Lisette's List (28 page)

“See? A
Parisienne
through and through.”

As I described to him the people I knew, a surprising pleasure warmed me. I told him about the giveaway box and going house to house with a wheelbarrow, asking for donations for the refugees and farmers. I explained how doing that had made me feel part of the community, André’s ancestral home.

I suppose it wasn’t so strange that taking a walk with Maxime made me think of the many walks André and I had taken in Paris. It was a warm feeling, not comparing, only enjoying. Just as in the city, where we would often stop to have a pastry, here Maxime and I went into the
boulangerie
in the lower village. I introduced him, and Odette smiled at him so genuinely that I knew she accepted him as my good friend. He bought a
pain au chocolat
for me, and we shared it while sitting in place du Pasquier, facing the valley.

“Do you remember in Paris when I worked at the
pâtisserie
and you often came in to buy a pastry and then gave it to me?”

“And that made that other counter girl so mad.” Maxime laughed softly at the memory. It was heartening to hear him laugh. I may have been mistaken, but I thought I recognized yearning in his eyes. The war had no power to dissolve their beautiful blue. Blue as the Mediterranean on a summer day, I surmised. I could swim in those eyes.

I felt embarrassed for looking at them longer than was proper, so I quickly said, “This is the Roussillon version of our Paris promenades. Oh! How could I have forgotten to tell you! There’s a painting called
The Promenade
by Marc Chagall.”

“I’ve seen it. He exhibited it in Paris.”

“I’ve seen it too, Max!
Here
. Well, near here. In it, Marc is standing in front of his village of Vitebsk and Bella is floating horizontally, supported on his arm.”

“As though she had taken a flying leap.”

“It was just after a revolution in Russia, and they were jubilant about their new freedom. She was so elated that she couldn’t stay on the ground.”

“How do you know this?”

“She told me.”

“Impossible! They were living in Paris.”

“Yes, but they came here to hide in a hilltop village nearby, and I used to visit them and take them eggs and cheese. The bus driver Maurice bought art supplies for Marc in Avignon and introduced me to them in their home.”

“Is this your imagination? You’ve always had a good imagination. All your outlandish tales of what the nuns at the orphanage whispered to each other at night. And now a compassionate goat and a cuddly Russian chicken and you talking with Bella Chagall. You must have just seen the painting in Paris and dreamt this.”

“It’s the truth, Max. I can prove it.”

“Oh, you can, can you?”

With that, I knew he was teasing me.

“Yes, because he
gave
me a painting.”

Maxime puffed air out of his mouth. “Truly?”

“I’ve hidden it, but if it’s still there, you can see it.”

“And if it isn’t, you expect me to believe you?”

“Yes, Max. I do. On the strength of our friendship, I do. It was safer to keep it hidden. My house was ransacked. But I suppose it’s safe to get it now. We can go there tomorrow, when you’ve rested some more.”

I made him take my arm and we climbed home slowly, a different way than we had come down. I wanted him to see that Roussillon wasn’t just a one-street village. We went up a narrow avenue where I knew the broad-leafed ivy growing against the houses had turned the lane Roussillon red, orange, and bronze, but their harmonious, warm colors did not hide the peeling ochre stucco made from local sand covering the gray building stone, which showed sadly in places.

At place de l’Abbé Avon, Maxime suddenly stopped. I thought he was out of breath, so I looked for a place for him to sit.

“Look!” he said. “A huge woodpile!”

“That’s the one. But they weren’t there.” In a near whisper, I went on, “It’s so exposed. Why would he hide them here?”

“Maybe because it’s such an unexpected place.”

I considered the idea. “The pile gets depleted every winter, and in the summer a forester gathers and chops wood and piles it up again. People put coins in that tin can to pay for their wood. André hid the paintings at the end of summer, when we received your letter.”

Maxime looked at the roof over the woodpile. “It’s not very weatherproof.”

Trying to appear casual, we noticed the edges of two large plywood boards serving as a platform, one directly on top of the other, with the firewood for the coming winter stacked more than two meters high above them. I hadn’t seen that there were two boards when I had been with
Herr Leutnant
in the dark. Maxime and I looked at each other. Despite my new hope, I scowled my puzzlement. Maxime shrugged his shoulders. We walked on.

