The Postmistress of Paris(83)

Nanée was right: if his camera didn’t relieve him of the guilt of being a watcher—an audience for those who, like Hitler, could not bear to be thought of as nobody—it did at least help expose them. Them and his own ugliness. The camera did record that which we would never recognize in our hearts and yet can see in the faces and postures of others. And wasn’t that how we started to heal the world, by digging through our own faults to find the best in ourselves?

He’d told Nanée that he couldn’t turn the camera on the watchers now, he needed to turn it on himself, but in that first self-portrait a decade ago he’d turned his camera to the watchers, only to see his own face staring back at him. Art was a hammer, after all. One to shatter his own hard shell, his own untrue vision of himself.





Sunday, December 1, 1940





VILLA AIR-BEL


The only lights on in the whole big place were here, in Nanée’s own bedroom, the rest of the chateau already turned in. She sat in her terry-cloth robe at the edge of her bed, with her hair up, her back to Edouard and his new Leica on his tripod by the door.

A shiver ran through her, although the room was warm enough.

“Can I ask you something first?” she whispered.

“Of course. What is it?”

“The photo, the one—” The one I think of as Ghost Wife, she’d nearly said. One lover photographing another. Edouard might have had affairs when he was married, of course; the Surrealists were quite free about sex. But she didn’t like to imagine him as a man who could profess to love one woman while tasting another, not in any event, and certainly not when one of the women was the one in that photograph.

“Nude, Bending,” she managed, but then found she couldn’t finish the question. She didn’t want to know who Caped Woman was; she wanted to be able to imagine herself in that photograph. But Nude, Bending?

“Yes,” he said, his inflection on the word leaving her unsure what he meant. Was it a question: Yes, what is it you want to know? Or was it an answer: Yes, the photograph was of his wife.

Nanée couldn’t say the word wife, much less her name. Elza. She didn’t want to step too far into his private grief, to make him talk about things he might not want to share, the gut-wrenching emotion captured in the photograph. She didn’t want to know it was Elza, and yet she wanted to know if he’d photographed other women too before this moment of her own vulnerability.

He whispered, “It . . . it was something she wanted to do. A demon she needed to rid herself of. No, a . . . a demon she needed to rid me of. One she knew I needed to purge from myself.”

His voice full of some pain Nanée had been trying not to touch. Some shame.

That photo—the woman bending over so vulnerably. What would drive a woman to wish to be photographed like that, or a man to want to do it? What kind of wound might that heal?

He whispered, “Can I ask you a question?”

She nodded.

“I only ask because Varian says we might leave as soon as this week.”

This week. The weight of it sinking through her. Edouard gone from her life. She’d thought for the briefest moment last night as they were dancing that he was going to ask her to go home with him. She could leave any time she wanted; she could present herself at the American embassy, and they’d help her arrange it. But could she live under Evanston Rules again? It would be a different thing too, to go with Edouard and Luki, with the ghost of Elza. And she had already failed at her sole attempt to mother a child; T had given Peterkin over for her to take to the States before France fell, but she was so unlikely a mother that even the damned bureaucrats in Biarritz could not be convinced.

“There’s a new path over the Pyrenees into Spain,” Edouard said. “I want to believe my release papers are real, but I think the only way they might be . . .”

She looked to the window, the darkness outside. She had to tell him. Like her, he couldn’t ask, but while she didn’t need to know whose body was in the photograph, he did need to understand how his release papers could be real.

“Yes,” she whispered.

She tried to make herself say the words he couldn’t ask—how she’d gained Edouard’s papers, if not his freedom, or what passed for freedom for a Jewish refugee in Vichy France. She didn’t want him to be as confused by her answer as she was by his. But he would see her differently if she told him about the night with the commandant. How could he not? She saw herself differently.

She shrugged off the top of her robe so that the soft terry cloth pooled at her hips.

Edouard was silent for a long moment. Perhaps he meant to tell her what his yes meant. Perhaps he meant to ask her to say more directly what hers did.

He murmured, “I expect this will be a little cold.”

She nodded again.

She waited in the quiet of a paint tube being opened. The chemical smell as he squirted it onto a painter’s palette he’d borrowed from Jacqueline. The paint cap being replaced.

He set the palette beside her on the bed.

The paintbrush on the skin of her back shocked, the contrast of the cold of the paint and the warmth of his touch. He used one hand to steady himself, or her, as he painted something just to the left of the small of her back.

He didn’t speak, but his breath was warm.