After she’d been unfaithful? But then why would he keep the photograph?
“Us,” he said. “Heal us.”
She glanced to his face, not wanting to make him uncomfortable but needing to see as well as hear what he was saying, to understand. Elza was pregnant with Luki in the photo, but Elza had never been unfaithful to Edouard. That was what he’d meant when he told her Luki wasn’t Jewish. That Luki wasn’t his daughter.
A child under German law was not Jewish if one of her parents was not. That was the . . . not just shame, but grief she felt herself, even when she first saw that photograph, Salvation, when she thought it was a man rather than a woman. It was, she saw now, both: Edouard capturing his own shame and grief in this photograph of a woman he had loved but had been unable to protect. A photograph that, in capturing their grief, somehow revealed Nanée’s own very different grief, her own very different loss.
Luki snuggled up to Edouard, her kangaroos forgotten in the moment, falling to the snowy ground. He pulled her closer as, in the cold blue sky, the lone creature spread its wings wide, riding low on the wind.
“Because of your work?” she said. “Because of your photographs?”
“Yes.”
“And still you keep taking them.” The girl saluting Hitler. The boy forced to cut his father’s beard. The people held prisoner on the SS Sina?a.
“She said some things were important, and other things were not. She said the test of who we are doesn’t come in easy times; it comes in times like these.”
Nanée set a hand on the log beside him, thinking a thing wasn’t anything if you didn’t allow it to be. Thinking shame was too powerful a force to leave its control in the hands of those who would manipulate it. Shame and expectation both. Thinking the person she had become here was the only person she wanted to be.
She slid her hand over until her bare finger bumped up against his already resting there. After a moment, he lapped his little finger over hers.
She looked out to the two seas that were the same thing, feeling the warmth of his single finger on hers as she focused on the stunning blue-green, the whitecaps, the single bird a black shadow against the light. And he looked with her. They watched the lone eagle arcing gracefully toward them, its wings stretching wide and magnificent. They watched together as, beyond him, the wild waters lapped against the shores of two different countries, connecting somewhere beyond the horizon, in a place they couldn’t yet see.
Monday, December 9, 1940
THE PYRENEES
Edouard stood to set off again, looking to the horizon but still scraping his heart over the past. I’m pregnant, Elza had told him. Pregnant with the child who would become Luki. He hadn’t been able to touch her. Hadn’t been able to ask. But of course she wouldn’t have known any more than he did whose child she was carrying. I want you to photograph me, she’d said. Photograph us. I know you. I know this will be easier for you if you take me back into your heart through your art. If you take this child, too, into your heart through your art.
He took the small rice-paper map from Nanée, who was standing too now, beside him. She picked Pemmy and Joey up from the snow and handed them to Luki as he focused on the markings Hans had drawn. His future, and Luki’s, and Nanée’s.
Were they here? Or here? Or here?
It was a long moment before he could get control of his voice.
“I think we’re here,” he said finally.
“Where?”
He pointed to the place on the little map where Hans had indicated the path would fall away to the Spanish border station.
“Here?” Nanée said.
“Yes.”
“But that’s in Spain.”
“Yes.”
He indicated the line of the path down to the Spanish border station, where they would have to register, to show their travel documents and hope not to be turned away or worse.
Luki said, “We’re in Spain, Papa?”
“Yes,” Edouard said. “We are out of France. We are out of France. We still must get the people in Spain to allow us to pass through to Portugal. But we are out of France.”
Luki hugged her kangaroos to her, and began to sob. She was exhausted. Of course she was.
“Moppelchen,” he said. “My Moppelchen.” He pulled her to him, kissed the top of her head, and stroked her hair. He lifted her and sat again on the log, and he rocked her for a few minutes, thinking, as he did so often, of how he’d failed Elza and Luki both, and imaging Elza writing that last note to him—If anything happens to me, promise me you will keep Luki with you and take care of her, always—when his love for Luki should have been absolute from the day she was born.