The Gown(102)

“Excuse me,” she asked a passing waiter. “What’s the best way to get to the exhibition? Can I take those stairs?”

“Certainly. Two floors down and then follow the signs.”

She hurried down to the third floor, urgency lending her speed, and walked straight to the gallery, at the very far end of the exhibition space, which held the Vél d’Hiv embroideries. It was darkened, quiet, and empty, apart from a single guard standing sentinel in the far corner.

Five embroidered panels ringed the room, each about six feet across and nine feet high. Lights were trained on the artworks, leaving the rest of the gallery in shadow, and apart from several introductory paragraphs on a printed stand, and a single line of text to the left of each embroidery, the surrounding walls were blank.

Heather moved to the first of the panels, Un d?ner de Chabbat. A Sabbath dinner. A group of people, a family, stood around a table laden with food, and the oldest of the men held high a silver cup. The colors of the embroidery were extraordinarily vibrant, as if it had been illuminated from within, and the delicately rendered faces were beautiful in their joy.

On to the second work, Le Rassemblement. The roundup. Some of the people from the first panel were being pushed down a narrow street, rifles at their backs. Their tormentors were in uniform, though they looked more like police officers than soldiers, and several wore the noxious emblems of Nazi Germany on their jackets and hats. At either side of the embroidery passersby looked on, men and women and children alike, their faces blank.

A figure at the center of the panel caught, and held, her attention. It was a woman from the Sabbath dinner, and she was turning back, reaching for someone, or perhaps she was warning them. The entire panel, Heather suddenly realized, was devoid of color, or rather so bleached of color, set against the first of the embroideries, that it appeared monochrome. The world had been reduced to brown and gray, black and white, and only the stark, sullen yellow of the Stars of David, neatly affixed to the family’s coats, broke free of the deadened palette.

Then Le Vélodrome d’Hiver, the third panel. The setting was a twisted blob of an arena, its bleachers and field obscured by the huddled figures of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people. Those at the back were silhouettes, hardly more, but the people in the foreground were minutely detailed. In her every line of stitching, every subtle change of color, Miriam Dassin had captured their weariness, their hunger, their fear.

Again Heather recognized the figures at the center of the panel: the elderly man, the woman, and a second man, taller than the others, his eyes dark with sorrow. He was embracing his loved ones, bending protectively over them. It was all that had been left to him.

Le Voyage à l’est. The journey east. A train arched across the fourth tapestry, its farthest carriages all but unseen in the gloom, only the train wasn’t made up of passenger carriages but cattle cars, their slatted wooden sides as weathered and barren as the empty landscape through which they moved. Heather could see nothing of the cars’ interiors, nothing that confirmed there were living, feeling, suffering people within, but she knew they were there. She knew it down to her bones.

And then to Au-delà. Beyond. This, the final panel, was drenched with color, its vivid hues so startling after the monochrome of its predecessors that Heather found herself blinking in surprise. In the foreground of the panel was an archway, its crumbling stones blanketed with a tangle of roses in full, bounteous, exuberant bloom, and beyond was the family, walking hand in hand, their faces upturned in wonderment. Surrounding them was a garden, and it reminded her of Nan’s flower beds with their old-fashioned flowers, only this garden was larger and wilder, its every petal, leaf, and branch a work of glorious perfection.

There was a bench in the middle of the gallery, and Heather now sat and stared at the embroideries, one after the other, turning and turning. It was impossible to look away.

“Have you found her yet?” It was Miriam. How had she known Heather would come here?

“I wasn’t looking for anyone. I just came down to see the embroideries.”

“What do you think?”

“I feel like I could stare at them for days, and even then I’d still be trying to figure them out,” Heather said, wincing inwardly at her feeble response. People had written entire books about these embroideries, and that was her answer?

But Miriam only nodded. As if she approved of Heather’s response. “Thank you. Just now I asked about Ann. I wanted to know if you had found her. She is there in the first panel, you know.”

“Really? But how . . . ?”

Heather approached Un d?ner de Chabbat, and she searched the faces, one after the other. “Is that her? The woman at the back? I can’t believe I didn’t notice before.”

“Well, you never knew Ann when she was that age.”

“I suppose. And I always forget that she had red hair. It was white by the time I came along.”

“I placed her among my family, along with some other friends. They became my family after my own was taken from me.”

Heather stared and marveled and tried, unsuccessfully, to smother an unexpected wave of sadness. “I so wish Nan had known. She’d have pretended to be embarrassed, but secretly she’d have loved it. I know she would.”

“I agree. Come back and sit down, my dear. I have something to tell you, and I also have something to give you. We haven’t much time before everyone else barges in and fills the air with their chatter.”