Edouard wasn’t sure what kind of omen that was. He couldn’t imagine any way that being put on a ship in the middle of the night could be anything but bad.
ON DECK, THEY were issued burlap-and-straw beds and blankets—six hundred guests of the Vichy government, in the not-so-deluxe accommodations of the SS Sina?a at quai du Président Wilson. They had no idea why they were there, or whether the ship was meant actually to set sail, to take Edouard away from Luki, or when or under what circumstances they might be released. Nanée protested when she was culled from their little herd, but she was ushered away at gunpoint to join the women and the elderly in the third-class cabins. Edouard hurried down into the hold and grabbed an upper iron bunk by a porthole, in view of one of the mooring lines on the quay side. If anyone began to make way to set sail, he would try to get back up to the deck and jump ship without being shot.
Varian settled on the bunk beside him, Danny below, and André next to Danny, below Varian.
Edouard lay huddled on the straw mat under the thin, rough blanket, looking up through the porthole to a cold, starry sky. He wished he’d had the sense to grab a photograph of Luki. He understood the despair that led Walter Benjamin to suicide, to have escaped incarceration only to be imprisoned again. He would leave France as soon as he got out of here, if he got out of here. He would find a way, and he and Luki would leave. He and Luki and Nanée.
The thought caught him off guard. That was why he’d been silently relieved when Nanée was made to go with the women. Edouard had lived this life before. He knew how hateful it could get, how unforgivable people could be under stress. He wasn’t sure who he hoped to protect by the separation. He’d endured this once before, and managed to keep his friends. She was a rich girl, used to luxury.
And yet here she was, choosing to stay in a France occupied by Germany when she might leave any day. Choosing a life that left her prisoner on a ship off the coast of France when she might be climbing into fine cotton sheets in a mansion in someplace called Evanston, in the peacetime luxury of the United States.
He raised his Leica, which, surprisingly, no one had taken from him, and photographed the men in the bunks.
They looked at him, surprised.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m only documenting this life. I don’t know what I’ll do with the photos, whether I’ll do anything with them. I only know that they need to be taken.”
Tuesday, December 3, 1940
ON THE SS SINA?A
Edouard tidied himself as best he could before Nanée rejoined them on deck the next morning while André, elected for the purpose, went to fetch their breakfast from the galley—so much like Camp des Milles.
“It is the way of incarceration,” Edouard assured the others, feigning less fear than he felt at being held here. “Everything requires waiting in line.”
André returned finally with black bread, faux coffee, and the news that not one among them would be allowed to communicate with anyone outside. Not Varian or Nanée. Not the other furious Americans. Not even the prominent French journalist who was taking copious notes.
After lunch—beef still quite frozen in the middle and, this being France, plenty of wine—they were loaded into the hull without explanation. This time Nanée was allowed to accompany them. A pock-faced, gawky guard at the hatch beamed shyly, like the teenage boy he probably was, when she wandered over to chat him up from below.
“I’m Nanée,” she said.
The poor fellow only stared mutely at her.
“Wouldn’t you like to tell me your name?” she asked.
“I’m . . . I’m Paul,” the boy stammered.
“Paul,” she repeated. “You’re quite adorable, Paul. Has anyone ever told you that?”
The boy answered, “My mother.”
Nanée smiled gently as those watching the interchange worked hard not to laugh.
“Paul,” she said, “I don’t suppose you have any idea how long they mean to keep us here?”
Paul shook his head.
Nanée thanked him, and returned to join them.
“That went well,” Danny said. “You didn’t want to ask him to find out?”
“The sad sacks are the easiest to bamboozle, but you can’t do everything on the first hello,” she said. “I did learn from voices overhead, though, that Pétain is about to come by in a coast-guard cutter.”
André said cheerily, “Can’t have the old man faced with the prisoners taken on his behalf.”