Edouard said to Luki, “We’ll stop to rest, but not yet.”
They reached the first clearing in about two hours. It was a third of the way—but the easiest third, Edouard concluded as he looked behind them, the land sloping gently down to the rooftops and the shore and the sea. Ahead were mountain peaks.
They’d left the workers behind now.
“Pemmy is tired of walking,” Luki said. “And she’s very tired of the wind noise.”
Edouard lifted her onto his shoulders.
“This will draw attention,” Hans Fittko said.
Edouard looked down to the town below them. Crawling slowly along the waterfront, like an all-seeing Surrealist beetle searching for prey, was one of the Gestapo’s dark limousines. The distance that had taken them hours on foot could be traveled in minutes on the road by those who could afford the attention an automobile brought. He swung Luki down.
Hans, reaching to help her, caught his foot on a tree root and went sprawling, holding tightly to Luki and rolling to the side to protect her from the fall. Edouard, trying to catch them both, fell with them. Luki was so surprised she didn’t even cry.
Edouard hurried to scoop her up, saying, “You’re fine, you’re fine.”
He looked around, hoping the ruckus hadn’t drawn any attention.
There was a thin line of red on Hans’s forehead.
Edouard set Luki on her feet, then turned back to Hans. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Let me give you a hand up.”
He brushed the gravel from the palms of his gloves.
Hans took a small first-aid kit from his musette bag. He cut off a length of bandage and wrapped his own already-swelling ankle, then returned the remaining bandage to the kit.
“When you get to the plateau,” he said, “you will see the seven pine trees.”
“We can’t leave you alone,” Edouard protested. “You’ll need help getting down the hill.”
“Keep those pines always on your right,” Hans insisted, handing him the medical kit, “so you won’t go too far north and lose the path.”
Nanée gathered Pemmy from several feet ahead, still with Joey sturdily pinned to her, the musical baby kangaroo sounding a single note when she picked them up.
Edouard met her gaze, knowing what she was going to say before she said it and wanting to stop her, as unforgivably selfish as that was.
“I could take Hans down,” she said. “I have an American passport. I can leave anytime.” She handed the kangaroos to Luki.
“You need to bring up the rear until you reach the border,” Hans said. “If anyone follows, you can delay them. As you say, you have an American passport.”
Luki said, “Pemmy and Joey could go with you, Monsieur Fittko.”
Hans smiled. “I’ve managed far worse than a short downhill hike on an ankle that is little more than twisted, I’m sure. Anyway, without espadrilles I’m not sure your kangaroos will be much help for me, and they’d be terribly sad to be parted from you, as will I.”
To Nanée and Edouard, he said, “Walter Benjamin told Lisa as she took him this route that it was best to pause before you become exhausted, to preserve strength.”
There is nothing which can overcome my patience, Benjamin had written in “Agesilaus Santander,” an essay about a Paul Klee oil transfer and watercolor of an angel he’d had to leave behind, which represented to him everything from which he’d had to part. But Benjamin had chosen a lethal dose of morphine rather than be returned to the Gestapo. A thing was so often nothing until it happened to you.
The sense of belonging Edouard would leave behind. A hat in which the initials that had always been his were scratched out. The hat itself now left behind too.
“Remember,” Hans said, “the path will parallel the official road over the ridge. It’s an old smuggler’s path that runs below the road, mostly concealed from it by an overhang, so again, the border patrol can’t readily see you. But if they hear you, they need do little more than peer over the edge to see you as well.”
He turned to Nanée. “Near the top of the mountain, there’s the vineyard that will lead you right to the point at which you can climb over the crest.”
“The vineyard,” Nanée repeated, and Hans assured her again that yes, even at the top of the mountains here, grapes were grown.
“Be careful. Keep on alert. There are wild bulls in these mountains, and smugglers. You don’t have provisions enough for a smuggler to bother with you, but they won’t know that when they see you.”
“The border guards and the Kundt Commission—are they likely to venture this high?” Edouard asked, thinking of that limousine.
“I’m afraid so,” Hans said.
Edouard found a fallen branch and broke it off to a slightly shorter length for Hans to use as a walking stick. “Thank you for all you’re doing for all of us, Hans,” he said. “For everybody like me. I hope . . . I’m sure Lisa will be fine, but . . .”
“Yes,” Hans said. “She has to be.”
As Hans set off, limping back down the hill, Edouard raised his Leica and took the shot: Portrait of the Man I Ought to Be.
Monday, December 9, 1940
THE PYRENEES
The climb grew steeper after they left Hans and the clearing. It was hard to have any sense of where they were due to the hills on either side, golden in the morning light, and the cliff ahead. What had been little more than a steep, rocky goat path—goat skulls being, Edouard gathered, what the sun-bleached ones that littered the path were—narrowed to boulders with small trails of gravel in between. More and more often they had to stop and take the measure of what was path and what wasn’t. So much of it was crumbling shale and slippery gravel. A misstep, and you might slide off the side and into the deep ravines. He held so tightly to Luki’s gloved hand that more than once she complained, “Papa, you’re hurting me.”
What had he been thinking, to insist Luki come this way with him?
They could see now the vineyards in the distance—wintering and windblown grapevines on ground sloping so steeply that it seemed to Edouard almost vertical. The sun was full on now, and surprisingly warming. The wind seemed to be letting up, but that might be the deception of hope.
Together he and Nanée eyed the way forward, searching for the path to get uphill from where they stood.
“Up there,” Nanée said.
He could see it now: the path on the mountainside above. But there was no way to get up to it.
He eyed the rocky cliff, then hoisted Luki onto his back. Nanée took Pemmy so Luki could hold more tightly to Edouard.
A spray of gravel rained down on him before he’d even set a hand in place to begin the climb, loose dirt blowing into his eyes. Behind him, Nanée grew suddenly quiet. Luki, too, was now completely still, clinging tightly to him.
He looked up. Heard a rustling above even over the wind, which was definitely less fierce now. He hoped that wasn’t just the shelter of the hill.