The Postmistress of Paris(5)

“You are a Surrealist then? I didn’t see any isolated female sex organs in your photos.”

Edouard reassessed her—a woman who could say “sex organs” without embarrassment?—as he draped the neck of his caged paper skeleton in a scarf like the one she wore, letting it fly out as if caught in a mighty wind. The kinds of photos she spoke of simply weren’t what interested him. What compelled him, or used to when he was still taking photos, was never the sin, original or otherwise. It wasn’t even the central power, the tragedy, the disaster or violence. It was the watchers, those standing to the side, never imagining they were involved.

He refolded the paper along the crease and flipped it over—stunned to see not Nanée’s skeleton eyes observing him from the page but Elza’s. Elza’s jawline. Elza’s nose. Elza’s cheekbones. Elza, his wife everyone described as “lost,” as if she might be found somewhere other than enclosed in a tomb. She peered up at him the way she did in his dreams, demanding to know why he’d let their child die. Not charging him with her own death or even her sister’s, but grieving for her unborn baby, the sibling Luki would now never have.

He picked up the pen and scratched a quick set of flight goggles over the eyes, refolded the paper, and passed it to André, who began blindly adding a body.

“Come to think of it,” Nanée said, “I didn’t see a single naked body in your photos, Edouard.”

“Nude, Bending,” André said without looking up.

Edouard again bristled at this title for Salvation, but correcting André would only draw more attention to the photo he hadn’t meant for anyone to see.

“Not a single woman’s body,” Nanée said.

André did look up then. “What did you see in that photo, Nanée?” he asked, the same question on Edouard’s own mind.

“Well, it’s . . . a man’s shoulders curled forward? Doing a push-up, I thought.”

“Sometimes the viewer doesn’t see all that is in the art,” Edouard said, silencing André. “Sometimes even the artist himself doesn’t see.”

“That’s the best of art,” André said, “the unedited subconscious expressing itself.” He folded the drawing paper and handed it to Nanée. “Let’s see what more you’re hiding about yourself then, shall we? You’ve played Exquisite Corpse before? In this version, we draw les petits personnages. Do not think. Simply draw whatever comes to your pretty mind.”

Nanée, with the fur bracelet again on her pale wrist, hesitated, but took up the pen.

Elsewhere in the room, a fragment of conversation: “Revelation of the Jewish racial soul.” The room went silent, even Nanée’s quiet dog hiding under the sofa turned to the voice. “We’re talking about Hitler’s war on ‘degenerate art,’” the man explained. Joking. As if he couldn’t imagine this Nazi insanity might cross into France.

Revelation of the Jewish racial soul. The phrase was the caption painted on one of the walls at the Nazi exhibition Entartete Kunst—“Degenerate Art”—some six hundred modern and abstract works presented for the sole purpose of inviting ridicule, most removed from the walls of German museums on the excuse that they insulted German feelings or undermined public morals or simply lacked artistic skill. Edouard had no idea where they’d obtained the two of his photos included in the Munich “exhibition,” one hung in a jumble of artworks under the words “nature as seen by sick minds,” the other under “an insult to German womanhood.”

“All that art will be destroyed now that the exhibition is over,” Danny said.

“The art will be quietly sold outside of Germany to fill Hitler’s coffers,” Nanée said. “It’s the artists themselves the Nazis mean to destroy.”

“Which is why any of you with an ounce of sense has fled the Reich,” André said, and they all laughed, the truth being so much easier to face with laughter. Half the artists in the apartment were German refugees.

Edouard, watching Nanée hand the folded Exquisite Corpse paper back to André, said, “You don’t chew your pen.”

“Chew my pen?”

He took it from her and turned it to show the barrel end, the bite marks.

“Oh!” She laughed lightly. “It was my father’s. When I was a girl I would spy on him sitting at his desk in the library. He did chew his pen. I’d forgotten that.”

“You spied on your father?” André asked.

Nanée closed her hand around the pen as if to hide it. “Is that so odd?”

“Did you spy on anyone else?” André asked.

Without waiting for her to respond, he opened the folded drawing paper and showed everyone the bizarre three-part creature: Edouard’s skeleton head in flight goggles and birdcage with Nanée’s scarf at her neck; André’s octopus body wielding paintbrushes, guns, swastikas, and a severed Hitler head dripping blood; and Nanée’s cartoon-man hips, legs, and knobby knees, a groin covered only with a fig leaf, shoes very like Edouard’s but with the laces tied together, and on the ground beside the creature, a stuffed kangaroo.

As Edouard tried to digest the shock of that little kangaroo, André joked, “Ah, it appears I find myself in the middle of something.”