The Postmistress of Paris(12)

My Luki, I hope I will be with you even before this letter arrives. But in case my train is delayed, or I am, I want you to know how very much you are loved.

—Papa

He tucked the note into an envelope and addressed it to Berthe at her quai d’Anjou address on ?le Saint-Louis. He put the box of stationery and pen into the suitcase, grabbed the photograph by his bedside—Elza and Luki and him at the Vienna apartment a lifetime ago—and the blanket he’d been told to bring. He locked the door, slid his key under the geranium pot, and rejoined the waiting police.





Sunday, October 15, 1939





CAMP DES MILLES


Suitcase and blanket in hand, Edouard climbed from the cattle car into a line herded by French soldiers toward a five-story red-brick tile factory outside Aix-en-Provence, its industrial smokestacks hard against an impossibly blue sky. He was prodded through a gate no wider than a car, past a caretaker’s lodge, and into a factory yard so thick with brick dust that his feet kicked up a red fog. He turned to see, through a spiky iron fence topped with barbed wire, a little French village and hilly fields, olive groves, vineyards turning golden in the fall, and a distant aqueduct that would perhaps lead to Marseille, twenty-five miles away. It was a good fifty back to Sanary-sur-Mer, and hundreds to Paris, and Luki.

The gate clanged shut.

His train was not the first to arrive. Laundry hung drying along the fence, and at the far end of the yard a man sat in front of an easel, improbably painting. Long lines waited at latrines. Ahead, internees were processed at tables set between two flagpoles flying the tricolor flag of the French Republic, blue and white and red.

It was hours in the hot sun and the painter had long ago folded up his easel before Edouard reached the flagpole, the tables, and someone to whom he could plead his case.

He said, “My Luki—”

“Money?” the guard asked.

“I can’t stay here. Luki. She’s alone. She’s only four. Her mother is dead.” Remembering Luki out at the dreaming log, asking why they had to leave.

“Money,” the guard repeated.

Edouard handed his money to the man, who turned to searching his suitcase with no attempt at thoroughness.

“I can’t stay here,” Edouard insisted. “Luki is in Paris with a friend who—”

“You are number one hundred and thirty-two. Next!”

“But you don’t understand. I—”

He sensed, then saw in his peripheral vision, a well-armed guard, gun drawn.

He was not a prisoner. He could not be a prisoner. He was no danger to France. This was all a mistake.

He gathered his things and followed the line into the factory building, stopping to let his eyes adjust to the dim light, dust already lining his throat and burning his eyes. He crossed a floor so thick with brick dust that it was lumpy. At the back wall, dark wooden stairs led into the bowels of the abandoned factory.

THE CAMP WAS full of others Edouard knew by reputation or more—artists and intellectuals from Germany who’d settled in Sanary-sur-Mer and Arles and elsewhere in Provence. It had been Max Ernst at the easel in the courtyard, painting with supplies brought to him by his artist-mistress. Fellow photographer Hans Bellmer was here. Nobel Prize winner Otto Meyerhof. Lion Feuchtwanger, who must have been taken into custody in Sanary-sur-Mer while Edouard was too busy packing to join friends at the café. Along the whole long length of the hallway where the kilns had once fired tiles, hundreds of men tried to create art of one sort or another.

“Work staves off hunger and anger in equal parts,” Hans Bellmer said.

Max Ernst added, “Lest we become brick debris ourselves.”

The two were working together on an odd mural: two women hunched over two dead men, with one of the men’s arms hanging out of a painted frame to grip the ankle of a surreal giant skeleton that was all pelvic bone and legs trying to escape to a high-heeled boot twice the size of the rest of the painting. Maybe art was a mirror held up to reality or maybe it was a hammer with which to shape it, Edouard wasn’t sure. He thought art might serve any purpose, and at its best it did reveal the truth of our own individual hearts. But he wished in this moment to wrap his fingers around the grip of any hammer, artistic or not, and swing it in every direction, not to shape this reality but to smash it to bits.

If others felt this anger, though, they didn’t show it. In a nearby cavern, actors rehearsed plays and even opera, while around them writers scribbled in journals, tiny print to preserve their paper. Poets. Playwrights. Translators. There were sculptors and architects here too. Film directors. Conductors. Songwriters and composers. Pianists and singers and musicians of every kind. University professors offered classes and lectures. Comedians shared jokes, although now everyone was a comedian, much of the art they created ironic. Art and intellect and humor—they washed away boredom, maintained morale, and allowed, somehow, a modicum of dignity. Only a few here weren’t creating art of one sort or another, and even they sat easily on piles of bricks, absorbed in games of chess played with pieces carved from spare bits of wood on boards scratched into the floor, or stood in heated discussion in a kiln that bore a DIE KATAKOMBE sign, a nod to the Berlin cabaret that had been a hotbed of political thought until Joseph Goebbels shut it down.

That night, after Max and Hans set down their paints, everyone put on their best clothes, as if headed for a night at the theater, and gathered in the camp’s hanger in the center of the tilery, where a makeshift stage, orchestra pit, and pseudo-seats had been set up. Even the camp staff came to watch.