Lankes dreamed. He held his fork in his mouth upside down and gazed at the group floating over the dunes. “That ain’t no nuns, it’s sailboats.”

“Sailboats are white,” I objected.

“It’s black sailboats.” It wasn’t easy to argue with Lankes. “The one out there on the left is the flagship. Agneta’s a fast corvette. Good sailing weather. Column formation, jib to stern-post, mainmast, mizzenmast, and foremast, all sails set, off to the horizon and England. Think of it: tomorrow morning the Tommies wake up, look out the window, and what do they see: twenty-five thousand nuns, all decked with flags. And here comes the first broadside…”

“A new war of religion,” I helped him. The flagship, I suggested, should be called the Mary Stuart or the De Valera or, better still, the Don Juan. A new, more mobile Armada avenges Trafalgar. “Death to all Puritans!” was the battle cry and this time the English had no Nelson on hand. Let the invasion begin, England has ceased to be an island.

The conversation was getting too political for Lankes.

“The nuns are steaming away,” he anounced.

“Sailing,” I corrected.

Whether steaming or sailing, they were floating off in the direction of Cabourg, holding umbrellas between themselves and the sun. Only one lagged behind a little, bent down between steps, picked up something, and dropped something. The rest of the fleet made its way slowly, tacking into the wind, toward the gutted beach hotel in the background.

“Looks like her steering gear is damaged or maybe she can’t get her anchor up,” said Lankes, running his nautical image into the ground. “Hey, that must be Agneta, the fast corvette.”

Frigate or corvette, it was indeed Sister Agneta, the novice, who came toward us, picking up shells and throwing some of them away.

“What are you picking up there. Sister?” Lankes could see perfectly well what she was picking up.

“Shells,” she pronounced the word very clearly and bent down.

“You allowed to do that? Ain’t they earthly goods?”

I came out for Sister Agneta: “You’re wrong, Lankes. There’s nothing earthly about sea shells.”

“Whether they come from the earth or the sea, in any case they are goods and nuns shouldn’t have any. Poverty, poverty, and more poverty, that’s what nuns should have. Am I right. Sister?”

Sister Agneta smiled through her protruding teeth: “I only take a few. They are for the kindergarten. The children love to play with them. They have never been to the seashore.”

Agneta stood outside the entrance to the pillbox and cast a furtive, nun’s glance inside.

“How do you like our little home?” I asked, trying to make friends. Lankes was more direct: “Come in and take a look at our villa. Won’t cost you a penny.”

Her pointed high shoes fidgeted under her long skirt, stirring sand that the wind picked up and strewed over our fish. Losing some of her self-assurance, she examined us and the table between us out of eyes that were distinctly light brown. “It surely wouldn’t be right.”

“Come along. Sister,” Lankes swept aside all her objections and stood up. “There’s a fine view. You can see the whole beach through the gun slits.”

Still she hesitated; her shoes, it occurred to me, must be full of sand. Lankes waved in the direction of the entrance. His concrete ornament cast sharp ornamental shadows. “It’s tidy inside.”

Perhaps it was Lankes’ gesture of invitation that decided the nun to go in. “But just a minute!” And she whished into the pillbox ahead of Lankes. He wiped his hands on his trousers—a typical painter’s gesture—and flung a threat at me before disappearing: “Careful you don’t take none of my fish.”

But Oskar had his fill of fish. I moved away from the table, surrendered myself to the sandy wind and the exaggerated bellowing of Strong Man Sea. I pulled my drum close with one foot and tried, by drumming, to find a way out of this concrete landscape, this fortified world, this vegetable called Rommel asparagus.

First, with small success, I tried love; once upon a time I too had loved a sister. Not a nun, to be sure, but Sister Dorothea, a nurse. She lived in the Zeidler flat, behind a frosted-glass door. She was very beautiful, but I never saw her. It was too dark in the Zeidler hallway. A fiber runer came between us.

After following this theme to its abortive end on the fiber rug, I tried to convert my early love for Maria into rhythm and set it down on the concrete like quick-growing creepers. But there was Sister Dorothea again, interfering with my love of Maria. A smell of carbolic acid blew in from the sea, gulls in nurse’s uniforms waved at me, the sun insisted on glittering like a Red Cross pin.

Oskar was glad When his drumming was interrupted. Sister Scholastica, the mother superior, was coming back with her five nuns. They looked tired and their umbrellas slanted forlornly: “Have you seen a little nun, our little novice? The child is so young. The child had never seen the ocean before. She must have got lost. Sister Agneta, where are you?”

There was nothing I could do but send the little squadron, now with the wind in their stern, off toward the mouth of the Orne, Arromanches, and Port Winston, where the English had wrested an artificial harbor from the sea. There would hardly have been room for all of them in the pillbox. For a moment, I have to admit, I was tempted to surprise Lankes with their visit, but then friendship, disgust, malice, all in one, bade me hold out my thumb in the direction of the Orne estuary. The nuns obeyed my thumb and gradually turned into six receding, black, wind-blown spots on the crest of the dune; their plaintive “Sister Agneta, Sister Agneta “ came to me more and more diluted with wind, until at last it was swallowed up in the sand.

Lankes was first to come out. Again the typical painter’s gesture: he wiped his hands on his trousers, demanded a cigarette, put it into his shirt pocket, and fell upon the cold fish. “It whets the appetite,” he said with a leer, pillaging the tail end which was my share. Then he sprawled himself out in the sun.

“She must be unhappy now,” I said accusingly, savoring the word “unhappy.”

“How so? Got nothing to be unhappy about.”

It was inconceivable to Lankes that his version of human relations might make anyone unhappy.

“What’s she doing now?” I asked, though I really meant to ask him something else.

“Sewing,” said Lankes with his fork. “Ripped her habit a bit, now she’s mending it.”

The seamstress came out of the pillbox. At once she opened the umbrella and started to babble gaily, yet, it seemed to me, with a certain strain: “The view is really divine. The whole beach and the ocean too.”

She stopped by the wreckage of our fish.

“May I?”

Both of us nodded at once.

“The sea air whets the appetite,” I encouraged her. Nodding, she dug into our fish with chapped, reddened hands revealing her hard work in the convent, and filled her mouth. She ate gravely, with pensive concentration, as though mulling over, with the fish, something she had had before the fish.

I looked under her coif. She had left her green reporter’s eye-shade in the pillbox. Little beads of sweat, all of equal size, lined up on her smooth forehead, which, in its white starched frame, had a madonna-like quality. Lankes asked for another cigarette though he hadn’t smoked the previous one. I tossed him the pack. While he stowed three in his shirt pocket and stuck a fourth between his lips, Sister Agneta turned, threw the umbrella away, ran—only then did I see that she was barefoot—up the dune, and vanished in the direction of the surf.

“Let her run,” said Lankes in an oracular tone. “She’ll be back or maybe she won’t.”

For an instant I managed to sit still and watch Lankes smoking. Then I climbed on top of the pillbox and looked out at the beach. The tide had risen and very little beach was left.