The man looked at her, confused. “That would be too dangerous. I’m too well-known.”
“Pretend you’re Edouard,” she insisted. “I’ll get you out.”
The guard called to Nanée, trying to signal her to bring her quarry along out of the godforsaken place.
“But . . . I’m Max Ernst,” the internee said. “Even that fool of a guard knows exactly who I am.”
Nanée tried to tamp down her astonishment, but she saw in his face that it was too late. Yes, that was the same roman nose, the same deep-set eyes. Max Ernst had been at her apartment on avenue Foch the night of the Surrealist exposition, with Leonora Carrington. Nanée had seen them both at later gatherings. His hair had been white and thin even then, but now it was nearly gone, as was his health.
“That guard isn’t one to bend rules,” he said.
The guard, seeing her look in his direction, motioned her again to move this along. She could defy him; there would likely be no consequence to her. But what about these men? What about Max Ernst?
“If you allow that Edouard isn’t here,” Ernst said, “all of Vichy will be looking for him.”
But what choice was there?
“Make up something,” he said. “Anything. Say you’ll come back for him. If you tell them he’s not here, he’ll be found, and he’ll be sent to Dachau. How far can he have gotten on foot in just a day?”
He took the photograph from the suitcase and thrust it toward her. “Take it,” he said. “Find him. Give it to him, with regards from me.”
“But if he’s brought back, if he’s captured and brought back, he’ll need it more.”
“I tell you, if he’s captured, he will not be brought back here.”
Sunday, November 3, 1940
CAMP DES MILLES
Only when the men were filing out to begin the day’s work, when the courtyard would be full and she wouldn’t be so obviously walking without Edouard across the empty courtyard, did Nanée rejoin the guard.
“Your prisoner?” he demanded.
She fingered the framed photograph in one coat pocket, Edouard’s papers in the other. “At the latrines,” she said. “He has dysentery, apparently such a bad case that he isn’t able to travel.”
The guard eyed her skeptically. She supposed the whole camp had heard by now how she’d spent the night.
“I will take you back to the commandant, then.”
“I’m afraid I have to hurry or I’ll miss my train.”
No, he didn’t believe her. She wasn’t such a good liar as that. She glanced to Max Ernst, who was watching her as they’d planned. She leaned close to the guard and whispered, “It won’t help any guard in this camp for the commandant to think a prisoner he’s just agreed to release has already escaped. I don’t imagine he likes to appear a fool.” She let the thought sit there, register, alarm. “When no one is looking, you’re going to open the gate, and I’m going to walk out.” That way, if she could find Edouard, he would have his papers, and in any event it would seem he had left legally. But she couldn’t be seen leaving alone, without him.
“How am I to arrange for no one to watch a woman like you?” the guard protested.
“I’ve taken care of that.”
He stared at her. He saw his predicament. She might have felt sorry for him, but he was a Frenchman who knew how these men were forced to live, and would do nothing to help them. He would not even enter the space where they slept.
She touched her hand to her lips, the signal to Max, who was now headed out to the yard with the other men.
He nodded. Yes, he’d seen.
“All right, then,” she said to the guard. “You’re going to take me to collect my case from the guardhouse and get me as near as you can to the gate without me seeming to be leaving.”
She took his arm, and he fell in beside her, heading out of the factory building.
“You will not punish the men who are going to save your skin with what they are about to do,” she said. “You will persuade the commandant or the other guards or anyone else you need to persuade that you will deal with them, and if I hear so much as the faintest suggestion that they suffered any ill treatment, I will visit your commandant again. Do you understand?”
His Adams’s apple bobbed in his throat. Desire and fear, they nestle so closely together in a weak man.
They entered the guardhouse, collected her overnight case, and emerged on the other side, nearer the gate. Max, watching from the line of brick-movers, saw her. A moment later he was swinging a fist at the fellow from the mat beside his in that filthy indoor space, just as they’d arranged. Everyone turned toward the fight, the other guards moving to intervene.