“Do you like Provence?” I asked.
“I love it. The wheat at harvest time reminds me of home. And I love the grapevines marching across hills in streams of green, and the light. Oh, the light. When I came to Paris, I thought that was light—ha!—until we came here.”
“Is that the reason you came to Paris, the light?”
“That, and to learn the language of art. After hundreds of years in Rome, in Toledo, in Amsterdam, Art settled in Paris. I knew I would feel the comradeship of other painters there. I wanted to bring my homeland to them. I haven’t really left Vitebsk. I haven’t painted one single painting that didn’t breathe its spirit.”
“To you, does Provence also have a spirit?”
“Oh, yes. I feel it when I go out in the early evening to smell the richness of the fields and to listen to the delicate resonance of the Angelus bell after it stops ringing.” His dreaminess lasted for only a few moments, and then his expression darkened. “I would be content to live here permanently,” he murmured.
I knew enough now not to ask him why they couldn’t.
WHEN MAURICE CAME TO get me, Monsieur Chagall wished him good health.
“Get home safely, God willing,” madame said.
In the bus, I spilled out all I had seen. “They are kind, gracious people. They said I could come again.”
“I will take you as long as I can get gasoline.”
“They’re hiding, aren’t they.”
“Yes, but you must not tell anyone.”
“I won’t. I’ll just hold them between my wings.”
IN MY OUTHOUSE, I opened the shutters to see the landscape of the Vaucluse. What did Monsieur Chagall see that I could not? The vineyards and oaks, bare of leaf in winter, held little beauty, but one night the temperature dropped below freezing and left a glaze on the leaves still hanging on the passionflower vine. In the morning, they looked like pieces of emerald stained glass, like those in Sainte-Chapelle on Île de la Cité. At that very moment, a breeze made them tinkle. It would have been nice to share that moment of loveliness with Madame.
Now, walking back across the courtyard, I caught sight of Mont Ventoux peeking over the smaller mountains. Its white chalky sheen looked as though it were lovingly painted with quicksilver.
If Monsieur Chagall could teach me to see beauty here in dull winter, I would have to visit him again.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LOVE
1941
ON A SATURDAY MORNING I HEARD A KNOCK ON THE DOOR and opened it to Constable Blanc with his pomaded hair swept up into a wave. Who could afford pomade in these times?
“I’m just making my rounds and thought I would check in on you. Is everything all right?”
“Yes.”
“Have you had any more disturbances?”
“No. None.”
“May I come in?”
“I was just going out.”
“A shame you cut your hair. You had beautiful long hair. Like a sea siren.”
“De Gaulle called upon every French person to unite with him in action and in sacrifice. Hair clippings are being collected for inner soles.”
“You’re unhappy, I know.”
Stating the obvious. What was his business here anyway?
“I know what you need to be happy.”
“No, I don’t believe you do.”
“Yes, I definitely do. Love.”
If I had not been raised by the Daughters of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, I would have spit in his face for his impertinence.
“In the meantime, you have other needs. Sugar, coffee, meat. I can get them for you. More than your ration coupons can provide. What would you like?”
What was this other side of him? Was he making a sincere offer? He had always been pleasant to me, except for that moment at the dance. Now again he was presumptuous, but maybe beneath it, he was just being kind to a widow in need.
Monsieur Chagall’s painting of a rooster cradling a woman in the burning village blazed across my mind. Not a rooster; but a hen would give me a steady supply of eggs.
“A chicken. A hen,” I blurted. “And some rennet tablets.”
“What’s rennet?”
“Never mind. Forget it.” I shouldn’t have asked for anything when I couldn’t really trust his motives. “I don’t need anything. I have to go.”
I closed the door in his face and went upstairs to put on my old flannel coat.
Louise and I were going to take Maurice’s bus to the Apt market. She had promised to show me how to make chèvre, the cheese from goat’s milk. We needed two things—a starter culture, which she could give me from the buttermilk she made, and rennet, which she didn’t have. It was a solidifying agent, she said. It would make the milk curdle.
