It was there on the table in the entry hall, where the Chagall painting of a flying cow had been until just that morning. An envelope. Edouard was descending the stairs, headed outside to help set up for a Sunday Armistice Day salon, marking the anniversary the next day of the cease-fire on the Western Front at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and with it France’s victory over Germany in the Great War—which was of course no longer allowed to be celebrated, now that Germany ruled France. But they were having a salon, at which they were going to show the flying cow. Varian was trying to persuade Marc Chagall to leave France before the chaos of the Marseille government gave way to enforcement of the new Alibert anti-Jewish laws against French citizens as well as foreigners, but Chagall wouldn’t believe his own government would turn against him, and he feared Varian’s illegal routes out of France. He preferred, he said, “to stay safely on the right side of the law,” but he’d given Varian the cow painting, and Nanée and Danny hung it from one of the plane trees that morning in preparation for the salon.
Edouard was whistling, actually, looking forward to seeing Max Ernst, who was on Varian’s list and had, with some help from Vice Consul Bingham, been released from Camp des Milles. But he stopped abruptly when he saw the letter Nanée had written to Berthe in search of Luki, marked “addressee not found.”
Wednesday, November 13, 1940
SANARY-SUR-MER
As the little wreck of a bus Nanée took from the Sanary-sur-Mer train station juddered away again, she set off on foot with an empty canvas bag big enough for her to sleep in, although that wasn’t the plan. How dismayed her mother would be to see her traveling in such common ways, but they needed to husband gas for escaping refugees, and this was something she could do for Edouard—get his cameras, to give him something to do while he waited for responses from her friends she’d written in Paris after the letter to his friend Berthe was returned. Damn these little French coast towns and their nothing roads, though. She stumbled about and retraced her path until she found the yellow cottage with the sign on the gate, ATELIER-SUR-MER, and the key under the pot of dead plants by the door.
Inside, the place was so completely abandoned that it was possible to imagine Edouard’s whole life might be shrouded in cobwebs and dust. A loaf of bread sat moldy on the round wicker table in the main room, yet hard as the clay tile floor. Badly fitted French windows were left unshuttered, the sun just now peeking through heavy clouds beyond the dirty glass. It was colder inside than out, where the sea, neither near nor far, rolled in darkly. A thought as dark as the water washed over Nanée, that she might find here the bones of Edouard’s child.
She gathered from the front closet a Rolleiflex box camera, a larger Speed Graphic, a flash, a tripod, canisters of film that might be photographs he’d not yet developed, and assorted odds and ends the purposes of which she couldn’t imagine. She loaded them into the bag. The gray felt fedora Edouard wore the night she first met him in Paris was on the shelf too, but there would be no room for a hat in the bag.
She pushed through the door into his bedroom, where his life was already in crates packed before his arrest. A life could not be boxed up in an hour unless one knew it had to be. She blew the dust from the nearest crate and looked through it. An address book. A few letters. Unframed photographs Edouard had told her to leave behind. “I don’t need any of the prints,” he’d said. “The negatives are together in a single crate. With the negatives, I can make new prints.”
And there they were, underneath a stack of prints: sheaths of 4-by-5s and 35 mm strips, his work in miniature, sometimes separated by paper marked with rectangles and dotted lines, arrows and squiggles and letters that didn’t make words.
She found shirts in the armoire to wrap around the photography gear. She considered the pants, too, but they were for a bigger man, one whose hips hadn’t been whittled by a year of starvation rations in an internment camp.
The desk here was empty but for a single sheet of stationery and a framed 8-by-10 photograph propped against the wall the way On Being an Angel was on her dresser back at Villa Air-Bel. She blew the dust off the note first and read, Dear Nanée.
A letter to her?
What followed was the start of a thank-you note, unfinished, for the gathering she’d hosted after the Surrealist exposition nearly three years before. How impossibly odd.
She used a sleeve to wipe a layer of dust from the glass over the photo, to see the push-up man. Such an eerie photo. She remembered the look that had passed between Edouard and André when she’d mentioned it at that party, the embarrassment she’d felt under André’s questioning. Sometimes the viewer does not see all that is in the art.
Was this photograph of Edouard himself? She considered taking it from its frame to save the weight of it and packing it, but it seemed wrong somehow to take the man from his pressed-silver home. A dark shadow hid the man’s derrière at the bottom of the print. Derrière. The French word so much softer and more evocative than the English buttocks or behind. She peered more closely at the photo. It was a naked torso, wasn’t it? Surely that was a waist, with the shoulders hunched forward awkwardly. Those bumps, was that the angle? Why was the photograph so unnerving? The man was naked, yes. Was that it? The reminder of the naked shoulders above her in bed, men who’d made love to her. No, not love. Men she’d gone the limit with, only imagining herself in love.
She looked at the back of the frame, to see if there was anything tucked into it. There was not.
She entered the cottage’s windowless bathroom, where Edouard said she would find his developing gear. She used a kitchen cloth to wipe the cobwebs and dust from the big black bulby thing that was an enlarger for printing photos, and from its wooden baseboard and the metal-and-wood easel. She wrapped the bulb end in one of Edouard’s shirts and repositioned the gear in the bag to accommodate its bulk.
A half dozen photos hung backside to her from wooden clothespins on a clothesline over a tub that held empty trays and bottles of developing chemicals he’d said to leave behind. She unclipped one, curious to see what Edouard had been working on before he was taken to the camp.
It was the same nude that was on his desk in the bedroom, but much darker. Push-up man.
She unclipped another of the photos: the same photograph, darker still. Another: again, the same photo. One after another, each darker or lighter, with more contrast or less, more light in one area of the print or another.
She examined one of the prints more closely. The slightly odd curve of the shoulders. The arms angled toward each other. The legs apart?
She peered more closely. Did she have it all wrong? Was it . . . ? Yes, the photograph was of a woman’s torso, not a man’s. A naked woman bent forward at the waist. The curves at the top that she’d thought were a man’s curled shoulders were a woman’s derrière. What Nanée had thought were the edges of a man’s arms behind his shoulders were a hint of thigh, and at the bottom of the photograph a woman’s spine disappeared into a shadow cast on her shoulders. The shadow of the photographer, of Edouard.
This photograph she’d seen as presenting a man’s strength instead captured the opposite, a woman collapsing forward in grief or shame or loss, supplication. And yet there was her long, straight spine too. There was the sense that she would unbend and rise up again.
Nude, Bending—that’s what Edouard had called that photograph back at her apartment in Paris. Or had that been André?
Ghost Wife. The vulnerability of the pose. The intimacy. Surely this was one lover photographing another? She looked over her shoulder, shivering at the impression she was being watched.