën 2CV was hurtling down the road. Here was someone they had not expected to see; in fact, since the incident on the headland, people had stopped thinking about Michel Bourdieu. The prospect of a miracle had made them forget everything else and, for his part, Michel had kept a low profile, staying away from church and avoiding the crowd that had unjustly condemned him. They raced towards the car, forcing it to stop in the middle of the road.
‘Michel, it’s past noon …’
‘And – surprise, surprise – Isaac isn’t here!’
‘He’s been making fools of us from the start.’
The crowd, like the tide, ebbed and flowed, forgetting that only a few days earlier they had humiliated this man. Now they were pressing against his car window; inside Michel Bourdieu and his son sat, both looking solemn, exhausted after a long and gruelling night. Calling the ambulance, the drive to Morlaix, the antiseptic air of the emergency room.
Those clustered around the car did not seem to notice how shattered they were.
‘Maybe we should go and knock on Alan’s door?’
‘The only reason the miracle hasn’t happened is because the lad’s not here …’
The miracle. Michel Bourdieu had forgotten what had been promised on this island. A shiver ran down the back of his neck, the cold caress of death. His daughter, the oxygen mask, her eyes closed as she lay in the hospital bed. It had begun in the evening with a fever. At first Julia had said nothing, had simply gone to bed early, but as the evening wore on, her temperature had soared, her breathing becoming so laboured she could not even tell her parents that Sister Anne had forced her to run all the way up to the headland. By the middle of the night, the child had lost consciousness. Michel Bourdieu’s knuckles were white as he gripped the steering wheel.
‘My daughter was rushed to hospital last night. There never was any “cure”. But you carry on waiting for this miracle of yours.’
Then he started the engine and sped off back to his house, leaving those who had approached him behind. The news quickly filtered through the rest of the crowd in the old chapel. At first, there was a sense of shock, since all of the islanders had believed that the little Bourdieu girl had been miraculously cured – her asthma had disappeared, even the doctor had been categorical. Then, gradually, there came a visceral rumbling, like the roar of lava surging from the bowels of the earth as the ground gave way; like a wave hurtling towards the rocks; like the tremulous ear-splitting seconds that herald an explosion.
‘It’s all the fault of that lad, Isaac!’
Piety prevails only as long as it is expedient. The meek, reverent congregation of the faithful suddenly erupted with obscenities, profaning the sacred ruins, abjuring the very thing they had come there to find. Righteous anger is more intoxicating than prayers and hymns, than twilight and the full moon. The crowd scattered, the black mass swarming across the dunes to ransack the shrine on the headland, to lay siege to Alan’s house; from everywhere came insults, fists banging on doors and shutters, tossed rocks and flower pots – anything that was to hand was hurled against this accursed house.
In the distance, Hugo stood at the far end of the road and surveyed the mayhem, rooted to the spot, feeling the same knot in the pit of his stomach.
The remains of the day slipped away from the coast; that singular moment when the light faded and the landscape became shrouded in a watery dark blue. A moment of calm, like every other evening. The last calls of the seagulls and the rising tide that lapped against the shore were immutable; all earthly things adhered to the same order, and all of mankind’s troubles stemmed from flouting it.
Sister Anne walked on, hoisting up her habit with one hand as she climbed from rock to rock; from time to time, her foot slipped and she would stop, her heart pounding, and watch as the sea rose and engulfed the reefs. Behind her, the coastline was deserted. The crowd had finally dispersed, sapped of its fury and a little stunned, like a drunk person sobering up and realizing the consequences of their actions. All around, the aftermath of this riot was plain to see: the flayed exterior of Alan’s house, its shutters broken, its windows shattered; the shrine on the headland laid to waste; the ground strewn with rosaries, broken vases, trampled flowers; the smashed statue of the Virgin.
The rocky outcrop, once a focus of prayer, was now a place of despair. At a distance, Sister Anne had waited for the shadowy figure to leave before sliding down the slope to reach the first rock. She had intended to depart the day before, the moment she had turned to Julia and heard her panting, wheezing breath. Like the rest of the crowd, she knew that the little girl was now in hospital. She moved on, clambering from rock to rock, intent only on reaching the boundary between the land and the water.
Only a single step now separated her from the sea. Beneath her feet, the waves broke, grabbing at her ankles like icy fingers come to drag her to the depths. She hunkered on the last rock; in the distance she could see the dark outline of Roscoff, the bell tower soaring above the roofs of the houses. The sky was a deep blue, almost purple, underscored by a golden streak that heralded the last moments of day. The distinctive way light fell over this peninsula was unlike anything Sister Anne had ever seen in Paris; it was truth, it was the wellspring, it was all the things mankind strived for through prayer and through science, and she had finally found it, here on this rocky stretch of coast, when it was too late.
She took a breath and bent over the black waters.
‘Sister.’
At first she was unsure whether the voice had come from within her, whether her mind was already foundering, because for some time now she had heard only the sea, a swelling, disconcerting melody that threatened to engulf her.
‘Sister Anne.’
She turned round, a little panicked, and at first saw nothing but a hand extended towards her. She who had been careful to wait until she was completely alone. She who had wanted to depart with no chance of intercession, had wanted the sea to take her body and never spit it out. She had not noticed that the skylight of the house the angry crowd had tried to breach was open; that, standing on his bed, Isaac was watching her: a navy-blue habit moving across the dark and distant rocks, sometimes stumbling, sometimes slipping, heading towards the sea.
When the silence had finally returned, Isaac had quietly opened his skylight to check that the crowd had dispersed. He had not intended to dupe them earlier. He had been preparing to go down to the ruined church, one hand on the handle of the front door, when he had heard the drone of an engine at the top of the hill, seen the Citroën hurtling down the road and screech to a halt. In the deafening roar of the riot that ensued, he had remained with his father, huddled on the stairs, wondering which of the windows would shatter first.
