“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.
“Moppelchen,” he said, trying to calm himself so he wouldn’t alarm her. She had been nowhere near the steep fall to the rocks and the sea. “Moppelchen,” he repeated, Elza’s nickname for her chubby baby, her little fatso. He pulled her close, buried his chin in her soft hair, and whispered, “What are you doing out here by yourself?”
“I heard them singing. Did you hear them?”
“Singing,” he repeated, wondering if he could find another house, one farther away from the Mediterranean. “Yes, that’s the sound of the birds and the sea. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“The birds and the sea, and the angels too.”
He held her head back a little, to better see her brow that was her mother’s, her tiny nose, her cherry lips. “Singing angels?” he said, trying to tease her out of another conversation about where Elza had gone. “Moppelchen, are you sleepwalking?”
“Listen. They’re all singing with Mutti.”
She began to sing then, the song Elza used to sing to her each night. He pulled her close, repeating “Moppelchen, Moppelchen,” the thoughts crashing in with the crash of the sea and the red-gold of the evening sky, the soft, steely blue of the water in the late-day light, and the sweet pungent smell of Luki’s hair pressed to his face. He tightened his arm around her and sang gently with her, “Wie ist die Welt so stille Und in der D?mmrung Hülle So traulich und so hold.” How the world stands still in twilight’s veil, so sweet and snug.
Yes, they would stay here, where perhaps the world would stand still. He would put a fence around the house. He would arrange it in the morning, and they would be safe here, listening to Elza and the angels singing with the birds and the sea as they sat together on this dreaming log.
Twenty Months Later: Tuesday, September 5, 1939
GARE DU NORD, PARIS
It was time. Germany had invaded Poland, provoking France and Britain to declare war. The miracle Nanée and everyone in France had thought would save them hadn’t come. Instead, the “appel immédiate” posters calling Frenchmen to enlist—posters that had been taken down after the Munich crisis a year earlier—were up again. This time the call was real.