As Edouard turned with the others to the black yawn of the factory doors, he caught sight of someone leaving the camp, already through the gate and headed to the train station.
“Danny!” he called out, hopeful for the briefest instant that the retreating back belonged to Danny Bénédite, although what Danny might look like after a year of war was anyone’s guess.
The man didn’t turn. And of course it couldn’t be Danny. Danny had been at Dunkirk. That was the last Edouard had heard of his friend, and it was too much to hope that the man who’d saved him once might save him again.
IN THE WEAK light of the bare overhead bulb, Edouard took off his clothes, folded them neatly despite the dust, and set them in his suitcase. He put on nightclothes, then spread his blanket across the straw. Around him, hundreds of men were doing the same in the dim light. It was hard to say why they clung to this semblance of normalcy, but it paid to remember they were human, as Max had suggested that first night, even after all these months. The alternative was to begin to lose one’s mind.
With a hand on his camera, he wrote his nightly few lines to Luki, words that grew increasingly honest as the likelihood of them ever reaching her dimmed. Other men chatted as they climbed under their blankets in every inch of space around him, but Edouard didn’t want to talk. Seeing the man who probably wasn’t Danny had brought back a trickle of hope—not that anyone might save him, but that someone he’d known somewhere along the way might save Luki. And with that hope came a flood of memories: the length of Elza in a silver dress the first time he saw her, at a speakeasy in Berlin when it was still possible to speak easy there; her delicate eyes looking up at him from behind delicate lace as he promised to keep and hold her, when the possibility of a forever had seemed real; the first touch of his finger to the squawking baby face—not the least bit delicate—of the child Elza named Lucca, after the walled city in Italy where Edouard had taken the first art photograph he’d ever sold. Elza had known him so well. Known how self-centered he was. She’d understood that memorializing his own moment of becoming an artist in Luki’s tiny new soul would bind him to her. But she’d been wrong about what that photograph in Lucca meant. It was something that was hard to see until you had some measure of success, but it wasn’t success that made one an artist. One was an artist. One was successful or not at selling work, but the sale of art no more made a man an artist than it made him a man. An artist simply was.
The men here who tromped down the steps to the bare, cold kilns in the basement each evening to paint or carve, to sing or play music, to rehearse, to write words or musical notes—the fact that Edouard himself had once made a living from his art didn’t make him any more an artist than they were. It was the need to create art that made a person an artist. The need and the doing, the creating with whatever you had. And they were making art while his camera sat idle, the film he’d brought still unexposed. Yes, he dabbled in other mediums. He helped Max with a fresco. He chipped at a brick. But he did not turn to the photographs that were his own art.
“Lights out!” the bugler’s voice called up the stairs, he too an artist. Max had sketched him playing his bugle in the basement just hours earlier. Not the hard notes of reveille he played each morning, but a jazz piece so soft and sorrowful that Edouard might not have believed it came from a bugle if he hadn’t heard it himself.
One bare overhead bulb blinked out. Then another. The last of the three glowed dimly over Edouard.
“I said lights out!” the bugler called, not angry, but with his own ass on the line and nothing to be gained in keeping the light on like there was in playing illegal jazz.
Max, on the other side of Edouard’s suitcase, said, “It’s your turn.”
Edouard stood and pulled the string to turn off the light.
Someone closed a window across the room.
“Do leave it open, will you?” Max called out. “The stench over here is unbearable.”
“We freeze with it open at night,” someone near the window answered.
Voices from all around the room rose up in favor of or against the open window.
Max lowered his voice and said to Edouard, “Word is someone came today. Someone looking for artists and intellectuals Hitler means to silence. Specifically, you.”
Edouard’s heart crowded his throat, as it had that first moment he’d held Luki, as Elza had made him repeat her words, made him agree, We’ll call her Luki.
“Any word whether it was friend or foe?” he managed.
Max’s voice floated almost silently into the darkness. “If you have friends in this neighborhood, I should love to know them.”
“But the Gestapo don’t operate here, not in Vichy.”
“Oh, Edouard, you are not so young as to be so naive.”
Edouard lay back on his makeshift bed, the hope seeping out of his tired bones. It was a long time since he’d felt young.
“There’s a group of them visiting camps to identify those of us they mean to deport to Germany,” Max said.
Edouard closed his eyes, again considering how he might escape. He couldn’t afford the risk. No one who escaped got any distance before they were caught, much less all the way to Paris, where he might or might not find Luki. But with the Gestapo coming for him, what choice did he have?
Friday, November 1, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL