The Postmistress of Paris(3)

“Edouard Moss!” The Edouard Moss photos Nanée knew were from newspapers and magazines: an adorable girl in pigtails enthusiastically saluting Hitler; a man having his nose measured with a metal caliper; a clean-chinned son taking scissors to his Orthodox Jewish father’s beard, the forgiveness in the father’s face heartbreaking and raw. Edouard Moss’s photojournalism as well as his art would have set Hitler against him, forcing him to flee the Reich.

“I thought you would like Edouard,” Danny said.

“‘Edouard’? That’s awfully chummy, isn’t it?” Nanée teased. Danny took such pleasure in befriending the artists he helped, quietly using his position with the Paris police to arrange French residency permits for refugees like Edouard Moss.

T straightened the flap on one of Nanée’s flight jacket pockets. “I thought you would like Edouard,” she said.

Edouard Moss stepped forward then, his tie askew and his dark hair charmingly unkempt. A square face. A mole at the end of his left eyebrow. Thin lines etching his forehead and mouth. He held the hand of a two-or three-year-old girl with carefully braided caramel hair and a much-loved mohair kangaroo. But it was the photographer’s eyes that caught Nanée off guard, willow-green and weary, and yet so intense that they left her sure it was in his nature always to be watching, to be aware, to care.

He frowned as he noticed one of the photographs on the revolving-door display—not the centerpiece merry-go-round horse at a frightening angle, distorted and angry, but a smaller print, perhaps the back of a naked man doing a push-up; Nanée so often couldn’t tell with Surrealist art, except when they wanted you to know that they had, for example, chopped a woman’s body in half. The photograph, improbably tender, left Nanée awash in something that felt like shame, or pity, or remorse. Grief, she might have said if that didn’t seem so ridiculous. The sight of all that skin, the shadow masking his derrière . . . It felt so personal, like the back of a lover lowering himself to join his vulnerable body with hers.

Edouard Moss said something to André Breton, his voice too low to hear but his expression insistent. When Breton tried to respond, Moss cut him off, leaving Breton to nod his lion head for an assistant to remove the push-up man photograph.

As the gallery quieted, Nanée whispered to Danny, “I have champagne if you want to bring your friends to celebrate afterward.” She couldn’t say why she extended the invitation; she’d meant only to put in an appearance and duck out early, to go home to her apartment and fresh pajamas. But she always did have champagne.

She returned her attention to Edouard Moss.

“Mutti!” the little girl with him called out, her face lighting up in surprise and delight.

Nanée looked around, sure the child’s mother must be right beside her.

She turned back to Edouard Moss, who was staring for such an impossibly long, disconcerting moment that the crowd turned to see what he saw. They were all looking at Nanée.

He offered an awkward, apologetic smile—to the people waiting or perhaps simply to her—then squatted to the girl’s level and took her little face in his hands.

It ripped Nanée’s guts out, that simple movement, a father lowering himself to his daughter’s level. But maybe they weren’t father and daughter. The girl might be a niece, or even the child of a friend. So many parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave Germany themselves were sending their children to live with family elsewhere.

“Non, ma chérie,” he said to the girl, his voice a cello baritone with only a hint of German accent. “Souviens-toi, Maman est avec les anges.”

Remember, Mama is with the angels.

“Mutti ist bei den Engeln,” he said.





Monday, January 17, 1938

GALLERIE DES BEAUX-ARTS, PARIS

Luki pulled Pemmy close, soothed by the scratch of Professor Ellie-Mouse’s kangaroo head, her wooly-warm smell. She wanted to go to the Mutti Angel, to hug her and ask her where she had been, but Papa’s hands were warm on her face. Papa smiled at the Mutti Angel, but he didn’t go to her either. Was the angel like in the storybooks? If you touched her, would she disappear? Luki didn’t want her to disappear. Pemmy didn’t either.

The angel looked like Mutti but different, maybe because she lived with the other angels now, like when they were in their old home with Mutti they spoke the old words, but now they only spoke the new words except when Papa wanted to make sure she understood. Luki usually did understand, but she liked to hear the old words, Mutti’s words.

“Maman est avec les anges, Moppelchen,” Papa repeated. “Mutti ist bei den Engeln.”

“But Mutti could bring the angels here, to see your photographs, Papa,” Luki said. “The angels could come home with us. They could have my bed. I could sleep with Mutti and you.”





Tuesday, January 18, 1938, 5:00 a.m.

NANéE’S APARTMENT, PARIS

It was coming up on dawn outside the elegant apartment’s arched windows, but still Edouard had to speak over champagne corks popping into a cacophony of voices in French, German, English, and the shared language of laughter. “May I?” he asked Nanée, indicating the Meret Oppenheim–designed fur bracelet André Breton was just handing back to her. André. What the hell had the man been thinking, hanging Salvation in the exposition, calling it Nude, Bending, such a prosaic title. And even as the photograph was being removed, Edouard had turned to see this Nanée’s face looking up at him, like Elza’s ghost. God, no wonder Luki had been confused.