The Postmistress of Paris(68)

“Luki is awfully competent despite her age.”

Was she? He knew so little about her now. He hadn’t seen her in more than a year. And her memory of her mother had faded so quickly; he’d kept a photograph of Elza beside Luki’s bed and talked about her all the time, and still what Luki remembered was the smell of her mother, “like caramel and the white flowers in the garden, and also bread.”

He ought to have gone for Luki himself, the risk be damned. But it wasn’t just a risk to him; it was a risk to her if she were caught with him.

“Maurice is meeting now with a German couple, Hans and Lisa Fittko, who are rumored to be getting refugees out over the Pyrenees on an ancient smuggler’s route from Banyuls-sur-Mer,” Varian said. “It’s ten steep and perilous miles, often in freezing temperatures and fierce winds—too difficult for many refugees—but with the gardes mobiles watching the Cerbère cemetery route so closely now, there’s no alternative.”

Edouard looked down at the stack of negatives, work that had put them all at risk, that had already caused Elza’s death. Perhaps Luki was safer wherever she was than she would be with him. But to leave France without her would be to dig his own heart from his chest and set it out on a rocky path over the border, to dry up and die.

“She needs a father. She needs you,” Elza had said when she first placed Luki in his arms. “Now, what shall we name her?” And when he didn’t answer, “I think we should name her Lucca,” binding this child to him through his art, through his arrogance. “We’ll call her Luki,” Elza said. Luki. This child Edouard had struggled to embrace. Elza had understood that, even as Edouard refused to. She’d written in that last note, explaining why she, rather than he, had to rescue her sister from Germany, If anything happens to you, Edouard, your daughter and I will be left destitute. Not Luki but “your daughter.” Not “my daughter.” Not “our daughter.” His. And this new child too, she’d written, as if she knew how often he imagined this new baby she was carrying would be a son with his eyes or nose or jaw. How horrible was he to have thought that? How much must it have grieved Elza to know what a horrible man he was. If anything happens to me, promise me you will keep Luki with you and take care of her, always, she’d written. Promise me you will put her before everything else, and make her know how very much she is loved. A promise Elza ought not to have had to ask of him. If he were a better man, his love for Luki would have been something Elza could count on, and not the last thing she’d needed to ask of him in her life.

“Edouard?” Varian said.

Edouard stared at him blankly.

“I was suggesting we might send Luki out by train, given her American passport. We do worry that applying for a French exit visa under the name Moss might draw attention to you, but—”

“You’d have us go separately?” Remembering Berthe holding Luki up to that train window more than a year ago. “No. I’ll carry her over the border.”

Varian adjusted his glasses. “We dress those we send over the border as day laborers. A man doesn’t cart his young daughter on his back all day as he harvests grapes.”

“No one would watch us the whole way.”

“Yet nor will they send word to let you know when they’ll be watching so you can set the child down before they see you carrying her. And it’s not only the French border patrol who might be watching. Free France is not so free as all that. The Kundt Commission—the Gestapo in France—have free rein over refugees, and like to make examples of those they find on the wrong side of the law.”

“Terrific,” Edouard said, a Nanée word, one of the peculiar choices that made the way she spoke so fresh and lively, so full of hope. But he said it sarcastically, with the opposite of hope.

Varian looked into the cold fireplace. “The Gestapo are as happy to make an example of a woman as of a man. Perhaps happier. And time is running out for refugees in France.”

Edouard looked to the clock on the mantel, the hands that never did move and yet at the moment were probably pretty close to right. Luki was just a child. Surely even the Gestapo wouldn’t subject a child to what they had done to Elza.

“I promised Elza I would keep Luki with me, always,” he said. A promise he’d already broken.





Wednesday, November 27, 1940





AMBOISE


Luki heaved open the heavy church door, careful not to get dirt on the white dress that used to be Brigitte’s and the blue cape Sister Therese had made her so she would be just like the Lady Mary, and the Lady Mary would love her more. Inside, she held Pemmy tightly, waiting until it wasn’t so dark anymore and she could see the window colors. She walked carefully along the center aisle, not looking up at the bleeding man with the thorns on his head. She crossed to the pew that faced sideways, to the stone Lady Mary, whose robe was chipped now from the noisy, scary, hiding-in-the-basement time when everywhere things were broken, houses and cars and the big bridge across the river, and Sister Josephina disappeared. She knelt in the pew and put her hands together, with Pemmy’s too, and closed her eyes. “Lady Mary,” she whispered, “will you please ask Papa to come get Pemmy and take her home?” You didn’t have to speak loudly in the church because God could hear you even if you were only thinking. And the Lady Mary was God’s mutti. Probably she would just tell God for you.