In Apt, we scoured all the food booths at the market for rennet in powdered or tablet form, as well as the épiceries on the side streets, to no avail. One vendor told us to go to a shop behind the filling station. The door was closed, with a sign saying, PLUS D’ESSENCE. No more gasoline. We knocked just as a gendarme approached and nailed a poster to the wall. It depicted a frightened boy sitting behind an empty bowl. The menacing black hand of a skeleton was reaching for the bowl. The words on the poster read, LE MARCHÉ NOIR EST UN CRIME. We had just knocked on the door of the black market! Wide-eyed, we took one look at each other and scurried away.
When I arrived home, there was a package wrapped in newspaper sitting in the pot of lavender by the front door—a plucked and gutted chicken. I laughed at the constable’s mistaken notion until I remembered his insinuations.
A whole chicken. There was something dark and secretive in that. Rationing permitted only large families to purchase a whole chicken. I didn’t think he had a large family, but even if he didn’t, how could he give away food? If he was unmarried, what connections did he have, that he could so quickly obtain a whole chicken? May my hands fall off, I thought, if I put that foul-gotten fowl in a cook pot!
That there was a chicken sitting in a pool of guilt on my sink counter was, at least in part, my own fault. I had asked for it, but I had failed to say a live chicken. Had he taken a risk to get it? Should I be grateful or wary? Was he showing off or had his act been motivated by genuine concern? Should I be suspicious or impressed by his quick willingness to commit a crime for my benefit, he, an officer of the law? Certainly, his character was now called into question.
Could the misbegotten chicken possibly be traced to me? How could I dispose of it safely? There was only one way. This was no time to waste even a misbegotten and misguided gift. It tasted delicious, with mushrooms, onions, celery, carrots, and lemon juice.
LOUISE WOULD NOT BE DEFEATED. The next day she took me to the boucherie, and we waited at the end of the long queue of women holding their ration books to get the meat legally allotted to them based on the size of their families. Could guilt be read in my eyes? Louise asked the frazzled butcher, Monsieur Aloys Biron, if he had any lining membrane of the fourth stomach of a calf.
“What in the world …,” I said.
Monsieur Biron chuckled his relief. “Since you are at the end of the queue, it’s a good thing you want something undesirable.”
“It’s worth a try,” Louise said. “My mother used it before there were rennet tablets.”
With that, I entered a realm no Parisienne would think to investigate.
WE CHOPPED THE STOMACH lining very fine and pounded it to a mushy pulp. I was impressed when it did curdle the milk in Louise’s cheesecloth sack, which I had hung from the panetière, and I ran five houses downhill to tell her. She told me how to use the whey that dripped out to make ricotta cheese. Geneviève produced two liters of milk a day, so, using two days’ worth of milk, I was able to make a substantial amount of both types of cheese.
IT HAD BECOME COMMON to see strangers on the street, refugees from the north. I tried to listen discreetly in the bakery and grocery to detect any German accent in their spoken French, as Bernard had cautioned me to d
o. Louise and I saw a woman dressed in men’s tweed trousers and boots accompanied by a woman in a Scottish tam whose monocle kept falling out of her eye socket. It was hard not to giggle.
“Résistants,” Louise whispered. “The one in trousers is a British novelist. She smokes a pipe. Maurice saw her do it. The other operates a mobile radio communication with England. There’s a playwright too. Beckett is his name. Irish. Maurice knows him.”
“How?”
“Certain deliveries.”
The code words for Maurice’s clandestine activities.
FOR THE FIRST TIME since we came to Roussillon, I saw people entering and leaving the windmill on the promontory. Curious about what was inside a mill, and how people could live in one, I walked around the high road to get to it, carrying some of my new batch of cheese. The mother was grateful and gave me a few centimes.
Four children hovered around the central works of the windmill.
