“We could threaten to go to the press if they don’t release him,” Danny said now. “It worked for Lion Feuchtwanger.”
“Even my mother, who rarely reads, has read The Oppermans,” Nanée said. “Edouard Moss is not Lion Feuchtwanger.”
Madame LaVache-à-Lait mooed somewhere in the distance. They were trying to teach her not to, since she was illegal, but it turned out she was even less compliant than Dagobert.
“We could get a group of artists to raise his visibility, like the French PEN club did for Walter Mehring,” Danny suggested. PEN had written so many letters insisting on the release of Mehring that the writer had been freed.
“That was before Vichy and surrender on demand,” Nanée said. “There aren’t too many people more likely to be on a Gestapo list than Edouard Moss.” Remembering again the individual hatreds Moss photographed that somehow struck more absolute terror in any decent heart than shots of vast Nazi crowds or military parades: the girl saluting Hitler; the man having his nose measured; the son cutting his Orthodox father’s beard. Such ordinary people. They might be you.
With the mobile affixed to the branch, she again descended the ladder, chose another canvas from the stack leaning against the trunk, and climbed the ladder again.
“So listen,” she said as she handed the canvas up to him.
Danny ignored the canvas. “You don’t really imagine an internment camp commander will just hand over his prisoners to you.”
“Not ‘prisoners.’ Just one.” She supposed it was Jacqueline’s little joke about being a fine whore that had put the idea in her head. “Varian won’t like it, though,” she said, already decided and wishing she could hurry down to the Marseille train station that very minute. But the effort would have to be more carefully planned.
“There is no chance, Nanée, that Varian would allow you to . . . to . . .”
“I believe the phrase you’re seeking is ‘jeopardize my virtue for the sake of nothing more than a man’s life.’” She smiled and again offered the canvas.
He only stared at her through his round lenses. She could risk her life delivering messages, and that was fine with him, but her offering a man a little insincere affection made him uncomfortable?
“Perhaps it’s prescient that I’m known as ‘The Postmistress,’” she said. “I’ll deliver the males.” She smiled wryly. “But really, Danny, I promise you that whatever virtue I have intact will remain so.”
She reached for a lower branch, affixed the twine herself, and eased the painting into place. Virtue was so relative, even in good times, and in any event not something she’d highly valued since she escaped that big house back in Evanston.
Friday, November 1, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Nanée stood under the plane trees on the belvedere, watching André greet each of the forty-some writers and artists arriving on the tram for this first salon as if the chateau were his. Many were on Varian’s list for American visas, including plenty who were radical in one way or another, while others, like André himself, were excluded as too left-wing to be palatable for Americans. “Villa Espère-Visa,” the Russian writer Victor Serge dubbed Villa Air-Bel that afternoon. Hoping for a Visa.
André began the salon with a reading by Benjamin Péret of a scatological poem, which was met with raucous whistles and cheers. He then led them in playing the word-game version of Exquisite Corpse, blindly stringing together adjective, subject, verb, adjective, and object to form crazy sentences. A sentence years before had given the game its name: Le cadavre | exquise | boira | le vin | nouveau. The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine. When Nanée was in the subject spot, the word kangaroo came to mind. Knobby knees. Fig leaf. She didn’t use any of them, choosing instead train and station, hurry, and imprisoned, thinking she ought to be leaving already to try to free Edouard Moss from Camp des Milles. But the game was unfailingly funny, and she too laughed. André would tack up anything that particularly pleased him on the tree trunk behind him. “So I’ll be able to find it later,” he said as he poured wine all around again.
They switched to the drawing version of Exquisite Corpse, creating bizarre composite characters—drawing but also using scissors and paste, fallen leaves and tree bark and twigs, a torn wine label, even scraps of food they incorporated into collages. One of the creatures looked so like a Surrealist version of the Vichy prime minister Philippe Pétain that André labeled it “The Prime Collaborationist” and tacked it up on his tree.