He turned then, realizing it was not Elza’s breath he was hearing, not Elza’s perfume, but Nanée’s.
Nanée was there, down the hall, beyond Luki’s door. She was disappearing through her own doorway into her own room, where they’d made love last night and the night before, where he’d painted her back and photographed her after she brought Luki to him. Was that really only a week ago?
He turned back to the photo, Salvation. He folded it in half, and when he heard the click of Nanée’s door closing, he took it out to the fire in the library and set it on the flames. The negative was already sequestered in the baguette, in one of the film canisters. He might print the image again someday, when he thought he could do it right, when it really would heal him.
He set the letters, the one from Luki and the ones he wrote her, in the empty suitcase. He ought to burn them too; they contained too much detail about life in the camps to be carried safely. He removed them from the suitcase and placed them in the pocket of the shirt hanging in his armoire, one Jacqueline had bought for him the day after he arrived at Villa Air-Bel. He would wear it the next day, when they left.
Saturday, December 7, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Nanée returned to her own room, still thinking about Edouard’s photo. Ghost Wife. She was surprised to find the door open; she was trying to be so careful, trying not to signal to those who didn’t need to know that she would be taking him to the border. But everyone at Villa Air-Bel knew that Edouard and Luki were leaving.
T was sitting at the edge of the bed, the Robert Piguet suit folded neatly in her lap. “Wear it for me, Nan,” she said. “The only other decent clothes you have are trousers, and they’ll draw the wrong kind of attention. You need a convincing suit. What you’re doing, it’s so dangerous.”
“Whatever do you think I’m doing?” Nanée protested. T was not someone who needed to know.
T gave her a look. “You’re taking a German refugee wanted by the Gestapo illegally across half of France, if not across the border.”
Nanée closed the door behind her.
“So you do mean to leave France with him then?” T said.
Nanée considered her friend, so much smaller than she was, and somehow so much more accomplished. A wife. A mother. A woman of substance on whom Danny relied.
“You should,” T said. “You should go with Edouard. Take a chance for once in your life. Don’t use the excuse of needing to stay to help Varian. Varian’s days here are numbered.”
Edouard’s voice drifted in from the room next door. He was tucking Luki in, reading from the letters he’d written her, as he did every night. Always funny bits. Light bits. Nanée wondered if that was all he’d written, or only what he now chose to read.
“You’d have me leave France for a man I barely know?” she said with a lightness she didn’t feel. Edouard had been at Villa Air-Bel for barely a month.
“All the work we do here will end soon, whether you stay or you go.”
Would it? Or when Varian left, would Danny take charge and carry on? Nanée closed her eyes, listening to Edouard’s voice, wondering if he would come to her again tonight, if he would whisper her name and make love to her before slipping back to his own room lest Luki wake and find him missing.
“I don’t think it would be good for Luki,” she said.
“For you to go, or for you to stay here? I ought to have pushed you to get to know him better in Paris.”
“He was leaving that day for Sanary-sur-Mer.”
“You might have written him letters, like Danny and me. And Sanary-sur-Mer isn’t that far for a girl who flies airplanes.”
If Edouard had sent that bread-and-butter note she’d found on his desk in Sanary, she would have written him back. Why hadn’t he? Why hadn’t she written first? How could they know anything about each other, really, in the few weeks they’d had together? Could she take him back to a world where she would be forever judged for not being the kind of woman she couldn’t stand to be, where everyone she knew would assume he was a penniless refugee who loved not her but her wealth? And once she left France, she would not be allowed to return.
“After the war, Edouard will not want the memory of his wife that he sees in me now.”
“You might let him decide that.”
“Luki—”
“Luki already thinks of you as her mother.”
“And yet I am not.”
T smiled gently. “And yet you’re saying goodbye here. You’re fixing this home in your memory.”