“Your papers,” she said, holding them out as if they were indisputably real.
He hurried to stand, awkward as he saw her register the carefully made bed in the bare room. He had nothing anymore. Even the clothes he wore belonged to someone else. Rose, the maid, had been charged with burning his own clothes and the vermin that came in with him. She’d done it while he bathed last night. She’d spent a good hour combing lice from his hair too—him holding back the tears that threatened at the simple touch of her fingertips on his scalp. Today, Jacqueline was in town to get him new clothes that would fit. The kindness here was almost unbearable.
He crossed the few steps to Nanée, close enough to accept the papers but no closer, not wanting to offend her as he had somehow in the greenhouse. He ought to explore in his art this desire to touch Nanée’s sweater just to feel its generous softness, his longing to feel the fur of the bracelet he’d once held to Luki’s cheek. But he no longer had even a camera, and he hadn’t taken a photo since that series of the caped woman he’d taken the day before Elza’s death.
Luki. How would he find her?
“Thank you,” he said, taking the papers and setting them on the dresser. When he turned back, the expression on her face so like Elza’s had changed. Had she seen his doubt?
If the papers were forged and she knew it, she would tell him. She wasn’t a fool. If they were forgeries, she would know that he needed to know when they might be used and when they might need to be destroyed. So either they were forged and she didn’t know it, or they were real. But if they were real, how could she have gotten them?
She blinked back some emotion and offered a smile that was all bluster of some sort, hiding something. He wondered briefly where her dog was.
“This too,” she said. “I didn’t want to take it in case you ended up back at the camp. I didn’t imagine I would ever see you again. But your friends assured me you wouldn’t. Wouldn’t end up back in that camp.”
If he was caught, he’d be sent someplace much worse.
She held out the photo of Elza and Luki and him, the little frame he’d set atop his suitcase every night before he wrote all those letters to Luki that he couldn’t send.
He’d thrown his arms around Nanée before he even realized what he was doing, how inappropriate it might seem, how presumptuous. Hell, what if Rose hadn’t gotten all the lice?
“I’m sorry,” he said, reluctantly loosening his hold.
She held tightly, almost as if she needed his touch as much as he needed hers. “It’s okay,” she said, her gentle voice a balm.
He realized he was weeping, then. Weeping at the simple touch of another human, someone not inadvertently bumping into him and apologizing for invading the tiny bit of space that was his. October 14, a year and twenty days ago—that was the last time he’d hugged someone. Luki at the station in Sanary-sur-Mer. A quick goodbye because he had so much packing to do, and he was to join her in Paris the next day.
“It’s okay,” Nanée repeated. “You’re here. We’re going to take care of you.”
Somehow they’d moved to sitting on the edge of the bed, just talking. Then sitting side by side, their backs against the pillows. He wanted to touch her hand or her delicate eyelashes, but he didn’t want to risk offending her in whatever way he had earlier.
The photo of Elza and Luki was on the table beside his bed—had he taken it from her hand? It was the only thing in the room other than the nightclothes André had loaned him, now hanging in the armoire, and the furniture.
“It’s a bit empty, I know,” he said, meaning the room, but seeing as he spoke that what he really meant was his life.
Luki was out there somewhere, though. Max was right. Edouard would know it if she were not. And this photograph belonged to him. A something. A family. A future.
“You . . . Would you like to be able to work?” Nanée asked. “To take photos?” Before he could answer, she rushed on, “You were in Sanary-sur-Mer? Did you leave your cameras with anyone? I could get them for you.”
His cameras. The worn leather strap of his Rollei. The cold snap of its case. The smooth metal of his Speed Graphic’s flash attachment. The thin edge of a filmstrip and the hard knob of his enlarger. The press of an eyepiece to his face.
“I can go to Sanary-sur-Mer,” she offered. “I suppose the place you were staying was re-rented, but maybe—”
“It’s mine,” Edouard said. “The cottage. I bought it for Luki to have a home.”
But was the cottage still his? The Vichy government had likely already confiscated it on the excuse that he was a foreigner, or a Jew, or simply because it was on the Mediterranean and so might pose a security risk, or on no excuse at all—just as they’d taken Edouard himself.
“I don’t need my things,” he said. “I need Luki.”
“I’m sorry. Of course nothing else matters compared to finding Luki.”
He touched a hand to his pocket, to Luki’s letter to him and the ones he’d written but couldn’t send. “My friend Berthe took Luki to Paris,” he said, “but I don’t even know if Berthe is still in France, or if Luki is with her. I can’t write to them myself, not letters I can send. If Berthe is pretending Luki is her child, it would put them in danger.”
“Of course,” Nanée said. “I . . . Why don’t I get some stationery and a pen, and I’ll meet you in the library?”
So simple. So easy. They would compose a letter together, one woman who’d lived in Paris writing another who still did, like old friends. No one would suspect. This was how he could reach out to Berthe without putting Luki and her at risk.
But how would he get Luki out of the occupied zone? The Nazis would shoot them on sight.
One step, he thought. One step, then another, the way he’d survived the camp. Find Luki. Maybe she was already safely out of France.
He followed Nanée out to the library, where André and Jacqueline sat drawing at the little table in the corner. As Nanée went to fetch her stationery, Edouard studied the playing card Jacqueline was creating—bright red and yellow and blue triangles and swirls that might have been painted by Miró.
“It’s Baudelaire,” she explained.
Nanée, rejoining them, said, “And I suppose, André, that octopus is some ‘marvelous’ personage too?”
The tentacles so much like the drawing André had done that night in Paris, André’s octopus body wedged between the head Edouard meant to be Nanée and his own legs she had drawn.
How had André come to be living here in Nanée’s villa? With Jacqueline, but it wouldn’t be the first time a Surrealist indulged in a ménage a trois.