Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  After so many days of solitude, it was exhilarating to have friendly conversations with the people of the village and countryside. Madame Bonnelly descended upon me out of the stream of people, took my head in her large, crablike hands, kissed me noisily, and bought two of each fruit. Not to be outdone, three women behind her did the same.

  Sandrine walked by holding Théo’s hand. He was a precocious child who was constantly moving. Spotting my rows of marzipans, he pulled Sandrine toward our table.

  “Maman, Maman, may I have a candy? May I? May I, Maman?”

  He was learning to speak with Provençal robustness.

  “Just one, so pick carefully,” she said.

  A scowl of concentration came over his face as he pointed to one after another, politely refraining from touching any of my ten types of fruits. Finally he settled on a red apple and said a perfect sentence. “S’il vous plaît, madame, je voudrais une pomme.”

  I was so delighted that I was tempted to give him two apples, but I didn’t want to undermine Sandrine’s rule.

  Henri Mitan said, “Ah-ah-all the g-grapes, s’il vous plaît.”

  I was nervous when Bernard came by our table, and prepared myself for some snide remark.

  “I don’t know which is prettier,” he said. I thought he was comparing one fruit to another, as Théo had done, until he picked up a cherry and added, “The cherry or the cherry maker.”

  “If you touch it, you will have to buy it,” I warned.

  “The cherry maker, you mean? I already have.” He ran his finger down the whole row of seven remaining cherries, touching each one, then letting a five-franc note flutter onto the table. He bit into the one cherry he had taken. “Sweet and succulent,” he said, flashing a leering look, and sauntered away.

  “He can turn any innocent thing into something lascivious,” I muttered to Maurice.

  “Bernard, he may seem threatening, but he wouldn’t harm a flea,” Maurice said. “He takes his role as constable seriously. Still, watch your step with him.”

  Agitated, I left the table, so that he wouldn’t find me there if he came back, and meandered in the other direction, where there were displays of santons—santouns in Occitan, the sign said—the beguiling small clay or wooden figures of saints and nativity characters outfitted as Provençaux. Also depicted were white-kerchiefed women carrying market baskets, boules players, fishmongers, shepherds, artists, farmers, even René in a tall white baker’s hat, Father Marc in his ecclesiastical mantle, and Mayor Bonhomme wearing the red Provençal sash. One santon even looked like me, I thought. I was relieved not to find the clay figure of the constable. That would have soured the day.

  At one of the santon booths, I found the real Aimé Bonhomme wearing his red sash and approaching me with a man I didn’t know. Aimé introduced him as Benoît Saulnier, the miller who owned the olive-pressing windmill called Moulin de Ferre. “He just told me something that would interest you.”

  The two men stepped away from the crowd, and Monsieur Saulnier greeted me with a certain gravity.

  “I haven’t worked the mill for years. All the olive pressing has moved to the big automated mills in Apt. There’s no use staying in Roussillon any longer. We have just moved to Apt. I was lucky to get a post there in a large modern mill. I was cleaning out my mill, packing up all the things that had accumulated over the years, tools and barrels and crates, when I spotted a curious picture, a child’s painting of heads.”

  I stifled a gasp.

  “I didn’t recall ever seeing it before when I was operating the mill and thought it was my daughter’s. She used to play there on rainy days, but she said it wasn’t. It being of no value, I just let it stay there, and we finished packing and left. In Apt I told my wife about it and she wanted to see it, so she sent me back for it.” Monsieur Saulnier swallowed, and his Adam’s apple moved up and down in his throat. “The painting was gone, madame. Aimé thought you should know. I suppose I should have told him sooner. I’m sorry.”

  “How long ago was it that you saw it?”

  “Two months, I suppose.”

  “Can you describe it to me?”

  “It wasn’t pretty. They were women’s heads, as far as I could tell. They had pointed chins and narrow faces, and their noses were bent to the side.”

  “Was the painting damaged?”

