VILLA AIR-BEL
Edouard set his enlarger up in a makeshift bathroom darkroom. He lined up in the tub a roasting pan for the developer, sheet pans for the stop bath and fixer, and a deeper pan for the rinsing water. The zinc was still damp from Nanée’s bath, the smell of the soap she used, citrus and verbena, bringing with it the glimpsed image: Nanée submerged in bathwater, the intoxicating stretch of her long, shadowed neck, her up-tilted chin. Always, what can be seen suggests what is hidden, the surface interesting not in what it is but in what it isn’t. It was true in photographs and in life.
“Here I am.” Nanée’s voice disconcerting.
He might have been thinking it himself, Here I am, finally, after all those months of being lost in that camp.
She stood in the doorway, her hair still wet, her face clean and fresh. He wished he’d shown her the other negatives in this sequence so she could understand the long days he spent watching from their Vienna window while Elza tutored her math pupils, the full life they had and this, one of the last moments. That was, he supposed, why he’d needed to br?lage the negative, to mix the chemicals into something like loss, and grief, and guilt.
He poured his chemicals into the pans and put the Kindermann globe over the bathroom’s single bulb, less daunted at the dim ruby glow now that he wouldn’t be alone with his demons. If Nanée weren’t there, he might explore dozens of crops and manipulations and exposures, but she’d never been in a darkroom, and what excitement was there in seeing a test strip emerge in the tray? He felt good about the br?lage too. In melting the emulsion, in leaving that to chance, perhaps he had created something. He would leave this printing of the caped woman too to chance.
He put the negative in the carrier, emulsion facedown lest the photograph print with what was right as left and what was left as right, the way it seemed his life had been for so long now, everything the opposite of what it should be. He adjusted the enlarger until the image came into focus on the easel, the clear lines of the operagoer’s billowing cape now melted and reformed into ethereal waves, her face more goddess than woman.
“Who is she?” Nanée asked, her own face goddesslike in the red light. “This woman in the dramatic cape, who you’ve inexplicably melted.”
The smallest bit of a laugh bubbled up from somewhere deep inside him as he inserted paper into the easel and set the timer. He had laughed at Camp des Milles, but that laughter had come from a place behind his eyes that wanted to be tears.
When the timer’s metal bell tinged, he moved the paper from the easel into the developer and rocked the roasting pan back and forth.
“Look, there she is,” Nanée said, her voice full of awe as the woman began to take shape, the wavy edges of her cape as haunting as he’d imagined when, seeing just the hint of Nanée’s body wavy in the bathwater, he’d remembered this image.
“The Goddess of the Chateau, despairing for a visa to America, like the rest of us,” Edouard said.
He ran the print through the stop bath and fixer, then set her in the water to rinse. He carried her in the water tray out into the light of the kitchen and set her on the counter for Nanée to better see. The print was dark, but that only added to her haunting quality.
“It’s like she’s us,” Nanée said. “Not us how we look but . . . but how I feel.”
She is you. The thought so sudden and true that Edouard was afraid he’d given it voice.
“Would you like to see who she was before?” he asked, thinking again of the full sequence of photos he’d taken: an elegant Viennese woman emerging from a matinee at the Opera to find the street blocked by a Nazi pop-up protest. Her face startled. Disgusted. Turning. Walking away. These were the kind of photographs he took, or used to. A watcher. A woman who never imagined she was involved. He’d followed her—stalked her, really—all the way to the little bridge crossing the canal in the Stadtpark where he’d taken this shot, her strides no less angry for the distance she put between herself and the Nazis by then being dispersed by the Vienna police. He couldn’t say even now why he’d followed her.
Nanée said, “I think if I saw her in other photos, it would spoil this quality, this light on myself.”
This light on myself. He wondered what it was of herself that she saw in the caped woman. Her proud anger, he thought. Her pride at her anger. He too saw himself in this photo, his fingers focusing the lens as Elza would have been writing that note back in the apartment, explaining that she had to go to Germany to get her sister. He’d believed his own proud anger set him above others. It was something he realized only after Elza was murdered, an unconscious assumption on which his work was based.
He said to Nanée, “This is what makes a photograph compelling, or shocking, or moving. We all imagine ourselves innocent. Aghast at cruelty. Empathetic. Human. We don’t imagine that in simply watching we provide an audience.”
We cheered or jeered, or perhaps we only stared. He wasn’t sure it mattered. In being there to watch, we encouraged. This was what he photographed: the genteel society from which violence seeped up.
He said, “We don’t imagine our own slovenly posture, our lurking eyes, our glee as we witness shame. The camera records that which we would never recognize in our own hearts, and yet when we see it in the faces and postures of others, we see it too in ourselves.”
“But there’s nothing slovenly or lurking in her.”
“We don’t see that our own proud anger allows us to feel superior.”
“Do you feel yourself superior, Edouard?”
His name warm in her voice.
“Do you not, Nanée?”
“Think you superior?” The slightest teasing smile on her lips. “Might we not learn even more from looking at photographs of ourselves?”
“We never believe the camera has truly captured us unless we appear beautiful. We think photographs showing our ugliness are distortions, bad angles, bad moments. Not who we are.”
He looked to the kitchen sink and the copper pans, the jug they used to collect milk from Madam LaVache. “Beauty, it isn’t interesting to me,” he said. “It’s the face we present to the world. I wish to capture what we hide. That which brings us shame.”
“And now?” Nanée asked gently. “There is so much violence and shame, slouching and lurking. So much hiding, saying we’re one thing while doing another. Why can you not photograph now?”
Edouard studied her face in the bright daylight streaming through the windows. “And now? Why do you stay in France?”
She crossed her arms.
He hadn’t meant to offend her. He never meant to offend her. But she could leave France any time she wanted.
“I suppose I prefer being in the thick of it,” she said.