In a low voice he said, “You say the paintings are removed from the frames?”

“Yes.”

“And off the stretchers?”

“I can’t be sure. There are some sticks in the root cellar that look like stretchers.”

He strode uphill with renewed energy. In the cellar, he confirmed that the sticks under the burlap bags were stretchers.

“How can we remove all the wood without making a mess in the street and without people questioning us?” I asked. “Every wife we’ve just passed has seen a strange man with me, and the rest of the village wives will have heard it secondhand at the
boulangerie
in the morning. They’ll be watching.”

“Do you have a battery torch?”

“No, but there’s a lantern hanging under the lean-to.”

“Then we could work at night.”

“Unload all that wood, remove the paintings from between the boards, pile it back up again exactly as it was, and sweep the street so people wouldn’t wonder? All in one night? Impossible.”

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s better to work at the end of winter, when the pile is depleted.”

I hated to think of the wait it would entail.

“Why do you think he didn’t hide them on our property?”

“Maybe to separate them from you for your safety.”

A
FTER AN EARLY DINNER
and Madame Bonnelly’s wine, Maxime grew quiet as we prepared to go upstairs. At the landing I said, “Promise me you won’t have a nightmare tonight.”

With a wry smile revealing the absurdity of such a request, he said, “I promise.”

His response to what I had intended as lightness, a little joke, I took to be an affirmation that he would not be controlled by the past.

“Before the war I saw a painting by Picasso called
The Weeping Woman
,” he said. “It depicted the raw grief and horror of a woman of Guernica, the Basque town bombarded by the Luftwaffe.”

“I know what happened there. You don’t have to describe it.”

“All of the woman’s features were disordered, deranged with pain, in lurid colors. Tears burst out of her eyes like white bullets. It made me imagine you the moment you learned of André’s death. I have nightmares about that.”

“You shouldn’t. I don’t.”

He held me with his eyes. “You weren’t the one to end his life.”

Awkwardly, I touched his cheek. “Neither were you.”

He responded by touching my cheek in the same way. We turned and went into our separate bedrooms.

I hugged my pillow, hungering to fulfill my latest vow.
Do something good for Maxime
.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

GIFTS FROM CHAGALL

1945

“E
VERY STEP IS ONE STEP CLOSER TO MY PAINTING
,” I
SAID
to encourage Maxime on the long walk to the bories the next day. I buttoned my jacket and breathed in the woodsmoke from the burning of the vines after the
vendange
.

Not long after we set out, we heard the sharp, sudden report of a rifle. Maxime’s shoulders jerked, and he whirled around in alarm.

“It’s only the hunters. There are wild boars in the foothills. They hunt them with hounds.”

“Men are primitives.”

A little while later, with the wind blowing our way, we heard the calls of the hunting horns.

“I like the way they sound,” I told Maxime, “so strong and urgent. There’s a lot about Provence I like, but there’s one big thing I hate.”

“Winter?”

“It’s that I’m so horribly isolated. I can only go to Gordes, Avignon, and Apt in Maurice’s bus. That leaves out Aix and Arles and Marseille, where there are probably art galleries.”

The high-pitched trill of a starling made us stop to listen.

“You would not hear that in Montparnasse.”

“True, but I would hear art talk. Oh, how I long for that.”

“We’re walking through a painting right now, Lisette. Just look around us. Coming back on the train from Germany and seeing the north so damaged, I thought that the beauty of rural France was only in children’s books now, but that isn’t so. This place is untouched.”

“You’re seeing it at its worst.” The trees were dropping their leaves, vegetable plots had not a tinge of green, and the lavender fields, cut at the end of summer, were only dry scruffy mounds. I had wanted the countryside to look its best for him. “I wish you could see it in June. Lavender washes the air with perfume then, and the grapevines are decked with new chartreuse leaves. Will you come back in June?”

“Maybe.”

That wasn’t a promise, but at least he didn’t rule it out.

