Lisette's List (21 page)

I rang the bell, but neither of them leaned out an upper window. The latch wasn’t locked, so I opened the door a crack.
“Bonjour, madame! Bonjour, monsieur!”
No response. I entered. A wail escaped me. I
was
too late. I went through the empty classrooms, stupefied and crying out my worry. Wondering how they had escaped, I prayed that they were safe. I tried to remember the paintings I had seen in each room. The same fear of forgetting that had anguished Pascal anguished me as well. I understood the depth of his grief when he found that Cézanne had died. Like Pascal, I had
waited too long before I asked what made a painting great. I scattered the petals on the floor where the portrait of the lovers had been.

I knocked on a neighbor’s door, and an old woman answered. I identified myself as Lisette Roux from Roussillon and gestured to the school building.

“Gone. They stayed with me the night before they left.”

“Are they safe?”

“How can we know? Someone in an American car came to get them at four o’clock in the morning. Their crates and trunks had been picked up the week before.”

“An American car? Were they going to America?”

“I presume so, if they could make it there.”

A ridiculous image popped into my mind—an American car motoring across the Atlantic Ocean. Then a grimmer image followed it—Marc and Bella wading far out into the sea at night, to be picked up by a fishing boat and taken to a ship, as at Dunkerque, Marc looking over his shoulder every couple of minutes to see that Bella was still there. I shuddered.

“Monsieur left a painting for you,” the woman said.

“He did?”

She went into another room and brought it out. “It was wet when he gave it to me, but it’s dry now.”

Instantly, my throat became tight as a thread. It was a painting of a dark-haired woman looking out an open window while embracing a chicken against her chest. With the other hand she drew a goat to her side. The lines indicating the chicken’s beak and the goat’s mouth curved upward slightly, as though smiling. The woman wore the same expression as the animals did. The feeling the painting evoked in me was the opposite of what I had felt looking at
The Martyr
. Here, in the south of France, a human being and animals were safe, but apparently the Chagalls were not.

On the horizontal muntin of the window in the painting, a tiny man was dancing, his right leg dangling behind him. Although he
was offering her a bouquet of flowers, the woman seemed not to notice him; she was content enough to be holding the animals. Through the lower windowpane, houses of a distant village stepped up a snowy slope. Was it Vitebsk? Gordes? Roussillon? Was the woman Bella or me? Was the man Marc or André? A crescent moon, or maybe it was a slim fish, hung in the rosy sky. I was tantalized by the ambiguity. The image blurred as I recognized Marc and Bella’s love for me.

The painting appeared to be opaque watercolor and colored chalk on paper mounted on cardboard. It was slightly broader than my shoulders, taller than it was wide. I could carry it easily, but not the cheese and eggs too. I gave them to the woman and thanked her for taking care of Marc and Bella on their last night.

“They were very solemn when they left. They loved it here.”

I stepped outside into damp air, and the woman called after me, “Wait! I almost forgot. They also left this for you.”

She waved a piece of paper bearing a Parisian address and the scribbled words
a friend
. I pocketed it and hurried up the roughly cobbled hill, through the village, and down the other side to the road to Roussillon. If it rained before I got home, the painting would be ruined. I had to find a place to hide it along the way.

I ran down the switchbacks and the long incline below Gordes, the wind flapping the painting away from me; I had to hold it close to my body to keep it from sailing off. I should have asked the old woman to keep it for me until better weather, but I had been too excited to have it. Thunder rolled above mighty Mont Ventoux, to the north.

Out of breath, I reached the flat road to the village of bories, the thick, beehive-shaped stone huts built by ancient people. Pascal had told me that every slab of stone must have been chosen carefully and overlapped at an angle so that water would be shed on the outside and no rain could penetrate within. Perfect, but I didn’t want to use any borie close to the road.

The sky darkened to charcoal, and the rain began, with pinpoint
drops on my cheeks, sparse, delicate, polite, then gathering comrades, splattering my face, trickling down my neck, intent on ruining my treasure. I took off my jacket and wrapped it around the painting.

A crack of thunder startled me, and I ran wildly, away from the main road, along a high rock wall encircling the village of bories, until I found an opening. I spotted a hut in good repair, the opening hidden by nettles, through which no one in his right mind would go. I shouldered my way through the thicket and entered. The rain was falling in ropes now, but not a drop seeped inside the hut. A recess in the back wall could have been an oven. To be doubly safe, I set the painting on edge in it, so I could wall it in with some of the stone slabs that lay around outside, which meant I had to wedge my way through the nettles twice for each slab. Their leaves tormented my skin, and hefting the rough stones bloodied my hands. Finally, I finished the double wall. The painting was surely safe now.

But were Bella and Marc? Were they out in this storm, crossing the Pyrénées on foot? Were they hiding in some leaky barn?

A nasty night was advancing, and I knew I couldn’t stay there much longer. Already the temperature had dropped, already puddles were growing outside, already the paper in my skirt pocket had become damp. By the time I arrived home, it would be sodden and unreadable. I memorized the address, 182 rue de Vaugirard, saying it a dozen times, then tucked it between my breasts, buttoned my jacket, and set out into swift rain that seemed in a hurry to drench me.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

NEW LIFE

1941

M
ORE THAN TWO HOURS LATER, SOAKED TO THE SKIN
and shivering, I hurried through the village, still repeating the address to myself. Luckily, the rain hadn’t stopped falling, so all the shutters were closed and there were no women’s sewing coteries gossiping in the streets.

