The Cairo Diary (7 page)

Béatrice swiftly replied that she was divorced, and had been single for a long time. “How about you?”

Marion answered with a nervous laugh. “Never married, no children, never divorced, in other words I've never taken any risks,” she said in a single breath.

“So was it your career, or haven't you ever met the right guy?”

“I think one influenced the other, and vice versa.”

“Shit, you say that as if everything was already over and done with. You're delightful, Marion, and that's not just flattery, it's what I really think. How old are you?”

“Thirty-nine.”

Béatrice spat out the smoke from her cigarette as she gave her a sidelong look. “And you've come to Mont-Saint-Michel to look for your Grail? My dear, you can't go questing for an escort, sorry, for your Prince Charming in a place where there isn't anybody.…”

“I'm on retreat. With the brotherhood.”

Marion followed to the letter the story Sister Anne had given her. She was on retreat for the winter or at least for a few weeks, fleeing the stress of the city to find herself again, regain serenity. Sister Anne had asked her not to mention anything about her real life, to make up a false surname for herself if she had to give one. Nobody outside the religious community must know her real identity, as a safety precaution.

The worst thing, she realized, was that she found it disconcertingly easy to lie. Her apartment in Paris, near the Gare de l'Est, was transformed into a house in Choisy-le-Roi, her job at the institute became artistic director for a small advertising agency, and so on and so forth for all the “formalities” of her existence. The most difficult thing was lying about the spiritual aspect of her presence on the Mount. She was not a believer, and not into Zen or Feng Shui and the rest, either; she found her own personal spirituality in the records of Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, and Rickie Lee Jones.

Béatrice invited her to lunch at her home, above the shop. Grégoire wasn't there. He had left school a year earlier and was looking for work in one of the region's small or medium-sized businesses. He borrowed his mother's car and spent most of his time away from the Mount.

The two women joked a lot and found out more about each other. Marion offered to look after the shop for a day or two, if that would be of help to Béatrice, and in exchange Béatrice promised to take her for a trip to terra firma if she should feel too hemmed in behind the fortifications.

Marion got back home late in the afternoon and made herself some dinner with the fresh vegetables she found in her refrigerator. Sister Anne had explained about shopping. All she had to do was provide a list, and at least once a week, one or two of the brothers would go to Avranches to buy everything.

At least she had gained a home-delivery service.

The storm began again early that evening. The rain poured down on the roofs with impressive enthusiasm. The chimneys soon disappeared in a grayish haze, spangled with the occasional distant flash of lightning.

Marion was beginning to get used to her new living room. The long window was its soul, she realized. A direct view into the life of this place, the village, then the bay, and the mainland in the distance.

She fell asleep in front of the television, and when she opened her eyes it was pitch-black. The rain was still falling, but with a more muffled sound, and the thunder had deserted the shore. Only solitary flashes of lightning remained on the horizon.

Marion gazed at the sight for several minutes.

This must resemble what it had been like during the landings in 1944. Spectral lights that tore through the darkness, and the vague echo of the guns. And not one human voice in all the chaos.

Marion switched off the TV and went up to bed.

*   *   *

The weekend was cast in the same mold. The brothers and sisters held a Mass in the abbey, before an audience of the staunch faithful who had defied the bad weather to come to Mont-Saint-Michel. Marion chose to remain on her own. She went to visit Béatrice and spent the two days arranging her few possessions in the house.

On Monday morning, the storm had ceased.

As had been planned, Brother Damien came to fetch Marion that morning to drive her to Avranches, where they were going to do some classification of the age-old collection. The old Simca carried them a good distance from the Mount, to the town hall square, where they parked between the brown puddles that filled the potholes.

Brother Damien showed his credentials, greeting all the members of staff by their first names, while Marion followed in silence. They climbed a staircase adorned with paintings to the glory of the great individuals who had created the town's history, and entered the library.

Marion thought she had entered a wooden cathedral.

The shelves reached very high, transforming the books into a single body of knowledge, accessible only by sloping ladders. A narrow and fragile-looking
U
-shaped gangway ran around almost the whole room, serving the top shelves, some five and a half yards above the ground.

Brother Damien roused her from her contemplation. “Do you know that among the manuscripts stored here are fragments of an eighth-century Bible? Phenomenal, isn't it?”

“I'm completely overwhelmed,” murmured Marion.

The floor creaked like the deck of an ancient three-master as they walked along.

“It is kept in an adjoining room, in an enormous safe, like the ones they have in banks. You have to put on white gloves to touch it, you know!”

“I can imagine…”

Brother Damien chatted with the chief librarian, a small and jolly man who wore half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose; then they set off up the spiral staircase that led to the upper gangway.

The books stretched away in rows until perspective made them appear as slender and small as a fingernail. Marion leaned on the guardrail, laying her hands upon it. Since her adolescence she had developed a theory, which held that all the keys to the cosmos were assembled at various earthly points: libraries. An individual who knew all the books in a few libraries could understand the universe, right down to its most intimate, most savage elements. You'd have to read everything, in order to be equal to the task of cross-checking, to know what had—sometimes stupidly—escaped the scientists. The main part was already within our reach, but dispersed, so one mind must assimilate it all; there were experts in each discipline, but nobody covered them all. All you had to do was choose your libraries well, perhaps ten or so, and the kinds of material oriented toward the absolute, and the mind would become the possessor of knowledge. Its reasoning would carry out the analyses, exchanges, and conclusions leading to knowledge. The impossibility of the task for a single brain and a single life reflected all the truth of this ultimate knowledge: It was not within the grasp of mankind. Marion had often thought about it. Why not accept that we were simply not capable of really understanding the whole cosmos? How could we imagine a cat working on the implications of the theory of relativity? And yet that doesn't mean it is incapable of thinking, at its own level, according to its means. This reasoning did not imply that we should stop wanting to understand, of course, but that Man should become humbler, less greedy, and that his conception of knowledge should be less a violation than a reflection. For sooner or later the Earth, on its own scale, will remind us of the cost.

