Lisette's List (29 page)

“Maybe because you were generous to them. He is speaking his gratitude with his brush.”

I looked at the size of my own hand in comparison and noticed that I had a blood blister.

“Keep away from the painting. Let me carry it when we go.”

He put his palm under my hand. “Your blood is beautiful. Like a ruby popping out of your skin.” He looked at it awhile, then shook his head. “No. Blood is never beautiful.”

“Imagine how they lived here,” I said quickly to divert his thinking. I spread out the tablecloth and unwrapped the picnic of bread and chèvre and hard-boiled eggs and Madame Bonnelly’s pears.

“If they had language, what do you think they talked about?” I asked.

“The seasons?”

“The stars and the moon, too, I think.”

“The sound of wind,” he said. “That might have suggested a sound that became a word. How else but by using words would Madame know when Monsieur Borieman was going to come home and want dinner?”

“Not just flat words,” I said. “She needed forceful language to tell him that she was sick and tired of eating rodents. Rodent
à la forestière
, rodent
à la vinaigrette
, rodent
à la bordelaise
, rodent
bourguignon
.”

“Mignon de rodent à la Maxim’s.”

“ ‘Be a man! Hunt me a boar!’ Madame Borieman would demand. ‘I’m dying to prepare
sanglier chasseur aux herbes de Provence
, hunter-style with mushrooms, shallots, and white wine.’ ”

“With a disc of truffle on top. Followed by a digestif.”

“Of pomegranate liqueur.”

We laughed together, and it felt whole.

“They weren’t so primitive that they didn’t feel hungers beyond food,” I ventured.

“Do you actually think that?”

“I certainly do. Hungers are part of being human. The yearning
to satisfy their hungers is what led them to words. Just like it does with us.”

“You are a deeper thinker than when I knew you in Paris.”

“Maybe it comes from living alone and having hungers myself.”

O
N THE WAY BACK
, Max carried the painting and the sickle, and I held the remains of our picnic. The flat countryside was easy going, but I knew he dreaded the uphill climb.

Just after Maxime jammed the sickle into the fence post, a small lorry pulled up beside us and came to a stop. Bernard Blanc rolled down the window on our side of the road.

“Wouldn’t you prefer to ride?”

“No, thank you, Constable. We’re on a stroll.”

He glared at Maxime. “It’s too cool for a stroll. Get in.”

“No, Constable. It’s a lovely afternoon. We prefer to walk. I want to show my friend the countryside.”

He ground his gears and roared off, spitting out gravel and raising dust in our faces.

“Who is the hotheaded grouch?” Maxime asked.

“Nobody important.”

A
T HOME
, M
AXIME CRIED
, “
Oh là là!
Look here!”

On the back of the painting Marc had written,
May it be a blessing to you, Marc Chagall
.

“You have a treasure here.”

“Why? Will he be famous?”

“He
has
been famous, for two decades.”

“I’m just glad to have it here and to know he painted it for me. And that it looks happy. The last time I saw him, he was painting chaos and cruelty.”

“There’s a place for that too in art.” Maxime propped the painting up on a chair.

“We have to hang it.” Standing in the center of the room holding André’s jar of stretcher tacks, I considered each wall. “Here. Right over André’s cabinet, so I can look at it while I eat.”

That done, Maxime said, “Now tell me about his other paintings.”

“He puts things together that don’t exist together in real life. Like a giant chicken and the Eiffel Tower. And he disregards the true sizes of things in relation to each other. That baffled me at first. So did a woman standing on her head. Houses and animals are sometimes upside down too. He doesn’t pay attention to the law of gravity. But that’s what I love in his work. All those creatures flying around, as though gravity weren’t a law at all.”

“His vision obeys higher laws. That’s his spirituality. Most good art has some spiritual dimension.”

“Is that what makes a painting great?”

“That’s just a start. A great painting has to be more than spiritual, certainly more than a piece of religious art. Let’s see. It has to be more than original, too, like Chagall’s work is. More than a good likeness, more than a beautiful subject painted in pleasing colors, more than an intriguing composition, more than an interesting application of paint.”

