Underneath the art tree, an assembled group began laughing together—friendly, appreciative laughter as one of them pointed to a photograph high in the tree: Nanée’s Beautiful Neck.
“This was your idea?” he said to Danny. “To hang my photos?”
Danny grinned, guilty. “But I had a coconspirator.”
They looked to Nanée, with Luki, who was telling her, “Papa saves my memories for me.”
“Saves your memories,” Nanée repeated. “Oh, that’s such a beautiful way to put it, Luki.”
He thought of Nanée in the bathwater, her head tilted back against the zinc of the tub. He thought of her naked in the tub that second time, as they made love. It was clear from her soft expression under the charming bowler hat she wore today that Luki had succeeded where he hadn’t yet: Luki had won Nanée’s heart.
“When I forget Mutti’s voice singing to me, I look at my photograph.” Luki pulled out from a pocket the photograph of Elza and Luki and him he’d tucked into her kangaroo’s pouch just before he put her on that train in Sanary-sur-Mer. “Then I can hear her again.”
And Edouard could hear Elza now too, as he looked at the photo. Elza singing to Luki. This child who was so much wiser sometimes than he was. All the photographs he hadn’t taken these last years since Elza died, they were moments lost, moments that would be ignored, forgotten, with no mirror held up to reality, no hammer shaping it.
He looked back to the solarized self-portrait, himself as a young man. Accentuated in the high contrast: a hint of wariness underlying his young man’s confidence in what he could and ought to do, how he would change the world. Something in the sideways cut of his eye toward the lens, the straight set of his mouth. He’d been afraid of what he was doing even then. He’d been afraid so many times, to be taking photos of Hitler’s fanatics that would blow back on him if the world turned out to be exactly as it now was. It had never occurred to him, though, not to take the shots he needed to take.
Was he afraid to see whatever his lens might reveal inside himself? Why hadn’t he taken a photograph since Elza died, not even at Camp des Milles? Why wasn’t he taking photographs now, capturing this moment of what it meant to be trapped in a world that didn’t want you but would not allow you to escape? All these people living together, some desperate for a visa, others desperate to help them find a way out. André going off every morning to the table in the library or to his greenhouse, to write. Jacqueline painting. Artists gathering every Sunday to celebrate what little they had. Even in the darkest times at Camp des Milles, the men kept making art and music, literature, theater. It was how they stayed alive. How they helped the world right itself.
Nanée was right: if his camera didn’t relieve him of the guilt of being a watcher—an audience for those who, like Hitler, could not bear to be thought of as nobody—it did at least help expose them. Them and his own ugliness. The camera did record that which we would never recognize in our hearts and yet can see in the faces and postures of others. And wasn’t that how we started to heal the world, by digging through our own faults to find the best in ourselves?
He’d told Nanée that he couldn’t turn the camera on the watchers now, he needed to turn it on himself, but in that first self-portrait a decade ago he’d turned his camera to the watchers, only to see his own face staring back at him. Art was a hammer, after all. One to shatter his own hard shell, his own untrue vision of himself.
Sunday, December 1, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
The only lights on in the whole big place were here, in Nanée’s own bedroom, the rest of the chateau already turned in. She sat in her terry-cloth robe at the edge of her bed, with her hair up, her back to Edouard and his new Leica on his tripod by the door.
A shiver ran through her, although the room was warm enough.
“Can I ask you something first?” she whispered.
“Of course. What is it?”
“The photo, the one—” The one I think of as Ghost Wife, she’d nearly said. One lover photographing another. Edouard might have had affairs when he was married, of course; the Surrealists were quite free about sex. But she didn’t like to imagine him as a man who could profess to love one woman while tasting another, not in any event, and certainly not when one of the women was the one in that photograph.
“Nude, Bending,” she managed, but then found she couldn’t finish the question. She didn’t want to know who Caped Woman was; she wanted to be able to imagine herself in that photograph. But Nude, Bending?