Lisette's List (36 page)

At home, with my own candle illuminating Cézanne’s fruit, I sat very still, thinking of the woman’s singing, until I felt peace descend like the brush of an angel’s wing. Then I ascended the stairs, humming the comfort of the Gloria and breathing in the frankincense of friendship.

CHAPTER THIRTY

THE OLIVE WREATH

1946

I
WOKE UP ON
C
HRISTMAS MORNING KNOWING
I
HAD TO TELL
Max about the painting that had been moved. It would be easier in a letter than in person. Still, I postponed writing it and went outside to milk Geneviève. Thinking that she might like a
chant de Noël
instead of “La Marseillaise,” I tried “Il Est Né le Divin Enfant,” but I sang without spirit, so no milk came. Agitated by my efforts, she butted me in the shoulder, and her horn tore my sleeve.

“Stop it! Now see what you’ve done? Why can’t you be good, Geneviève, like you used to be?”

Over the last several months, she had become cantankerous in other ways too, butting her horns against the door and shredding the wood, knocking down the wire fence around the vegetable garden and chewing lettuce, cabbage, and carrot tops down to the roots. Louise had told me that she had outlived her usefulness and that I should take her to the butcher. It appalled me to hear that, but what did I know about animal husbandry? What I foresaw wasn’t a pretty picture.

I stopped trying to milk her and just stroked her neck. I thanked her for the milk, and the milk of companionship, and went back into the house to write the letter—the shorter the better. I recounted
what the miller had told me and ended with an urgent plea for Maxime to come as soon as he could get away, since it was evident now that someone had found that painting and could well be looking for the others, perhaps even finding them before I could.

I addressed the letter, stamped it, sealed it, and left it on the desk. It suddenly seemed a shabby thing to do, writing to him rather than waiting to tell him face-to-face. André had said that Maxime had taken a special interest in that painting. In the meantime, I would tell Pascal.

I headed downhill, and in place de la Mairie I sang out
“Joyeux Noël”
to the old men stalwart enough to be sitting outside the café. The air was exceptionally still in the cemetery. As I approached the simple Roux family tomb, I was surprised to see that a roughly made wreath of olive branches and red berries had been placed on it.

“Tell me, Pascal, who laid this wreath? Was it Louise? Maurice? Aimé? Odette?” It was curious. No one had mentioned a word to me. And why wasn’t it made of pine branches this season of the year?

“I have some good news,” I said, and I told him I had found the still life in the mine and the Pontoise paint factory in the Moulin de Sablon. “I know how you loved that little painting.” My throat tightened to a straw. “I have some bad news too. The painting of modern heads that Jules bought was hidden in a windmill, and then someone took it. Now it could be anywhere, and whoever has it could be looking for the other paintings. I’m so sorry to tell you this. I’ll keep looking, though.”

There was no sense in telling Pascal about the German officer. All I could do was to kneel at Pascal’s tomb and sing, “Ah! Quel Grand Mystère.”
King of the universe, who gives life back to us by breaking our chains
.

I laid my cheek on the cold stone and knew I would mail the letter the next day, when the post office was open.

All the words of all the
chants de Noël
I’d ever known came to me as I strolled among the sleeping
Roussillonnais
in the graveyard, and I sang them.

At the back of the cemetery, a row of a dozen identical unmarked tombs had been placed very close together against the cliff. I assumed they were unoccupied, because the vertical slabs at the foot of the tombs were leaning askew. One was completely missing. Paintings could be hidden in them!

I bent down but couldn’t see to the back of the tomb’s dark interior. There was no other way but to crawl inside. Louise’s
Vogue
magazines had once contained illustrated designs for couture jumpsuits appropriate for descending into bomb shelters. Not having the luxury of proper apparel, I checked behind me, saw no one, tucked the hem of my skirt into the leg openings of my underpants, and got down on my hands and knees. I crept in as warily as a cat, crunching dry leaves that had blown in. In the dimness, I jammed my knee hard against the rough edge of a raised stone slab. A painting could easily be beneath it. I ran my hands under it all the way to the back of the tomb, touched the cold fur of some small stiff animal, and recoiled, backing out quickly, my skirt sliding up.

“Looking for bones?”

The voice came from above. I yanked down my skirt and looked up the cliff. The constable stood at the edge, peering down at me with his arms crossed. He chuckled softly, amused but not taunting, it seemed to me.
“Joyeaux Noël,”
he said wryly.

I clenched my fists. “Why is it that you always find me at my most compromising moments?”

“My good fortune.”

“You’ve been spying on me.”

He gestured to the olive orchard behind him. “My home is in the orchard. I was assessing what pruning needs to be done when I heard someone singing, so I came to the edge to see who it might
be. Père Noël gave me a gift—the view of two beautiful legs wiggling out of a tomb. What a pleasant resurrection.”

Ouf! He never failed to exasperate me.

“By the way, you’re bleeding.”

Rivulets of blood trickled from a scrape on my shin. I wiped them away and then didn’t know how to wipe the blood off my hand.

“Now you’ve gotten it dirty. You had better come up and wash it. Besides, you can see in all directions from here, the Vaucluse in all its glory. It’s nearly as high as the Castrum.”

How could I even consider following him after that encounter with the pomegranates? Yet a flash of alarm had streaked across his face when he had held me on the ground, and he had controlled himself and had helped me up. A man of contrary impulses, he was.

I looked down at my bloody leg.

“There’s a pathway to your right, at the corner of the cemetery.” Was my agreeing to go up there what Maxime meant when he’d said I should not offend the constable?

“It’s steep and treacherous,” he said. “Are you afraid?”

