Lisette's List (12 page)

“Which one shall I buy, Mimi?”

“This one. No. This one. This one with the grapes, like Papa’s vines.”

We discussed the merits of each, agonizing with delight over which one to choose. Finally I made a decision, and Mimi agreed. Yellow sunflowers, something we didn’t have in Paris. With Mélanie’s shopping recommendations, I had money left over. “Spend it all,” she advised. “You don’t know when you’ll get more.” So I bought a straw sunhat with Mimi’s approval, a pair of red espadrilles, and an issue of
Modes et Travaux
, which had sewing projects. There was nothing like a day of shopping to turn two women and a little girl into fast friends.

Excited to show André my purchases, I burst into the house, spread the cloth, and stood back to look. With a jolt, I saw only empty walls. No paintings. No frames. Confusion descended on
me. André came in from the courtyard, and I demanded to know what he had done with them.

He pulled a chair back from the table. “Sit down, Lisette.”

“You didn’t sell them, did you?”

“No. I would never do that. I hid them.”

“Where? Why?”

“They’re not safe here. Many people in the village have seen them. Pascal talked about them to everyone. I can’t fault him. It was innocent exuberance that made him want to share them, but these aren’t innocent times. People will need food and many other things. The black market will be rampant. Need and suffering can turn a person. Friends have secret friends who may be black market dealers. Art can be traded for items no longer available. Poof! The paintings will become untraceable. I can’t trust anyone.”

“Even me? You can’t trust your wife?”

“I trust you, but it’s better that you don’t know. An inadvertent glance at a hiding place might reveal it.”

Pained by his secrecy, I scanned the empty walls and struggled not to cry.

It wasn’t just that he was keeping the hiding place a secret from me. It was a darker ache—that
he
was a secret to me. He had secret thoughts, secret plans. No matter what he told me, there were things unsaid. Maybe he had sold them. Maybe they had been stolen and he was just appeasing me by pretending they were hidden. Was it wise for him not to tell me? To have made his plans without consulting me?

He handed me a letter from Maxime.

27 AUGUST 1939

Comrade
,

Read this twice, then burn it. Hide your paintings. There are more than rumors here. Métro stations are being fitted out as air raid shelters. If the Germans penetrate France, God forbid, all of France’s art is endangered—the paintings still in museums and those in private hands as well. Every single museum in Paris closed its doors today. The art market here is in chaos. Every day the workers in the Louvre hear of cunning plans for quick sales to Germans and to anyone buying to save important paintings from destruction. At that auction in Lucerne, Monsieur Laforgue bid to save a Van Gogh self-portrait and Picasso’s
Absinthe Drinker
but was outbid on both. There was a frenzy of bidding for Matisses, Braques, Klees taken straight from Germany’s own museums, with proceeds to the Nazi Party
.

This past spring one thousand oil paintings and nearly four thousand watercolors and drawings deemed of no international value or considered objectionable by the Reich Chamber of Culture were burned by the Berlin Fire Department to “purify” the art world. It’s horrifying. If any paintings are in line with Hitler’s aims, sycophants drooling over prestige positions steal them to give to Hitler, buying favor with art. Either way, the art is lost to its owners
.

If the Germans take Paris, nothing is safe. Hide your paintings, André, and hide them well. Tell no one
.

People here fear the worst. We must enlist together or get conscripted separately. Come to Paris. Better that we fight shoulder to shoulder to save our country’s treasures, our patrimony, our cities, our identity, and our freedom—in short, to save France
.

Give a kiss to jolie Lisette for me. Come soon
.

Maxime

“Oh, André!”

Sudden dryness stopped my mouth. I handed the letter back to him. He read it one more time, lifted the circular lid of the cooking
stove, and fed it to the flames. Seeing the edges curl and turn Maxime’s handwriting to ash, I could only imagine what André and Maxime would see, what they would have to do.

