Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  This past spring one thousand oil paintings and nearly four thousand watercolors and drawings deemed of no international value or considered objectionable by the Reich Chamber of Culture were burned by the Berlin Fire Department to “purify” the art world. It’s horrifying. If any paintings are in line with Hitler’s aims, sycophants drooling over prestige positions steal them to give to Hitler, buying favor 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 cooking stove, 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.

  THE NEXT DAY, SUNDAY, 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’s shoes 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.

  IT 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 the sun sink behind the windmill on the promontory beyond the ravine, cherishing each other in every way, stroking each other’s favorite places, unable to love enough to last the duration. I prepared his favorite dish, cassoulet béarnais, a casserole made with mutton, pork, andouille sausages, and white beans. I bought pain fougasse, a flat olive loaf, which he loved, and I asked René to make some palmiers, André’s favorite pastry. We fed morsels to each other just as we had done in Paris when he called me his perfect lily. And of course, we slept in each other’s arms.

  He was right about one thing. My eyes naturally went to possible hiding places—beneath the mattresses, under the beds, behind the headboards and dressers in both bedrooms, in the root cellar. He had puttied the holes where the paintings had hung so expertly that no one could tell a nail had been there. I had to believe that he had hidden the paintings with equal care.

  I watched with an aching heart as he made his methodical preparations. He took down the wide plywood boards he used as work surfaces, folded up his sawhorses, laid out his tools on a shelf in the lean-to, covered them with canvas, and weighted the canvas with rocks. He bought firewood at the communal woodpile and stacked it neatly against the house. At our Thursday market, he bought a huge sack of rice and another of dried white beans, four long sausages, six tins of sardines, a large tin of coffee, a sack of sugar, another sack of flour, a salt cake, and olive oil. He shook the almonds from our tree, and I gathered them. He left all our money from the Palais des Papes job in the green ceramic olive jar. Only one thing remained to be done—to repair the kneelers in the church, his promise to Pascal. Now he vowed that it would be his first task when he came home.

  It was when he packed his satchel that I couldn’t stand to be silent.

  “Can’t I go to Paris with you? I’ll find a way to live. As a seamstress of army uniforms, or back at the pâtisserie.”

  “You think there will be sugar for pastries? Be realistic.”

  But even with the windows along les Champs-Élysées boarded up, the streets dark, cafés closed, statues cocooned within mounds of sandbags, there would still be the Seine. I could sit on my favorite iron bench in the square of Vert-Galant at the point of Île de la Cité and watch the fisherman too old to be in the army. The chestnuts would soon be dropping, the leaves of the plane trees crunching under my feet, and the faucets would still be running.

  Despite my longings, I knew that when he said, “No, chérie. It’s safer for you here,” he was right. Paris was the capital, after all, and so it would be vulnerable.

  He would leave the next Monday, a week after his twenty-sixth birthday, and would ride Maurice’s bus to Avignon. I counted down the days, then the hours. There was no crowd shouting “On to Berlin!” at the bus stop, only Constable Blanc standing off to the side. André approached him to speak to him privately, then came back to embrace me. He kissed me one more time and said, “It won’t be long, and I’ll be home. Then we can live in Paris. I promise.”

  I stood between him and the bus, a foolish barrier between war and peace, until Maurice climbed up behind the steering wheel. André and I were left on the ground while the people in the bus watched us through the windows, knowing. Maurice started up the sputtering engine, which rattled my heart to pieces. André had to grasp my shoulders and move me aside in order to get on.

  Gray exhaust snarled out at me, and I stood motionless, looking at André’s form as he made his way through the bus, his neck and jaw and left ear already shadowy to me.

  Watching until the bus turned downhill, I felt an arm rest heavily on my shoulder. It was the garde champêtre, Bernard Blanc, who had brought Pascal home once.

  “Worrying won’t help him. You have to help yourself now,” he said.

  I wrenched my shoulder free and hurried home and knelt i
n front of André’s cabinet, trying to calm myself, trying to pray, tracing with my fingertips the A and the L leaning against each other.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE RADIO AND THE CAFÉ

  1940

  I TRIED TO BE HOPEFUL AS I WALKED TO THE POST OFFICE. Maybe this time there would be a letter from André. I thought again of the last thing he had said to me. It won’t be long, and I’ll be home. Then we can live in Paris. I promise.

