He wasn’t a fool, but the train would be sealed until it crossed the border, and once he was in Spain there would be no coming back, no way for him to reach Luki in France.
He’d been able to write her once a week and receive letters from Berthe and her before the Germans took Paris, but he hadn’t had word of Luki since the letter she’d written by herself, which he kept in his pocket. He didn’t know whether Berthe and her daughter had fled Paris, whether they’d taken Luki with them, or where they might be if they had. Luki living with Berthe under Nazi rule—the thought was terrifying. But so was the idea that Luki might be anywhere in France or even in the world without him knowing where.
He didn’t wait for the train to leave. He didn’t allow time for his own fear to tempt him to change his mind. He returned to his straw mat under the bare bulb and opened his suitcase. He took his Leica out and set it aside. He took the top sheet from the box of stationery and, with one hand on his camera, began to write in the tiniest script he could manage, My Luki . . . Another letter he couldn’t send.
There would be a way out. There had to be. He wasn’t so naive as to believe Goruchon would open the gates and allow Edouard and the others to walk out. The camp commander was taking a huge risk even with the train, but an entire locked train might be explained as prisoners in transit lost in the chaos of the German invasion. Anything more would seal Goruchon’s fate when the Germans overran Aix-en-Provence. But in the chaos of the invasion, there would be a way out, just as there had been a way out of Germany.
Except there hadn’t been a way out for Elza.
Saturday, June 22, 1940
BIARRITZ
Nanée sat at the American consulate in Biarritz for the fourth time in as many days, looking for permission to take Peterkin to the United States. Despite the connections of the vile woman they’d ridden with and her remarkable knack for backing up and speeding around roadblocks she couldn’t talk her way through, there’d been no getting into Bordeaux. Nanée and Peterkin had ridden with her to a chateau outside Biarritz, where Nanée spent a single long night being appalled at the certainty of the woman’s fascist friends that Hitler would bring order to France. The next morning she took rooms in a hotel in town where she’d stayed so often that the concierge remembered her. She hired a girl to watch Peterkin, bought a suit from her favorite boutique—regretting she’d left the Robert Piguet in which she could convince anyone of anything in the trailer back in La Bourboule—and set about trying to talk her way around bureaucrats.
“As my colleagues have already told you,” the latest bureaucrat in the phalanx was now saying, “you may of course leave any time you would like. You have your American passport. But we cannot allow you to take this French child without his passport and a valid French exit visa.”
Nanée wondered if there wasn’t some way to back up from this beast of a bureaucrat and race around him.
“By the time I get permission from the French,” she insisted, “the armistice will be signed. Any permission the French granted me today might be no good tomorrow.”
The nasty little functionary responded, “Then you might ask yourself why you continue to sit here rather than hurrying on to inquire with the French authorities.”
AT THE FRENCH prefecture of Bayonne, Nanée presented her single passport as if it were all that could possibly be needed for her to leave for America with a young French boy. The man across the desk examined it like a jeweler looking through a loupe at a fake.
“Of course you may have an exit visa anytime,” he said.
Nanée gave him Peterkin’s name with her own.
“I’ll need to see the boy’s passport,” he said.
How was it that now, when they ought to be a mess of panic, the French authorities were showing a remarkable ability to stick to no as the answer to anything? But she couldn’t risk offending this lout’s fragile French pride.
She explained that Peterkin had been separated from his mother in the flight from Paris—a story she could tell with the confidence of a woman speaking the truth.
He would have none of it.
“Peter has an aunt in Maine who will take him in,” she explained. “Surely you don’t want to keep an American boy in France during a war.”
“But the war is over, mademoiselle.”
Nanée lowered her gaze, as ashamed as she could manage. She whispered, “The truth, sir, is that he’s my son.”
He eyed her ringless fingers.
“Only mine. The father has no idea of him.” Avoiding the word illegitimate, which would leave him thinking less of her. Less sympathetic. Less willing to help.
“You will have to prove that also, mademoiselle.” The last word spit out in distaste.
For heaven’s sake, was she really stuck with the only absolute prude of a man in all of France?
She didn’t wait for him to explain what she already knew—that even illegitimate children were issued birth certificates.
BACK AT THE hotel, she sent a telegram she hoped would reach T. She had failed. They would have to meet up somewhere so she could return Peterkin to his mother, although she had no idea how she would manage that. The trains weren’t running, and she had no car, nor any certainty that she would be allowed to take Peterkin anywhere.
With nothing left to do, she woke the next morning, checked for the answer from T she knew could not possibly have arrived yet, and took Peterkin to stroll on the promenade and dig in the sand.
A week later, with no word back yet from T, a low rumble woke Nanée—a sound she knew without ever having heard it. She jumped out of bed, pulled on slacks, scooped up the sleeping Peterkin, and ran down to a lobby lit by a single lamp at an empty reception desk.
From here, the stomp stomp stomp of boots on pavement was deafening, and still the boy slept.
She joined the frumpy hotel clerk in the doorway, her back to the rooms where she had, in years past, danced and drunk champagne and flirted with men in tuxedos, with no idea that that time might ever end.
She held Peterkin more closely as she watched an endless stream of vehicles and tanks and German guns pass on the road, German soldiers marching in orderly formation, tall and fair, clean-shaven, and perhaps handsome if you didn’t know they were horrid. She breathed in the slightly sour smell of Peterkin’s hair and his scalp, this sleeping child who was not her own, who would never be. She nuzzled her face to his and whispered—to him or to herself or to whatever god might be watching over them, although that was hard to imagine—“And so they have arrived.”
Part II
TWO MONTHS LATER
September 1940
The Villa Air-Bel came into our lives, first as a house out of town for the Bénédites and myself . . . The Surrealists who found themselves in the region soon flocked around Breton for afternoons and evenings of talk and games . . . Strangely enough, we rarely referred to it as Air-Bel, or the villa, but called it the chateau, which was a gross exaggeration and had no business on the lips of such a democratic left-wing bunch, anyway.
—Mary Jayne Gold, Crossroads Marseille, 1940