BANYULS-SUR-MER
Nanée lay awake, listening for the quiet knock on her door but hearing only the pop of the burning wood and the steady crash of the sea, the wind, and occasionally the sound of Hans coughing somewhere else in the house. The Robert Piguet suit sat neatly folded atop her traveling case with Gussie’s book and a note asking Hans to have Beamish take them back to T.
The light knocking came finally, and her door opened slightly.
“Nanée?” Edouard whispered.
“Yes,” she said, not a question but an answer, an invitation.
The door creaked slightly on its hinges, the shadow of Edouard appearing in the doorway, illuminated by the firelight, followed by the quiet sound of the door touching the jamb again.
She watched the shadow of him standing there. His arms lifting to his face. The whisper of a shutter.
“I don’t know that I’ll get anything in this light,” he whispered, “or what I’ll do with it if I do.”
He set the camera on the bureau, beside Gussie’s book and the neatly folded suit. The shadow of him moved between her bed and the fire. Then he was lifting the covers and climbing in with her.
“Luki?” she whispered.
“Fast asleep.”
He touched her hair, her face, her chin, her neck. The length of him beside her was first cold, then warmer. Her body moved to him, responded, wanted.
He lifted the hair at her neck, his breath on her skin.
She touched the mole at the end of his eyebrow, which was sturdy and straight. She closed her eyes and listened to the howl of the wind and the crash of the sea, half expecting a torrent of rain to fall, the way it would when this kind of weather blew in over the point and Marigold Lodge.
“I have a house in Michigan,” she said. “On a lake. It’s my family’s summer house, but it belongs to me now. My father left it to me.”
He looked at her, but didn’t say anything.
She traced one of the lines on his forehead, another at the edge of his mouth. “There’s plenty of room. It would be an easy place to start over. Luki would like it there.”
He put a finger to her mouth and traced her lips. To caress her, or to silence?
She put her own lips to his, and she kissed him.
He kissed her back, as desperately as she kissed him. He didn’t say anything. He kissed her and she kissed him, and he pulled his shirt off over his head.
She felt his hand under her nightclothes. His skin on her skin.
They made love silently, as intensely as the wind now rattling the windowpanes.
Monday, December 9, 1940
BANYULS-SUR-MER
It was still dark when they left for the long walk with Tante Nanée and the sad man with the wide hair and the pokey-outy ears.
“Stay right up against me,” Papa said. They were passing the place where the men who spoke the bad words had disappeared the night before. Papa picked her up and walked very fast until they reached the place where the long black cars stopped and the man didn’t have any chocolate to give her. Luki was a little afraid.
They kept walking, out of sight of the building with the bad men, before Papa set her down again.
“Stay right next to me. You’ll be warmer right up against me.”
“Pemmy is cold,” Luki said.
“Do you want me to button your top button, Luki?”
“No, Pemmy. She doesn’t have a coat.”
Tante Nanée took the white angel wings from her neck and tied them around Pemmy’s neck. She had to wrap it and wrap it, because Pemmy was small, especially at her head.
“It is amazing how much warmer a scarf keeps you,” Tante Nanée said. “That’s why I always wear this when I fly.”
“You wear this to fly?” Luki said.
“I do. I’m not sure I could fly without it!”
Luki touched the white, which was soft and flowy. “Can Pemmy fly?”
“Can Pemmy fly?” Tante Nanée laughed her colored-church-window laugh. “Well, I suppose she would need flight lessons. That would be something, wouldn’t it? A flying kangaroo?”
Luki nodded. She wanted to ask how hard the lessons were, and if she could fly too.
“If you fly as high as the angels,” she said, “can you come back again?”
Tante Nanée knelt and looked into her face the way Papa did. “The thing about flying,” she said, “is that it’s always hard to return to earth, no matter where you’ve flown.”
Monday, December 9, 1940
BANYULS-SUR-MER
Edouard carried nothing but the musette bag Hans Fittko had filled with bread and jam substitute, in which he’d also stowed the Leica, several rolls of film, two canteens of water, and the stale baguette in which his negatives were hidden. Nanée’s held sandwiches and more water. The four of them—Edouard and Luki and Nanée, led by Hans Fittko—crossed a little creek at the edge of Banyuls-sur-Mer, then made their way through a group of houses among towering trees—the area Hans had told them was often thick with border guards, but they saw none. Hans was coughing less this morning and, he said, perhaps able to take them all the way to the border.