“Non, ma chérie,” he said to the girl, his voice a cello baritone with only a hint of German accent. “Souviens-toi, Maman est avec les anges.”
Remember, Mama is with the angels.
“Mutti ist bei den Engeln,” he said.
Monday, January 17, 1938
GALLERIE DES BEAUX-ARTS, PARIS
Luki pulled Pemmy close, soothed by the scratch of Professor Ellie-Mouse’s kangaroo head, her wooly-warm smell. She wanted to go to the Mutti Angel, to hug her and ask her where she had been, but Papa’s hands were warm on her face. Papa smiled at the Mutti Angel, but he didn’t go to her either. Was the angel like in the storybooks? If you touched her, would she disappear? Luki didn’t want her to disappear. Pemmy didn’t either.
The angel looked like Mutti but different, maybe because she lived with the other angels now, like when they were in their old home with Mutti they spoke the old words, but now they only spoke the new words except when Papa wanted to make sure she understood. Luki usually did understand, but she liked to hear the old words, Mutti’s words.
“Maman est avec les anges, Moppelchen,” Papa repeated. “Mutti ist bei den Engeln.”
“But Mutti could bring the angels here, to see your photographs, Papa,” Luki said. “The angels could come home with us. They could have my bed. I could sleep with Mutti and you.”
Tuesday, January 18, 1938, 5:00 a.m.
NANéE’S APARTMENT, PARIS
It was coming up on dawn outside the elegant apartment’s arched windows, but still Edouard had to speak over champagne corks popping into a cacophony of voices in French, German, English, and the shared language of laughter. “May I?” he asked Nanée, indicating the Meret Oppenheim–designed fur bracelet André Breton was just handing back to her. André. What the hell had the man been thinking, hanging Salvation in the exposition, calling it Nude, Bending, such a prosaic title. And even as the photograph was being removed, Edouard had turned to see this Nanée’s face looking up at him, like Elza’s ghost. God, no wonder Luki had been confused.
He reached for the bracelet, the brush of Nanée’s fingers warm, the scent of her in his hands now. He touched the fur to Luki’s cheek before he could think how inappropriate that might be.
“Meret says it was Picasso joking at Café de Flore about this bracelet that inspired her fur teacup,” he said to Nanée.
T said, “That cup spoiled my tea-drinking for months. Even now, when I raise perfectly lovely china to my lips, I can’t stop imagining fur in my mouth.”
“And T is dreadfully cranky when she can’t enjoy her Earl Grey,” Nanée teased.
She looked less like Elza in the brighter light and without the hat she’d worn at the gallery—much fairer—but she did have the same arch of brow, charming little nose, slightly impish mouth, the same direct look in her eyes as she watched him watch her, the same obliviousness to her own charm.
“Yet that’s what made Meret famous,” he said. “The fact that you cannot now shake her fur teacup—”
“The point of Surrealism is to provoke,” André interrupted, drawing Nanée’s attention away from Edouard and back to him, as he’d been doing all night. The man was married to a stunning and talented painter, Jacqueline Lamba, his second wife, with a daughter even younger than Luki, but marriage was no barrier for a Surrealist, monogamy not being held in any great esteem by the movement for which André himself set the rules.
Edouard said, “We seek to overthrow the confines of society—”
“—to find the marvelous in the world,” André again cut in. “Only the marvelous is beautiful. And beauty is convulsive. Beauty is a disorienting and shocking disordering of the senses. It will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.”
Nanée smiled, slow and warm and yet challenging. “I might be more sympathetic,” she said to André, “if someone could explain to me why ‘the marvelous’ has its women naked with their heads in cages or their bodies dismembered, while its men are invariably intact and clothed.”
André, leaning closer to her, said, “Ah, I do think we should introduce you to our friend Toyen, who changed her name because in her native Czech the surname identifies a person as male or female, and she wishes simply to be a painter, not a female one.”
“You avoid my question,” Nanée said. “Why are the women naked and dismembered, while the men are full-bodied and fully clothed?”