“But Nanée, beauty is convulsive,” André said. “A disorienting and shocking disordering of the senses.”
“I’m not sure I care to have whatever beauty I might have disordered,” Nanée said, “much less shockingly.” Joking, and yet not. Her hand still at her throat.
Veiled-erotic. André’s term. Did André use it to seduce women? Had he seduced Nanée? Was he seducing her now, in front of his own wife?
André still watching.
“Close your eyes,” Edouard said.
“Close my eyes?”
“Imagine you’re that black swan.”
“What black swan?” André asked.
Damn him for crowding in, making the impossible more so.
“Close your eyes and lean your head back. Stretch your neck as long as the swan’s, and don’t think about anything but that beautiful bird.”
She smiled uncomfortably, but she closed her eyes as if to test whether she could trust him. She slowly tipped back her head.
“Your hand,” he said.
She hesitated, then lowered her hand so that the long stretch of her neck was exposed. Vulnerable. Veiled-erotic.
He wanted to reach over and set a fingertip at the dip between her collarbones.
“I do hope you’re not the throat-slitting type,” she said.
Everyone around the table laughed, a welcome break in the tension.
“But of course we know he is,” André said.
“He didn’t slit her neck that night,” Danny said. “He plunged a fountain pen into it.”
“A little more, Nanée,” Edouard said. “A little farther back. Now stretch your chin up toward the stars.”
Her chest arched with the motion, the way Elza’s used to arch when they made love. Go ahead, Edouard. I want you to, Elza had said that first time, on a blanket on the ground in broad daylight. They had gone on a picnic. The lovemaking had surprised them both, and yet it hadn’t really.
Elza had been dead so many years now. Elza had died only yesterday.
“Right there,” he said. “Hold that.”
He pressed the shutter release.
“All right,” he said. “Thank you.”
Nanée sat forward as if brought back from a dream.
“That’s all? Just one?” she asked, puzzled, but also perhaps relieved. She put her hand to her throat again, gently, as if an explanation might be felt in the touch of her neck.
“Yes,” he said.
“Just me, leaning my head back?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No,” he said. “Neither do I.”
He held her gaze, remembering her beautiful neck tilted back against the zinc tub, wet from the bath. He’d wanted to touch it then too. He wondered if she would think the photograph he’d just taken obscene. He wondered if he would show it to her, or to anyone. He couldn’t say why he’d needed to take it, why he imagined taking this very shot might free him.
“It’s a way to see myself,” he said.
He stood then, and took his camera, and he backed away. He knew the whole long table was watching him, but it didn’t matter, the others didn’t matter.
Nanée didn’t say a word, either. She just watched him go. She wasn’t a watcher, but she was watching him.
Monday, November 25, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Madame Nouget was measuring the day’s bread into equal portions and the children were just in from milking the cow, with Dagobert tagging along, when Edouard entered the kitchen. He was headed for the bathroom darkroom, but Peterkin’s face lit up the way it did, and the boy insisted he would share his cup of warm milk with Edouard. T split her son’s milk in two portions, and Peterkin brought the second cup to him, carrying it so carefully.
“It will make your belly warm for the day,” the boy said.
They were all hungry, always. This was a way T cared for her son, feeding him something warm and soothing, loving, as the day started and again before she tucked him into bed. Edouard didn’t want to deprive the boy of a drop, but he imagined Luki handing this cup to him, how much it pleased both of these children to share what they had.
“Thank you,” he said, relieved to see as he accepted the cup that T was surreptitiously topping up Peterkin’s own cup from the milk set aside for the neighbors.
He took the first warming sip. It was morning. The day barely begun. Another morning in which he had awoken not on straw in a room crowded with a thousand men snoring and coughing and groaning, the smell of sweat and vomit and excrement, but in a bed in a room filled with sunshine, a view of open countryside and mountains, the smell of coffee, albeit ersatz.