We read the Paris newspaper clipping Maxime had enclosed about Kristallnacht, the night ten months earlier of brutal attacks on Jewish synagogues and businesses throughout Germany and parts of Austria. An estimated thirty thousand German and Austrian Jews were rounded up and sent to camps.

That evening, we ate our dinner silently, shocked, watching each other raise fork to mouth. Every second of silence thickened my fear. Something was shifting. The sundering of our parallel thinking pierced the closeness of our lives, and in the tiny opening, acute sadness poured in. I said with my eyes what I could not say with words:
Don’t go
.

He touched my shoulder as he stood up, lingering a moment, his hand resting there, before he put on his cap. I stood too and reached for my shawl.

“No, Lisette. Stay here,” he said with softness in his voice, and left for the café.

Every evening since Hitler had taken Czechoslovakia, he had been going to the café in order to listen to the radio and talk with the men of the village about the likelihood of the German army penetrating France. Could he not understand that I wanted to hear it for myself?

I tried to recall Maxime’s letter—all those paintings turning into an ash heap, the art world of France and of my dreams shattered, hope shriveled. Thank God Pascal didn’t know. I washed the dishes and went to bed, chilled to the bone on this hot summer night.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, S
UNDAY
, we went about our work quietly. I searched André’s face at supper before he left to go to the café, saw only worry written there, and went to bed alone. I awoke when André’s
shoes dropped heavily onto the floor. Under the sheet he pulled me toward him, his breath smelling of beer as he said, “De Gaulle declared war today.”

It was the third of September, a date impossible to forget now. He cupped my breast, but he didn’t fondle me as he did most nights before our lovemaking. We lay still, our hearts too heavy for playfulness. My mind tumbled with questions. When he felt me tremble, he held me tighter. Tomorrow’s dawn would bring a new reality. Then we would talk about what to do.

I
T WASN
’
T LIGHT THAT
awakened me. It was the sharp rasp of André’s saw going through wood that made me shudder. The tapping of a mallet, then the sanding went on for two weeks, so intent was he on finishing a large, waist-high cabinet, a gift to me, while the glue was setting on each pair of palace chairs. I had seen in his drawings that the carving on the double cabinet doors would be an
A
and an
L
with their upright strokes leaning against each other; all around them he would carve a circle of fleurs-de-lis. He intended the cabinet to be for dishes, so they wouldn’t be exposed on shelves when the mistrals blew dust through the house. He was going to position it beneath the place where Cézanne’s still life of fruit had hung, next to the stairs. Once the war was over, the cabinet and the painting would look magnificent together.

Surely we should have been doing something other than this feverish work, and we did, savoring delicate, tense moments together, our arms around each other’s waists as we watched the sun sink behind the windmill on the promontory beyond the ravine, cherishing each other in every way, stroking each other’s favorite places, unable to love enough to last the duration. I prepared his favorite dish,
cassoulet béarnais
, a casserole made with mutton, pork, andouille sausages, and white beans. I bought
pain fougasse
, a flat olive loaf, which he loved, and I asked René to make some
palmiers
, André’s favorite pastry. We fed morsels to each other just as we had
done in Paris when he called me his perfect lily. And of course, we slept in each other’s arms.

He was right about one thing. My eyes naturally went to possible hiding places—beneath the mattresses, under the beds, behind the headboards and dressers in both bedrooms, in the root cellar. He had puttied the holes where the paintings had hung so expertly that no one could tell a nail had been there. I had to believe that he had hidden the paintings with equal care.

I watched with an aching heart as he made his methodical preparations. He took down the wide plywood boards he used as work surfaces, folded up his sawhorses, laid out his tools on a shelf in the lean-to, covered them with canvas, and weighted the canvas with rocks. He bought firewood at the communal woodpile and stacked it neatly against the house. At our Thursday market, he bought a huge sack of rice and another of dried white beans, four long sausages, six tins of sardines, a large tin of coffee, a sack of sugar, another sack of flour, a salt cake, and olive oil. He shook the almonds from our tree, and I gathered them. He left all our money from the Palais des Papes job in the green ceramic olive jar. Only one thing remained to be done—to repair the kneelers in the church, his promise to Pascal. Now he vowed that it would be his first task when he came home.