“What more?”

“Well, let me think.” He looked up at the ceiling, as if to find the answer written there. Then he spoke slowly, one word at a time. “A great painting encourages us to feel some connection with a truth.”

“You’re talking riddles.”

“No, no. Great art—painting, sculpture, and architecture—gives us something very rich. It allows us to experience times, places, emotions, that we might not otherwise encounter. It invites us to ponder some item—a piece of fruit or a violin in the sky or a marble figure or a cathedral—until its qualities teach us something, or enrich us, or inspire us. This is difficult to express. It’s capable of grabbing a person”—he clenched his fist—“and holding him in a
trancelike state of union with the subject until he sees who he is or who we are as human beings more clearly.”

“A painting can do that?”

“Individually it can, and collectively too, I believe. Not that a viewer necessarily sees himself as similar to a figure in a painting, or that he adopts the painter’s vision of the world. But being completely absorbed by the piece of art, he becomes minutely different than he was before, less limited to his previous, narrower self, and this equips him to live a better life and to avoid getting swallowed by the world’s chaos.”

“Give me an example.”

“Take architecture. That German prison guard must have had such a trancelike experience in his cathedral in Cologne, just as I have had many times in Notre Dame. We each love those buildings, their qualities of solidity, soaring power, intricacy, harmony, light, the feeling you have when you stand in them of being enfolded in the arms of God. Because we both wanted to experience each other’s cathedral, our longing for those qualities allowed us to transcend enmity. For that moment we were brothers. It’s infinite and powerful, what art can do.”

Maxime shook his head and blew out a puff of air. “I haven’t expounded on art like this since I left the gallery.”

It was more than art that he was speaking about. I glimpsed in that moment that prison walls could not confine him. In reaching out to the German guard, he had seen that beyond the walls, the world was made not merely of stone and wood, material things, but of the meaning of things, of their spirit. This was talk that could heal. I could hardly contain my joy.

“I often saw Pascal stand for an hour in front of one of the paintings. Their ochre colors made him aware of his life purpose—bringing ochre out of Roussillon’s mines to Paris for painters to make great paintings. It made him proud to do that humble thing.”

“See how it showed him himself?”

I wondered again which of Pascal’s paintings had been André’s favorite.

“Have you ever been transfixed by a painting until it told you—?”

“A truth about myself? Many times,” Maxime said.

“Think of one.”

After a reflective moment, he said, “Now that you bring Chagall to mind, I remember a Chagall painting of two standing figures, full frame. The woman was upside down, and one of the man’s legs was wrapped around her to steady her, while his arms enclosed her legs and the hem of her skirt. They were intertwined. Their lives were intertwined.” He paused. “They needed each other for support.”

His questioning eyes asked if I had grasped what had landed so artlessly in our laps. Neither of us moved so much as a little finger, in order to prolong the moment.

Eventually, perhaps out of embarrassment for a truth laid bare, he was the first to speak.

“Chagall picks up a paintbrush and out from the tip of it fly beautiful memories, and freedom, and love.”

“Tell me a beautiful memory. Let it fly out of you.”

He was silent. Was it so hard for him?

“Are you searching for one, or are you choosing?”

“Choosing. Ah, this. The three of us in the Closerie de Lilas in the spring. A flower seller came by our table selling violets. André bought a nosegay and pinned it onto your dress.”

His voice cracked, and my throat seemed filled with petals.

“You were radiant. He adored you, Lisette. Never forget that.”

“As much as Marc adores Bella?”

“At least that much.”

L
ATER HE SAID
, “You know, I felt almost well talking about Chagall and what great art does.”

“Then he has given you a gift also. And because he has, he has given to me doubly.”

Maxime raised his shoulders so that his neck was lost between them. It seemed an unintentional gesture of gathering courage to express a thought.

“I was thinking just now that I might be ready soon to speak to Monsieur Laforgue. I would like to help him rebuild his gallery and his business.”

I laid my hand on his arm. “Yes, Maxime. Do that.”

