“I can wait.”
Some long moments passed. Looking only at the floor in front of him, he resumed, “I was firing our squadron’s machine gun, which was mounted on a tripod, so I had to raise my head to keep the barrel level over the sandbags, and André was feeding it ammunition and could stay low in the trench. We had been trading off positions because one was more dangerous. It was futile, but we fought on anyway. A grenade landed right next to him, the side opposite from me.”
Max’s voice tightened to a high pitch. “His body shielded mine.”
I let him weep silently until he gasped back his voice enough to say, “Sharp metal fragments riddled …”
He held out his scarred hand. A fit of coughing racked his chest. I brought him a glass of water.
“The lieutenant waved a white flag, and eventually the explosions stopped. I spit out dirt. ‘Hold on,’ I said to André. ‘It’s over. Hold on.’
“He was trying to say something. I could make out ‘Lisette … Lisette …’ ”
A hot current coursed through me.
“He … I …” Maxime’s face contorted, and again he couldn’t speak for some time.
“Everybody laid down their weapons and was forced at gunpoint to walk away, into an open field, and lie flat on the ground in rows. I had to leave André lying sprawled, so I gestured to a guard for permission to go back to him. He nodded and came with me, his rifle drawn on me the whole time. I laid André right and searched in his clothes for anything the guard would let me remove. I allowed our blood to mingle.”
Maxime laid in my hand a worn, folded scrap of paper, brown with dried blood, containing a single line:
Dearest Lisette, my own true love, my life
“This is enough for today,” I murmured.
WE CLIMBED THE STAIRS, and I showed Maxime to Pascal’s bedroom. When he was finally breathing the rhythm of sleep, I went into my own room, peopled now with the images from his words.
I woke hearing screams from the next room and rushed to Maxime’s side. I grabbed his flailing arms and tried to quiet him.
“Finish,” he cried, thrashing in the bed. “Finish …” The rest became muffled, with his face in the pillow.
“Wake up, Max. Wake up. It was only a dream. Leave it behind. You’re safe. You’re with me. Lisette.”
Words were inadequate to wash away his visions, so I lifted his hand to my cheek, which set off a trembling through his body. Awake now, he pulled up his legs into a fetal position and moaned.
I stroked his head, his temple. “Shh, Max. It’s all right. You can be calm now.”
“Calm! I spent five years in hell, burning in fury that I was kept out of the war and couldn’t retaliate for his death, and now you expect me to forget it all and be calm?”
Great sputtering sobs issued from his throat, and I was mortified for having said something so shallow. I had relegated his inner battle to a child’s nightmare. All I could do was sit on the bed, lean down over him, hold him, and hope that the closeness of my presence would quiet his agony.
Eventually exhaustion allowed him to breathe naturally. I moved away from the bed and brought a chair alongside it to keep watch all night, fighting off a nightmare of my own. The room was filled with blackness such that I could see no limit to it, no end of pain, no respite from sorrow.
I WAS AWAKE TO see the morning star wink its pale light in the predawn gray. Maxime’s nightmare must have exhausted him, because he slept late. He finally came downstairs, one hesitant step at a time, humbly, as though he doubted I would want to see him.
“Come. Sit down.” I poured him a hot drink. “It’s made from the rose hips of sweetbriar. It grows wild around here. Goat’s milk is good in it.”
A wan smile told me that he appreciated my chatter.
“I am at a loss to explain how terrible I feel about last night. I thought I could control it, but telling you brought it all up.”
“Don’t berate yourself, Max.”
“Was I screaming?”
“Yes.”
“Words?”
“Just one that I could make out. Finish. You said the rest into the pillow.”
“I don’t suppose you know what I meant?”
“No.”
Maxime leaned toward me, waiting for me to figure it out, willing me with the intensity of his eyes to comprehend it.
“He asked for his quietus, Lisette, his finishing stroke. He said, ‘Do it.’ ”
The rest of André’s plea exploded into sudden clarity. Finish me off.