  I filled my mind with that vision, that he would come home from the war and I would be delirious with happiness. We would make joyous love, and I would conceive a child. We would sell this drafty house, and I would give birth in Paris, and our child would learn all the lessons well at école élémentaire, and if she was a girl, she would wear flowered dresses in summer like Mélanie’s Mimi, and if he was a boy, he would wear short gray pants and show his dimpled knees. As André rowed in the upper lake of the Bois de Boulogne, our perfect child would trail a delicate hand in the water, and all that would be lovely, but we would never be quite as we had been because André hadn’t trusted me.

  THEN, THE HAPPY SIGHT: Odette’s daughter, Sandrine, the post office clerk, balancing a letter on her palm. “Voilà! From your husband,” she said with great respect.

  At home, I opened it carefully.

  17 JANUARY 1940

  Dearest Lisette,

  Maxime and I managed to get in the same platoon. It’s comforting to have a friend here, wherever here is. All I know is that our train passed vast cemeteries from the Great War—this presumably is the petite one—with crosses laid out in rows like stone vineyards. I wonder if my father is sleeping there. I must finish the work he began.

  To that end, we’ve been fitted out with scratchy uniforms, boots, kit bags, and rifles. We’re learning how to march, fall lizardlike onto our bellies, squirm along like worms, and shoot. I’m better at squirming. Maxime is better at shooting but worse at marching. My first sight of blood was his bloody blisters, thanks to his stiff, tight boots. Next we’re going to learn how to operate machine guns.

  This turning of art lovers and craftsmen into killers doesn’t sit well with me. It’s against our natures, but being here in this atmosphere, a person can’t help but get caught up in the importance and necessity of it. In a month, we’re supposed to be hardened soldiers—ha!—and will go to the front, somewhere, to repel the Germans. In the interim, all I want to do is to repel mice. I suppose my rifle isn’t the appropriate instrument.

  I miss you terribly, and think of you in every quiet minute we’re not being yelled at.

  Forever, my love, I am yours,

  André

  Anxiety shaped itself into a piteous memory I couldn’t shake. The horror and sadness I had experienced as a little girl seeing a man leaning on a single crutch with half a body slid uninvited into my mind. No left arm, no left leg, no left ear. Left eye sunken, half-closed. His face sewn together in a lumpy purple seam below the left eye and across the jaw. “Dry him off and bring me someone who has half a chance,” I now imagined the surgeon saying. But he did survive. This soldier from the Great War had done one more courageous thing. He had come to see his son, who lived where I was living, in a home for unclaimed children. I felt only awe for his bravery.

  If André came home in a similar condition, I was certain I would still pour out my love for him from a bottomless well.

  NO LETTERS CAME WHILE he was on the move. Then this:

  6 MARCH 1940

  Mon petit trésor,

  I pray that you are warm and well. I can say that at least the latter is true for me.

  En route to our position, we had our first view of the Maginot Line of concrete fortifications and wicked-looking tank obstacles. We are not told how far they stretch, but rumor has it that in one form or another there are emplacements from Switzerland to Luxembourg. We hear that some units are connected by underground passageways and even a rail line and telephones, with comfortable living quarters.

  Nothing so grand for us here. Max and I learned how to make a bunker of wood and cement to shelter a big gun. We made a splendid trench for ourselves, connecting one bunker to another. With the woods behind us, we get afternoon shade, which we dread this time of year. The humane thing would be that by international law, all winter wars would be called off. Last week the ice in our canteens never thawed. I can’t tell you where, but from the ridge behind our trench home, we have a grand view of a beautiful frozen river a short distance away, German ice and French ice indistinguishable.

  As new recruits, we have been scattered among the reservists. Max and I hope that means that they know what to do in a moment of truth and we can just follow their lead. Simple, right?

  Nothing new here in this phony war. That’s what our lieutenant calls it in disgust, he who wants it to start so we’ll all be heroes and he will be decorated. Other than that, he never talks about the reasons for war.

