“We’re here, Luki,” he said, jostling her awake as the train slowed into a little shed of a station, where a public bus waited to take them and their luggage to the cottage.
Luki looked up at him with a sleepy smile so like Elza’s that he thought he would cry.
“Where’s Mutti?” she asked.
He grabbed his Rollei and stood, then lifted Luki into his arms and folded them into the few passengers waiting to disembark, the weight of her sorrow so heavy to carry. How did you make a child understand that the mother who taught her to dance before she could walk would never dance with her again? How did you make a child understand that the loss wasn’t her fault, that she’d done nothing wrong and no better behavior would bring her mother back?
“Mutti loves you more than anyone,” he said, “but she has to stay with the angels. She’s left me to take care of you. We’re going to our new house now, remember?”
Luki said, “And I’m going to take care of you?”
Edouard blinked back tears. “Can you smell that, Luki? That’s the smell of wild thyme.”
Chanel N°5. That was the scent of that fur bracelet. The scent Elza wore, but then so many women did.
“But how will they find us?” Luki asked.
Edouard studied her expectant face, trying to understand what she was asking. “The angels?”
“Yes. How will they find us to bring Mutti to our new home?”
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.