Sailors Lost at Sea

      ONE AFTERNOON, OUT OF CURIOSITY or else boredom, Hélène wandered into an abandoned church. A moment later she found herself locked inside.

      This was in France, in Brittany, and Hélène was a girl of fourteen who had been walking home from the village school to the house where she and her mother were temporarily living. Why she had stopped and touched the handle of the church door, she didn’t know. She had been told, several times, that the little church was kept tightly locked, but today the door had opened easily at her touch. This was puzzling, though not daunting, and she had entered bravely, holding her head high. She had recently, since arriving in France, come to understand the profit that could be had from paying attention to good posture, how she could, by a minor adjustment of her shoulders or a lifting of her chin, turn herself into someone who had certain entitlements.

      She and her mother were from Canada and, despite her Manitoba accent—which she knew seemed quaint, even comic to French ears, funnier even than Québécois—she was regarded with envy and awe by the girls in the village school in St. Quay. That she was from a place called Winnipeg, the girls found exotic. “Weenie-pegg,” they said, with a giggling way of hanging on to the final g. Her mother said this was because St. Quay was an out-of-the-way sort of place.

      This was true. It was a fact that only two girls in her level had ever been to Paris, which was just five hours away by train, and a surprising number of them had never been even as far as Rennes. Also impressive to these girls was the fact that Hélène’s mother was a poet, a real poet, who had published three books. Trois livres? Vraiment? Their eyes had opened wide at this, and they weren’t giggling any longer. (“That’s one thing about the French,” Hélène’s mother told her. “They respect writers.”) The girls at l’école Jeanne d’Arc were forever asking Hélène how her mother was getting on with her poetry. “Ta mère, elle travaille bien?” Their own mothers were the wives of fishermen or shopkeepers. Hélène had been presented to some of these mothers in the village streets: thick-ankled, round-faced women wearing old woolen coats and carrying groceries in bags made of plastic net.

      Hélène and her mother had never intended to spend the whole of the year in St. Quay. They had planned to travel, to drift like migrants along the edges of the country. (La France has the shape of a hexagon, Hélène has been taught in the village school; this fact is repeated often, as though it carries mystical significance.) Instead of traveling, they had attached themselves like barnacles—this was how Hélène’s mother put it—to this quiet spot on the channel coast, and Hélène had enrolled in the local school. There was a very good reason for this, her mother surprised her by saying. “The only way to get the feel of the country is to become a part of it.” Of course, as Hélène now knew, and as her mother would soon discover, it was not possible at all for them to become part of the community. Everywhere they went, to the boulangerie, to the post office, everywhere, there was a rustle and a whisper that went before them, announcing, just behind the weak smiles of welcome, “Ah, les Canadiennes!” It made Hélène feel weak; she always was having to compose herself, to imagine how she must look from the outside.

      In St. Quay there were a number of old churches, though the largest, a church dating from the thirteenth century, had been torn down ten years earlier. It had been replaced with a brown brick building that was square and ugly like a factory, and distressingly empty, distressing, that is, to the local priest, a Father Dominic. He was an old man with creased yellow skin and a stiff manner, but he was the only friend Hélène’s mother had so far found in St. Quay.

      “Alas,” said Father Dominic, rubbing his long chin, “Brittany was once the most religious corner of France, and now it has become, overnight”—he made a zigzag in the air to signify lightning—“secularized.” He said this in his loud, lonely voice, speaking as though there could be no reversal.

      “The church,” he said, “has lost out to television and motorbikes and modernism in general, and it has all happened in a flash.”

      Well, this was not quite the truth, Hélène’s mother explained later. The truth was that during the French Revolution Brittany had been filled with ranting anticlerical mobs who tore the statues out of church niches and removed stone chunks (heads chiefly or the fingers of upraised hands) from the roadside cavalries that dotted the Côte du Nord. Quel dommage, Hélène’s mother said, in sly imitation of Father Dominic, her only friend.

      The particular church where Hélène found herself imprisoned on a Thursday afternoon was one of these small, desecrated churches, statueless and plain, its heavy doors shorn clean of carving and its windows replaced by dull opalescent glass. The church was officially closed. She knew that; it had been closed for many years.

      Father Dominic had explained to them that it was no longer served by a priest. Nowadays there was but a single Mass celebrated here each year—it was he who had the privilege of serving—and that was on a certain spring day set aside by tradition to honor sailors who had been lost at sea. On that particular Sunday in early April, the doors would be thrown open and people would enter carrying armloads of spring flowers; after that, a procession would wind over the rocks and down the beach itself.

      When Hélène’s mother heard Father Dominic talking about this festival, her eyes had softened with feeling, and she had nodded as though she too had had occasion to pay tribute to lost seamen—which, of course, coming from Winnipeg, she had not.

      “That will be something to see,” she said to Hélène, and wrote the name of the festival in her notebook. At that moment, seeing her mother writing down the details of the fete and imagining the blond sunniness of this festive day, Hélène truly understood that they would be staying here the entire year, that their drifting, which she had loved, all ten days of it, was not to be resumed.

      The old church stood just outside the village on the rue des Chiens, the same street where they had found a house to rent. “We’ve installed ourselves in a cheap stone