“It’s too big a risk for you,” he said.
“Pffft,” she said. “I risked my life once for a bird, you know. A beautiful black swan. I nearly crashed my plane into the frozen lake at Bois de Bologne avoiding him.”
“A black swan,” he repeated, remembering a better time with Elza, when they were in Paris just after they were married. Elza in a rented rowboat on that same lake, marveling at a black swan as it swooped in and settled on the water. “What an extraordinary creature,” she’d said, and they sat for the longest time watching before he lifted his camera and photographed the bird. The image, though, was nothing of what he’d hoped it would be. He couldn’t say why, except perhaps that the magic of the moment was not in the swan itself but in Elza’s awe, which was nowhere in the frame.
“They’re extraordinary creatures,” he said, thinking he would get Luki himself, he would keep his promise to Elza.
“I couldn’t bear to hit him,” Nanée said quietly, a confession. Then more surely, “I was flying in his world. It was my duty to get out of his way.”
BACK IN HIS room, Edouard found the bag of his gear at the end of his bed, where Nanée told him she’d put it. He carefully removed the things from the top, to uncover the enlarger. He set it on the floor, plugged it in, and turned it on. Yes, the negative was still in the carrier. Elza, bending forward, appeared in outline on the bare easel.
Why hadn’t he stopped taking photographs when it might have saved them from everything? Why hadn’t he stopped even after that first awful violation, which was nothing about Elza and everything about his work? The weeks turned into months, and Edouard spent more and more time away from her, working. Away all night because that was when the worst of the Nazi horror was done, he told himself. Neither of them said another word about what had happened after that first conversation. They were trying to ignore it, or he was. Trying to pretend it didn’t exist.
That morning, the morning he took this photo, he’d arrived back home to Elza at the door. “Come with me,” she said, the tone of her voice warning him not to defy her. She took his hand and she took him, still with his camera, into their bedroom. She pulled the drapes against the dim light of dawn, and she stood in front of him and began to remove her clothes.
“If you can’t look at me, they will have taken everything that matters,” she said. “You don’t even have to touch me. Look at me through your camera. That will be easier for us both.”
And he tried. He focused on her standing there, naked before him. But he could not take the shot, could not forgive himself. She was the one to bend forward. In despair? In grief? He couldn’t say, but a new fear washed over him, not for what had happened, but for how it might destroy them. She was right. She had been right from the first, when she’d begged him not to go to the authorities. No one even bothered to deny what had happened. They said Elza was “entertaining” the Nazis who had pulled her off her bicycle in the Tiergarten, and they couldn’t help the fact that his wife preferred other men. They made sure he understood the details she had tried to spare him. Five men. On the route she rode home after she tutored each Tuesday night. They called her “Frau Moss.”
Elza, bending before him, understanding somehow what he could not imagine, that taking this photograph would free him to touch her again, to take her into his arms, into their bed.
They stayed in Germany. He thought it was the right thing to do, to use his camera to fight to save his country, even still. That was his worst guilt until they murdered Elza and her sister—that he had stayed, that he continued to put her in danger. They never talked about the photo. He never developed the film, much less printed it, until he came home one evening to find Nazis in his own sitting room, Elza serving them beers, because what choice did she have? Luki watching, wide-eyed and afraid. He took them to Austria the next day. Fled to Vienna. He thought they would be safe there. He developed the negative and printed the photograph only then, Salvation, reclaiming Elza’s love.
Thursday, November 14, 1940
THE AMERICAN CONSULATE, MARSEILLE
I knew your father, of course,” Harry Bingham said.
“Did you?” Nanée responded to the American vice consul, trying to provoke a bit more detail and reexamining her story in light of this fact.
He sat observing her through round wire-rimmed glasses, more her own generation than her father’s, his wavy light hair, straight nose, and round cheeks friendly-looking despite his small, thin-lipped mouth.
“My brother Dickey’s daughter is here in France and in need of a passport,” she said.
Bingham registered surprise. “I didn’t know he was married.”
She feigned the awkwardness a proper girl from Evanston would feel in making the suggestion that a brother might have an illegitimate child. “You can imagine what a great surprise this daughter was for us.”
“I see,” Bingham said.
“But his child is of course entitled to an American passport.”
Bingham waited. She waited him out.
He said finally, “And the mother isn’t American, I gather?”
“The mother has passed away,” she said, sticking with the truth to the extent it could fit and even benefit her story.
Bingham said, “That’s—”
Convenient, she thought, but she said, “You’d like to offer condolences, but the cold fact is that my brother is happy to be able to put his daughter into better care, if you understand what I mean.”
The implication being that a man who took responsibility for his illegitimate child was honorable in some way the mother who bore the child would never be. Nanée hated the double standard of the wealthy, or perhaps of the entire world.
“I see,” Bingham said. “And this daughter is . . .”
“Yes, unfortunately, she’s in the occupied zone.” Nanée had no idea where Luki was, but it would take Bingham time to get the child an American passport, if he would.
“You have a birth certificate?”
She extracted a baptismal certificate Father Pierre Marie-Beno?t had provided, with Luki’s real name and date of birth, listing her mother as Elza Moss and her father as Dickey.
“Ah, Père Barbiche,” Bingham said, using the Capuchin friar’s nickname, born of the man’s long beard. The Catholic Church supported Pétain, who offered the possibility of restoring France to more “traditional” values that required women to stay home and be good wives, supporting their husbands, and assumed only Christians could have good values. The Vatican, being authoritarian itself, wasn’t much bothered by Hitler; they’d reached a concordat with him only months after he was made German chancellor. But there were good people everywhere, including in the Church.