When they crested the summit, they stopped altogether. The steep cliffs fell away to a little town with red tile roofs far in the distance, and just beyond, the white-capped blue of the Mediterranean, all the way until it met the blue of the sky. Was that the Spanish coast?
In the other direction, the path they’d come up stretched down to Banyuls and what seemed to be a second sea. Behind them, an arc of higher peaks—Catalonia’s Roussillon—was dotted with snow.
It was breathtaking, truly. Edouard must think so too; he stood taking it in. Even Luki simply looked.
“It’s like there are two seas here,” Nanée said.
Were they on the right path? In all the explanation Hans had given as he drew the map for them, he hadn’t mentioned this stunning vista.
“Papa, a dreaming log.” Luki scrambled down from Edouard’s back and hurried off, slipping a little on the snow but recovering her balance and carrying on.
“Moppelchen, we can’t stop here,” Edouard said. “We can’t stop again until we’re in Spain.”
“I don’t remember Hans talking about a vista like this,” Nanée said. “Do you? We need to consult the map, to make sure we’re where he meant us to be.”
She watched Luki climb onto the log, remembering her big brother on the log sofa in Michigan, laughing at her when she tried to scramble up to join him, and her father lifting her up onto the log and sitting beside her, putting his arm around her so she wouldn’t fall off. Was it a real memory? It seemed both unreal and undeniable at the same time. She’d spent a lifetime trying to please him, trying to become the brave girl she’d imagined he wanted her to be.
But she wasn’t in Michigan now. She wasn’t in Evanston. She wasn’t a child reading stories about girls as extraordinary as she wanted to be, stories that always had happy endings and had never been real. She was in France. She was smuggling a German refugee and his daughter over the border. The penalty for shooting even a single Gestapo was the least forgiving kind of death.
They hadn’t been able to see the two men still on the road above them. They weren’t standing. Would knowing they were dead make her feel better, or worse? They were someone’s sons, maybe someone’s brothers or husbands. Someone’s fathers. And she had killed them. But they would have killed her. They would have killed Edouard. They would have killed Luki. Wouldn’t they have?
They sat in the sunshine, the wind gentle now and almost silent, with no canyon to howl down up here on this peak. Edouard sat beside Luki, and Nanée beside him. She dug from her musette bag a bit of bread. She took the smallest bite possible, to seem to be eating while leaving the bread for them. She passed it to Edouard, careful to make sure he had it before she let go, lest it fall to the ground. He didn’t even pretend to eat any before holding it for Luki to take a bite.
“You need to eat,” Nanée said. He was visibly exhausted from carrying Luki. “You need to keep your strength up.”
“You need to eat,” he said. “You . . .”
“I’m okay.”
She made herself meet his gaze, his startling green eyes that were sad and weary still, but also wild and alert, watching, aware. Full of compassion.
“They would have killed us,” he said. “You did the right thing. They would have killed us.”
She nodded.
She removed her gloves and pulled from her pocket the little rice-paper map she was meant to swallow if they ran into trouble, but then she just held it in her cold fingers.
Edouard kissed the top of Luki’s head.
Nanée sat silently beside them as a large bird, a hawk or an eagle, floated high overhead. Would the Germans have shot first if she hadn’t? She didn’t know. She couldn’t even say that in that moment she had thought about it, that she had considered that she couldn’t risk what those men might have done. She’d only focused the way her father taught her. She imagined a bull’s-eye, a target like the one from that first pistol shooting contest she’d won. She fired on instinct, as she’d once shot that dove who hadn’t done anything, who was only flying up in a sky in which he belonged.
“She was pregnant,” Edouard said quietly. “In the photo.”
Nude, Bending. Ghost Wife. Salvation.
He didn’t say Elza’s name, or Luki’s. His gaze remained on the bird floating higher now, growing smaller in the sky before turning and swooping down toward the earth.
She waited, silent.
“After . . . after she’d been . . .”
What word couldn’t he say? Or wouldn’t he say with his daughter there?
“It was a way of . . . of . . . I don’t know. She wanted me to take the photograph. She thought it would help heal me.”
After she’d been unfaithful? But then why would he keep the photograph?
“Us,” he said. “Heal us.”
She glanced to his face, not wanting to make him uncomfortable but needing to see as well as hear what he was saying, to understand. Elza was pregnant with Luki in the photo, but Elza had never been unfaithful to Edouard. That was what he’d meant when he told her Luki wasn’t Jewish. That Luki wasn’t his daughter.
A child under German law was not Jewish if one of her parents was not. That was the . . . not just shame, but grief she felt herself, even when she first saw that photograph, Salvation, when she thought it was a man rather than a woman. It was, she saw now, both: Edouard capturing his own shame and grief in this photograph of a woman he had loved but had been unable to protect. A photograph that, in capturing their grief, somehow revealed Nanée’s own very different grief, her own very different loss.
Luki snuggled up to Edouard, her kangaroos forgotten in the moment, falling to the snowy ground. He pulled her closer as, in the cold blue sky, the lone creature spread its wings wide, riding low on the wind.
“Because of your work?” she said. “Because of your photographs?”
“Yes.”
“And still you keep taking them.” The girl saluting Hitler. The boy forced to cut his father’s beard. The people held prisoner on the SS Sina?a.
“She said some things were important, and other things were not. She said the test of who we are doesn’t come in easy times; it comes in times like these.”
Nanée set a hand on the log beside him, thinking a thing wasn’t anything if you didn’t allow it to be. Thinking shame was too powerful a force to leave its control in the hands of those who would manipulate it. Shame and expectation both. Thinking the person she had become here was the only person she wanted to be.
She slid her hand over until her bare finger bumped up against his already resting there. After a moment, he lapped his little finger over hers.
She looked out to the two seas that were the same thing, feeling the warmth of his single finger on hers as she focused on the stunning blue-green, the whitecaps, the single bird a black shadow against the light. And he looked with her. They watched the lone eagle arcing gracefully toward them, its wings stretching wide and magnificent. They watched together as, beyond him, the wild waters lapped against the shores of two different countries, connecting somewhere beyond the horizon, in a place they couldn’t yet see.
Monday, December 9, 1940
THE PYRENEES