According to my mother, the last letters my father wrote her in late June—they did not get to her until after he was reported missing in action—insisted that she call for my governess, Maria Nikolaevna, to come down from Paris. She should then install the two of us in his primitive little farmhouse in Sanary. “I’ve been forwarded a letter from Bertrand asking me to send Francine to his house in [Sanary]—to this farm that doesn’t even have any beds,” my mother had written Alex while she was still ill in the third week of July. “In his view she could live there on stuff sent from the city, waiting for the end of the war, which he thought would come soon.” “Yesterday my temperature was better—39.5—and I hope to get out of bed soon,” she reports the following day, still seeming torn about whether to join Alex. “Francine has taken wonderful care of me.”
Meanwhile, Alex, safe in his house in Sainte Maxime, was chafing at the notion that my father would not have allowed me to stay with him. My father’s wishes were related to him by the nonchalant Dessoffys, who lived forty-five minutes away in Sanary and were visiting him frequently. They reported that my father had indeed asked them to take charge of me there. In his letters to Mother, Alex seems keenly aware of the Dessoffys’ fecklessness, their fairly chronic state of druggedness, and their general unsuitability as guardians—they appear to have vanished the second they were asked to take charge of me. Moreover, Alex pleads, the farmhouse did not even have any furniture or running water. (My father’s totally absurd edicts had indeed reflected the general mood of irrationality that seized French citizens upon the debacle.) Alex, the only one making sense throughout that month, offers to finance and oversee the completion of the house, but thinks that the whole notion is absurd. The only solution, he pleads, is for my mother to get another Ausweis and come straight down with me to his house.
“I sense that you have a new problem—your daughter!” he writes my mother in the third week of July, before he’s received her letter from Vichy.
How can it be that in a difficult moment like this B[ertrand] couldn’t understand that for Francine’s sake it would be better for her to be here! Three weeks ago B. wrote to Hélène to keep an eye on Francine, but she can’t do it now and Jacques doesn’t know what to do. He has a letter from B. addressed to you, it is “recent.” Maybe it advises you to do something altogether different? What will Francine and Maria Nikolaevna do without a car, in the middle of nowhere? Don’t worry about money. As long as I have money, you and Francine have it too. I can not stand it without you—as soon as I hear a car on the road, I think it’s you and my heart stops. We’ve already bought the bicycle for Francine! Decide everything here when you’ve arrived, after you’ve read B’s last letter. What a terrible, difficult life! Come!!!
P.P.S. Jacques just called again…he opened B.’s last letter to you. It instructs you to do what you wish, but ‘not to expose Francine to Sainte Maxime.’ And he asks Hélène to take care of Francine.
Are there no relatives? No other friends? We might also rent a hotel room for the two of you while you wait for Maria Nikolaevna.
It is at this point that the Kommandant of Tours, Herr Professor Hebert, reentered our lives. His kindness was revealed to us once more in an episode that I did not witness but heard my mother relate many times in later years. In the last days of July, just as she was recovering from bronchitis and was wondering how she might go about getting an Ausweis for both of us, she received a message from Kommandant Hebert asking her to visit him in his office, alone. The way she recounted it, he sat her down courteously in an armchair and said words to this effect: “I hear from our intelligence reports that your husband joined the Free French and is missing in action. There may be problems for you. It might be safer for you and your daughter to travel to the Free Zone.” And he offered her an Ausweis. They parted again on the warmest of terms, and for the following decades my mother, a shameless boaster, would announce to the world that Kommandant Hebert had been passionately enamored of her.
A week or so later, in mid-August 1940, we were back in our little Peugeot, sputtering and stalling every few minutes—my mother never would learn to work a clutch properly—toward the Vichy Zone and the south of France. Heedless of my parents’ sacrifices and suffering, I remember little else than my constant joy and excitement, throughout those dreadful months, at the sense of finally being the center of my mother’s affection. I took great pride in my father’s “secret mission,” the possible routes of which I painstakingly traced every few days on the atlas I had brought from Paris. Upon learning that we were finally going to the south of France, I felt keen pleasure at the prospect of seeing the nice man with the little mustache again and of sitting in his seaside studio while he painted another portrait of me.
