A crowd was gathered around a display of photographs hung on freestanding revolving doors at the dim room’s center. And there was Danny, all neatly-slicked-back hair and round black glasses, long nose, tidy mustache over a narrow, dimpled chin, with T beside him even smaller than her husband, her boy-cut dark hair and huge hazel eyes more handsome than beautiful.
Nanée threw her arms around Danny, then exchanged bee kisses with T. La bise.
“Don’t you look posh?” T said.
Nanée, who’d forgotten to take off the flight jacket and scarf, said, “Do you like it? I’m calling this look ‘Aero-Chanel.’” She smiled wryly. “Sorry I’m late. The winds were fierce.”
“When are the winds in your life not fierce?” Danny teased.
The French writer André Breton stood in front of the revolving-door photographs, clasping and unclasping his hands as he finished an introduction and asked everyone to join him in welcoming Edouard Moss.
“Edouard Moss!” The Edouard Moss photos Nanée knew were from newspapers and magazines: an adorable girl in pigtails enthusiastically saluting Hitler; a man having his nose measured with a metal caliper; a clean-chinned son taking scissors to his Orthodox Jewish father’s beard, the forgiveness in the father’s face heartbreaking and raw. Edouard Moss’s photojournalism as well as his art would have set Hitler against him, forcing him to flee the Reich.
“I thought you would like Edouard,” Danny said.
“‘Edouard’？ That’s awfully chummy, isn’t it?” Nanée teased. Danny took such pleasure in befriending the artists he helped, quietly using his position with the Paris police to arrange French residency permits for refugees like Edouard Moss.
T straightened the flap on one of Nanée’s flight jacket pockets. “I thought you would like Edouard,” she said.
Edouard Moss stepped forward then, his tie askew and his dark hair charmingly unkempt. A square face. A mole at the end of his left eyebrow. Thin lines etching his forehead and mouth. He held the hand of a two-or three-year-old girl with carefully braided caramel hair and a much-loved mohair kangaroo. But it was the photographer’s eyes that caught Nanée off guard, willow-green and weary, and yet so intense that they left her sure it was in his nature always to be watching, to be aware, to care.
He frowned as he noticed one of the photographs on the revolving-door display—not the centerpiece merry-go-round horse at a frightening angle, distorted and angry, but a smaller print, perhaps the back of a naked man doing a push-up; Nanée so often couldn’t tell with Surrealist art, except when they wanted you to know that they had, for example, chopped a woman’s body in half. The photograph, improbably tender, left Nanée awash in something that felt like shame, or pity, or remorse. Grief, she might have said if that didn’t seem so ridiculous. The sight of all that skin, the shadow masking his derrière . . . It felt so personal, like the back of a lover lowering himself to join his vulnerable body with hers.
Edouard Moss said something to André Breton, his voice too low to hear but his expression insistent. When Breton tried to respond, Moss cut him off, leaving Breton to nod his lion head for an assistant to remove the push-up man photograph.
As the gallery quieted, Nanée whispered to Danny, “I have champagne if you want to bring your friends to celebrate afterward.” She couldn’t say why she extended the invitation; she’d meant only to put in an appearance and duck out early, to go home to her apartment and fresh pajamas. But she always did have champagne.
She returned her attention to Edouard Moss.
“Mutti!” the little girl with him called out, her face lighting up in surprise and delight.
Nanée looked around, sure the child’s mother must be right beside her.
She turned back to Edouard Moss, who was staring for such an impossibly long, disconcerting moment that the crowd turned to see what he saw. They were all looking at Nanée.
He offered an awkward, apologetic smile—to the people waiting or perhaps simply to her—then squatted to the girl’s level and took her little face in his hands.
It ripped Nanée’s guts out, that simple movement, a father lowering himself to his daughter’s level. But maybe they weren’t father and daughter. The girl might be a niece, or even the child of a friend. So many parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave Germany themselves were sending their children to live with family elsewhere.