The hill crested to a view of the newer docks of the industrial port, filled with barrels and crates and massive dirty mounds of coal meant for Britain but going nowhere due to the blockade. A light drizzle began to fall on the coal and on the filthy street and on Nanée.
And there was the house she was looking for. The shutters Varian had described as pink were the color of the Pepto-Bismol her daddy used to take. A chunky woman in a high-slit skirt and wide-necked blouse adjusted her garter in the doorway, leaning low so her breasts were visible. Nanée glanced over her shoulder to see the whore’s mark—one of the men from the table. Was he following her?
Poor Daddy. He was rolling over in his grave. But it was a sign of Varian’s growing confidence in Nanée that he’d given her this delivery.
She pretended to search her pockets for something to keep the rain off her head as the man passed her. He slowed for a free look at the woman’s breasts. After he carried on, Nanée slipped past her and through the door into a front room full of scantily clad women and attentive men. She found the stairway at the back, climbed dirty, deteriorating steps to the fourth floor, and knocked at the second door to the left, twice, then three times, then once.
The door creaked open, a chain affixed to keep anyone from barging in.
“Postmistress?”
“Indeed, yes,” Nanée said. “I’m afraid there will be no news from Paris.”
“No!” the woman wailed, a heart-wrenching sound. A low moan from behind her, a man’s grief. Still, Nanée made herself turn back toward the nasty stairway.
“Please don’t go.” The woman was sobbing now. “Please don’t leave us. We can’t bear this.”
Nanée hesitated at the rattle of the door chain. The poor woman was trying to open the door, so frazzled she didn’t realize she had to close it to get the lock off.
“My husband can’t bear this.” The woman was sobbing even harder, the man keening.
Nanée longed to turn back to comfort her. Whenever she’d delivered bad news before, she’d been able to talk to the recipients, to assure them that it wasn’t that they would never get their papers, never get over the border, but simply that there had been a delay.
Did this mean something more—“No news from Paris”？ Not just that there was no help for these refugees now, but that there never would be? That a parent or a child or some other loved one they’d expected to escape with would have to be left behind? That someone was dead?
Could Nanée really not spend even one moment comforting this poor couple?
But already a nearby door was opening, drawn by the commotion even here in this place where nobody wanted to be seen. And Varian’s voice was in her head, the look on his face when she’d asked him what the message meant. Not one extra moment, Nanée. Not one word more. You deliver the message and you get out.
Thursday, October 31, 1940
CAMP DES MILLES
Edouard pulled a sprig of crabgrass from a crack in the courtyard, the first bit of green he’d eaten in weeks. It was evening, the internees out for a last bit of fresh air, only Max still underground, chipping away at another brick as if art dug out of manufactured stone might save him.
“All indoors!” the bugler called.
As Edouard turned with the others to the black yawn of the factory doors, he caught sight of someone leaving the camp, already through the gate and headed to the train station.
“Danny!” he called out, hopeful for the briefest instant that the retreating back belonged to Danny Bénédite, although what Danny might look like after a year of war was anyone’s guess.
The man didn’t turn. And of course it couldn’t be Danny. Danny had been at Dunkirk. That was the last Edouard had heard of his friend, and it was too much to hope that the man who’d saved him once might save him again.
IN THE WEAK light of the bare overhead bulb, Edouard took off his clothes, folded them neatly despite the dust, and set them in his suitcase. He put on nightclothes, then spread his blanket across the straw. Around him, hundreds of men were doing the same in the dim light. It was hard to say why they clung to this semblance of normalcy, but it paid to remember they were human, as Max had suggested that first night, even after all these months. The alternative was to begin to lose one’s mind.
With a hand on his camera, he wrote his nightly few lines to Luki, words that grew increasingly honest as the likelihood of them ever reaching her dimmed. Other men chatted as they climbed under their blankets in every inch of space around him, but Edouard didn’t want to talk. Seeing the man who probably wasn’t Danny had brought back a trickle of hope—not that anyone might save him, but that someone he’d known somewhere along the way might save Luki. And with that hope came a flood of memories: the length of Elza in a silver dress the first time he saw her, at a speakeasy in Berlin when it was still possible to speak easy there; her delicate eyes looking up at him from behind delicate lace as he promised to keep and hold her, when the possibility of a forever had seemed real; the first touch of his finger to the squawking baby face—not the least bit delicate—of the child Elza named Lucca, after the walled city in Italy where Edouard had taken the first art photograph he’d ever sold. Elza had known him so well. Known how self-centered he was. She’d understood that memorializing his own moment of becoming an artist in Luki’s tiny new soul would bind him to her. But she’d been wrong about what that photograph in Lucca meant. It was something that was hard to see until you had some measure of success, but it wasn’t success that made one an artist. One was an artist. One was successful or not at selling work, but the sale of art no more made a man an artist than it made him a man. An artist simply was.