“Wherever did you find him?” he asked. “We looked everywhere.”
“He was in a coat pocket,” she said.
He wrapped his fingers around this familiar old softness, glad of the dark night, glad Nanée could not see the tears pooling in his eyes as he remembered the frantic search the morning Luki left for Paris, his own promise that he would find Joey. His promise to Elza’s memory that he would keep Luki with him, always.
“We’re going to find Luki too, wherever she is,” Nanée said. “We’re going to find her and we’re going to get her here, to Villa Air-Bel.”
He closed his eyes to the dormant garden and the still pond, the dark sky, the shadow of this woman who had no idea what she was saying. They couldn’t even locate Luki, much less get her safely out of France. He hadn’t been able to protect Elza, and he couldn’t protect her daughter now.
An owl hooted in one of the plane trees, startling them both.
Nanée said, “I’ll go to the American consulate tomorrow morning and . . . and see if I can arrange documents for Luki. And I have an American passport. I can go anywhere I want.”
He hesitated. It was too dangerous for a man to smuggle someone out of the occupied zone, much less a woman.
“It’s too big a risk for you,” he said.
“Pffft,” she said. “I risked my life once for a bird, you know. A beautiful black swan. I nearly crashed my plane into the frozen lake at Bois de Bologne avoiding him.”
“A black swan,” he repeated, remembering a better time with Elza, when they were in Paris just after they were married. Elza in a rented rowboat on that same lake, marveling at a black swan as it swooped in and settled on the water. “What an extraordinary creature,” she’d said, and they sat for the longest time watching before he lifted his camera and photographed the bird. The image, though, was nothing of what he’d hoped it would be. He couldn’t say why, except perhaps that the magic of the moment was not in the swan itself but in Elza’s awe, which was nowhere in the frame.
“They’re extraordinary creatures,” he said, thinking he would get Luki himself, he would keep his promise to Elza.
“I couldn’t bear to hit him,” Nanée said quietly, a confession. Then more surely, “I was flying in his world. It was my duty to get out of his way.”
BACK IN HIS room, Edouard found the bag of his gear at the end of his bed, where Nanée told him she’d put it. He carefully removed the things from the top, to uncover the enlarger. He set it on the floor, plugged it in, and turned it on. Yes, the negative was still in the carrier. Elza, bending forward, appeared in outline on the bare easel.
Why hadn’t he stopped taking photographs when it might have saved them from everything? Why hadn’t he stopped even after that first awful violation, which was nothing about Elza and everything about his work? The weeks turned into months, and Edouard spent more and more time away from her, working. Away all night because that was when the worst of the Nazi horror was done, he told himself. Neither of them said another word about what had happened after that first conversation. They were trying to ignore it, or he was. Trying to pretend it didn’t exist.
That morning, the morning he took this photo, he’d arrived back home to Elza at the door. “Come with me,” she said, the tone of her voice warning him not to defy her. She took his hand and she took him, still with his camera, into their bedroom. She pulled the drapes against the dim light of dawn, and she stood in front of him and began to remove her clothes.
“If you can’t look at me, they will have taken everything that matters,” she said. “You don’t even have to touch me. Look at me through your camera. That will be easier for us both.”
And he tried. He focused on her standing there, naked before him. But he could not take the shot, could not forgive himself. She was the one to bend forward. In despair? In grief? He couldn’t say, but a new fear washed over him, not for what had happened, but for how it might destroy them. She was right. She had been right from the first, when she’d begged him not to go to the authorities. No one even bothered to deny what had happened. They said Elza was “entertaining” the Nazis who had pulled her off her bicycle in the Tiergarten, and they couldn’t help the fact that his wife preferred other men. They made sure he understood the details she had tried to spare him. Five men. On the route she rode home after she tutored each Tuesday night. They called her “Frau Moss.”