An afterthought: if things fell in my favor, there might still be a place for me there.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

SAUSAGES

1945

I
COULDN
’
T POSTPONE IT ANY LONGER
. N
OW, BEFORE THE
first snowfall, it was time. I put on the one pair of André’s shoes I had saved, hiked my skirt up above my knees and tied it with twine, wrapped his biggest handkerchief over my nose, and stepped out into the courtyard.

I had been preparing for winter with a light step, gathering grass for Geneviève on dry days and saving vegetable scraps for Kooritzah in a pile the snow would soon cover. Now all that was left was the most distasteful task. I went to work shoveling out the shallow pit in the outhouse, using the hoe to push the waste down the cliff as far as the hoe handle would permit. I gagged and spat and my eyes watered, but I persisted. After every second shovelful I put my nose in the honeysuckle that André had planted alongside the outhouse, hoping for a whiff of last summer’s blossoms. In honeysuckle talk, it said that he was still with me.

I wanted everything to be nice for Maxime when he came again. Like Bella had said about her first visit to Marc’s cottage, life was new after Maxime’s first visit here. I felt a stronger impulse to recover the paintings—not just for me or for André’s sake, but for Maxime, so that the paintings would help him escape his memories.
Two of my vows—
Retrieve the paintings and Do something good for Maxime—
had become one.

When the woodpile was nearly depleted, I would write to him, he would come, and together we would collect the last of the wood, put some coins in the tin can, and lift up the top platform. There they would be, a hidden gallery that had eluded the Germans. Oh, what a pleasure to think about that while I was shoveling and gagging and trying not to breathe.

Just then Geneviève uttered an urgent
baa
. “What’s the matter,
lapushka
?” Concentrating on not spilling each shovelful until I could dump it over the cliff, I added, “You don’t like the smell?”

She bleated again, and I looked up. Bernard was standing just inside the gate with his hands behind his back.

“Bon Dieu!”
I snapped in exasperation.

“My, my. What have we here? A
Parisienne
disguised as a peasant. Filth and stink and all. Utterly charming in her getup, if I might say so, showing off her pretty knees. Such odd shoes for a dainty foot. You have a fine white handkerchief, but where are your silk stockings?”

I yanked off the kerchief, soiling it. “I did not invite you here. You have no right—”

“Ah, ah, ah.” Uttered staccato, like drumbeats. “Not so. As
garde champêtre
, I do have the right to pass through anyone’s property, for the welfare of the commune. And right now I’m checking on the welfare of my good friend Lisette.”

“Madame Roux.”

I resumed shoveling and didn’t look at him.

“A shame that a pretty woman like you has to do the basest work in the world.”

I ground my teeth at that.

“Look what I have for you today.”

He brought his arm forward to dangle a string of sausages, and swung them back and forth.

“How long since you’ve eaten
andouille Prussienne
? Have you forgotten what it tastes like?”

He had a point. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten more than a morsel of horse meat. Just meal after meal of chèvre and eggs and vegetables. But now, with winter coming, there would not be lettuce or celery or tomatoes, only my root vegetables in the cellar.

All those sausages swinging at once, not divided as they would be if he had bought them with ration tickets. It was the black market still operating right there before my eyes, tempting me.

“Why don’t you come visit me at my house? You could eat a fat, juicy sausage every night.”

His chuckle told me he intended the innuendo.

“Crassness will not win me, Constable, nor will your gifts, your authority, or your shiny boots. I do not want any more of your gifts with assumptions attached.”

“I suspect that your war widow’s pension does not go far with food prices the way they are now. Why can’t you accept a gift as a kindness?”

“Because there is no kindness in your voice.”

“A man can’t help how his voice sounds.”

“Yes, he can!”

He took a few steps toward me and kept swinging the sausages. I kept shoveling.

“You haven’t told me. Did you like the stockings? I haven’t seen you wear them. I dream of seeing those dark seams down the backs of your shapely legs.”

“That’s your own foolish fault.” I pushed in the shovel with my foot and hurled its contents over the cliff. “You will never see them. I burned them.”