It was when he packed his satchel that I couldn’t stand to be silent.

“Can’t I go to Paris with you? I’ll find a way to live. As a seamstress of army uniforms, or back at the
pâtisserie
.”

“You think there will be sugar for pastries? Be realistic.”

But even with the windows along les Champs-Élysées boarded up, the streets dark, cafés closed, statues cocooned within mounds of sandbags, there would still be the Seine. I could sit on my favorite iron bench in the square of Vert-Galant at the point of Île de la Cité and watch the fisherman too old to be in the army. The chestnuts would soon be dropping, the leaves of the plane trees crunching under my feet, and the faucets would still be running.

Despite my longings, I knew that when he said, “No,
chérie
. It’s safer for you here,” he was right. Paris was the capital, after all, and so it would be vulnerable.

He would leave the next Monday, a week after his twenty-sixth birthday, and would ride Maurice’s bus to Avignon. I counted down the days, then the hours. There was no crowd shouting “On to Berlin!” at the bus stop, only Constable Blanc standing off to the side. André approached him to speak to him privately, then came back to embrace me. He kissed me one more time and said, “It won’t be long, and I’ll be home. Then we can live in Paris. I promise.”

I stood between him and the bus, a foolish barrier between war and peace, until Maurice climbed up behind the steering wheel. André and I were left on the ground while the people in the bus watched us through the windows, knowing. Maurice started up the sputtering engine, which rattled my heart to pieces. André had to grasp my shoulders and move me aside in order to get on.

Gray exhaust snarled out at me, and I stood motionless, looking at André’s form as he made his way through the bus, his neck and jaw and left ear already shadowy to me.

Watching until the bus turned downhill, I felt an arm rest heavily on my shoulder. It was the
garde champêtre
, Bernard Blanc, who had brought Pascal home once.

“Worrying won’t help him. You have to help yourself now,” he said.

I wrenched my shoulder free and hurried home and knelt in front of André’s cabinet, trying to calm myself, trying to pray, tracing with my fingertips the
A
and the
L
leaning against each other.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE RADIO AND THE CAFÉ

1940

I
TRIED TO BE HOPEFUL AS
I
WALKED TO THE POST OFFICE
. Maybe this time there would be a letter from André. I thought again of the last thing he had said to me.
It won’t be long, and I’ll be home. Then we can live in Paris. I promise
.

I filled my mind with that vision, that he would come home from the war and I would be delirious with happiness. We would make joyous love, and I would conceive a child. We would sell this drafty house, and I would give birth in Paris, and our child would learn all the lessons well at
école élémentaire
, and if she was a girl, she would wear flowered dresses in summer like Mélanie’s Mimi, and if he was a boy, he would wear short gray pants and show his dimpled knees. As André rowed in the upper lake of the Bois de Boulogne, our perfect child would trail a delicate hand in the water, and all that would be lovely, but we would never be quite as we had been because André hadn’t trusted me.

T
HEN, THE HAPPY SIGHT
: Odette’s daughter, Sandrine, the post office clerk, balancing a letter on her palm. “
Voilà!
From your husband,” she said with great respect.

At home, I opened it carefully.

17 JANUARY 1940

Dearest Lisette
,

Maxime and I managed to get in the same platoon. It’s comforting to have a friend here, wherever here is. All I know is that our train passed vast cemeteries from the Great War—this presumably is the petite one—with crosses laid out in rows like stone vineyards. I wonder if my father is sleeping there. I must finish the work he began
.

To that end, we’ve been fitted out with scratchy uniforms, boots, kit bags, and rifles. We’re learning how to march, fall lizardlike onto our bellies, squirm along like worms, and shoot. I’m better at squirming. Maxime is better at shooting but worse at marching. My first sight of blood was his bloody blisters, thanks to his stiff, tight boots. Next we’re going to learn how to operate machine guns
.