Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  THE MARTYR, THE GOAT, AND THE CHICKEN

  1941

  GLORIOUS SPRING HAD DECKED THE ORCHARDS WITH PINK and white apricot, plum, and cherry blossoms—enough to give a woman hope, if she hadn’t lost someone already. I could hardly reconcile myself to the thought that André wasn’t here to enjoy their fragrances.

  The hillsides on the way to Gordes were deep yellow with broom—beautiful, until I remembered the edict from Vichy that broom, wild or cultivated, was to be appropriated for the making of fabric. But tractors for the harvest sat in the fields, unused because of the gasoline shortage. All farm work had to be done with horse and plow.

  In the spirit of getting by, Maurice told me, his bus would be inoperative while the engine was rebuilt to run on gasogene, a fuel extracted from smoldering wood chips. This would be his last trip before the work of installing the apparatus would begin. In the same spirit of making do, I told him that by selling Geneviève’s cheese to René, I had been able to buy a live chicken already laying from a farmer at the Thursday market. I felt uncomfortable about it, since the chicken was worth more than what I had paid him, but I was happy to bring eggs as well as cheese to the Chagalls.

  Maurice dropped me at the outskirts of Gordes, so he could go about his business quickly. I gathered that it was for the Résistance, maybe to collect some dropped ammunition. He was, after all, a patriot, a true chevalier de Provence, delivering ducks and ladies in distress and grenades.

  That left me to discover alone the trunks and packing cases on the ground floor of the school. Bella’s lips were tight with resolve when she explained apologetically, “We’ve been advised.”

  It took a moment for me to comprehend what she didn’t say.

  “We saw the treatment of Jews in Poland half a dozen years ago. It was unspeakable then, and we suspect it’s worse now.”

  “But here, in France?”

  “Yes. Paris is not immune to a bully. Come upstairs.”

  My fear for their safety suddenly loomed large. “Where will you go?”

  “Come see Marc.”

  It was a measure of his nature to welcome me in such a situation as warmly as he had done on my previous visits. He asked after Geneviève, remembering her name, and I told him about the chicken and presented him with eight eggs.

  He opened the box and admired their soft color. “Like café crème. A shame to crack them open. Have you named your hen?”

  “Not yet.”

  “All animals who serve us deserve a name.”

  “What is the Russian word for hen?”

  He chuckled. “Kooritzah. Same as for chicken.”

  “Kooritzah?”

  “Kooritzah.”

  “From this moment, her name is Kooritzah. She will remind me of the chicken that bore the two of you on her back in Paris.”

  “May she support you as well.”

  He had been working on a painting he called The Martyr. Against the background of a village aflame, a man wearing a Russian cap and partially covered by a fringed cloth was tied to a stake.

  I felt outrage at that. When I questioned Bella about what the cloth was, she explained that it was a Jewish prayer shawl. Now I recalled seeing similar shawls hanging below men’s coats in the Marais district. Although the figure’s skin had turned yellow, his face was strangely peaceful. Below him, a suppliant woman leaned against his leg. The figures made me think of Christ and Mary Magdalene. Around him a crimson creature, half cow, half man, and a frightened chicken were tumbling in the sky. A soldier was ransacking a house, throwing chairs out an upper window, while a bearded Jew appeared to be reading verses from an open book and a fiddler was playing out his sorrow.

  Beyond Marc’s innocent, childlike paintings of village life, here was what his art could do—mirror the blast of barbarity now happening in Europe. A painting such as this, seen by enough people, could get them to feel my outrage. It could get people to act, to resist, to march willingly to war, as André had done. With this single painting, I realized that art wasn’t just about love and beauty. It could also be a strong political force.

  Marc had stopped working to talk to me, but I motioned to his brush. “Continue.” Watching would put me in the very heart of the art world, seeing an important painting in the making.

  He laid down a worm of deep blue on his palette, flattened it into a circle, and worked black into it from the edges. “The most important aspect of a composition can be accentuated by the brightest color, or by the strongest value contrast,” he said.

  With that, he painted two diagonal blue-black stripes on the figure’s white prayer shawl, using the flat of his brush. Then with the same pigment, he painted narrow straps on the man’s arms, using the edge of the brush.

  “There is delight at the edge as well as at the end of a brush. Now there is no question that he is a Jew. And if you outline something, that draws attention to it.” He outlined the man-cow in the same hue.

  “Are you suggesting that chaos and cruelty affect man and beast alike?”

  “Oh-ho, aren’t you a quick study!”