“No!”

“No, you won’t come, or no, you’re not afraid?”

I hesitated, not quite knowing what I meant.

“A woman brave enough to crawl into tombs ought not to be afraid of heights, or anything else.”

That was the last thing I wanted him to think, that I was afraid—of him.

I started up the path and slipped in my wooden-soled shoes. He came down and offered his hand to steady me, telling me where to step.

“This is certainly not the normal way you reach your house.”

“I’m not taking you to my house. I’m taking you to see the view.”

Was he avoiding having me in his house because I would find the
painting of heads there? Or all the paintings still lost? I had to see. With Bernard pulling me, I scrambled up to the top. Now blood was on both of our hands.

“On second thought, you had better come inside so I can wash and bandage you.”

“I don’t need a bandage, but I should wash it.”

I turned away from him and looked out over the stepped red clay rooftops of Roussillon. From this distance, I could not see the bare patches on walls where the rose and salmon and golden-ochre stucco had disintegrated or fallen off. With every window and roof and chimney at a different height, it appeared a storybook village, with an open ironwork cupola on the bell tower constructed so that mistral winds would blow through it.

“It’s exhilarating,” I said. “Like being up in
la tour Eiffel
or on the platform of Sacré-Coeur. Not that this is like Paris. It’s just the thrill of being up high and having a grand view.”

Surrounding Roussillon on both sides, bare vineyards and leafless orchards lined the slopes. The vegetable farms in the valley lay fallow now, waiting for spring planting, the soil dark and rich like chocolate. And beyond, the Luberons.

He led me along the periphery of the orchard. In one direction below us, the convoluted ochre canyons spread out from the wide, scooped-out bowl. Red and orange pinnacles and curving passageways had been scoured clean by wind and quarrymen.

“Don’t go down there in the summer or when the ground is wet. And never go down alone. If you’re interested, let me take you.”

Making a wide circuit around his house, we could see, to the north, the Monts de Vaucluse and, beyond the ridges, the white limestone peak of Mont Ventoux. And on the knob of a nearby hill … “A windmill!” I cried.

“That’s Moulin de Ferre. An olive-pressing mill. No one works it now.”

The very mill where someone had put the study of heads and
then another someone had taken it! Bernard had a direct view of it. How could we ever sneak in to see if Monsieur Saulnier had overlooked it?

I ventured a safe question and watched his face. “Does anyone use it or go inside?”

“Only the miller, but I understand he has moved away. It will probaby fall into disrepair.” Nothing in Bernard’s expression revealed a thing.

The
pigeonniers
and two-story
cabanons
isolated in the fields were also excellent hiding places, but Bernard would be able to see me snooping around the ones on his side of the village hill, and that might antagonize him.

He pointed to the northeast, toward a castle in ruins at the top of Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt, a medieval village nestled against the forested Plateau de Vaucluse. He explained that
Résistance
workers had hidden their armaments and explosives there and in Gordes, and he recounted the atrocity when a German soldier was killed by a
maquisard
. “In retaliation,” he said, “a German platoon, maybe the same one that had come through Roussillon, rounded up villagers and massacred them in the central square.”

“Yes, you told me.”

He peered down at me as if to assess my reaction. There was something hinging on my knowing that, but I couldn’t determine what it was. “Imagine how that
maquisard
must have felt” was all I thought it safe to say.

He ended that topic of conversation by remarking that the oak-covered hills were a prime truffle-hunting region.

After we’d circled his property, he noticed the blood still trickling down my leg.
“S’il vous plaît,”
he said politely. With that, I allowed him to lead me along the pathway to the back door of his house. We entered the large kitchen, where he turned on a faucet in the sink and out came water.

“Running water! How is it that you have running water?”

“A water tank on the roof. A flush toilet too.”

“You must be the only one in town.”

“Oh, no. Several homes on the hill have plumbing. Mayor Pinatel’s, Monsieur Voisin’s home behind the café, the Hôtel de la Poste, and the
bastides
, the large estates in the valley.”

He held a cloth under the faucet and crouched down to wipe my leg with it.

“I can do it myself!”

“Where would the pleasure be in that?”

Following Maxime’s advice not to offend Bernard, I yielded to his attentions. He had a light touch and took great care to clean off all the blood. Then he ripped a strip off a dish towel and began to wrap it around my shin.

“There. Come into the dining room and sit until we’re sure it has stopped bleeding.”

A separate dining room! I was too inquisitive not to follow, and I felt safe enough. He had been nothing but a gentleman today.

The walls were bare. Shafts of pale sunlight poured in from four tall windows on the south side and fell across an oak table nearly four meters long. In the center was a white
compotier
of the style Cézanne painted, filled with beautiful ceramic fruit.

“These must be from Marseille,” I said. Surely the hand of a wife had selected them. “Is there a Madame Blanc?”

He sat down opposite me at the table. “There was once. She died giving birth to our son. He only lived a matter of hours.” He looked away, out the window and across the valley. “This would have been his tenth Christmas.”

I glimpsed his double grief of losing two, just at his moment of high anticipation.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

How strange to find myself feeling empathy toward this man. He brought his gaze back to me, which made me think he could see that the mention of his loss would naturally make me think of André. Sharing each other’s pain, if only for a moment, suddenly felt like a mark of friendship.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, leaning his forearms on the table. “I’ve been thinking that maybe we could declare a truce.”

This was not the constable I knew. I had to be wary. However, the mystery of the olive wreath was suddenly plain. The olive trees in his orchard had the same leaves as those in the wreath.

“You made that wreath, didn’t you?”