Nanée looked again to the bowlers. “Yes, they’re speaking Catalan.”
“How come some people have one kind of words and other people have another?”
“I’m not sure,” Nanée admitted.
“Some of their words are like the words we use now. Not like the words Maman used.”
Edouard moved closer, looking at them through his camera. Too familiar, Nanée thought. But perhaps she knew too much. Perhaps others who noticed them, if anyone did, would think him photographing the station and, with it, strangers on a bench.
“In America,” Luki said, “we’ll use different words than here.”
“In America, people use different words,” Nanée agreed.
“Tante Nanée taught me some,” Luki said to Edouard. Nanée took Luki’s hand in hers and squeezed it, but Luki was already saying in English, “I love you, Father.”
Edouard lowered his camera, his smile sweet and warm. Far too familiar.
A gull landed a few feet away, in search of crumbs the pétanque players might drop. Luki hopped from the bench and approached the creature as carefully as she had always approached Madame LaVache-à-Lait, leaving Pemmy behind on the bench.
Edouard resumed his seat beside his suitcase at the bench’s end, as if the abandoned kangaroo somehow reminded him that he wasn’t supposed to be traveling with them. He picked up Gussie’s book. A distant whistle sounded, the train bound for Banyuls-sur-Mer arriving.
Nanée smoothed her conservative, calf-length blue skirt with its soft yellow pinstripes, thinking how empty her own traveling case was compared to his. No negatives. No photographs. Not much more than a pair of slacks, a clean blouse and sweater, and her flight jacket for the trek, her espadrilles, her silk flying scarf. Luki’s things, yes, but they weren’t hers.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked into the train whistle and the cheer of the game ending, one team winning while the other lost. Edouard kept his gaze on the bowlers already tossing out the little target ball to begin a new game. She and he might be two strangers continuing a conversation started over the child traveling with her. Nude, Bending, she wanted to say. Ghost Wife. But she only watched silently as a ball lofted through the air and fell back to the ground, far away from the target.
The train whistle sounded again, much nearer now. They watched another ball loft through the air and hit the dirt, and keep rolling, farther and farther away from its mark, as the train pulled into the station. He stood, and she stood too, and she called to Luki as if she really were her own niece. Luki abandoned her bird and took Nanée’s hand. Nanée gave her Pemmy, with Joey still safely pinned into her pouch, and again took up her traveling case. She headed through one of the limestone archways back into the station, where they boarded a single-class local train for which no one even asked to see their tickets. She and Luki took seats on one side of the aisle while Edouard sat alone on the other, beginning the last long hour to Banyuls-sur-Mer.
Sunday, December 8, 1940
BANYULS-SUR-MER
It was evening. Banyuls-sur-Mer had the deserted feel of a place no one wanted to stop. The tiny station was nothing more than a small stucco building with an outdoor platform, on the side of town farthest from the house on the sea where they were to find Hans and Lisa Fittko. Edouard, with his suitcase in his right hand and Gussie’s book in his left, disembarked from the train ahead of Luki and Nanée so that Luki would be able to see him, always. It would be harder to remain apart here. If all looked well, Nanée and Luki would join him as if they were a family traveling together.
They were the only passengers to step off the train into a cold, biting wind.
“All right then,” he said to Nanée as she joined him. He handed her Gussie’s book, and he knelt and kissed Luki, then buttoned her coat and helped her pull on her gloves. “Here we are,” he said. “Here we are.”
“Can I carry the lucky book now?” Luki asked, and Nanée helped her manage both Pemmy and the book.
He pulled on his own gloves and buttoned his own coat, and they set off downhill through the little fishermen’s village, the vineyard hills disappearing as they wound along narrow roads through colorful buildings, pink and yellow stucco with bright blue shutters so like Sanary-sur-Mer.
In just a few minutes they reached the sea, the palm trees blowing and trails of sand dancing across the empty stretch of beach, electric lights from the waterfront buildings reflecting off the water, which was white-capped and turbulent in the wind. The town’s little square was as alive with pétanque players as the station in Perpignan had been—players laughing so enthusiastically that Edouard let go of Luki’s hand to photograph them. He didn’t register the sound of wheels on pavement until a car was just behind them. Such an unusual sound, an automobile.
A large black limousine pulled to a stop, then a second one, the headlights on him for a moment before they dimmed. He turned instinctively toward Luki as already men piled out, bracing themselves against the wind. Black boots. Black uniforms. One after another after another. Gestapo from the Kundt Commission, tasked with finding wanted Germans in free France and arresting them under the authority of the Article 19 surrender-on-demand provision of the armistice agreement. A dozen or more.
Luki was twenty paces ahead of him, with Nanée, both of them safer without him. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do but act as if he were alone and these men of no concern to him.
If they arrested him, Nanée would take Luki to the States.
The bowlers too grew silent, attending only to their little metal balls, pretending innocence and indifference, but their quiet was telling. Edouard’s instinct was to photograph them, the watchers pretending not to watch, but he didn’t dare draw attention to himself.
The Gestapo took a tour around the square, intimidating merely by their presence. One fell into step with Nanée, who held tightly to Luki’s hand. It was all Edouard could do to keep his distance as the man asked her in German if she would like to join them for the evening. She appeared to understand his intent, if not his words.
She set her suitcase down and, with her free hand, smoothed her blue pin-striped lapel above the top button of her coat as if drawing power from the fabric. “I understand that when I wear a short skirt, the party will come to me,” she responded in English, “but if you could see beneath my coat, you’d realize my skirt is rather long.”
The man tried to puzzle out what she was saying. “Amerikanerin?” he asked.
“I’m afraid so,” she said. “Not the master race.”
He said, “Ich hei?e Robert.”