Already Nanée was sweet-talking a young clerk. No, please, she and T didn’t want to be separated from their friends, but she did need to use the restroom. She was gone an awfully long time, but returned with a smile that Edouard took to mean that André’s incriminating green-ink manuscript had been torn up and flushed away.
The commissaire flew into a rage on learning that Varian had the briefcase. Varian merely handed it to him.
They were held all day, Edouard growing increasingly alarmed. He knew as well as anyone that an hour of questions could stretch into days or months or years in a camp. How could Varian hold on to his American naivete even now?
He pulled Nanée aside, finally, not wanting to ask but needing to know. “Nanée, the release and my papers. I . . . It’s hard to imagine how you could have gotten them.”
She looked across the crowded little room. “The camp commander didn’t know you’d escaped,” she said finally. “I didn’t know you’d escaped.”
A newsboy interrupted with the evening papers, the headlines announcing the upcoming visit by Pétain, “Victor of Verdun.” Varian bought several, and handed him one to share with Nanée, then offered the boy money with the promise of more if he would fetch them some sandwiches and drinks.
Edouard studied Nanée’s face, her head tilted toward the newspaper. “I . . . If I understood . . .” He made himself say it as directly as he could. “The commandant isn’t a man who releases prisoners just because a pretty woman asks him to.”
Nanée smoothed her hand over the newsprint as if the gesture might make the news disappear. “I entertained him,” she said, not looking up.
He looked away, but already he was seeing in his mind Nanée bent forward, in grief and shame. Edouard’s own shame, his unworthiness.
Nanée, still focused on the newspaper, whispered, “It wasn’t like you’re thinking. I did stay the night, yes, but only to . . . I got him drunk so that . . . So he wouldn’t remember. So he would imagine he owed me something.”
He longed to tip her chin up the way he had Elza’s after he’d photographed her, before he touched her bare cheek and her shoulder, before he made love to her because he could not let them succeed in taking everything. He wanted to see in Nanée’s eyes the truth of what she was saying. But he was afraid to touch her. He was afraid to see in her eyes that this was only a story meant to ease him into the reality he was left to live with, only tolerable if left unvoiced.
They were interviewed one at a time, pro forma conversations after which T was allowed to leave. Varian pleaded Edouard’s case as Luki’s only parent, and the interviewer said he would take the request to the commissaire. The clock kept ticking. The man didn’t return.
At seven, knowing Luki would be terrified if bedtime came and he wasn’t back, Edouard implored Varian to inquire again.
The commissaire had gone home for the day.
They’d been moved to a bigger, equally crowded room on the ground floor, and it was nearly ten o’clock, when a detective approached Edouard, saying, “We have more questions for you.”
“Me?” Edouard said, shifting his Leica to his side to be less obtrusive.
“You are Monsieur Breton?”
André reluctantly identified himself, and permitted the man to take him to a table in the corner for further questioning. Something in the still confidence of André’s lion head moved Edouard to photograph the two of them walking away through the crowded room.
André returned not much later, having gotten more information than he gave up. “They’re taking us to the SS Sina?a,” he said.
Varian said, “I came to Europe on that very ship some years ago.”
Edouard wasn’t sure what kind of omen that was. He couldn’t imagine any way that being put on a ship in the middle of the night could be anything but bad.
ON DECK, THEY were issued burlap-and-straw beds and blankets—six hundred guests of the Vichy government, in the not-so-deluxe accommodations of the SS Sina?a at quai du Président Wilson. They had no idea why they were there, or whether the ship was meant actually to set sail, to take Edouard away from Luki, or when or under what circumstances they might be released. Nanée protested when she was culled from their little herd, but she was ushered away at gunpoint to join the women and the elderly in the third-class cabins. Edouard hurried down into the hold and grabbed an upper iron bunk by a porthole, in view of one of the mooring lines on the quay side. If anyone began to make way to set sail, he would try to get back up to the deck and jump ship without being shot.
Varian settled on the bunk beside him, Danny below, and André next to Danny, below Varian.
Edouard lay huddled on the straw mat under the thin, rough blanket, looking up through the porthole to a cold, starry sky. He wished he’d had the sense to grab a photograph of Luki. He understood the despair that led Walter Benjamin to suicide, to have escaped incarceration only to be imprisoned again. He would leave France as soon as he got out of here, if he got out of here. He would find a way, and he and Luki would leave. He and Luki and Nanée.
The thought caught him off guard. That was why he’d been silently relieved when Nanée was made to go with the women. Edouard had lived this life before. He knew how hateful it could get, how unforgivable people could be under stress. He wasn’t sure who he hoped to protect by the separation. He’d endured this once before, and managed to keep his friends. She was a rich girl, used to luxury.
And yet here she was, choosing to stay in a France occupied by Germany when she might leave any day. Choosing a life that left her prisoner on a ship off the coast of France when she might be climbing into fine cotton sheets in a mansion in someplace called Evanston, in the peacetime luxury of the United States.
He raised his Leica, which, surprisingly, no one had taken from him, and photographed the men in the bunks.
They looked at him, surprised.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m only documenting this life. I don’t know what I’ll do with the photos, whether I’ll do anything with them. I only know that they need to be taken.”
Tuesday, December 3, 1940
ON THE SS SINA?A
Edouard tidied himself as best he could before Nanée rejoined them on deck the next morning while André, elected for the purpose, went to fetch their breakfast from the galley—so much like Camp des Milles.
“It is the way of incarceration,” Edouard assured the others, feigning less fear than he felt at being held here. “Everything requires waiting in line.”
André returned finally with black bread, faux coffee, and the news that not one among them would be allowed to communicate with anyone outside. Not Varian or Nanée. Not the other furious Americans. Not even the prominent French journalist who was taking copious notes.
After lunch—beef still quite frozen in the middle and, this being France, plenty of wine—they were loaded into the hull without explanation. This time Nanée was allowed to accompany them. A pock-faced, gawky guard at the hatch beamed shyly, like the teenage boy he probably was, when she wandered over to chat him up from below.
“I’m Nanée,” she said.
The poor fellow only stared mutely at her.