  “No, madame. It was just the way they were painted. Like a child would do. Their eyes didn’t match either.”

  I looked at Aimé. “It was André’s painting. I’m sure of it. Was the windmill locked?”

  “No, madame. There being nothing of value in it, I took the lock with me to Apt.”

  I didn’t think I should say who might have painted it. I just thanked him, accepted his apology, and turned back.

  There was someone moving the paintings around, or someone else searching for them who had happened on this one before I could. Or perhaps someone had just come upon it by chance and recognized its value. I was furious with myself for not acting more quickly.

  A great urgency swelled up in me as I walked home. We had to get into that windmill. Maybe the miller had overlooked the painting or had inadvertently placed something over it. Maybe there were others hidden there.

  At home, I put twenty-one francs fifty in the olive jar, wrote Vow Fourteen, Earn my way to Paris on the back of my paper sign, and slipped it inside the jar. But what did twenty-one francs fifty count for, when I had lost a Picasso or a Modigliani worth who knew how much?

  I went to the Chevets’ for a Christmas Eve veillée. Everyone greeted me with congratulations for my success at the market. I tried to respond cheerfully, but Louise knew something was wrong. Whispering for me to tell her later, she served the traditional Christmas Eve supper of vegetable broth, baked cod with cauliflower, chard stalks, and celery.

  The guests laid out the thirteen desserts for tasting, the number thirteen referring to Jesus and his disciples. Mélanie had brought the four beggars, which represented the four mendicant monastic orders—raisins from their vineyard for the Dominicans, hazelnuts for the Augustines, dried figs for the Franciscans, and almonds for the Carmelites. Then Sandrine laid out dates and dried plums, examples of the foods of the region where the nativity had taken place. Odette brought quince cheese and pear and winter melon slices. René had made cumin-and-fennel-seed biscuits, the flat olive loaf called pain fougasse, and oreillettes, thin light waffles. The thirteenth dessert was my marzipan.

  Mimi sang “Les Anges dans Nos Campagnes,” with everyone joining in on the chorus of “Gloria, in excelsis Deo.” I yearned to feel the love of the angels of our countryside, as the song said. Before I left, I gave Odette the remaining marzipans for her to sell in the boulangerie, hoping that it might start a continuous business.

  At Midnight Mass, the older boys of the village, dressed as shepherds, formed a living nativity scene. Théo knelt alongside a cow brought close to the manger to shed its warmth on the Christ Child. Monsieur Rivet, the town notary, Mayor Aimé Bonhomme, and Maurice, with his head wrapped in a dish-towel turban that kept coming undone, took the roles of the three wise men. The most recently born babe in the commune, the child of a former prisoner of war, lay in the straw. How deeply joyous his parents must have been to see him swaddled there in the manger. A line from a chant de Noël, “Born that man no more may die,” came to mind. I considered that a babe born to freedom was more important than a painting. If it were my child, I would certainly think so. A woman wearing a lace-edged white shawl crossed over her breasts like folded wings stepped alongside the altar and, with the voice of an angel, sang “Gloria in Excelsis” in Occitan. If I hadn’t been preoccupied with worry about someone else finding the paintings, her voice would have lifted me off the earth.

  After the service, I lit ten candles—for André, Pascal, Maxime, Sister Marie Pierre, Bella, Marc, Pissarro, Cézanne, Modigliani, and Picasso. The flames cast a soft golden glow. But what did lighting a candle mean? I suppose it signified that I was aski
ng God to take care of someone. But if God was all-knowing, I reasoned, He already knew my yearning and didn’t require a candle to remind him. Still, I felt a need to say an individual prayer for each of them, an affirmation in my own words. I thought God would appreciate that more than my lighted candles, since He was already the source of light and goodness. Thinking that made me feel that all was well with them. That I could not see them or speak with them was not sufficient evidence that they were not living still.

  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 CHRISTMAS 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.