The Postmistress of Paris(28)

“I’m going to work on that fresco tonight,” he said, trying to raise Max’s spirits the way Max so often did for him.

“If we’re still making art, we’re still alive,” Max said.

A guard called out, “Reverse!”

The men groaned, but they reversed the direction of the flow of bricks. In the high sun, Edouard set the one he’d just lifted from the pile back onto it, and accepted from Max the brick he’d just handed him, to be stacked right back where it had started.

EDOUARD PAINTED WITH Max that evening on a brick wall in the underground of the old tile factory. He ought to be capturing this all with his camera, the men at work and the art everywhere. Yet he couldn’t. It was getting worse, his distance from his art. At first, he was able still to look through the lens. He framed shots. Set the f-stop. Focused. He rationalized: he had limited film and no way to develop it, even the water here too foul for rinsing film.

“I don’t even know why we do this,” he said to Max. “Why we keep creating art out of nothing while we devolve into brick dust.”

Max studied him, then picked up a brick and began with a penknife to chip at a hole in it. Dust reflected in the light of the dim overhead bulb. Slowly, others gathered to watch as Max dug and dug at that brick, which began to take shape as a face.

“It staves off hunger, making art does,” Max reminded him. “It’s a balm for anger. You have a daughter, Edouard. I have a son. We’re lucky. We have children for whom we must stay alive.”

Max dug into the brick again. Edouard watched, wondering if it was Max’s son he was sculpting—his son as the young boy who had never really lived with Max, or as the grown man the son now was, safe in New York. Edouard wondered whether Max ever doubted that he deserved to call the boy his son.

He said, “I have to get to Paris. I have to get to Luki.”

“If your daughter is still in Paris,” Max said, “I hope she’s hidden from the Germans.”

“I don’t know,” Edouard said. “I don’t even know.”

Max put a hand lightly on his shoulder, the way he sometimes did just for the assurance that they were still human, that they could still feel. “And yet you must know she is somewhere,” he said. “You would feel it in your heart if she were not.”

THAT NIGHT, LIKE every night, Edouard sat on his straw mat under the bare bulb and opened his suitcase. He took out his camera, set it aside. Then his box of stationery. He closed the suitcase. Opened the box. Extracted the top sheet, which was already filled on one side with his handwriting in the smallest script he could manage; he had so little paper left.

He turned it to the empty back side, and set his hand on the camera. He couldn’t say why this routine was important. He closed his eyes, feeling the metal camera body cool on his fingers, imagining Luki on the dreaming log in Sanary-sur-Mer, Luki somehow being watched over by Elza. He tried to shut out the sound of the men around him, to replace it with Luki’s voice singing and the splash of the sea, her mother joining her. He imagined Luki turning to see him. He imagined framing the shot. The smile on her face rising from a print so that he would always have it, always have her with him.

He took up the pen then, and began, My Luki—one more letter he could never send, but the writing of it kept him alive.





Monday, September 30, 1940

THE CAS OFFICE, MARSEILLE

Nanée followed Varian into the CAS office’s small washroom, where he set the water running for one of his conferences. Dagobert immediately put his paws up on the tub and took a drink, as had now become his routine, Varian always happy for his company.

“That click and buzz on the phone?” Varian said to Nanée. “It’s a tap. A friend at the prefecture confirmed that.”

He peered closely at her face, as if he suspected she’d set the bug herself. Did he imagine she would confess to it so easily if she had? He was under a lot of pressure. He’d been successful at acquiring soap on his trip to Lisbon, but less so at persuading the US government to leave him to his work here. A September 18 cable sent through the US consul general had been waiting on his return: “This government cannot—repeat cannot—countenance the activities of Mr. Fry, however well-meaning his motives may be, in carrying on activities evading the laws of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations.” His passport was valid until January, but everyone was pressuring him to leave France immediately, before he was arrested or expelled: the American embassy in Vichy, the American consulate in Marseille, the US State Department, the Emergency Rescue Committee that had sent him, and even his own wife. Varian ignored the efforts to recall him, and worked even more urgently to get refugees out of France. But that too was getting harder, the pressure from Vichy necessitating all communications be underground and anything sensitive communicated in person. They’d even taken to unplugging the phone between calls.

He said to Nanée, “I thought it might be time to have you try delivering messages for us.”

She said, “Whatever I can do to help, boss,” glad finally to be accepted as loyal, trustworthy, and fair, and in no way a spy for the US State Department or Vichy or anyone else.

“It’s far more dangerous than you might imagine,” he said.

“You don’t have to flatter me by making this seem important. I’m happy to do anything you need.”