The Postmistress of Paris(37)



That morning—a Saint Martin’s summer day, November but still warm enough for shirtsleeves—they set tables and chairs out on the belvedere, with white tablecloths, dishes, and silverware for the scant repast Madame Nouget was able to muster, and quantities of wine. Also long pads of paper, colored pencils and crayons and drawing pens, scissors and paste, and old magazines for the games André meant for everyone to play.

Danny climbed up a ladder Nanée held for him and out onto a branch of a tree. Nanée climbed to a lower rung and handed a painting up to him. Some of André’s friends planning to attend this first salon had contributed works of art the two were now to hang from the trees. Danny took hold of the twine attached to the canvas, leaving the painting itself in Nanée’s hands while he tied the twine around a branch.

“All right,” he said.

“Are you sure it’s secure?”

He gave her a look.

“It’s a Miró, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “I’m not going to be the one to tell André I dropped it ten feet onto rough stone and I’m very sorry but it’s now worthless, never mind how much money it might have fetched to help refugees.”

She carefully let the painting go. It hung at a slight angle, but the ladder was too precarious for her to straighten it, and anyway, she rather liked the tilt.

From this height, she spotted Varian sitting with Dagobert, seeking his advice about whether he ought to get his own dog. Dagobert was as often with the children or one of the others as with Nanée now, as if he’d grown from a toddler always wanting his mother into a teenager who preferred his friends. And his best friend was, oddly, Varian.

Jacqueline Breton appeared below, her bangle bracelets jangling as if to announce the arrival of the mobile she handed up to Nanée—small, dangling black-and-white photos taken by Man Ray, who’d managed to flee Paris for Los Angeles. No color at all, not like the Calders Nanée loved, mobiles first envisioned in Mondrian’s Paris studio thanks to light playing over colored cardboard tacked to the wall much like, Nanée imagined, the sunlight now reflecting from the colored glass adorning Jacqueline’s blond hair.

“A bit of art actually meant to be hung,” Jacqueline said, seeming so much more mature than Nanée even though they were the same age. Because she was married to André, who was fifteen years their senior? Because she was the mother of a five-year-old?

“I think we need to hang you, Jacqueline,” Nanée said, meaning to compliment her hair, but sounding like a complete idiot. “I mean, you look like a work of art yourself.”

“Of course if someone bid on me, we would have to sell me,” Jacqueline answered brightly. “But then you never know. I might just make a fine whore!”

Even as Jacqueline turned back toward the house, Nanée said to Danny, “I have an idea how to get Edouard out of Camp des Milles.”

Danny grinned. “‘Edouard’? That’s awfully chummy, isn’t it?”

Danny had returned late the night before from a trip to Camp des Milles, where he’d managed to bribe one of the guards to allow him to see the list of prisoners. Several of the men on Varian’s list were indeed being held there, including Max Ernst and Hans Bellmer, as was Edouard Moss. “Who is Edouard Moss?” Varian had asked. Moss was well-known in Europe, but not well enough known in the United States to have made Varian’s list.

“We could threaten to go to the press if they don’t release him,” Danny said now. “It worked for Lion Feuchtwanger.”

“Even my mother, who rarely reads, has read The Oppermans,” Nanée said. “Edouard Moss is not Lion Feuchtwanger.”

Madame LaVache-à-Lait mooed somewhere in the distance. They were trying to teach her not to, since she was illegal, but it turned out she was even less compliant than Dagobert.

“We could get a group of artists to raise his visibility, like the French PEN club did for Walter Mehring,” Danny suggested. PEN had written so many letters insisting on the release of Mehring that the writer had been freed.

“That was before Vichy and surrender on demand,” Nanée said. “There aren’t too many people more likely to be on a Gestapo list than Edouard Moss.” Remembering again the individual hatreds Moss photographed that somehow struck more absolute terror in any decent heart than shots of vast Nazi crowds or military parades: the girl saluting Hitler; the man having his nose measured; the son cutting his Orthodox father’s beard. Such ordinary people. They might be you.

With the mobile affixed to the branch, she again descended the ladder, chose another canvas from the stack leaning against the trunk, and climbed the ladder again.

“So listen,” she said as she handed the canvas up to him.

Danny ignored the canvas. “You don’t really imagine an internment camp commander will just hand over his prisoners to you.”

“Not ‘prisoners.’ Just one.” She supposed it was Jacqueline’s little joke about being a fine whore that had put the idea in her head. “Varian won’t like it, though,” she said, already decided and wishing she could hurry down to the Marseille train station that very minute. But the effort would have to be more carefully planned.

“There is no chance, Nanée, that Varian would allow you to . . . to . . .”

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