The Postmistress of Paris(9)
SOMEONE ON THE platform called Edouard’s name. Lion Feuchtwanger?
“I’ve come to take you to your cottage lest the wood benches on that rattletrap bus leave you unable to sit and drink with us at Chez Schwob,” the German novelist said.
“But you . . . How did you know we were coming?”
“Ah, but everyone knows everything in Sanary, unless they don’t want to know.”
“This is Professor Ellie-Mouse,” Luki said.
“Well, how do you do, Professor?” Feuchtwanger said. “You look awfully like a kangaroo for a mouse.”
“She is a kangaroo! She has a joey but we can’t find him. He was only an inch big when he was born, but now he’s bigger and he can sing. In Australia—which is different from Austria, where we came from—Pemmy and Joey would live in a mob of fifty kangaroos. If you’re mean, they pound the ground with their big feet and kick you and bite you.”
Feuchtwanger pantomimed fear. “Well then, I shall be very careful not to offend the good professor.”
They loaded their luggage into Feuchtwanger’s car and set off from the station toward Sanary Bay, Luki hanging out the window to better see the narrow streets lined with pastel-colored shops and bead-curtain doors, their shutters just opening to the morning: butchers and grocers, laiteries selling fresh milk and butter, a shoemaker, a hardware store, bonneteries offering stockings and thread, beach hats, espadrilles. The fishing boats were already unloading the morning catch—rock lobsters and sardines and sea bass—and setting it up for sale right there on the quay. Gulls circled and called as women mended nets in the sharp morning sun, chatting easily together as their children collected mussels into buckets.
“Papa, can I play in the sea?” Luki asked.
“After I teach you to swim,” Edouard said.
“And Pemmy. Kangaroos can swim. They use their tails.”
Edouard, imagining the stuffed kangaroo sinking into the Mediterranean, said, “We’ll see.”
In a public square across from the harbor and palm walk, a gnarled old man in clothes as wrinkled as his face stood in front of a pink stucco town hall, surrounded by crates of olives, apples and pears, oranges and clementines, cabbages and carrots and potatoes and endive. “I have twenty centimes, twenty centimes,” he called out in a nasal voice, the produce, like the fish, to be auctioned and shipped to Paris or Brussels or London. Edouard would buy fresh fish and vegetables and bread here. He would take photos again, and Luki would go to school someday, and they would make friends and be healthy and free and safe.
Feuchtwanger drove slowly past the waterfront terraces of Café du Port and H?tel de la Tour, where people sat over early coffee and already cards were being dealt. He occasionally offered explanations or answers: Sanary hadn’t a full-size library, but Au Grand Tube had some decently stocked bookshelves and good-quality art and photography supplies. Edouard must try the big wheel of Gruyère at Chez Benech, but for today Feuchtwanger’s wife had made Edouard and Luki a poulet à la crème.
“Is there a cinema?” Edouard asked. Elza had loved the movies; why hadn’t he brought her here when he could?
“A converted garage shows films on Sunday nights, but for anything filmed in this decade you’ll want to go to Toulon.”
At a spit of rocky beach backed by a palisade, they turned up toward steep cliffs and out to the point, then left onto a narrow lane. Across from a white two-story stucco house that was Thomas Mann’s Villa la Tranquille, a driveway led to an ochre-yellow cottage with faded blue shutters and a sign on the wrought-iron gate: ATELIER-SUR-MER.
EDOUARD UNPACKED LUKI’S things in the room with the beautiful window, the view of the sea in the distance framed by a large pine and the remains of another fallen tree beside it, long dead and stripped of its branches. He placed a photograph of the three of them on the nightstand along with a page full of math equations in Elza’s tidy script that Luki wanted to keep. He made them a big luncheon from the poulet à la crème, then left Luki to play while he settled his own things in the other bedroom—his cameras, prints, and negatives. He set Salvation, still framed for the exposition, on the desk, and he lay back on the bed and closed his eyes for just a moment, raking his heart over the spike of memory.
HOW LONG HAD he been sleeping? It was eerily quiet, with only the singing of evening birds outside the window in the red-gold of fading sun and the rhythmic lap of sea crashing on rock. Could Edouard live in so much silence? Could Luki?
“Luki?” he called with sudden alarm.
It was far too quiet. But surely Luki too had fallen asleep.
“Luki?” he repeated more quietly lest he wake her, but rushing to her room. She’d slept on the train while he lay awake almost all night, afraid she might wander from the compartment.
She wasn’t in her room.
He called her name again and again, constantly, loudly, as he ran out of the house and toward the palisades.
Good god, what had he been thinking, taking a house on a cliff overlooking the sea with a child who wasn’t yet three?
He tripped on a tree root. Went sprawling. Was up and running again, calling her name at the top of his lungs.
And there she was. Thank heaven, there she was, turning now to look at him.
He hurried to her, scooped her up from her perch on the fallen pine trunk. He hugged her to him for a long moment before sitting on the log, pulling her into his lap.