Approaching the Bonnellys’ large farmhouse, which the people here called a
mas
, I told him that I had picked grapes in their vineyard for the
vendange
when Monsieur Bonnelly was a prisoner. “Two seasons I did it. It was hard work, but I would do it again. It made me feel that I contributed to the community. People have been good to me here. Madame Bonnelly bolstered my hopes when I didn’t hear from you.”

“I’m grateful to her, then. Are people here so good to you that you might forsake Paris forever?”

“No. Not forever. Just until I find the paintings.”

We stopped to rest in Madame Bonnelly’s outdoor kitchen under an arbor. She gave Maxime one of her hearty handshakes and a glass of wine. Bursting with garrulous talk, she ended her typically Provençal discourse on the weather with “Wouldn’t you like to stay for the midday meal?”

“Merci, non,”
I answered. “We are on a promenade. I have packed a picnic.”

She offered us two apples, but when Maxime smiled his thanks with missing teeth, she grabbed them back and gave us two ripe pears and a bunch of grapes instead.

Half an hour down the road, I ran ahead of him to the fence post that had the sickle stuck in its top. “Look! Amazing. It’s been here as long as I have lived in Roussillon, just waiting for some farmer to remember where he left it. Nobody bothers it. You know, Roussillon teases a person. Just when I’m feeling bored and isolated and deprived, it gives me something that pleases me.”

An instant frown clouded Maxime’s face.

“This sickle, for example. We need it. Can you get it out?”

“You want to destroy this wayside curiosity?”

“We’ll put it back.”

“In the same fence post?” He freed it and built a circle of rocks around its base so we could locate the same place on the return trip.

As we approached the village of bories, I explained what they were and how ingeniously they were constructed.

“It’s in that one, the one behind the nettle bush.”

“You certainly didn’t pick one that had a welcome sign.”

“Wasn’t that the point?”

He began hacking at the nettles with the sickle, and I carefully pulled them away from the borie.

“Is it safe in there? The roof won’t fall in on us?”

“These huts have been here for centuries.”

“They remind me of gun emplacements.”

“Don’t think of that.” I stepped in and turned around to face him. “Button up. It’s cool in here.”

He ducked and came inside. “So where is this painting of yours? I don’t see it framed and hanging on the wall.”

“It’s not framed at all. It’s behind this panel of slabs.”

I started to lift them off, and he worked beside me. I put my face right up next to the opening we made and peeked down into the large niche.

“It’s there! I see the edge!”

“Careful. Don’t pull it out yet.”

Excited, I lifted off another slab and it slipped, pinching my finger between it and the one below it. Maxime removed the rest of the slabs, lifted out the painting, and took it outside into the light.

“Ah, yes. This
is
a Chagall. A sweet-faced goat. He is partial to goats almost as much as cows. The village through the window in the snow must be his.”

“Vitebsk,” I said.

“The woman is you, the way he saw you.”

“Really? I thought it was Bella. What makes you think it’s me?”

“Because you tip your head to the right like this woman is doing, like you’re doing right now. And your mouth stretches more to the left than the right, like hers. It’s definitely you.”

That made me so excited I had to fan myself with my hand.

“And the goat and the chicken. He knew about them. He was the one who named Kooritzah Kooritzah.” I giggled. “I like saying her name.”

“I hate to tell you. That isn’t a hen. It’s a rooster.”

I looked at it objectively. “Oh, I guess you’re right. I don’t care. Maybe he just put those red things there to fill a space. He does that. He told me so. To me it’s a chicken. He didn’t know about the outhouse with the window, and there we are, the three of us looking out the outhouse window. My family.”

“Don’t assume too much. It’s just a house that fits the space, just like that little man with a bouquet standing on the muntin fits the windowpane.”

“He’s dancing,” I said, delighted. “I think it must be Marc giving me flowers.”

“Flowers and snow. That’s just like him to put incongruous things together in one picture.”

“To him they are related,” I protested, “even though we don’t understand the connection. They are images from his dreamworld, so they can be simultaneous. But why did he have to make my hand so big?”