No one was there.
Still, she went out into the main room and looked around. She locked the front door. She retrieved the hat from the closet and fingered the inside leather band, softened by years of hair and skin oils but the tag still clean, the hat well cared for, the initials—ELM—only slightly faded. She took the hat back with her into the bathroom to put it in the bag after all, but already there was no room for it. She set it on her own head. Too big, but easy enough to carry that way. It smelled of Edouard, comforting.
Should she take one of the prints? Nude Bending. Ghost Wife. She peered at the photograph again. So intimate. It had been hanging in the exhibition, but Edouard had made André take it down. And he had been so clear about not needing any of his prints.
She wanted to take one for herself, but she carefully pinned the prints back up where she’d found them, on the line, and hauled the bag, heavy now, out of the little room.
She braced herself and opened the door into the last room, Luki’s room, strewn with clothes and as full of dust and cobwebs as the rest of the cottage. She opened the window to the sound of waves against rocks, and gulls calling. Was that singing? She opened it wider and poked her head out to see a small area enclosed by a fence between the house and the sea. Surely that wasn’t anyone singing, but rather some combination of the water and wind and birds.
She brushed away cobwebs and began sorting through things as she had in Edouard’s bedroom, wanting to bring him something of his daughter. To leave behind all of Luki’s belongings seemed to leave behind hope. She found the beautiful red coat trimmed with black velvet that Luki had worn in Paris, but the child was nearly three years older now; it would no longer fit. There was a cloth doll, clean and unloved. A book too young for Luki now.
They would have packed anything special except perhaps something bulky, like the coat, but how could she give Edouard this red coat his daughter couldn’t wear, even if she could be found?
She tossed the coat back on the bed with the other clothes. A muffled tinkle of music sounded, as if some small musical instrument were in the pocket. But no, when she checked she found only a child-size pair of red gloves, soft leather that suggested the rich life they had left behind when they fled Austria. She started pulling the other clothes from the bed, feeling each carefully before setting it aside. Under a last little-girl white blouse was a tired old coat quite a bit larger than the red one. Bought secondhand, she supposed. Nothing else. She lifted the coat and felt inside its pockets. Pulled out a little wool thing that released another single note.
She held a tiny stuffed animal with a wind-up back.
She turned the key.
As the tinny notes sounded from the creature, Nanée was back in her own childhood, in her bedroom at the Evanston house. She was opening the lid of her music box, an exquisite round porcelain thing painted to look like a merry-go-round and inlaid with gold and pearls. When she lifted the lid, three miniature merry-go-round horses circled inside as this delicate music played. “Waltz of the Flowers,” from The Nutcracker. A piece by Tchaikovsky that had been a failure in his lifetime, that had only succeeded after his death. Nanée couldn’t have been much older than Luki was now when she first heard it, sitting in a dark theater in downtown Chicago. A special outing, just Daddy and her. He’d taken her hand when it looked like the Mouse King would kill the poor wounded Nutcracker, and assured her it was only pretend, and anyway, the Nutcracker would get that Mouse King. Nasty creatures always get their comeuppance in the end.
Nanée stared at the furry creature as its music wound down into the silence of the ocean beyond the open cottage windows, the waves lapping the rocks at the bottom of the palisades. It was a kangaroo, a baby one that must belong in the pouch of Luki’s funny mohair mama that the motherless child had clung to at the gallery in Paris. Nanée tucked it into her pocket and, with Edouard’s gray felt hat still on her head, closed the bag. She closed the window too, and walked out the front door. She locked the cottage and set the key back where she’d found it, under the pot of dead plants.
Wednesday, November 13, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Edouard was sitting on a stone wall in the dark garden when he heard footsteps on the gravel—Nanée, identifiable even as a shadow in the moonlight.
“I’ve brought you something,” she said, close enough now that her perfume mingled with the decay of the garden.
She had seen them, he thought. Of course she would have. All those prints of Salvation.
She handed him his Speed Graphic.
“Thank you,” he said, relieved even with the weight of it, the burden heavy in his hands.
He let the lens bellow outward and peered through the viewfinder to the shadow of her face. He could not imagine ever taking a photograph again.
She put her hands in her jacket pockets and stood staring back at him, directly into the lens. “I brought as much as I could manage,” she said. “All the negatives, like you asked. The enlarger and both cameras.”
Both cameras. Yes, he had only two now, the Leica a casualty of his flight from Camp des Milles. The last thing to be left behind.
“Thank you,” he said again, lowering the Speed Graphic and letting it hang from the strap around his neck.
She took his hand in hers and opened it, palm up, and set something in it, something from her jacket pocket. A single note escaped, a single pin plucking a single prong of the steel comb, a high note of the music he’d played every night for Luki, to make the transition from his own singing to the silence of the lonely nights after Elza died.
“Wherever did you find him?” he asked. “We looked everywhere.”
“He was in a coat pocket,” she said.
He wrapped his fingers around this familiar old softness, glad of the dark night, glad Nanée could not see the tears pooling in his eyes as he remembered the frantic search the morning Luki left for Paris, his own promise that he would find Joey. His promise to Elza’s memory that he would keep Luki with him, always.
“We’re going to find Luki too, wherever she is,” Nanée said. “We’re going to find her and we’re going to get her here, to Villa Air-Bel.”
He closed his eyes to the dormant garden and the still pond, the dark sky, the shadow of this woman who had no idea what she was saying. They couldn’t even locate Luki, much less get her safely out of France. He hadn’t been able to protect Elza, and he couldn’t protect her daughter now.
An owl hooted in one of the plane trees, startling them both.
Nanée said, “I’ll go to the American consulate tomorrow morning and . . . and see if I can arrange documents for Luki. And I have an American passport. I can go anywhere I want.”
He hesitated. It was too dangerous for a man to smuggle someone out of the occupied zone, much less a woman.