“All right, then,” he said. “Thank you.”
“But it will be Friday the thirteenth,” she said. If Varian left tomorrow, he and his protégés would arrive in Cerbère that evening and try to cross the border the next day, Friday.
“Gussie is coming with me as far as the border,” he said. “No doubt he’ll carry his copy of L’envers et l’endroit to keep us all on the right side of luck.”
Nobody ever did stop Gussie, but Nanée chalked that up to his jacket and tie, his strawberry-blond hair, and his sweet young face rather than that lucky book of Camus essays.
“Why you, Varian?” Nanée asked on impulse.
Varian set down his pen and studied her. “You mean because I’m nothing more than an American journal editor, with no apparent qualifications for spiriting people wanted by the Nazis out of France? But I do speak French and German, and my very lack of skills leaves me unlikely to be the subject of a Gestapo file. And you, Nanée?”
His “very lack of skills,” much like hers.
“How did you get our country to agree to give you visas for your list?” she persisted. “They’re leftist or downright Communist, and mostly Jewish, and lord knows anti-Semitism is alive and well under the Stars and Stripes.”
Varian leaned back in his chair. “The committee sent two representatives to appeal to Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said. “It didn’t hurt that, just days before, she’d seen a photograph of her friend Lion Feuchtwanger interned at Camp des Milles—and just weeks after he’d been received by then French president Lebrun. Before our deputation left her office, she’d called her husband to assure him that if he refused to authorize our visas, German immigrant leaders, with the help of American friends, would rent a ship to bring them to Washington and cruise up and down the East Coast until the American people, out of shame and anger, forced him and Congress to permit them to land.”
Nanée waited, one of her few skills being an Evanston-bred ability to allow men permission to brag on themselves.
“I came because no one else would,” Varian said.
Dagobert tilted his head, studying Varian, then trotted over to him. To Nanée’s surprise, Varian set a hand gently on his head.
“I was in Berlin in July of 1935,” he said, “and happened upon an anti-Jewish riot, Nazis brutally kicking and spitting on a man lying helpless on a sidewalk, his head covered with blood. The police did nothing to stop it, and neither did I. I went home and wrote about it, a piece almost no one read.”
It was, she supposed, the same reason she had joined his effort—because she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t help. He’d left a good job, a wife, a home, and friends to do it when no one else would. Perhaps there was a more interesting soul behind the Harvard tie, the I-don’t-believe-you-appreciate admonitions, and the unrelenting optimism than she’d given him credit for.
“Well, travel safely, Varian,” she said. “And do please bring back some soap.”
Wednesday, September 11, 1940
CAMP DES MILLES
Edouard lifted one of the last bricks from a pile near a guard tower and passed it on to Max, who passed it to the next person, who in turn passed it on again, the men nearly as uniform as the bricks now, with their shaved heads and their ragged clothes, their bony bodies, bony faces. The line stretched all the way across the courtyard to a growing pile of bricks by the factory door, the camp full again now that most of the men who’d nearly escaped on the ghost train were back. The good old days of Commander Goruchon and relaxed discipline were over. Theoretically, Les Milles was now the camp for internment of “foreigners of the Jewish race” who intended to emigrate, and who among them didn’t intend to leave France if only they had the chance? But the Vichy government had transferred the administration of the camp to the gardes mobiles, a particularly unforgiving branch of the French police.
Beyond the iron rails and the barbed wire, a woman walked by.
“Jumbo!” Max called out. “Your wife!”
Jumbo emerged from one of the latrines, already dropping his mop and looking toward the fence. His wife was no longer there; no passerby was allowed to stop to look in. Still, he ran full speed straight toward the wall she’d disappeared behind, and Edouard and Max gave him a boost up so he could peek over the top.
“Isabelle!”
Already, Jumbo was being pulled down by one of the guards.
Already, Edouard and Max were again moving bricks.