with art. Either way, the art is lost to its owners .
If the Germans take Paris, nothing is safe. Hide your paintings, André, and hide them well. Tell no one .
People here fear the worst. We must enlist together or get conscripted separately. Come to Paris. Better that we fight shoulder to shoulder to save our country’s treasures, our patrimony, our cities, our identity, and our freedom—in short, to save France .
Give a kiss to jolie Lisette for me. Come soon .
Maxime
“Oh, André!”
Sudden dryness stopped my mouth. I handed the letter back to him. He read it one more time, lifted the circular lid of the cookingstove, and fed it to the flames. Seeing the edges curl and turn Maxime’s handwriting to ash, I could only imagine what André and Maxime would see, what they would have to do.
We read the Paris newspaper clipping Maxime had enclosed about Kristallnacht, the night ten months earlier of brutal attacks on Jewish synagogues and businesses throughout Germany and parts of Austria. An estimated thirty thousand German and Austrian Jews were rounded up and sent to camps.
That evening, we ate our dinner silently, shocked, watching each other raise fork to mouth. Every second of silence thickened my fear. Something was shifting. The sundering of our parallel thinking pierced the closeness of our lives, and in the tiny opening, acute sadness poured in. I said with my eyes what I could not say with words: Don’t go .
He touched my shoulder as he stood up, lingering a moment, his hand resting there, before he put on his cap. I stood too and reached for my shawl.
“No, Lisette. Stay here,” he said with softness in his voice, and left for the café.
Every evening since Hitler had taken Czechoslovakia, he had been going to the café in order to listen to the radio and talk with the men of the village about the likelihood of the German army penetrating France. Could he not understand that I wanted to hear it for myself?
I tried to recall Maxime’s letter—all those paintings turning into an ash heap, the art world of France and of my dreams shattered, hope shriveled. Thank God Pascal didn’t know. I washed the dishes and went to bed, chilled to the bone on this hot summer night.
T HE NEXT DAY , S UNDAY , we went about our work quietly. I searched André’s face at supper before he left to go to the café, saw only worry written there, and went to bed alone. I awoke when André’sshoes dropped heavily onto the floor. Under the sheet he pulled me toward him, his breath smelling of beer as he said, “De Gaulle declared war today.”
It was the third of September, a date impossible to forget now. He cupped my breast, but he didn’t fondle me as he did most nights before our lovemaking. We lay still, our hearts too heavy for playfulness. My mind tumbled with questions. When he felt me tremble, he held me tighter. Tomorrow’s dawn would bring a new reality. Then we would talk about what to do.
I T WASN ’ T LIGHT THAT awakened me. It was the sharp rasp of André’s saw going through wood that made me shudder. The tapping of a mallet, then the sanding went on for two weeks, so intent was he on finishing a large, waist-high cabinet, a gift to me, while the glue was setting on each pair of palace chairs. I had seen in his drawings that the carving on the double cabinet doors would be an A and an L with their upright strokes leaning against each other; all around them he would carve a circle of fleurs-de-lis. He intended the cabinet to be for dishes, so they wouldn’t be exposed on shelves when the mistrals blew dust through the house. He was going to position it beneath the place where Cézanne’s still life of fruit had hung, next to the stairs. Once the war was over, the cabinet and the painting would look magnificent together.
Surely we should have been doing something other than this feverish work, and we did, savoring delicate, tense moments together, our arms around each other’s waists as we watched
If the Germans take Paris, nothing is safe. Hide your paintings, André, and hide them well. Tell no one .
People here fear the worst. We must enlist together or get conscripted separately. Come to Paris. Better that we fight shoulder to shoulder to save our country’s treasures, our patrimony, our cities, our identity, and our freedom—in short, to save France .
Give a kiss to jolie Lisette for me. Come soon .
Maxime
“Oh, André!”
Sudden dryness stopped my mouth. I handed the letter back to him. He read it one more time, lifted the circular lid of the cookingstove, and fed it to the flames. Seeing the edges curl and turn Maxime’s handwriting to ash, I could only imagine what André and Maxime would see, what they would have to do.
We read the Paris newspaper clipping Maxime had enclosed about Kristallnacht, the night ten months earlier of brutal attacks on Jewish synagogues and businesses throughout Germany and parts of Austria. An estimated thirty thousand German and Austrian Jews were rounded up and sent to camps.
That evening, we ate our dinner silently, shocked, watching each other raise fork to mouth. Every second of silence thickened my fear. Something was shifting. The sundering of our parallel thinking pierced the closeness of our lives, and in the tiny opening, acute sadness poured in. I said with my eyes what I could not say with words: Don’t go .
He touched my shoulder as he stood up, lingering a moment, his hand resting there, before he put on his cap. I stood too and reached for my shawl.
“No, Lisette. Stay here,” he said with softness in his voice, and left for the café.
Every evening since Hitler had taken Czechoslovakia, he had been going to the café in order to listen to the radio and talk with the men of the village about the likelihood of the German army penetrating France. Could he not understand that I wanted to hear it for myself?
I tried to recall Maxime’s letter—all those paintings turning into an ash heap, the art world of France and of my dreams shattered, hope shriveled. Thank God Pascal didn’t know. I washed the dishes and went to bed, chilled to the bone on this hot summer night.
T HE NEXT DAY , S UNDAY , we went about our work quietly. I searched André’s face at supper before he left to go to the café, saw only worry written there, and went to bed alone. I awoke when André’sshoes dropped heavily onto the floor. Under the sheet he pulled me toward him, his breath smelling of beer as he said, “De Gaulle declared war today.”
It was the third of September, a date impossible to forget now. He cupped my breast, but he didn’t fondle me as he did most nights before our lovemaking. We lay still, our hearts too heavy for playfulness. My mind tumbled with questions. When he felt me tremble, he held me tighter. Tomorrow’s dawn would bring a new reality. Then we would talk about what to do.
I T WASN ’ T LIGHT THAT awakened me. It was the sharp rasp of André’s saw going through wood that made me shudder. The tapping of a mallet, then the sanding went on for two weeks, so intent was he on finishing a large, waist-high cabinet, a gift to me, while the glue was setting on each pair of palace chairs. I had seen in his drawings that the carving on the double cabinet doors would be an A and an L with their upright strokes leaning against each other; all around them he would carve a circle of fleurs-de-lis. He intended the cabinet to be for dishes, so they wouldn’t be exposed on shelves when the mistrals blew dust through the house. He was going to position it beneath the place where Cézanne’s still life of fruit had hung, next to the stairs. Once the war was over, the cabinet and the painting would look magnificent together.
Surely we should have been doing something other than this feverish work, and we did, savoring delicate, tense moments together, our arms around each other’s waists as we watched
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