First photograph taken by Alex of Francine after her arrival in the south of France in September 1940.
I believe our car broke down in Montélimar, for my mother kept consoling me with boxes of that city’s famous nougat candy. Within a few hours, Alex had sent a car and chauffeur to fetch us there and bring us to Sainte Maxime, a gesture characteristic of his resourcefulness and prodigality—who else but Alex Liberman could have found a car and chauffeur in the middle of the oil shortage and general mayhem of the 1940 debacle? That same night, we arrived at his house, Va-et-Vient, and saw Alex leap out of a thicket of bushes like a faun, his face and hands trembling with excitement.
I recall waking up the following morning in the blessed heat of the south and wandering through the house, lonely and hungry. Food has gotten scarce, but suddenly Alex comes bursting out of his kitchen with a precious breakfast ferreted out on the black market that dawn: cornflakes topped with a fried egg topped with ketchup. As I devour my meal he watches me with his great green eyes and asks, in Russian, “Is it good, Frosinka?” “Oh, so good,” I say, thinking, This man will provide for me. He then presents me with a possession my governess had never allowed me to have, a gleaming turquoise-blue bicycle, which he teaches me to ride in a matter of hours; by the end of the week, he has taught me to swim like a fish.
Another banal tale of survival, another instance of destiny being kind. I was a tough, resilient, endlessly optimistic child who already adored to travel and welcomed the challenge of constantly adapting to new situations, new protectors, new exiles, new friends. My mother, or God, or my beloved Babushka’s genes, seemed to have granted me a great inclination to happiness. For although the delusions and deceptions attending the events of 1940 would have awesome repercussions for me in later years, I recall those tragic summer months as some of the most blissful ones of my life.
ELEVEN
Leaving All Behind
For the following few months, we were crammed into Alex’s sun-drenched little house, a coquettish pink stucco villa a hundred yards from the beach, with terraces that looked out upon the Gulf of St. Tropez. Designed to house four persons at the most, it now overflowed with a motley crew of rotating houseguests—Parisian refugees, like ourselves, seeking shelter in the south before deciding what to do for the rest of the war. Irena Lidova, Alex’s former colleague and lover, was there for a few weeks with her pleasant husband, a dance photographer. At times, our crowded circumstances led to outbursts of temper. Being swift of tongue, on occasion I may have been impertinent, and at some point I must have made a brash comment to Lidova, for one afternoon as we were walking down the corridor that led to my room she roundly slapped my face. My parents had not believed in corporal punishment; no one had ever so much as rapped my hand. Mother, who was walking ahead of us, wheeled around and shouted fiercely at Lidova, “No one slaps my daughter’s face! Is that clear? No one!” And she slapped Lidova’s face in return. Poor Lidova! It must have been difficult for her to live in the same house with the woman who, she most probably realized, was Alex’s great love.
Mother and I had gotten to the south just in time: by September, passage from the Occupied Zone to Vichy France had become almost impossible—few if any travel permits were being iss
ued. Food was getting scarce, and the bass Alex caught spearfishing in the Gulf of St. Tropez every day became our principal source of protein. As he stalked his prey, I swam alongside him with a mask, elated by my first marine experiences. I helped carry his catch to the kitchen and watched Maria, the young local woman who served as his housekeeper, bake it with mounds of fennel for lunch, which we ate on the sunny terrace, still dressed in our bathing suits.