“There was no time to reason out right and wrong. The Germans were bearing down on us. That was the moment to do it. I couldn’t stand to leave him suffering. The white flag went up. Enemy soldiers ordered us to the surrender area. If I had stayed with him until he died … on his own—”
“You would have been killed too.”
I MUST HAVE GONE upstairs to be alone, because I found myself lying on my bed in a stupor. Slowly new images emerged, raw, vivid, unspeakable. I wrestled with the question How could he? and rose and fell on waves of hurt as on an angry sea. After some time, I broke onto the shore and arrived at the thought I needed: No matter how horrifying, Maxime’s deed had made André’s end easier. It was an act of love. In that split-second decision, Maxime had begun his soul’s dark journey, and for that instantaneous act of love, I ought to be grateful.
I found him downstairs, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, staring at the tile floor. At the sound of my presence, he drew in an agitated breath but would not look up.
“You must hate me. You have every right to hate me.”
I sat down in front of him and put my hands around his.
“No, Max. How could I? He would have died anyway. You fulfilled his final wish.”
“Do you think being a prisoner was my punishment?”
“We don’t get punished for acts of mercy, Max. It was a moment of grace between friends. You sacrificed your peace for his. Thank you.”
He did not weep outright. There was no sound, just a tear slowly filling each eye and tumbling. After some minutes he raised his head.
“I wish it had been me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
PROMENADE
1945
LATER THAT MORNING, WHILE RIPPING MORSELS OFF A BAGUETTE, we began haltingly to speak of other things. Only then did Maxime notice the bare walls.
“You never found the paintings?”
“No. Just the frames in the root cellar.”
His knit brow told me he was thinking something out.
“If I had not told André to hide them, you would still have them.”
“Don’t do that to yourself. They would have been stolen. In fact, they were.”
Then I told him about the encounter with Herr Leutnant.
“There was only a blank piece of canvas, which he must have used to cover them. We have our own woodpile in the courtyard. I used up all the wood he had piled up. There was nothing beneath it either.”
“How about under the ground beneath it?”
“It’s worth a look, but then why was his canvas at the communal woodpile?”
Without an answer to that, we went outside, and I said to Geneviève, “This is my friend Maxime, from Paris, your city.” I told Max, “Maurice, the bus driver, and Louise, his wife, gave her to me. When I’m sad she leans against my leg to comfort me. And this is Kooritzah Deux. She’s Russian and likes to be carried around.”
“Of course. Russian chickens are like that.” He indulged me with a wry smile. “I see that rural life has beguiled you.”
I arched an eyebrow at that, and he chuckled. I went down to the root cellar and got the shovel, then went back out to the courtyard and started to dig.
“Let me,” he said. “I’m used to digging. I don’t want you to get dirty.”
“Dirty! I am a countrywoman now.”
Gently, he took the shovel out of my hands. “You’ll always be a Parisienne to me.”
We traded off
digging but found nothing.
I slumped onto the bench in the lean-to. “It would have been so simple if they were here, so wonderful to see them again with you, to have you put them back into their frames and hang them.”
“It’s been a long time since life has been simple for either of us.”
I SUGGESTED THAT HE rest and then we would take a short promenade around the village. There was nothing else to do here, and only the horrible things to speak of again. We stayed in the upper village at first, stopping to sit on benches in the shade, and climbed up to the Castrum, the high plateau at the north end of the village, which was a camp and lookout of Roman soldiers in former times. I didn’t tell him that. We could see the Monts de Vaucluse to the north and, beyond them, the white limestone sliver of Mont Ventoux. I explained that it was where the mistral came from.
We descended through the Gothic arch to place de la Mairie and sat awhile at an outdoor table in front of the café. I told him about being the first woman to enter the café at apéritif hour and how that had spread to other women.
“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.”
AFTER 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 m
e 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
“EVERY 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?”