  He wiped the brush dry and touched it lightly to the roofs of the houses. As if by magic, the painting was coming together. Although it depicted conflict and cruelty, all of its elements were in harmony. He stepped away from his easel and asked if I had retrieved my paintings.

  “No. It’s still not safe to have them in my house.”

  He looked straight at me. “You’re right, but you must never give them up.”

  I nodded. Vow number eleven would be Retrieve the paintings. Why hadn’t I put that on my list earlier? Only because it was so obvious that it didn’t require being written.

  It was a privilege to help Bella lay some canvases in a crate and to wrap the portrait of lovers in a sheet. “I will never forget the tenderness of this one,” I told her.

  “I postponed packing it in case you came again.”

  “Thank you.” I couldn’t say that I needed this vision of love to offset the evidences of hatred in Marc’s martyrdom painting, but perhaps she understood that.

  “May I ask you something? If I find the paintings and return to Paris, my deepest yearning is to be a part of the art world in some way. I was hoping for a position in a gallery, but I have no education. Do you know any kindly gallery owner who might take me on as an apprentice, just on the strength of my longing?”

  “I’ll ask Marc. Maybe he can write to someone.”

  “I know it was impulsive, but I offered myself as a washerwoman in the Louvre.”

  “Lisette! That’s much too humble for you.”

  “No, it isn’t. I would be happy doing that. Maybe you know a painter whose studio I could clean.”

  She smiled. “I’ll ask Marc that too.”

  They were preoccupied, so I didn’t stay long. At the door, I asked the question that had been distressing me: “Will you be safe?”

  “If we act quickly,” Marc said. “Good health and long life, lapushka.”

  “It’s Russian. It means something affectionate, soft as a kitten’s paw—something like ‘darling.’ ”

  “I’ll come again before you leave.”

  An embrace, and I stepped outside, feeling anxious for their safety. I hurried on in the spring drizzle to the place Maurice had left me, trying to hold on to those two words, kooritzah and lapushka.

  THE MEN IN THE CAFÉ had begrudgingly become accustomed to women coming in at the apéritif hour. I had stopped going during the cold weather of January and February, but Odette and I resumed our visits in April. A Vichy broadcast blamed the defeat of France on American bars, the English weekend, Russian choirs, Argentine tangos. “Absurd,” “ridiculous,” “shameful” were the muttered reactions. More serious was the proclamation that all previous French culture was decadent and only Aryan culture was pure. It was hideous to hear that said by a French announcer.

  Would this mean that if my paintings were found by someone other than me, they could be turned over to the Ge
rmans to be destroyed? That made me anxious to retrieve them, but where else could I put them? For a moment, I was glad André had hidden them so well. No one would think to look in a woodpile. But what if they found Marc’s whole life’s work before he could get it out of France? The Germans would certainly burn every one of his paintings as degenerate. And what if they found Marc and Bella?

  Soon after that, we heard the announcement that Pétain’s government had established a Department for Jewish Affairs, which had made the anti-Jewish laws already in place more strict and added new ones. Now I was all the more anxious to get to Gordes again. I went to Henri’s forge to see how the conversion of Maurice’s bus was coming along. I found Maurice sawing wood into small cubes while Henri welded a platform onto the front of the bus for a canister as large as a trash can to sit on. “It’s a fi-fi-firebox,” Henri explained. “Th-th-the wood is p-put in here, and the f-f-fumes come out the bottom into a fi-filter, and then th-through a pipe to the engine.” It was good of him to make the effort to explain it to me—apparently it was that important to him—but if he stopped work to explain the workings of the gasogene device to everyone who asked, the bus would never be ready.

  It had been nearly three weeks. I couldn’t wait any longer. Pascal had gone to Aix to buy The Card Players too late. I didn’t want to make a similar mistake. I made a batch of cheese, collected eggs, and set out on foot for the nine-kilometer journey. This time, it wasn’t to see the paintings. It was to see Marc and Bella.

  ALTHOUGH THE MORNING WAS CLEAR, by the time I got to Gordes, two and a half hours later, the sky in the distance was turning the color of plums, and the heavy air bore the acrid odor of approaching rain. Birds cried out in single syllables their complaints about the wetness to come. I picked up almond blossoms that had blown off their branches to give to Bella, their creamy white petals cupping yellow centers that sprouted pink filaments—as beautiful as any cultivated orchid in a Paris florist’s shop.

  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

  MORE THAN TWO HOURS LATER, SOAKED TO THE SKIN and shivering, I hurried through the village, still repeating the address to myself. Lucki
ly, 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.