Marion's hands gripped the guardrail.

She hadn't had these types of thoughts for a long time. Imitation eco-freak, hippie fever. None of the things she respected or wanted to be. And yet … the routine of work, the need to integrate into society, having a bank account, bills, a social life: From year to year, all of this pushed further back what she had been when she was younger, with her hard-line, anticonformist ideas. What others regarded as maturity suddenly appeared to her like a sort of brainwashing. And finding herself abruptly isolated, no longer seeing her few friends, being shut away in her home, doing nothing but thinking … little by little, all of this awakened that part of herself that she had forgotten, or at least believed had moved on.

“Get back!” the librarian shouted up from below. “Don't lean on the rail like that; it's not very stable!”

Marion straightened up and gave him a nod.

Brother Damien had disappeared.

She followed the one and only path to the corner, from where four steps led up to a minuscule door, which stood ajar.

“Come in, don't be afraid.” Brother Damien invited her in with his usual bonhomie.

Marion entered the attic. It took the form of a rectangular, low-ceilinged room, lined with shelves that groaned under the weight of books, old magazines, local periodicals, cards, and ornithological sketches. A fanlight at each end allowed in a little light, just enough to move without tripping over the piles of encyclopedias or old magazines that grew here and there on the floor.

“This is our office for the days to come,” joked the brother.

“Is all of this part of the heritage of Mont-Saint-Michel?”

“Not at all, it belongs to the town of Avranches. We come here to draw up an inventory; the town hall employs us for that. Each brother and sister in our brotherhood earns a salary, not for personal gain but simply to earn his or her living. Generally we work part time. Right, well, we've got plenty on our plate!”

Brother Damien handed her a notebook and a pen and allocated her the left-hand section. Her task was to list all the works in minute detail, by hand and with no classification system save the one in which they were already more or less arranged.

Marion faced the hundreds of well-worn spines lined up before her. And she set to work.

Seeing that they were going to be there for several days, she suggested to Brother Damien that they should equip themselves with a radio the next day, so they could at least listen to a little music. He grimaced at the idea, and reminded Marion of the virtues of working in silence, for thought and prayer.

Behind his permanent good humor, Brother Damien was still a member of the brotherhood like all the rest, Marion reminded herself.

For more than three hours, she sorted and listed periodicals, newspapers, and newsmagazines covering all of the second half of the nineteenth century and up through the 1940s. The covers gave off the forgotten smell of the colonies, the Roaring Twenties, the fox-trot, and of journeys by steamer or airship. And the smell of war.

The industry of death.

By the end of the morning, from superannuated images of bygone cultures and their delicious fascination, Marion had declined into a misanthropic melancholy.

At noon, Brother Damien took her to a café in the square, along with the librarian and a few members of staff from the town hall. Marion remained silent, introduced by Brother Damien as being on retreat in their community. She left them while they were having dessert and went to buy
Ouest-France
at the café opposite, where she settled herself at the counter to read.

The scandal that had forced her to leave Paris was still on the front page.

Nobody was talking about anything else.

She skimmed through the newspaper. Then her eyes lit on the telephone next to the toilets. She longed desperately to phone her mother. To hear the sound of her voice, tell her over again that everything was okay, that she mustn't worry.

The man from the DST had explicitly forbidden her to do it. For her safety, and for that of the people she loved. Marion had had only a few hours to say goodbye to those close to her, to explain to them that she had to go into hiding for a while until things calmed down, perhaps until a court case was opened. If that was possible.

She had a telephone card in her purse, next to the debit card the DST had given her, forbidding her to use her own until they gave her permission. There was next to nothing on the account, just enough for basic needs.

Just one quick phone call … to hear the sound of her voice …

And screw everything up!

She paid for her coffee and went out. The others were still sitting at their table.

Marion crossed the square and entered the town hall. She climbed back up to the attic, where she set to work again, although she was unable to find the switch to work the fluorescent lighting. It was dark between the shelves. The most badly damaged books were difficult to identify, and she had to take them out and open the flyleaf to read the title inside. She did this for a quarter of an hour, before reaching the lowest shelf.

Marion took the weight off her knees and sat directly on the floor, sucking the end of her pen. Here the books were smaller, but heaped up any which way, one on top of another and covered in dust. An index card was stuck in at the end of the shelving: “Bequest of the library of the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel—1945 or 1946—to be listed and classified.”

The card was yellowed, and had probably been there for fifteen or twenty years.

Everything in this room constituted the unwanted castoffs from the library. The most beautiful items were stored downstairs, while the ones that had little value had been slumbering here for a long time.

Marion returned her attention to the abbey bequest.

Around fifty works. At first sight, they all seemed to be in foreign languages.

Briefly scanning them, Marion noticed especially the books in English, a few in Dutch, and a handful in German.

She had always had a slight weakness for old books, especially those for children, which smelled of dust, mildew, and time. She read English perfectly, so she was interested in the titles of the first volumes.

Authors whose names were unknown to her.

Henry James appeared suddenly. Marion seized it by the edge and pulled it out to smell it. She closed her eyes.

Then she replaced it and moved on. Virginia Woolf was lost between manuals on good etiquette in society.

One folio volume was distinguished by its black color. It was injured; the base of its spine lay open, and twisted threads hung down from it. The letters of its author's name had half-disappeared between two cords, eaten away by the decades.