The next day the azure sky was marbled with wispy swan’s-down clouds. I set out dry grass from the barrel for Geneviève and potato peelings for Kooritzah. In the outhouse with the shutters open, I pretended to be the woman in Marc’s painting. The window he had painted was in a narrow peaked building no wider than the proportions of the outhouse. How could he have known?

I could hardly believe that I, Lisette Irène Noëlle Roux, raised in an orphanage, a twenty-four-year-old widow with little money, possessed a painting of my own, painted expressly for me, with love in every brushstroke.

I stepped outside for a wider, grander view. The yellow honeysuckle André had planted near the outhouse to offset the smell was blooming. Beyond the rosemary bushes marking the edge of the courtyard, deep pink monkey orchids grew wild on the downhill
slope. The stone windmill, Moulin du Sablon, perched on a windy promontory, had lost its vanes but it was still imposing.

In the clarity after the rain, the valley appeared as a living version of Cézanne’s landscape, at least as I remembered it. The terrain was divided into distinct shapes, each in a different hue—the striped chartreuse green of the vineyards, the solid, darker green of vegetable plots, the golden grass of wheat fields, the sprays of pink cherry and white apple blossoms, the cultivated fields of sunflowers, their faces turned to the sun. Exquisite.

André had framed the landscape in the outhouse window perfectly to show the best of the view. Might that mean that the Cézanne landscape was his favorite painting? Thinking so allowed me to feel our thoughts connect.

Beyond the valley, the Petit Luberon rose to the west in foothills of deep green cedar forests, a mere prelude to the Grand Luberon, to the east, where eroded white limestone cliffs thrust upward. If I could arc the path of my vision over the mountains, I could see the Durance River flowing swiftly this morning, and a Cézanne quilt of colors that spread over the land all the way to the blue of the Mediterranean. I breathed in spring as a drowning man rising to the surface of the sea gulps air, and exhaled new life.

An unseen bird issued a soft, repetitious
whoo-whoo-whoo
. Whether it was an owl, which Pascal had called a
bubo bubo
, or a mourning dove, I didn’t know. Was its plaintive cooing urging me toward wisdom or perpetual sorrow? “Whoo-whoo,” I sang along with it, softly at first, then robustly, the Provençal way. Geneviève came to my side and joined in with her
baa-baa
. Putting my arm around her neck started Kooritzah fussing and fluttering her jealousy, throwing herself against my leg until I cradled her too.

“Such a silly chicken you are. Don’t you know I love you too?
J’ai deux amours
, the song goes. I have two loves. Do you understand now, mademoiselle? Don’t forget it.”

D
AYS LATER, A LEADEN TRUTH
landed when I happened to glance at the calendar on the desk. It was May 13, the day of André’s death a year earlier. How had I gotten through the twelve months? One day of hollow sadness at a time. I had cried in every room in the house, sometimes in great gasping sobs, other times like a quiet rain at night. Sometimes a memory crept into my mind like a sly serpent. Other times a thought exploded like a grenade, as it did when I opened a government envelope and found the first check marked “War Widow’s Pension.” More than once, tears had fallen into my milky hickory coffee. My onion soup was flavored with my own salt.

Spring was suddenly mocking me. Nevertheless, the day cried out for some recognition, for me to do something to acknowledge it. I looked at the view of the Luberon Valley and thought of Cézanne’s landscape painting, which I felt sure André would have wanted me to have. He knew that beauty gave comfort, that there was solace in the play of colors against one another, and upliftment of spirit in the grace of an arabesque curve.

Meanwhile, I had pressing needs. My government compensation for André’s death was pitifully small because I had no children. I added an item to my list,

12. Learn how to be self-sufficient,

and went in search of Maurice. I found him at Henri Mitan’s forge, working on the top-heavy gasogene converter, which was now sitting above a smaller canister on the platform attached to the front of the bus.

“What a crazy, unwieldy contraption that is!”

“What do you mean? She is beautiful, this girl.” He stroked the side of the firebox lovingly and then patted the filter box below it.

“I need work,” I said.

“Then hand me that wrench.”

“I mean work that pays.”

He suggested I pick cherries for Émile Vernet in June and mulberry leaves for Mélanie’s silkworms anytime. During the
vendange
, the time of gathering grapes in the fall, I could work in Madame Bonnelly’s vineyard.

“Her husband is a prisoner of war. She promised work to a Parisian refugee for the
vendange
, but I’ll wager she could use more help than one picker.”

“Fine. I’ll do those things in season, but it’s spring now, time to plant a vegetable garden.”

“Oh! Our pretty
Parisienne
is becoming a
Provençale.
”

“A widow has to live, Maurice.”

“All right then, Madame Jardinière. Usually you can get seeds at Cachin’s grocery or at the market in Apt. But now?” He raised his shoulders and lifted his greasy palms. “That’s doubtful.”

“What does it matter?” I said. “You’re not going to Apt or anywhere for a while. We’re stuck here on this hill.”

I took him aside, out of earshot of the old men working on equally old vehicles, and told him that the Chagalls had escaped and that Marc had left a painting for me. Maurice asked where it was, and I told him precisely. It wasn’t wise to have only one person know the location.

“Just keep it there. Roussillon is changing. Strangers live here now. You can’t trust anyone anymore.”

I went directly to Jérôme Cachin’s
épicerie
to ask if he had any seeds for growing vegetables. No, he didn’t.

“I’ll ask the constable of the commune if he knows of any farmer’s wife selling them from their last crop,” he offered.

“No. no. Please don’t do that.”

He shrugged. “It’s no trouble, madame.”

I was trapped by need and said no more.

“Are you enjoying the toilet paper?”

“Immensely.”