“How are you managing?” I asked.
“We’re scraping by. The oldest boy is good at trapping birds, and Constable Blanc brings us stew meat from time to time. Imagine. He uses his own ration tickets. He has delivered food to other refugees too.”
Walking home, further perplexed by that man, I doubted that it was his ration tickets that he used.
A FEW DAYS LATER, I wrapped the larger portion of cheese in one of André’s handkerchiefs and took it to the Chagalls. At last I was doing something on my list. They were touched by the gift and remarked that they could not remember the last time they had eaten fresh chèvre. They marveled at its smoothness. Their gratitude was a gift back to me.
Bella looked so radiant that I asked Marc—they had both said that I should use their first names—if he had ever painted her.
He gazed at her with the softness of deep love. “I’ll never stop painting her. Show her, Bella.”
Leading me up the stairs, she said, “I’ll show you the first one he painted of me. I didn’t know him well at that time. What a strange bird he was. Introverted, dreamy, eccentric, his hair growing every which way, like an untended garden. I thought his arms and legs had been attached haphazardly because they jutted out at odd angles. But in him was a burning intensity, like a small sun, which fascinated me, and his drollery and spurts of playfulness could change in an instant to lightning intelligence.
“I gathered wildflowers for his birthday, stole candies from my mother’s kitchen, and took my flowered and paisley scarves to decorate the little room he rented by the river. I surprised him by coming there. ‘Do not move. Stay just as you are,’ he commanded, with what I can only call hot urgency.”
She stopped at a closed door to pantomine her story.
“He put a fresh canvas on his easel, snatched up brushes, and flung himself at it so passionately that the easel shook. Dabs of red, blue, white, and black flew through the air and swept me up with them. Up and up. I looked down and he was standing on tiptoe on one foot. He lifted me off the ground, leapt up himself, and glided with me up to the ceiling.”
Bella flung open the door, and there it was—a painting of both of them soaring upward on a diagonal, his neck swooping back on his supple body so that they were nose to nose, airborne in the little room.
“He whispered a song, and I could see the song in his eyes. We flew out the window as easy as could be, dancing through space hand in hand. I saw at once that he had painted my ecstasy.”
She became quiet and reflective. “Life was new after that.”
“Love made visible,” I murmured.
“You have to understand that for the Hasid—our village had a Hasidic community—”
“Pardon me, Bella, but I don’t know what a Hasid is.”
“Oh, of course. It’s a member of a Jewish sect that emphasizes mysticism, strict rituals, religious zeal, and joy. In fact, spontaneous joy and love are just as important to them as law or ritual. It was not uncommon to see a Hasid explode with happiness and dance in the street or climb onto a roof and play his violin for the moon. Hasids think it’s possible to commune with God through music and dance.”
That explained Marc’s fiddler dancing on the roof. I asked if there were more paintings of the two of them.
The pointed corners of her dainty mouth curved. “He will be so pleased when I tell him that you asked.”
She showed me one she called The Promenade. In a meadow with Vitebsk behind them, Marc, dressed in a black suit, stood on tiptoe, his face a broad, toothy smile. One arm was raised, and pivoting on that uplifted hand, Bella, in a long violet dress with a violet ribbon in her hair, had leapt up high above him and was fluttering horizontally, like a banner in the breeze.
“Pure exuberance!” I murmured.
“The October Revolution had just happened, and for Jews, it meant liberation, the end of humiliations and restrictions. It simply sent me skyward.”
“It’s more than that. It’s a love painting. Your two hands are connected in your happiness, and his lips are the same violet color as your dress.”
She gave me the kindest, warmest look I could imagine. “Listen to you, bashenka. You’re learning how to read a painting.”
She showed me another—Bella as a bride, Marc nestled behind her as they rode on the back of an enormous chicken. A dark blue Eiffel Tower stretched skyward behind them, with diminutive Paris buildings huddled under its arch. A little man wearing a cap was reading a floating book above a cow whose body had become a violin. Angels flew around them, and a tiny Vitebsk, like a distant memory, was crowded in a bottom corner.
