Lilly had also grown up around these women and had seen them transformed in weeks or months from my muse to that impossible woman, had seen these men of genius flee Prague while their muses’ bellies grew big and their hearts broke wide open, and she set rules for herself to avoid their particular fate. Not that she was a nun during her years in Paris and elsewhere. In time, her predilections became a running joke among her circle, for though she served as apprentice, student, amanuensis, and sometime model, she would not sleep with other artists. As she had once told a friend, she drew a strict line between the darkroom and the bedroom.
But that life, that world—it was all gone or quickly going. It had been years since Berlin, Munich, and Vienna had purged themselves of degenerate art and the degenerate artists—her friends and rivals—who created it. Surely Prague would be next, and while Paris was still Paris, it was foolish to believe that could not change in one blink of the camera’s eye. The poison was sure to keep spreading. Who was there to stop it? She often wondered what her mother would have thought of this latest turn of events. Madame Bloch never considered her salons to be merely some rich lady’s exercise in luxury and self-congratulation. No, her efforts among the avant-garde were more than a private indulgence. They were a bulwark against idiocy. Art, to her, was a light in the darkness, and if it burned brightly enough it could dispel the dark forces altogether. Such a funny thought for a woman who saw herself as a latter-day Medici. When had one of Raphael’s frescoes ever stopped the Florentines from marching against Pisa, or kept the Spanish from the gates of the Tuscan republic? Lilly’s mother had been lucky enough not to live to see one of her most cherished values overthrown by columns of brown-shirted troops marching, unimpeded, across the Charles Bridge.
Lilly wasn’t an idealist, and she didn’t see a virtue in walking boldly into the lion’s maw. If the lion wanted to eat you, it would eat you—and how then could you continue to create? With the collapse of Mr. Musgrove’s plan, and the likelihood that she would have to leave New York after all, she had begun to wonder if there would be some way to jump ship in Marseille and make her way to Paris. But France was in no hurry to draw in Europe’s outcasts and oppressed artists. If her family still had money, there might have been a way to gain entry through doors otherwise locked, but her father had died years ago and when the board of directors learned just how expensive Madame Bloch’s art collecting and artist-supporting had become—and of the debts that Meyer Bloch had accrued to make both possible—they shut off the flow of funds that had nourished Madame Bloch’s künstlergarten. The house had to be sold, and Madame Bloch decamped to a flat in a once-fashionable district now known for its faded charm and the poor water pressure of its pipes. Toward the end of her life, she was selling her greatest finds for a pittance just to keep the lights on. When her mother died last year, Lilly had been back in Prague for only six months, watching her mother struggle against emphysema and the indignities of an empty sitting room and walls that grew more bare with each month’s rent.
How would she have made it through those months without Josef? She had been in Barcelona running with a crowd of journalists and war photographers, then bounced back to Paris, where she continued her street photography and began to experiment with frank, unadorned portraits. News of her mother’s rapid decline had brought her home, where Madame Bloch commented frequently on how much her daughter had aged in the intervening years and confided to her that her looks (which Lilly questioned) and talent (which her mother questioned) could be used as bait for only so long. Lilly’s chances of snaring a husband to support her and restore the Bloch family’s curatorial prominence were dwindling with each line on Lilly’s face, each night she wasted in the darkroom, each painting that disappeared from the apartment’s walls.
It was on a rare night out at the Café National, after a heated argument with a group of drunken surrealists—why did she always find herself tangling with surrealists?—that her friend Magda introduced her to Josef, a lawyer and a columnist for one of the city’s antifascist newspapers. Lilly, an incorrigible skeptic when it came to love, arrived back at her mother’s flat completely smitten. Josef was dark and small, almost waifish, but he was lively and funny and when she spoke he seemed to be weighing the value of every word she said. Within a week he had met her mother and Lilly never would have guessed what a blessing that would be. On the first night he visited the flat, Josef plunked himself down on a sofa and argued—seriously and jovially—with Madame Bloch for over an hour. They shared a few opinions on art—Braque was a genius, Dalí a charlatan—but were at loggerheads on music and theater. Madame Bloch was annoyed by Brecht, whom Josef revered as a giant. After that first night Josef became a regular fixture in the flat with its musty, faded wallpaper and haphazard assortment of furniture salvaged from the former Bloch manor. He would often arrive when Lilly was not at home and banter with Madame Bloch until she returned, after which he and Lilly would meet friends at the Café Slavia or take in one of the American or French films playing at the Cinema Julis at Wenceslas Square. Sparring with Josef—educating him was how she saw it—brought Lilly’s mother great pleasure, even if she was loath to admit it. Oh, that boy, she would say. Where does he get these ideas?
Lilly’s mother had died in December, and it was only a few days after her burial that word reached Lilly that she had been offered a grant by the Foundation. She had made an inquiry in the late spring, back when she was still in Paris, and only now, in the depths of the Prague winter, did she receive a letter from the woman who had taken over her Paris flat informing her that a man called Musgrove had been trying for months to contact her.
A WOMAN WITH platinum-blond hair poked her head into the lounge where Lilly sat and told her that it was time. She led Lilly down a hallway to a door that looked much like Mr. Musgrove’s except for the name stenciled in gold on the lustrous wood: Crabtree. It was not a name that suggested good fortune.