I remember those months of the late summer and early fall as being suffused with sun and joy. On days when food was particularly scarce, we entertained one another by thinking up the most dreadful combinations of food imaginable. Whoever thought up the most disgusting blend won, and I scored highest by coming up with sardines topped with chocolate sauce. During our first weeks together, I also discovered that Alex could make me laugh as no one before had. He had a brilliant gift of mimicry, which he exhibited to small, select audiences; his repertory included one particular pantomime that we referred to as “a man gone wild,” which I would beg him to perform again and again until I was well into my teens. He would start jumping up and down and every which way, taking huge leaps and emitting weird, piercing noises, like an ape leaping in the jungle from tree to tree, his limbs wildly loosened and eerily elastic, as if barely attached to his body. I don’t know whether he invented the impersonation for me or for some earlier young fan. The wildness suddenly released by this tender but rigorously self-controlled man came from some deep inner source—perhaps from his own mother’s gift for pantomime—and would last a minute or two, sending me into bouts of uncontrollable laughter.
My mother sunbathed, read, and hugged me wordlessly more than ever. There was constant talk of American relatives and acquaintances who were helping us to obtain the proper papers to emigrate to the United States. John Wiley, a high-placed American foreign-service official who had befriended my parents in the 1930s and whose wife, Irena, was Mother’s close friend, was helping to prepare our immigration visas. Another diplomat—William Bullitt, the American ambassador to France, who had recently been called back to Washington—was writing letters on our behalf, as was my mother’s father, whom she had not seen since she was exactly my age. Meanwhile, Simon Liberman, who had been living in New York since 1939, was helping to get an immigration visa for Alex.
I did not yet know the meanings of the words “mistress” or “lover.” Alex was simply presented as a dear childhood friend of my mother of whom she was very fond, a relative of sorts who would protect and take care of us until my father returned. Yet I sensed—with that sixth sense particularly strong among children from troubled families—that Alex was to my mother what the lady in red had been to my father. And in our new life with Alex, I stopped asking questions about my father’s whereabouts. For I was somehow made to understand that Alex and Mother would rather not hear such questions, and I restructured my life around the crucial goal of obtaining and preserving their love.
And so I cloaked my worries about my father with a mask of silence. Now that we were with Alex, it felt nicer, more proper, to lock my father into some quiet inner space. My silence was a vault into which the deepest part of me—the part that wished to know about my father—was hidden. The outer husk encircling this crypt remained bright and cheerful. My twinkling surface gaiety made my inner chasm all the more secret, all the more my own, like a cave that only I could enter. So I smiled, curtsied, danced, made charming dinner conversation, twinkle, twinkle, little star, praises whirled and sparkled like a rainbow about me, my mother glowed with pride. Meanwhile, there lay inside me a private chamber in which I’d carefully buried my fears, a chamber that no one else could enter—oh, curses and banishment on anyone who tried to break into it.
For my secrecy was also like a cloud, a veil, that shielded and protected my father from all possible harm—I believed that only silence, secrecy would help to keep him alive. And as Mother and Alex were painstakingly preparing our move to the United States, it is in this inner crypt of my imagination that I nurtured fantasies about my absent, silent father: He was in Syria, acting out clandestine missions for the Free French, helping to plan an Allied invasion of France; or he was shuttling back and forth between the French and British coasts, carrying such crucial messages that an interception by the Nazis could cause many deaths on the Allied side; or he was carrying out similarly hazardous secret missions in Bangkok, in Dakar, in all the distant exotic places depicted in those paintings by Uncle Sasha that had surrounded my childhood.
I nurtured these muffled, private thoughts throughout those joyously sunny last months in the south of France. There was only one nighttime experience I remember from that entire autumn. It was also a kind of mission—a mission given me by Alex for the sake of his health, which I could accomplish only in the late afternoon and evening, as it was getting dark.
