“My wife is in hospital,” he said.
“I’m so sorry,” Nanée said. “What’s happened?”
“She’s jaundiced,” the man said. “Her fever kept climbing,”
Edouard looked uneasily to Nanée. They ought not to say a thing until they saw the matching scrap of paper. But Nanée was saying nothing about them. She was simply showing the kind of sympathy anyone would.
“The doctor wouldn’t come because the boy told him we were German,” the man continued. “Thank the lord for Hermant.”
“I’m so sorry,” Nanée said again, relaxing a little at the sound of Hermant’s name, as Edouard himself was. Hermant—Beamish—was one of them, long trusted by Varian with couriering refugees.
“I’m sorry,” Hans said. “Forgive me. Do come inside.”
Still, Nanée hesitated.
“Again, my apologies,” Hans said. “I forget myself. Wait a moment.”
He disappeared into the house, coughing again. A quick moment later he emerged with the companion paper scrap, and he again invited them in.
“But I cannot take you over the border,” he said. “Even under the best of circumstances, I couldn’t make the trek alone with you.”
Nanée handed Pemmy to Luki. Edouard grabbed his suitcase, glad to get Luki out of the wind and cold. Nanée reluctantly allowed the exhausted Hans Fittko to carry her case. She took Gussie’s book, carrying it in her left hand.
THE HOUSE INSIDE was room after room of fine wood paneling and beautiful fireplaces and views right on the sea, with not a single bathroom. “I’m afraid we don’t even have running water,” Hans Fittko apologized, “but there are the public toilets across the street.”
The place didn’t belong to the Fittkos, but to a doctor no one had seen or heard from since he went off to war. The mayor himself—Azéma, the old mayor—had suggested the Fittkos take it over. It had plenty of rooms in which to house refugees until they could get across the border. He’d given the Fittkos handwritten statements on his letterhead, certifying that they were residents of Banyuls, too, and entered them in the town register so that they didn’t have to use the fake identity cards Varian had gotten them in Marseille. He’d even issued them ration cards and given them extra food stamps for the refugees. Those days had ended, though, with the new, Vichy-installed mayor.
“Please,” Hans Fittko said, “just choose whatever rooms you like. I’ll get you something to eat, although I’m afraid our larder is less full now than it once was.”
Edouard suggested Luki and Pemmy might explore the house and choose a room, but Luki hesitated.
“You can choose a room where you can hear the sea,” he said.
“Like from the dreaming log.”
“But don’t go outside without me. Choose a room for you and one right next door to it for me. That way, you won’t have to hear me snore.”
Luki grinned, that tooth she’d lost while he was on the boat a reminder of so much he’d missed, and she said she didn’t mind his snoring, but it woke Pemmy and Joey. “We can leave our doors open? And you’ll be right here all the time, so I can come find you?”
“I will be right here,” he assured her.
“Can I choose a room for Tante Nanée too?”
“Perhaps I could have the room on the other side of yours, just like at Villa Air-Bel?” Nanée replied.
After Luki set off to explore, Edouard and Nanée shed their coats and hats. Hans poured them glasses of wine, along with one for himself, and offered them a bit of stale bread.
“There are linens and blankets in the cupboards in most of the rooms,” he said. “I would help you, but . . .”
“You must be exhausted,” Nanée said.
“You cannot stay here long,” Hans said. “It isn’t good for the child. My Lisa, she washed her hair in the cold, and now . . . She needed to be taken to the hospital in Perpignan at once, but if I took her myself, without travel papers, they would have arrested me. Hermant arrived just then, as if he knew we needed him. He took her to the hospital, and returned to tell me she was there, but that it would be three days before the doctor came.”
Edouard listened to Nanée assure him that it wasn’t his fault or his wife’s, that jaundice came from poor nourishment, and she was sure they were too generous in giving their food to refugees.
“We won’t stay one moment longer than necessary, for Luki’s sake and for yours,” she said.
“You are American?” Hans said. “Perhaps you could visit my Lisa at the hospital in Perpignan, and let me know how she does?”
“We changed trains there,” Nanée said. “I wish I had known.”
But of course she couldn’t have stopped there, not when she was traveling with Luki and him.
He hated even to raise it with the man’s wife in the hospital, but it had to be asked. “I . . . I understand you can’t possibly take anyone over the border right now, but perhaps you have a map of the route?”
Hans excused himself, and returned in a moment with a pencil and a thin square of paper. “My Lisa,” he said, “she is the one who knows the way. We cannot keep a map here. It isn’t safe.”
He set about drawing a map as best he could.
“Here, just past the creek,” he said, “you will go through the Puig del Mas. It is on the outskirts now, but it is where the town of Banyuls began. You must be here when the vineyard workers go out for the day, as often there are border guards here. You will try to blend in.” He indicated Edouard’s hat. “It is too nice for a worker, you see? You must seem to belong. If you are very lucky, perhaps the morning will be too cold for anyone who does not have to be there.”
He continued drawing the path, going through the markers and the risks.
“Here the route passes an empty stable. After this, there will be seven pine trees on the plateau that will indicate the right direction. They will be always to your right.
“Here the path follows a low stone wall.
“A boulder marks the path here.
“Here, you will cross a clearing, and there will follow a steep vineyard where there will be no path at all, where you must clamber up through the vines.”
Edouard took a shot with his Leica: Hans drawing a map of escape. This is what they did. Clandestine. Forbidden. This was a man who risked his life for others. A Jewish German, like Edouard himself.
“Here, you must be very careful. The path is precarious. It will not be easy. There is a narrow ridge at the top, where you will need to rest if you can, but look carefully first.”
He marked on the little map a point where it was very easy to lose the way if you weren’t careful, as the path would be barely visible and at the same time the seven pines would be hidden behind a hill.
“Here the path is very close to the road,” he said. “You must be absolutely silent and listen for traffic. You cannot easily be seen from the road just above, but you can be heard. You will not wish to invite a closer look over the edge.”