“I’m sorry,” he said. “Of course you’re exhausted. I ought to let you go to bed.”
“I’m not tired,” she said as unconvincingly as Luki had when he’d tucked her in.
He smiled a little, his heart light for the first time in forever. “Thank you for bringing Luki back to me.”
She looked up at him. I missed you, he thought. He wanted to kiss her, but not here, not in front of everyone. Bing Crosby sang on the radio about wanting to be with someone as the years come and go.
Edouard whispered to Nanée, “Do you ever think about going home?”
She set her head on his shoulder and swayed with him to the music coming all the way from Boston, all the way from the far side of the world.
Part IV
DECEMBER 1940
The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.
—Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
Sunday, December 1, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
It was Sunday. Salon day. Voices drifted up from the belvedere, the guests arriving, with Edouard and Luki not even quite dressed. They’d slept through breakfast, but Madame Nouget brought them a tray with bowls of thin porridge, ersatz coffee for him, and milk for Luki—which she was quite devastated not to have coaxed from the cow herself. He pulled on his jacket and tie, then fixed a ribbon Aube had given Luki into hair lighter than her mother’s, but with the same luster and wave. She smiled her gummy smile, one of her bottom front teeth loose. She could read now too. She could write. Already, he had missed so much.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
“You’re handsome, Papa.”
He hugged her. Truly, he could not get enough of hugging her. He hadn’t realized how much she completed him until she’d arrived back in his physical life.
Outside, Edouard introduced Luki to everyone.
“Marcel, this is Luki. Luki, this is Monsieur Duchamp, who paints and sculpts, and is awfully good at chess.” Duchamp had routed Edouard whenever they played at Camp des Milles, on that board scratched into the floor.
“I can beat my papa at checkers,” Luki said.
Duchamp said, “That does not surprise me!”
Edouard was particularly moved to introduce Luki to Max, who was talking with Nanée but knelt down to Luki’s level and told her he felt like he knew her. “From all the stories your papa told me about you when we were at Camp des Milles.”
“You were with Papa?”
Max said, “I slept right next to him, and I will tell you I watched him say he loved you to your picture every night, and kiss you every morning. He missed you so much.”
Luki was silent for a long moment, her hand warm and small in Edouard’s. “He slept next to me all night long last night,” she said.
Max smiled. “I hope he didn’t snore so loudly that he woke you!”
Luki giggled. “Papa doesn’t snore!”
“Doesn’t he?” Max said. “Ah well, it was hard to say who was making what noise back then. We did some paintings together, your papa and I did. Did you know that?”
“Papa does the best pictures.”
“Yes, he tells me that too.”
“Look, a horse,” she said.
“Is there a horse here as well as a cow?” Max asked.
“In the tree!” She pointed to one of the plane trees flanking the belvedere.
Edouard’s photograph of that horse on that empty merry-go-round, distorted and out of kilter—who’d hung it there? His own anger from that morning in Berlin was reflected in the image, the manufactured horse rearing back from the photo’s bottom left corner, as if as startled by the photographer as Edouard had been when Luki was refused a seat on the empty ride. Elza hated this photo, hated the memory of her daughter being denied on account of being something she wasn’t, really. But Edouard felt the photograph said something people ought to know. That was why he’d given it to André, who’d made it a centerpiece of the Surrealist exposition in Paris.
It wasn’t the only one of his photos displayed in the art trees. There was his solarized self-portrait, unframed but nestled in the branches. And The Caped Woman, Br?laged—Edouard couldn’t see it now without thinking of Nanée’s words. I think if I saw her in other photos, it would spoil this quality, this light on myself. Her pride at her anger, like his own, he’d thought. She hadn’t answered his question about what of herself she saw in it, just as she never answered his question last night about whether she might consider going home. She was good at remaining silent when asked a question she didn’t want to answer, when her answer would bring a hurt she didn’t want to bring.