“I suppose the good friar must have been on a visit to Paris when the child was born,” Bingham said. “He was at an Italian monastery until he fled Rome earlier this year.”
“He’s a friend of the mother’s family,” Nanée said, as the friar had suggested, should this question come up.
Bingham steepled his fingers. “You’ll have to apply to the Germans, of course, to bring the girl out of the occupied zone.”
“If I don’t take her home directly from Paris,” Nanée said, skirting the issue of the documents she would indeed need to apply to the Germans for to legitimately enter the occupied zone herself.
Bingham apparently appreciated the cleverness of this little twist, subterfuge being more likely to succeed when carefully planned. “It would be better if your brother applied from Chicago for this passport,” he said.
“Dickey has no photograph of her, and with the post being what it is now . . . I rather hope to get her home quickly, and Varian tells me you occasionally expedite passports for friends.”
“Varian?” Bingham said. “He didn’t tell me you were coming.”
She slid a photograph of Luki across his desk—an old one, but it was all they had. “It’s a bit delicate, this business,” she said. “My brother would prefer to keep the circle small until he can make things right.”
Bingham said, “The occupied zone is a dangerous place. An American passport won’t protect you there should you be caught defying Nazi law.”
“I have many flaws, Mr. Bingham,” she replied, “but being a fool is not one of them.”
“It’s the rare fool who recognizes himself as such.”
She waited him out again, trying not to think of what a fool she’d been at Camp des Milles. She was going to tell Varian what she was doing this time, after she’d gotten this passport for Luki. She would apply to Vichy for a French transit visa for herself, but she wasn’t sure whether to seek permission to enter the occupied zone, an application that would have to be made to the Nazis and would raise her visibility with them. Her inclination was not to; the harder part was getting out of the occupied zone with Luki, if that’s where she was. And asking a refugee-friendly vice consul for an American passport for a German-born Jewish girl was one thing; drawing the Nazis’ attention to herself as she went to smuggle that girl out was another thing entirely.
“Let me see what I can do for you,” Bingham conceded. “Your brother’s given name is Richard?”
“Samuel Dickey,” she said.
“Of course. Your mother was a Dickey.”
She tried to imagine how Dickey would react if this idea that he had an illegitimate French-born child got out. But she meant to have Luki safely out of France before any rumor got out of hand. Once Luki was in the States, the truth could be revealed. Of course Dickey would put his reputation at risk to save a girl’s life, she imagined saying. He’s an honorable man.
Friday, November 15, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Nanée, back early from delivering messages in the Panier, settled into the zinc tub in the ground-floor bathroom, as she now did once a day and sometimes more. At the sound of someone entering the kitchen—Madame Nouget beginning the dinner, she supposed—she sank deeper, so the water in her ears muted the world. She scrubbed and scrubbed, her skin and her hair too, and still she could smell the stink of it all on her: the rats and the sewage in the streets, the despair and failure and mistakes, the rotten stink of the commandant and that camp, which, no matter how often she bathed, was always there. She lay farther back, submerging her head and holding her breath until her lungs nearly burst, letting the soap float out from her hair. When she emerged, with her hair slicked away from her face and her eyes still closed, she leaned her head back over the tub’s edge.
“Oh! I’m so sorry!” Edouard’s voice.
Already he was closing the door again, his voice from the other side of the door now saying, “I knocked. There was no answer.” Sounding mortified.
She said, “I . . . I was just getting out. Give me a minute.”
God, how cold the water had gotten.
She stood and wrung her hair out, brushed the water from her skin.
Was he still there, in the kitchen?
“Just a second,” she called out.
She shrugged on her heavy terry-cloth robe and quickly toweled her hair. She pulled the robe up around her neck to cover the mark there, faded to yellow now, then flung the door open.
On the counter by the kitchen sink sat Edouard’s enlarger and easel she’d brought from Sanary-sur-Mer, a collection of roasting and sheet pans, and the photographic paper and chemicals Danny bought for him. Edouard himself, though, had retreated—never mind the claims of all these Surrealists that the human body was natural, or at least the woman’s body was.
She hurried across the kitchen, through the dining room and the Grand Salon and up the stairs, looking for him, sure he must have taken some new photos now that she’d brought him his cameras.
SHE FOUND HIM in his bedroom, striking a match and lighting a candle on the dresser. The door was open, but she knocked on the jamb to let him know she was there.
“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling her nakedness under her robe, pulling the heavy cotton tighter at her neck. Why hadn’t she dressed first? “I monopolize that bathroom. It’s such a luxury, a bath.”
“No. No.” He blew the match out. “I . . . That’s what a bathroom is for, of course. I just thought . . . I had an idea. Some work I might do. I thought I might print some old film, and I need darkness and water to print, is the thing. But you did me a favor, putting me off by being . . .”
He held a negative up to the window light for her to see: a woman crossing a bridge, away from the camera, an opera cape blown open behind her so that it seemed she might lift off the pavement and take flight.
“So you’re going to print something you’ve already taken?” she asked.
“André’s comment about me not touching my camera has unsettled you.”
“No,” she said, only then aware of the disappointment he must have heard in her voice. “No of course not. Your art is your art. You have to come to it when you can.”
“A photograph is art made in two parts,” he said. “In the taking of it, and in the manipulation and development. The same negative can be so many things. The same sky can be light and joyous or dark and menacing, all in the wave of my hand between enlarger and paper.” He took the negative to the burning candle on the dresser. “Ansel Adams says the negative is the score and the print the performance.”
He held the negative over the candle flame.
“Wait! Don’t destroy it!” she said. “I’ll never forgive myself for having been in the bath when you meant to print it.”
Still he held the negative there. She could see it getting hot, not melting or becoming misshapen, but the chemicals on the top side pooling so that even she could see the woman in the cape had lost her shape.
“I’m making her more haunting,” he said.
Nanée said, “You’re not destroying the negative?”
“Sometimes it is only in destroying a thing that we find what we create.”
Friday, November 15, 1940