“It’s a picture of your leave-taking from Russia, isn’t it?”
“You might call it that, yes. I can show you only one more, because last time you were here, Marc was disappointed that I had taken you away for so long.”
When she uncovered it, my breath escaped in a long, trailing sigh. Whereas the others showed exuberant, shout-it-to-the-sky love, this was quiet, private, exquisitely loving, an intimate portrait of an embrace. Marc’s half-open mouth pressed against her shoulder, his eyes nearly closed, his forehead against the side of her cheek. He looked as though he felt himself in heaven; and in a lace collar and a dark dress, her deep eyes open, her small, three-pointed mouth closed, Bella was loving the moment. All was gratitude, all surrender.
I surrendered to the enchantment of this painting as well. I only wished that Marc had painted André and me in such a state of perfect love.
DOWNSTAIRS, I STAMMERED my appreciation. He asked me how I had come to love art. I told him of the Madonna and Child in the orphanage chapel, of the many paintings André and I saw on our gallery walks; and I explained how Pascal had acquired his collection, who the painters were, and how much he loved them.
“They are very important painters. How many did he have?”
“Three of each, plus a study of heads with one woman’s face all stretched taut and disarranged with one eye higher than the other. His son bought it cheaply from a concierge. I don’t know who painted it.”
“That could be either Modigliani or Picasso. What you have is a progression. Cézanne learned from Pissarro, and Picasso learned from Cézanne. A very important collection. Maybe you’ll let me see them.”
“I would if I could. They’re hidden now. I don’t know when I can recover them.”
The next part was hard to say, but I explained it all. Except for telling Pascal at the cemetery, this was the first time I’d had to tell anyone about André’s death. My world was so small in Roussillon that everyone knew. Marc and Bella instantly enfolded me in their arms, murmuring words of comfort.
Marc drew back, looked at me seriously, and gave my shoulders a little shake. “You must retrieve those paintings. They are too important to the world.”
“To the world? I had only considered them important to me!”
“Think larger, Lisette. Promise us that when the time is right, you will dedicate yourself to retrieving them.”
“I have already promised myself.”
&nb
sp; In the kitchen, Bella cored an apple, cut it crosswise and arranged the discs in a circle, overlapping them slightly, like the petals of a flower around a dollop of the soft cheese. I wished I had cut an apple like that for André. Having no coffee, we drank hot water. The atmosphere was so homey that I asked what I had been burning to know.
“Were you ever acquainted with a young art dealer in Paris named Maxime Legrand? He worked at the Galerie Laforgue.”
Marc thought for a moment and shook his head. “A friend of yours?”
“My husband’s longtime friend. He was in my husband’s platoon. I don’t know if …”
Instantly they shared the same impulse, to lay their hands on my wrists.
I WAS FULL TO bursting on the way home. In careful handwriting, I added one more line to my List of Hungers and Vows.
10. Try not to be envious.
THAT EVENING, I SAT at the table staring at my empty walls. Perhaps it was a higher art to invent a painting by assembling elements from one’s heart, like Marc did, rather than painting what one actually saw. I wasn’t sure. I had to think about it.
If I were to create a painting of my own, what would it contain? Like Marc, I could put anything I wanted in it. In my mind’s eye, I saw a couple, André and me, floating close together between the girders of the Eiffel Tower, held aloft by his open umbrella; a shorthaired lady drifting alone in a rowboat without oars in a lake of the Bois de Boulogne; a row of small beds, one of them upside down; the sewn-together man resting his one hand on his son’s shoulder; a nun whose starched white headdress wings waved to me; a calendar with 13 May 1940 completely blackened; a narrow outhouse with a window and shutters; a white goat in profile wearing André’s wool cap and shedding a blue tear.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN