Edouard stood to set off again, looking to the horizon but still scraping his heart over the past. I’m pregnant, Elza had told him. Pregnant with the child who would become Luki. He hadn’t been able to touch her. Hadn’t been able to ask. But of course she wouldn’t have known any more than he did whose child she was carrying. I want you to photograph me, she’d said. Photograph us. I know you. I know this will be easier for you if you take me back into your heart through your art. If you take this child, too, into your heart through your art.
He took the small rice-paper map from Nanée, who was standing too now, beside him. She picked Pemmy and Joey up from the snow and handed them to Luki as he focused on the markings Hans had drawn. His future, and Luki’s, and Nanée’s.
Were they here? Or here? Or here?
It was a long moment before he could get control of his voice.
“I think we’re here,” he said finally.
“Where?”
He pointed to the place on the little map where Hans had indicated the path would fall away to the Spanish border station.
“Here?” Nanée said.
“Yes.”
“But that’s in Spain.”
“Yes.”
He indicated the line of the path down to the Spanish border station, where they would have to register, to show their travel documents and hope not to be turned away or worse.
Luki said, “We’re in Spain, Papa?”
“Yes,” Edouard said. “We are out of France. We are out of France. We still must get the people in Spain to allow us to pass through to Portugal. But we are out of France.”
Luki hugged her kangaroos to her, and began to sob. She was exhausted. Of course she was.
“Moppelchen,” he said. “My Moppelchen.” He pulled her to him, kissed the top of her head, and stroked her hair. He lifted her and sat again on the log, and he rocked her for a few minutes, thinking, as he did so often, of how he’d failed Elza and Luki both, and imaging Elza writing that last note to him—If anything happens to me, promise me you will keep Luki with you and take care of her, always—when his love for Luki should have been absolute from the day she was born.
But he saw as he looked out to the two seas, Luki warm in his arms, that Elza’s note hadn’t been a request; it had been a reminder. Elza had been sure of his love for Luki even when he doubted his own heart. She would never have risked leaving her daughter behind to return to Germany for her sister if she hadn’t been sure of that love.
He watched Nanée watching Luki as Luki wound down, her fear settling out through her tears. Yes, this child had already won her heart too.
“We’d better go,” he said finally. “We don’t want to miss the last train out of Portbou.”
Nanée looked directly at him, watching. “Yes,” she said.
She set a hand on Luki’s. “I’m going to miss you, Luki,” she said.
Words meant for him too. He heard that in her voice, felt the blow. Her gentle way of saying goodbye to Luki, and to him.
He stared down at the markings on the map. How had he convinced himself that Nanée belonged with him? That she had chosen him. That she would leave everything she loved behind to come with him. To go home, he’d thought, but where he was going was no more home to her than it was to him.
He searched for a reason he might offer to change her mind: It was too dangerous for her to stay, more dangerous for her even than for him, because she’d shot the Germans; if any of them had survived, they would be looking for the woman who had planted two feet firmly on that path and shot them, not the man and the child tucked up against the cliff behind her. Varian would surely be evicted from France soon too, and what would she do then, even if she was allowed to stay? Luki would want her to come with them. He wanted her to come.
He said, “If those Germans have been found—”
“I know, but I’ll be able to see the approach from above, I think.”
She’d thought it through, then, this turning back.
“It’s too dangerous,” he insisted.
“No one suspects American women of anything but needlepoint. Men so seldom imagine us capable of the things we’re capable of.”
“I—”
“Everything good I’ve ever done,” she said, “I’ve done here.”
She looked at him then, watching him so closely in this moment of freedom and despair, the way he’d watched her all that first night they’d met, from that moment after he’d demanded André take Salvation down.
He wanted to ask if she would leave France when Varian did. But nobody could replace her. He knew that. The work she did as the Postmistress put her life at risk every day, and nobody else at the CAS could do what she did.
He held the tiny map out to her, wanting to ask if he would ever see her again.
“You’ll need it to find your way,” she said, refusing it. “Me, I would only have to eat it.”
He laughed a little. How had she known that would make him laugh? And that he needed either to laugh or to cry.
All the life he was leaving behind. The sense of belonging.
“I could stay too,” he said. Nobody could do what he did either, really. If he stayed, the photographs he could take would make the world see. He had always been afraid; it was there in that first self-portrait, and still he’d taken his photographs and published them, knowing he was taking impossible risks even if he couldn’t imagine the consequences: that he would lose Elza and the child they made together, that he would have to abandon everything of the life they’d built, taking only his cameras and as much of his work as he could gather, and Luki. He was carrying his photos with him even now.
He said, “I ought to stay.”
“You would endanger everyone who knows you,” she said. “Varian. Danny and T. Gussie and Lena and Maurice and Beamish.”
Her cheeks were red from the wind and the cold, and her nose too, and she had never looked more beautiful.
And you, he thought. If I stayed, I would endanger you.
She took her canteen from her musette bag and made him take it. “For Luki,” she said.
“I—”
“The photos you’ve taken already tell the story here.”
She took from her musette bag his letters, and she handed them to him. “These too. Use them for good whenever you can.”
Luki said to Nanée, “The angels still need you,” as if she had sorted this out in her own way.
“Yes,” Nanée said. “Yes, I suppose the angels do need me here in France. They appear to need all the help they can get.”
Luki said, “And Dagobert.”
“Yes,” Nanée said. “Yes, Dagobert needs me.”
“He will take care of you, like I take care of Papa and he takes care of me.” Looking to him now.
“Yes,” Nanée agreed.
“But you will watch over us, like the Lady Mary?”
Nanée touched a finger to Luki’s cheek, then trailed it down her arm to Joey and to Pemmy, to her scarf around Pemmy’s neck. “I will always be thinking of you, Luki,” she said.