Nanée had her clothes back on before she emerged from the darkroom bathroom with Edouard, but still she felt stripped bare. Edouard must have seen it in her face, because he touched her arm, he started to ask if she was okay. She turned away, not wanting him to see, just as she had turned away so briefly as he lifted her into the tub, as she felt the extent of the damage his body had suffered: his bony shoulders, bony hips, knees as bony as she had imagined them in that Exquisite Corpse drawing she’d done the night they met.
There was a new interzonal postcard waiting there on the kitchen counter where Rose must have left it, addressed to her but meant for him, from his friend Berthe. From Dinard, in Brittany. La Famille X va bien.
“Luki is in Amboise,” Edouard said, the words coming like the release of a long-held breath. He stood beside her, holding the card so she too could read the second line, Mon autre fille va entrer à l’ecole d’église Saint-Denis en Amboise. Berthe’s “other daughter” would enter school at the Saint-Denis church in Amboise.
“Amboise,” Nanée repeated, more exhale than word. For two days after Pétain had begged for peace, some of the last and bravest of the French had fought the Germans from the entrance to the Chateau d’Amboise, a castle that had welcomed the likes of Leonardo da Vinci in centuries past. For two nights the Germans had shelled the town, tons of explosives leveling large parts of it. If Luki had been long in Amboise, she might not have survived.
The damned Germans. The damned Vichy. The damned commandant.
“We could send a letter,” she said. “To Amboise. To the school.”
But they didn’t know anything about the people at the school. They didn’t know if anyone there knew Luki was Jewish, or even that Luki was Luki. And a third letter would add delay, with every day Edouard spent in France a danger.
If she could get Luki and bring her to Marseille, Edouard could leave. Edouard would have to leave.
Nanée could leave with him, though. She was American. She could always go back to Evanston, to hell with their ideas about who a girl ought to love.
She was moving too fast; she knew that. The moment in the tub was a moment captured, like one of his photographs. What went before and what came after were unfixed, ungrounded, unreal. To have expectations was to open your heart to breaking.
But Amboise. It was in the occupied zone, yes, but just the other side of the demarcation line. Not more than ten miles, she didn’t think.
“I could go get her,” she said. “We have an American passport for her. I have an American passport. No one would suspect an American woman my age traveling with a child.”
Wednesday, November 27, 1940
AMBOISE
It took Nanée all of Tuesday to get the nearly five hundred miles from Marseille to Tours, where she caught the first bus Wednesday morning to Amboise, the easy part of this journey to find Luki. She came alone, traveling on a valid French transit visa, with more francs than she would need in her pocket but without the German-issued ausweis or passierschein necessary to enter the occupied zone. She did, though, still have a Paris apartment, as she explained to the nice young border guard to whom she handed her American passport with a bribe discreetly tucked inside. Monday night Varian had helped persuade Edouard that she ought to be the one to find Luki and bring her to Villa Air-Bel. Then after they turned the radio off and everyone went to bed, Edouard tapped lightly at her door, and climbed into her bed, and made love to her again. She woke Tuesday before dawn to him still beside her, wanting to tell her more about Luki, to share with her his love for this child he’d been separated from for so very long.
The bus dropped her in a rubble pile of a town, mansard roofs collapsed into crumbling facades, or intact but hanging out over lopsided walls and shattered windows, or in heaps of nothing that would ever be anything again. All that remained of what had been a church—perhaps the église Saint-Denis of Luki’s school?—were high pillars of unroofed stone. Yet along the Loire here a winter market offered the last of the fall produce spread on tables, stalls of tablecloths and napkins, and plenty of local wine.
Nanée hadn’t eaten much since she left Marseille, but the attention she drew in the market made her uncomfortable. No one trusted a stranger these days. So she asked the woman at the first market stall to point her to the school.
“The school?” The woman frowned suspiciously and pointed back across the main road, mercifully away from the bombed-out church. “église Saint-Denis is two blocks up and to the right. White-and-brown Tudor. But there is no school.”
Nanée held herself hard against the tears threatening. “The school was destroyed?”
The old woman stepped back and, with fear in her eyes now, repeated, “There is no school.”
NANéE STOOD LOOKING up at the stone and slate and mercifully unbroken stained glass of église Saint-Denis, trying to imagine what Edouard’s friend could have meant to send them looking for Luki at a school that didn’t exist. But the interzonal card form left little room for providing information. She was just about to pull the church doors open when a young nun emerged, as startled by Nanée as Nanée was by her.
Nanée asked if the nun could point her to the school.
“The school?”
The nun took Nanée to the Mother Superior of her order, a bull of a woman dressed, like the younger nun, in heavy black robes with a simple black drape of fabric over her head, her face and shoulders encased so tightly in white that all you saw was her guarded face, surprising clear skin, and plain-brown-paper eyes. Her face in all that fabric was disconcerting. Face Floating in White and Black, Eduard might name the photograph he might take.
“I’m looking for a girl I believe to be at school here, a five-year-old,” Nanée said. “The child of a friend. They were . . . separated. Her family are frantic to find her.”
The Reverend Mother stood and calmly closed her door. “You are not the girl’s mother?” She blinked long lashes the same faded brown as her eyebrows and eyes. Could Nanée trust her? Was Luki here, and if so, did they know her as Luki?
“I come at the request of her father,” Nanée said.
“And he is where?”
Nanée simply met her gaze. She was in occupied France. She couldn’t assume anyone here was on her side, much less anyone in a position of authority in the Catholic Church.
“It is complicated to trust in this moment,” the nun said. “I find that if I put my trust in the Lord, he guides me. Perhaps we could start with this missing child’s name?”