The men here who tromped down the steps to the bare, cold kilns in the basement each evening to paint or carve, to sing or play music, to rehearse, to write words or musical notes—the fact that Edouard himself had once made a living from his art didn’t make him any more an artist than they were. It was the need to create art that made a person an artist. The need and the doing, the creating with whatever you had. And they were making art while his camera sat idle, the film he’d brought still unexposed. Yes, he dabbled in other mediums. He helped Max with a fresco. He chipped at a brick. But he did not turn to the photographs that were his own art.
“Lights out!” the bugler’s voice called up the stairs, he too an artist. Max had sketched him playing his bugle in the basement just hours earlier. Not the hard notes of reveille he played each morning, but a jazz piece so soft and sorrowful that Edouard might not have believed it came from a bugle if he hadn’t heard it himself.
One bare overhead bulb blinked out. Then another. The last of the three glowed dimly over Edouard.
“I said lights out!” the bugler called, not angry, but with his own ass on the line and nothing to be gained in keeping the light on like there was in playing illegal jazz.
Max, on the other side of Edouard’s suitcase, said, “It’s your turn.”
Edouard stood and pulled the string to turn off the light.
Someone closed a window across the room.
“Do leave it open, will you?” Max called out. “The stench over here is unbearable.”
“We freeze with it open at night,” someone near the window answered.
Voices from all around the room rose up in favor of or against the open window.
Max lowered his voice and said to Edouard, “Word is someone came today. Someone looking for artists and intellectuals Hitler means to silence. Specifically, you.”
Edouard’s heart crowded his throat, as it had that first moment he’d held Luki, as Elza had made him repeat her words, made him agree, We’ll call her Luki.
“Any word whether it was friend or foe?” he managed.
Max’s voice floated almost silently into the darkness. “If you have friends in this neighborhood, I should love to know them.”
“But the Gestapo don’t operate here, not in Vichy.”
“Oh, Edouard, you are not so young as to be so naive.”
Edouard lay back on his makeshift bed, the hope seeping out of his tired bones. It was a long time since he’d felt young.
“There’s a group of them visiting camps to identify those of us they mean to deport to Germany,” Max said.
Edouard closed his eyes, again considering how he might escape. He couldn’t afford the risk. No one who escaped got any distance before they were caught, much less all the way to Paris, where he might or might not find Luki. But with the Gestapo coming for him, what choice did he have?
Friday, November 1, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Nanée was surprised how quickly they settled into life together at Villa Air-Bel. Each morning, Madame Nouget or T or one of the others took the children to milk the clandestine cow they had acquired, named Madame LaVache-à-Lait for the gallons she produced daily. T—and after the Bretons arrived, Jacqueline too—gave their children big cups of milk each morning, still warm from the cow. They set aside another cup for each child for bedtime, so that even with the rationing—a half pound of pasta and six ounces of rice per person per month, ten ounces of meat and four of fats and cheese per week, and eight ounces of bread per day, all tallied on cheap paper ruled liked bingo cards—they wouldn’t go to sleep hungry. They shared the rest of the milk with the neighborhood mothers who showed up each morning with jugs in hand, generosity born of concern for the children, but also some small insurance against anyone reporting the illegal cow.
Most mornings, Nanée and T and Miriam lingered together out on the belvedere over cups of ersatz, a nice-sounding word to describe a pale liquid brewed from acorns and twigs or, if you were lucky, roasted chicory root or barley made barely tolerable by a little grape-juice sweetener. Rose cleaned up, and Madame Nouget did the shopping, an hours-long chore given the scarcities resulting from so much of France’s food going to the German war effort. A Spanish girl named Maria cared for Peterkin and for Aube Breton while André wrote in one of the greenhouses or the library, the only room in which they kept the fire lit all day, and Jacqueline laid out her paints, and everyone else took the trolley into the CAS office. Varian had taken so quickly to Danny that he’d already made him his chef de cabinet, in charge of the office, and the key person for locating refugees. T, with her flawless French and English, worked with them too.