Alex’s ulcer diet stipulated a quart of milk per day. But by the fall of 1940, most victuals had grown scarce, transportation was very limited, and we lived on whatever goods were produced in our immediate locale. Milk was particularly hard to find. Whatever there was of it had to be gotten from local farmers who kept cows—in the south of France they were few and far-between, and they sold milk only to children. So a few weeks after our arrival, I was sent out almost every night to a farm, five miles inland from our seaside home, to get Alex’s milk. By this time, I was whizzing through all kinds of terrain on my gleaming blue bicycle, and my mission filled me with pride—I’m getting milk to heal Alex’s ulcers! I zipped down our driveway, a metal milk can dangling from my handlebar, and after gliding a few miles down the road that borders the gulf, I turned inland onto a sandy path flanked by vast stretches of parasol pines. The pines had shed much during the summer, forming thick carpets of needles, which were hazardous and fun to slide on. To be absolutely sure of obtaining milk, my mission had to take place toward dusk, when the cows had just been brought in from the fields and been placed in the milk barn. The setting sun filtered aslant through the trees, dappling with gold the brown, satiny floor. I enjoyed the stillness of the forest, broken only by the whish of my tires on the thick carpet of pine needles, the cling-clang of the empty milk can against the metal of my handlebar, the twitter of birds being quieted to sleep by the last rays of slanting sun. After a few miles, the pines became sparser and I came into a clearing, and the farm suddenly came into view at the end of a dirt path on the right. I dismounted my bicycle and walked it to the dairy barn, where a few children had already started to queue up, waiting for the farmer to arrive.
Francine picking grapes in the south of France in October 1940. (The scars on her forehead were caused by the recent car accident in Tours.)
As the sun began to brush the horizon, the farmer came out of the dairy barn, a slow-moving, distrustful man. When it was my turn, he poured four ladlefuls of milk from his pail into my can, then carefully counted the change I had taken out of the pocket of my shorts before returning it to me. The easy part of the mission had been accomplished: Now I had to get home without spilling the milk and without getting too scared of the dark.
For as a child I believed in ghosts, and I was terrified of the darkness hours, which, I had been led to believe, betokened all kinds of ghoulish presences. This was yet another phobia once induced by my father: His strategy had been to toughen me up by instilling fears in me—such as my terror of his driving too fast—and then, with luck, helping me to overcome them. As the autumn days shortened through October and November, much of my journey was undertaken in the dark, and I was terrified of crossing the isolated pine forest. As I set forth from the farm, I switched on the light on top of my handlebar. While pedaling, I tried to concentrate on the yellow circle of light glowing just ahead of my front tire, hoping that it would safeguard me from the forest’s demons. I pedaled slowly, dreading any brusque movement that would cause the milk to spill, dreading even more the presences about me, looking steadfastly at the golden spot of light ahead of me. But at every stirring of the wind in branches, at t
he rustle of any animal on my path, great panic seized me, I imagined that a dread presence was reaching out for me, was thrusting its arms out from the very forest, about to grasp me…. Oh, Father, Father, I’m not afraid, see, I’m not afraid of ghosts, I’m a good little soldier, I’m not afraid of all that you’ve taught me to fear, no, the dead cannot come and claim me, I’ll pedal on, I’ll look straight ahead at my circle of light until I’m gone past them….
I cycled faster, milk pail lurching; the pursuers receded, I’d escaped them once more—ahead of me glimmered the lights of the main road. I reached the end of my forest lane, turned left on the main road that runs parallel to the Gulf of St. Tropez. The car traffic was sparse. A few minutes after passing the last café, I turned up our own driveway, the driveway to the best house Mother and I had ever lived in, and Alex was there to greet me, brushing his funny little mustache against my cheek as he thanked me for the milk. “Merci, Boubousiki,” he said. (“Boubous” or “Boubousiki,” interchangeably, were Russian terms of endearment Alex, Mother, and I had adopted when we began to live with one another; they created a special bond between us, singling us out as a budding family.) Alex brought the milk into the kitchen, where Maria quickly brought it to a boil to pasteurize. Then we put it into a large shallow pan to cool down quickly by dinnertime. And as we sat down at the long, hospitable oak table, the three of us and whatever migrating guests might be staying with us that week—the Lidovs, or one of Alex’s friends from Les Roches days such as Jean-Pierre Fourneau and his family—I was filled with pride as Alex savored the tall glass of milk that was so essential, so the doctors had told him, to the healing of his ulcers.
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