The Postmistress of Paris(106)
He set the camera on the bureau, beside Gussie’s book and the neatly folded suit. The shadow of him moved between her bed and the fire. Then he was lifting the covers and climbing in with her.
“Luki?” she whispered.
“Fast asleep.”
He touched her hair, her face, her chin, her neck. The length of him beside her was first cold, then warmer. Her body moved to him, responded, wanted.
He lifted the hair at her neck, his breath on her skin.
She touched the mole at the end of his eyebrow, which was sturdy and straight. She closed her eyes and listened to the howl of the wind and the crash of the sea, half expecting a torrent of rain to fall, the way it would when this kind of weather blew in over the point and Marigold Lodge.
“I have a house in Michigan,” she said. “On a lake. It’s my family’s summer house, but it belongs to me now. My father left it to me.”
He looked at her, but didn’t say anything.
She traced one of the lines on his forehead, another at the edge of his mouth. “There’s plenty of room. It would be an easy place to start over. Luki would like it there.”
He put a finger to her mouth and traced her lips. To caress her, or to silence?
She put her own lips to his, and she kissed him.
He kissed her back, as desperately as she kissed him. He didn’t say anything. He kissed her and she kissed him, and he pulled his shirt off over his head.
She felt his hand under her nightclothes. His skin on her skin.
They made love silently, as intensely as the wind now rattling the windowpanes.
Monday, December 9, 1940
BANYULS-SUR-MER
It was still dark when they left for the long walk with Tante Nanée and the sad man with the wide hair and the pokey-outy ears.
“Stay right up against me,” Papa said. They were passing the place where the men who spoke the bad words had disappeared the night before. Papa picked her up and walked very fast until they reached the place where the long black cars stopped and the man didn’t have any chocolate to give her. Luki was a little afraid.
They kept walking, out of sight of the building with the bad men, before Papa set her down again.
“Stay right next to me. You’ll be warmer right up against me.”
“Pemmy is cold,” Luki said.
“Do you want me to button your top button, Luki?”
“No, Pemmy. She doesn’t have a coat.”
Tante Nanée took the white angel wings from her neck and tied them around Pemmy’s neck. She had to wrap it and wrap it, because Pemmy was small, especially at her head.
“It is amazing how much warmer a scarf keeps you,” Tante Nanée said. “That’s why I always wear this when I fly.”
“You wear this to fly?” Luki said.
“I do. I’m not sure I could fly without it!”
Luki touched the white, which was soft and flowy. “Can Pemmy fly?”
“Can Pemmy fly?” Tante Nanée laughed her colored-church-window laugh. “Well, I suppose she would need flight lessons. That would be something, wouldn’t it? A flying kangaroo?”
Luki nodded. She wanted to ask how hard the lessons were, and if she could fly too.
“If you fly as high as the angels,” she said, “can you come back again?”
Tante Nanée knelt and looked into her face the way Papa did. “The thing about flying,” she said, “is that it’s always hard to return to earth, no matter where you’ve flown.”
Monday, December 9, 1940
BANYULS-SUR-MER
Edouard carried nothing but the musette bag Hans Fittko had filled with bread and jam substitute, in which he’d also stowed the Leica, several rolls of film, two canteens of water, and the stale baguette in which his negatives were hidden. Nanée’s held sandwiches and more water. The four of them—Edouard and Luki and Nanée, led by Hans Fittko—crossed a little creek at the edge of Banyuls-sur-Mer, then made their way through a group of houses among towering trees—the area Hans had told them was often thick with border guards, but they saw none. Hans was coughing less this morning and, he said, perhaps able to take them all the way to the border.
They folded in with workers speaking Catalan and carrying spades and baskets, headed uphill to the vineyards. Hans said a few words to two of the workers, who handed over their baskets, one to Hans and one to Edouard.
Hans gave the men several cigarettes, which they tucked into shirt pockets as they carried on, walking basketless now on the outer edge of the vineyard workers.
They were walking along a low, overgrown stone wall when Hans nudged Edouard deeper into the trail of workers.
“On the left,” Hans said. “Don’t turn your heads.”
Two caped shadows stood in the gap between trees and bushes. Not, Edouard didn’t think, the Gestapo from last night. French border guards. They were danger enough. He kept Luki close at his side so his own body and the other workers might block her from view.
The workers who’d given Hans their baskets stepped up to the shadows. A match flared. One cigarette glowed red, then a second and a third before the match was extinguished. A distraction, Edouard saw. Yes, a cigarette. A polite request for a light.