“Must be nice to have a French wife who comes once a week from Marseille just to walk by for a glimpse of you,” Max said, his own Leonora having sold their house in France and returned home to Spain.
Edouard rolled the bit of straw in his mouth, the most solid thing he had to chew to stave off hunger now that the toothpicks he’d made last for days each were gone. Next week he would have kitchen duty, an entire seven days of collecting potato peels from the floor at the end of the day, scraps he would try in vain to make last for the intervening weeks before he had kitchen duty again.
“At least we’re not on latrine duty today,” Max said. “This exercise is good for my sleep.”
“You sleep here?” Edouard joked, and they both laughed glumly.
“Me? No, I lie awake, trying to come up with distractions so I don’t think of the bromides they put in our food eroding my memory.”
As Edouard passed another brick to Max, he remembered waking in his bed in the cottage at Sanary-sur-Mer, soothed by the ocean as Luki slept in the room beside his. He still had no idea where she might be, whether she was living in hiding, or even if she was still in Paris. He’d had no word for three months. With the armistice, Germany had decreed there would be no mail between the free and occupied zones, leaving no way for Berthe to get word to him. Not that he could get there even if by some miracle he managed to gain release from Camp des Milles; even French citizens who were Jewish were forbidden to return to occupied France. The Nazis wanted free rein to seize their wealth for the Reich.
Edouard didn’t even know what had happened to the cottage. Had Vichy confiscated it? It was tucked so far away from the world that they might not even know it was there, or that it was empty. He wanted to claim it to protect his property, the only thing of value he might sell to raise funds for passage for Luki and him to some other country, but to inquire about it would be to invite attention, to ask to have it taken from him. The Vichy government was grabbing property left behind even by French citizens like the Rothschilds and Charles de Gaulle. And there would be no release from Camp des Milles for Edouard. The only way anyone walked out of this camp other than under armed guard now was if his paperwork to emigrate was in order, his passage paid, and his boat about to leave. And the only reason anyone’s papers were in order was because the Gestapo hadn’t yet organized the enforcement of Article 19 of the Franco-German armistice, the “surrender on demand” clause. No one was working for Edouard’s release, and this reprieve would not last.
“I’m going to work on that fresco tonight,” he said, trying to raise Max’s spirits the way Max so often did for him.
“If we’re still making art, we’re still alive,” Max said.
A guard called out, “Reverse!”
The men groaned, but they reversed the direction of the flow of bricks. In the high sun, Edouard set the one he’d just lifted from the pile back onto it, and accepted from Max the brick he’d just handed him, to be stacked right back where it had started.
EDOUARD PAINTED WITH Max that evening on a brick wall in the underground of the old tile factory. He ought to be capturing this all with his camera, the men at work and the art everywhere. Yet he couldn’t. It was getting worse, his distance from his art. At first, he was able still to look through the lens. He framed shots. Set the f-stop. Focused. He rationalized: he had limited film and no way to develop it, even the water here too foul for rinsing film.
“I don’t even know why we do this,” he said to Max. “Why we keep creating art out of nothing while we devolve into brick dust.”
Max studied him, then picked up a brick and began with a penknife to chip at a hole in it. Dust reflected in the light of the dim overhead bulb. Slowly, others gathered to watch as Max dug and dug at that brick, which began to take shape as a face.
“It staves off hunger, making art does,” Max reminded him. “It’s a balm for anger. You have a daughter, Edouard. I have a son. We’re lucky. We have children for whom we must stay alive.”
Max dug into the brick again. Edouard watched, wondering if it was Max’s son he was sculpting—his son as the young boy who had never really lived with Max, or as the grown man the son now was, safe in New York. Edouard wondered whether Max ever doubted that he deserved to call the boy his son.
He said, “I have to get to Paris. I have to get to Luki.”
“If your daughter is still in Paris,” Max said, “I hope she’s hidden from the Germans.”