Sunday, December 8, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Nanée stopped halfway down the stairs to the entry hall, where everyone was saying goodbye to Edouard and Luki. The girl’s hair was tucked into two tidy caramel braids. Nanée wondered how many men knew how to braid a little girl’s hair.
This is real, she thought. They were leaving.
Dagobert trailed at her side, not on a leash.
As T looked up, Nanée tried to see herself as she did. Her new traveling case in hand—very like the old one she’d left at Madame Dupin’s tomb—with Luki’s things and her own, including her own espadrilles. “In case Hans and Lisa need your help getting them out; you’ll need the better foothold on the stony paths,” Varian had said when he gave them to her, although when he’d told everyone at the breakfast table that Edouard and Luki were indeed leaving that morning, he hadn’t mentioned Nanée. She wore her gray coat unbuttoned and, underneath it, the blue suit with the soft yellow pinstripes that she hadn’t believed she could ever wear again. She would trade them for the trousers, flight jacket, and scarf in her traveling case when they arrived at the Fittkos’ in Banyuls.
She took the last stairs carefully, remembering Rose sprawled on the entry floor, André lifting the maid and carrying her up to her room, herself on her knees, cleaning up, and the postcard she’d found on the floor, suggesting Berthe was in Brittany. She fingered the things in her own coat pockets. How empty the house would seem without Luki’s gentle giggle, without the trace of developing chemicals, the occasional sound of a shutter when you least expected it, the apology that forever followed, Edouard’s gentle voice saying he was only documenting this life, that he didn’t know what he would do with the photos but that he needed to take them.
Dagobert nuzzled her leg as if he sensed what was to happen here, that she would, as she had in Brive, take this child and leave him behind.
Gussie shyly offered Nanée his lucky copy of L’envers et l’endroit. “Carry it under your left arm, not your right,” he said.
“But you still need the luck yourself.”
“Knowing you’re carrying it will bring me more luck.”
“Gussie—” Nanée kissed his cheek, unable to finish giving voice to her thoughts. If she were ten years younger and had half an ounce of sense, she would fall for him.
“Are you ready?” she asked Luki.
The girl nodded. Solemn. Resolved. How devastating that a child so young had to know so much of the ugliness of the world. When Nanée was Luki’s age, she’d slept in a four-poster bed draped in lace, with no idea that anything in the world would interrupt her night, much less her whole life. She chose each morning from a closet full of clothes, and played on the sands of Lake Michigan, and read any book she wanted, and learned French from her governess. She summered at the beautiful Marigold Lodge that was now hers, and spent long days on the family yacht, and never gave a thought to the milk she drank. And yet her father had never braided her hair. A life of wealth and a life of riches aren’t always the same.
She looked to Edouard: his square face, the mole at the end of his left brow, the startling willow-green eyes as steeped in sadness as they had been the night she first met him, at that exposition she hadn’t wanted to attend. His Leica, slung by its strap around his neck, hung at his side. He nodded as solemnly as his daughter had. His suitcase, the negatives hidden in the baguette inside it, sat on the floor by the door. No rucksack. Only Germans carried rucksacks, and he would need to pass as anything but German on the path over the Pyrenees.
Edouard said he’d like to take a group photograph to remember everyone by, so they gathered on the belvedere for the natural light, arms around one another to fit more tightly together. Nanée scooped Dagobert up and held him, then set a hand on Luki’s shoulder and looked out to the long, wide stretch of France framed by the neat row of boxwoods and the tree trunks and the lacy branches: the pine and olive trees, the red-tiled roofs, the paths of the railroad and the trolley, and, this morning, a gorgeous blue sea. It was somehow easier to imagine leaving it in the bright light. She loved France, but she could leave it, if only she could take Danny and T and Dagobert with her, if only she could take this feeling of being useful, of being intrepid, of doing good.
Edouard set his camera on the tripod he would leave behind. He framed the shot, adjusted the settings, and showed Madame Nouget what to press. He joined them then, sliding one arm around Nanée’s waist and setting his free hand on Luki’s other shoulder. Nanée let go of Luki now that her father was beside her, to get Dagobert to look toward Madame Nouget as she pressed the shutter release.
Edouard took back the camera and slung it around his neck, then put on his gray felt fedora. “All right then,” he said.
“Wait.” Nanée set Dagobert down, took the hat from Edouard’s head, and looked at the leather sweatband inside, his initials there, ELM. He was to be traveling as Henri Roux.
She took the fountain pen that had been her father’s from her coat pocket and used the nib to scratch Edouard’s initials out.
“I’m obliged to act the criminal,” Edouard said.
At the pain in his voice, Nanée lifted hers. “Misbehavior can be awfully fun if you embrace it,” she said. She wanted to set the hat on his head and kiss him, but she only handed it back to him and slid the pen into her coat pocket.
“I almost forgot, I have something for Pemmy,” she said, pulling out the oversize safety-pin brooch, silver and Bakelite red, she’d tucked in her pocket first thing that morning. She knelt in front of Luki the way she’d knelt that night to clean up after Rose, and she pinned the baby kangaroo safely to his mother. “So Pemmy won’t lose Joey on her way to America.”
This is real, she thought again. They were leaving.
“That makes Joey so happy that he wants to sing for you,” Luki said, and she wound the key on the baby kangaroo and let it go so that the little music box buried inside him played “The Waltz of the Flowers.”
Nanée smiled at Edouard, wishing she had a way to similarly connect him and Luki. “It makes Pemmy happy too, I bet.”
“Yes, Pemmy too,” Edouard agreed.
“Except Pemmy doesn’t sing,” Luki said. “Only Joey sings.”
They began the goodbyes again, all of them hugging Edouard and Luki and wishing luck to Nanée, no one but T and Varian with any idea that she might not return.
“I’ll see you in New York, then,” Varian said, the send-off Nanée had come to see less as a sign of Varian’s optimism than as a way for him to inspire confidence in his protégés as they embarked on this perilous journey.