It wasn’t a question, but still Edouard thought: true. So much of what he created came from violence, but the closer violence came to him personally, the less fascinating it became. He’d felt that even before Elza was murdered. He saw even then what a voyeur he was. And now? Now violence was there in the mirror every time he looked. Given a short moment with the men who had killed Elza and her sister, he would kill them with his bare hands and be glad of the chance. Up close so he could see their faces as the life bled out of them.
What had fascinated him when he saw it in others, he now abhorred in himself. And yet there it was. There it always had been. Evil in himself. Evil in everyone. In the beautiful Jacqueline and the more beautiful Nanée. In Varian, who imagined he was here only to do good. In Danny and T, who wanted to help Varian. In Elza. Yes, even in Elza. Not in Luki, though, he didn’t think. Not in Luki, he hoped.
Sunday, November 10, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
It was there on the table in the entry hall, where the Chagall painting of a flying cow had been until just that morning. An envelope. Edouard was descending the stairs, headed outside to help set up for a Sunday Armistice Day salon, marking the anniversary the next day of the cease-fire on the Western Front at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and with it France’s victory over Germany in the Great War—which was of course no longer allowed to be celebrated, now that Germany ruled France. But they were having a salon, at which they were going to show the flying cow. Varian was trying to persuade Marc Chagall to leave France before the chaos of the Marseille government gave way to enforcement of the new Alibert anti-Jewish laws against French citizens as well as foreigners, but Chagall wouldn’t believe his own government would turn against him, and he feared Varian’s illegal routes out of France. He preferred, he said, “to stay safely on the right side of the law,” but he’d given Varian the cow painting, and Nanée and Danny hung it from one of the plane trees that morning in preparation for the salon.
Edouard was whistling, actually, looking forward to seeing Max Ernst, who was on Varian’s list and had, with some help from Vice Consul Bingham, been released from Camp des Milles. But he stopped abruptly when he saw the letter Nanée had written to Berthe in search of Luki, marked “addressee not found.”
Wednesday, November 13, 1940
SANARY-SUR-MER
As the little wreck of a bus Nanée took from the Sanary-sur-Mer train station juddered away again, she set off on foot with an empty canvas bag big enough for her to sleep in, although that wasn’t the plan. How dismayed her mother would be to see her traveling in such common ways, but they needed to husband gas for escaping refugees, and this was something she could do for Edouard—get his cameras, to give him something to do while he waited for responses from her friends she’d written in Paris after the letter to his friend Berthe was returned. Damn these little French coast towns and their nothing roads, though. She stumbled about and retraced her path until she found the yellow cottage with the sign on the gate, ATELIER-SUR-MER, and the key under the pot of dead plants by the door.
Inside, the place was so completely abandoned that it was possible to imagine Edouard’s whole life might be shrouded in cobwebs and dust. A loaf of bread sat moldy on the round wicker table in the main room, yet hard as the clay tile floor. Badly fitted French windows were left unshuttered, the sun just now peeking through heavy clouds beyond the dirty glass. It was colder inside than out, where the sea, neither near nor far, rolled in darkly. A thought as dark as the water washed over Nanée, that she might find here the bones of Edouard’s child.
She gathered from the front closet a Rolleiflex box camera, a larger Speed Graphic, a flash, a tripod, canisters of film that might be photographs he’d not yet developed, and assorted odds and ends the purposes of which she couldn’t imagine. She loaded them into the bag. The gray felt fedora Edouard wore the night she first met him in Paris was on the shelf too, but there would be no room for a hat in the bag.
She pushed through the door into his bedroom, where his life was already in crates packed before his arrest. A life could not be boxed up in an hour unless one knew it had to be. She blew the dust from the nearest crate and looked through it. An address book. A few letters. Unframed photographs Edouard had told her to leave behind. “I don’t need any of the prints,” he’d said. “The negatives are together in a single crate. With the negatives, I can make new prints.”
And there they were, underneath a stack of prints: sheaths of 4-by-5s and 35 mm strips, his work in miniature, sometimes separated by paper marked with rectangles and dotted lines, arrows and squiggles and letters that didn’t make words.