The Postmistress of Paris(82)

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

“You’re handsome, Papa.”

He hugged her. Truly, he could not get enough of hugging her. He hadn’t realized how much she completed him until she’d arrived back in his physical life.

Outside, Edouard introduced Luki to everyone.

“Marcel, this is Luki. Luki, this is Monsieur Duchamp, who paints and sculpts, and is awfully good at chess.” Duchamp had routed Edouard whenever they played at Camp des Milles, on that board scratched into the floor.

“I can beat my papa at checkers,” Luki said.

Duchamp said, “That does not surprise me!”

Edouard was particularly moved to introduce Luki to Max, who was talking with Nanée but knelt down to Luki’s level and told her he felt like he knew her. “From all the stories your papa told me about you when we were at Camp des Milles.”

“You were with Papa?”

Max said, “I slept right next to him, and I will tell you I watched him say he loved you to your picture every night, and kiss you every morning. He missed you so much.”

Luki was silent for a long moment, her hand warm and small in Edouard’s. “He slept next to me all night long last night,” she said.

Max smiled. “I hope he didn’t snore so loudly that he woke you!”

Luki giggled. “Papa doesn’t snore!”

“Doesn’t he?” Max said. “Ah well, it was hard to say who was making what noise back then. We did some paintings together, your papa and I did. Did you know that?”

“Papa does the best pictures.”

“Yes, he tells me that too.”

“Look, a horse,” she said.

“Is there a horse here as well as a cow?” Max asked.

“In the tree!” She pointed to one of the plane trees flanking the belvedere.

Edouard’s photograph of that horse on that empty merry-go-round, distorted and out of kilter—who’d hung it there? His own anger from that morning in Berlin was reflected in the image, the manufactured horse rearing back from the photo’s bottom left corner, as if as startled by the photographer as Edouard had been when Luki was refused a seat on the empty ride. Elza hated this photo, hated the memory of her daughter being denied on account of being something she wasn’t, really. But Edouard felt the photograph said something people ought to know. That was why he’d given it to André, who’d made it a centerpiece of the Surrealist exposition in Paris.

It wasn’t the only one of his photos displayed in the art trees. There was his solarized self-portrait, unframed but nestled in the branches. And The Caped Woman, Br?laged—Edouard couldn’t see it now without thinking of Nanée’s words. I think if I saw her in other photos, it would spoil this quality, this light on myself. Her pride at her anger, like his own, he’d thought. She hadn’t answered his question about what of herself she saw in it, just as she never answered his question last night about whether she might consider going home. She was good at remaining silent when asked a question she didn’t want to answer, when her answer would bring a hurt she didn’t want to bring.

Underneath the art tree, an assembled group began laughing together—friendly, appreciative laughter as one of them pointed to a photograph high in the tree: Nanée’s Beautiful Neck.

“This was your idea?” he said to Danny. “To hang my photos?”

Danny grinned, guilty. “But I had a coconspirator.”

They looked to Nanée, with Luki, who was telling her, “Papa saves my memories for me.”

“Saves your memories,” Nanée repeated. “Oh, that’s such a beautiful way to put it, Luki.”

He thought of Nanée in the bathwater, her head tilted back against the zinc of the tub. He thought of her naked in the tub that second time, as they made love. It was clear from her soft expression under the charming bowler hat she wore today that Luki had succeeded where he hadn’t yet: Luki had won Nanée’s heart.

“When I forget Mutti’s voice singing to me, I look at my photograph.” Luki pulled out from a pocket the photograph of Elza and Luki and him he’d tucked into her kangaroo’s pouch just before he put her on that train in Sanary-sur-Mer. “Then I can hear her again.”

And Edouard could hear Elza now too, as he looked at the photo. Elza singing to Luki. This child who was so much wiser sometimes than he was. All the photographs he hadn’t taken these last years since Elza died, they were moments lost, moments that would be ignored, forgotten, with no mirror held up to reality, no hammer shaping it.

He looked back to the solarized self-portrait, himself as a young man. Accentuated in the high contrast: a hint of wariness underlying his young man’s confidence in what he could and ought to do, how he would change the world. Something in the sideways cut of his eye toward the lens, the straight set of his mouth. He’d been afraid of what he was doing even then. He’d been afraid so many times, to be taking photos of Hitler’s fanatics that would blow back on him if the world turned out to be exactly as it now was. It had never occurred to him, though, not to take the shots he needed to take.

Was he afraid to see whatever his lens might reveal inside himself? Why hadn’t he taken a photograph since Elza died, not even at Camp des Milles? Why wasn’t he taking photographs now, capturing this moment of what it meant to be trapped in a world that didn’t want you but would not allow you to escape? All these people living together, some desperate for a visa, others desperate to help them find a way out. André going off every morning to the table in the library or to his greenhouse, to write. Jacqueline painting. Artists gathering every Sunday to celebrate what little they had. Even in the darkest times at Camp des Milles, the men kept making art and music, literature, theater. It was how they stayed alive. How they helped the world right itself.