Luki said, “Pemmy and Joey could go with you, Monsieur Fittko.”
Hans smiled. “I’ve managed far worse than a short downhill hike on an ankle that is little more than twisted, I’m sure. Anyway, without espadrilles I’m not sure your kangaroos will be much help for me, and they’d be terribly sad to be parted from you, as will I.”
To Nanée and Edouard, he said, “Walter Benjamin told Lisa as she took him this route that it was best to pause before you become exhausted, to preserve strength.”
There is nothing which can overcome my patience, Benjamin had written in “Agesilaus Santander,” an essay about a Paul Klee oil transfer and watercolor of an angel he’d had to leave behind, which represented to him everything from which he’d had to part. But Benjamin had chosen a lethal dose of morphine rather than be returned to the Gestapo. A thing was so often nothing until it happened to you.
The sense of belonging Edouard would leave behind. A hat in which the initials that had always been his were scratched out. The hat itself now left behind too.
“Remember,” Hans said, “the path will parallel the official road over the ridge. It’s an old smuggler’s path that runs below the road, mostly concealed from it by an overhang, so again, the border patrol can’t readily see you. But if they hear you, they need do little more than peer over the edge to see you as well.”
He turned to Nanée. “Near the top of the mountain, there’s the vineyard that will lead you right to the point at which you can climb over the crest.”
“The vineyard,” Nanée repeated, and Hans assured her again that yes, even at the top of the mountains here, grapes were grown.
“Be careful. Keep on alert. There are wild bulls in these mountains, and smugglers. You don’t have provisions enough for a smuggler to bother with you, but they won’t know that when they see you.”
“The border guards and the Kundt Commission—are they likely to venture this high?” Edouard asked, thinking of that limousine.
“I’m afraid so,” Hans said.
Edouard found a fallen branch and broke it off to a slightly shorter length for Hans to use as a walking stick. “Thank you for all you’re doing for all of us, Hans,” he said. “For everybody like me. I hope . . . I’m sure Lisa will be fine, but . . .”
“Yes,” Hans said. “She has to be.”
As Hans set off, limping back down the hill, Edouard raised his Leica and took the shot: Portrait of the Man I Ought to Be.
Monday, December 9, 1940
THE PYRENEES
The climb grew steeper after they left Hans and the clearing. It was hard to have any sense of where they were due to the hills on either side, golden in the morning light, and the cliff ahead. What had been little more than a steep, rocky goat path—goat skulls being, Edouard gathered, what the sun-bleached ones that littered the path were—narrowed to boulders with small trails of gravel in between. More and more often they had to stop and take the measure of what was path and what wasn’t. So much of it was crumbling shale and slippery gravel. A misstep, and you might slide off the side and into the deep ravines. He held so tightly to Luki’s gloved hand that more than once she complained, “Papa, you’re hurting me.”
What had he been thinking, to insist Luki come this way with him?
They could see now the vineyards in the distance—wintering and windblown grapevines on ground sloping so steeply that it seemed to Edouard almost vertical. The sun was full on now, and surprisingly warming. The wind seemed to be letting up, but that might be the deception of hope.
Together he and Nanée eyed the way forward, searching for the path to get uphill from where they stood.
“Up there,” Nanée said.
He could see it now: the path on the mountainside above. But there was no way to get up to it.
He eyed the rocky cliff, then hoisted Luki onto his back. Nanée took Pemmy so Luki could hold more tightly to Edouard.
A spray of gravel rained down on him before he’d even set a hand in place to begin the climb, loose dirt blowing into his eyes. Behind him, Nanée grew suddenly quiet. Luki, too, was now completely still, clinging tightly to him.
He looked up. Heard a rustling above even over the wind, which was definitely less fierce now. He hoped that wasn’t just the shelter of the hill.
A few more bits of gravel spilled downhill.
Was that a man in the shadow of that overhang above, near the top? Near the vineyard they needed to reach? He quietly turned so that Luki would be hidden behind him, protected, albeit with her legs still wrapped at his waist.