  The days pass, empty and interminable, and the enemy hasn’t poked their noses in our business. Busy elsewhere, I suppose. We huddle around a makeshift stove and speculate until all we do is repeat each other’s words, like crows. Any day now, we expect, they will try to cross the river and get at us. This waiting sets our nerves on edge at every sound. We hear rumbles and trucks and tanks and, in our sardonic moments, alpenhorns and bassoons and Dudelsacks. Max swore he heard sleigh bells.

  Some fellows brag about how many Boches they’re going to kill. I stay away from them. It’s that silent one with the vacant eyes I worry about. Waiting and wondering whether we’ll distinguish ourselves or turn coward and run preys on everyone’s mind. Our lieutenant boasts about a quick victory. I wish we had more men and more artillery. To my mind, we’re spread too thin—just like the beans in our bean soup. I wouldn’t mind having some thick goulash, even if it’s Prussian.

  The waiting isn’t the worst thing. Missing you is the worst thing. Imagine that I’m holding you tonight. I’ll do the same.

  With a full heart,

  André

  Despite his levity, I worried that the man with the vacant eyes might be André himself. Or Maxime.

  THE WAITING WAS HARD on me too. I hated not being able to do anything other than send him letters. If I could just discover where the paintings were, take a peek at them, and leave them there, I would feel closer to him again. I would touch the stones or boards or plants or earth he had touched.

  But where to start?

  The bell tower, ostensibly to see the view. Father Marc gave me the key, and I searched on every landing, in every crevice, to no avail. Sandrine let me look around the post office, in case a letter from André had been put in the wrong cubbyhole. While there, I peeked behind doors and in large cabinets. I asked Aimé if I could look in the salle des fêtes for a lost scarf. Could André have hidden the paintings in the café? He went there every night. I asked outright if I could watch Madame Voisin prepare fricassée de poulet. “No,” Monsieur Voisin said crossly, turning his back to me while he did something behind the bar.

  “Would you permit me just to look in your kitchen?”

  “Certainly not!” He whirled around. “There’s nothing here that would interest you.”

  “There might be, monsieur. I just thought—”

  “Don’t think. You’ll be better off that way.”

  And that was that, for the present.

  ANDRÉ’S THIRD LETTER HAD no date, which was disconcerting because I couldn’t tell how long it had taken to reach me.

  Dearest Lisette,

  I hope that the wood I banked alongside the house has lasted the winter. You should be receiving my army pay warrants by the time the Palais des Papes money runs out. Then you’ll have enough to buy from the communal woodpile, and to eat as well as rationing allows.

  This waiting is deeply frustrating, and the incessant drilling and marching is a bore. The ice on the river has broken up into fanciful icebergs. Max drew the scene on his canteen with a piece of charcoal. After that, he did a
good likeness of me on mine. Now everyone in our platoon wants a portrait on their canteen. Some of the men pose with exaggerated dignity, while our overzealous lieutenant bares his teeth and puts on an expression like an angry bulldog. Interesting, the personalities in our platoon.

  Our armored tanks are big and heavy but slow, only twenty-five kilometers an hour. It remains to be seen how they will fare when they face the Panzer II.

  I have rethought my decision not to tell you where I hid the paintings. I didn’t tell you because I thought your innocence would protect you, but it might be just the opposite. If, God forbid, the Germans take France and if it’s known to them that we have paintings and some German officer comes to the house to seize them before I get home, you could come to harm for not telling him where they are. I would never forgive myself for that. What I mean is, if there is any trouble, give up the paintings. They are not worth bringing injury to yourself, my darling. They are under the big woodpile.

  Keep safe, my love. I am expecting to be showered with your kisses the moment I see you.

  With love and infinite devotion,

  Your André

  I was both relieved to know where he had hidden them—what an odd hiding place—and worried that behind his change of heart, he had some doubt that he would come home.

  WINTER HERE HAD ENDED with a three-day mistral, and a vivid spring sunset that faded to reveal a full moon rising. The hills below the village were just becoming fragrant with flowering wild arugula. Plump Odette Gulini, old enough to be my mother and wise in the ways of the country, told me I could use the leaves in a salad, so we went to gather them. It would be a pleasant diversion from thinking about the war.