Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  “I’m asking if you would like to help save great art.”

  They talked in a corner for hours.

  “You cannot discuss this,” he said. “Ever. If you do, you will probably be shot. I’ll explain to Keo what I can.”

  SINCE 1938 THE LOUVRE HAD MOVED ITS MOST VALUABLE TREASURES several times. The first had been after the Munich Agreement when Europe seemed on the brink of war. Paintings were moved downstairs to the museum’s basement, and it was so well planned, it took only twenty minutes to pack the most important paintings behind bombproof walls once used as wine cellars for Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici. It took another ten days to wrap the paintings. As soon as the threat of war receded, they were unwrapped, restored to their original places. The museum reopened in seven days.

  The next crisis had come in 1939, as Hitler took Czechoslovakia in March and, in September, Poland. By then the Louvre had been quietly moving its masterpieces—Rembrandts, da Vincis, Delacroix—out of Paris to privately owned châteaux in the country. For the second alert, they had called on legendary packers of antiquities who had moved pharaohs’ coffins from Egypt to the British Museum, who had moved emerald doors the width of rooms from Mayan jungles to the Prado. Men whose hands were delicate as eunuchs’, others who had backs and shoulders like wrestlers.

  Fifty such packers were chosen, along with half a dozen Chinese experts in bamboo scaffold rigging, the medieval art of lashing bamboo poles with flosslike strips of split bamboo, creating nailless scaffolds of strength and flexibility. For one long night, Chinese scaffolders sat in bare feet before a thirty-by-forty-foot Veronese weighing three tons, quietly debating how they would scale the thing, how to attach pulleys and delicately remove it from the wall.

  Through the night, ten of the husky packers practised walking backwards through the Louvre, semaphoring directions to their colleagues with the three-ton burden in its frame, guiding them in slow motion through the highest, broadest exit portal. A large truck then moved into the night taking the master painting to safety in the country. The Chinese sat again meditating before another three-ton monster, retwisting their bamboo strips, strengthening their scaf-foldings. Perhaps remembering their fathers’ fathers’ legends of the time before paper, two thousand years earlier, when ancestors wrote their literature and history on this talking jade-grass called bamboo.

  Next, the massive Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace were moved from their pedestals with the help of the graceful, wiry Chinese and their bamboo scaffolds. In bare feet, they arabesqued and pliéed, seemingly climbing air round the sculptures, lowering levers and pulleys, hoisting ropes. The statues were wrapped and boxed, laid on their sides, and slid along corridors and down specially built ramps to trucks. In frigid dawns, the Chinese quietly dismantled their scaffolding, winding up flosslike strips of bamboo, laying the poles side by side. Then they sat studying bare walls, imagining, inside grimy outlines, the paintings they had rescued.

  Now in the first months of 1940, with Hitler’s invasion imminent, lesser masterpieces were being packed—Ingres, Corot, Chagall. Brême invited Sunny to join a skeletal staff, mostly wives of curators and restorers who had marched off with the army, in a desperate attempt to save them from the Nazis, with their mania for obliterating “decadent” art.

  In gray overalls, gauze mask, and hair net, Sunny knelt in the basement of the Louvre with dozens of other women, supervised by experts. Smaller paintings were removed from their frames and rolled up, while canvases over three feet were wrapped intact. First, thick cloth was wrapped carefully round each canvas. Next came layers of excelsior, to cushion shock. Asbestos, a fire preventative, composed the third layer; then, to prevent water damage, came tar paper, the final layer. Now and then women interrupted their work, stepped aside and wiped their eyes, shaking with emotion. Each package was finally berthed in wooden cases, on wooden pegs preventing vibration as they were transported to the country.

  Every night for weeks, Sunny bent over the wrapping crates, back aching, fingers swollen from the constant prick of excelsior. Rashes now circled her arms and wrists from the irritation of tar paper, reminding her of pineapple rash from summers in the canneries back home. She never complained. Each night she entered the Louvre with senses so heightened she felt drunk.

  When she came home exhausted at dawn, Keo fed her and put her to bed. She fell asleep trying to tell him what she had held in her hands, the living flesh of paintings she had touched. She tried to explain what it meant, how she had never felt so necessary. So alive. She wondered what in her life would compare to this.

  Now the Louvre was closed to the public. With all paintings safely gone, curators and workers began cleaning and polishing, scrubbing walls and marble floors not scrubbed in decades. Sunny moved slowly, concentrating on each marble square, each mosaicked tile, kneeling and scrubbing the grouting between them with tiny brushes. She scrubbed like a penitent, head truantly low, face so near the floor she felt cold exhalations from the stone.

  Each day she moved slower, praying the war would not come, it would pass them by, so she could continue here forever. One day there was nothing left to scrub. The Louvre was closed to everyone. She stepped through its portals into soft rain, and backed away slowly until its shimmering façade could be held in her hand.

  N HOA PAIO

  The Enemy

  MALIA’S LETTERS FROM HOME KEPT HIM ABREAST.

  . . . Folks tense, almost a quarter-million military men in Honolulu . . . Jonah-boy wants to leave university, join the army. Which makes Mama go pupule . . . Shirashi Mortuary still closed . . . Papa with no job . . .

  He hung his head, guilt mixed with longing. He closed his eyes, smelling coral furred with limu. He felt his hands rubbing the grain of old koa canoes. He was sick to death of stone. Buildings, streets, even the river seemed made of stone.

  “I’m homesick too,” Sunny whispered. “But this is what we chose.”

  He thought how pitiful they were, like weeds. He thought how dehydrated he felt, no sea, no humid air. He missed soft voices in his lane, the smell of ginger.

  Sunny thought of her mother. “I didn’t save her. Papa will make her pay . . . for everything.”

  They wondered if they had traveled too far from their islands, if they would ever fit in again. For now, there was enough here to sustain them. Other jazzmen transplanted from the Pacific. Tahitian Frenchmen with fabric shops off Rue Cordorcet. Polynesian dance troupes. And there were always foreign students at the Halo Bar.

  Some days Sunny sat in a small park near Sacré Coeur, watching sunlight electrify the saxophone of Endo Matsuharu while Keo coached him on melodic structure. A handsome, sensitive young man, he talked of abandoning law studies, becoming a serious jazzman. At which point his uncle, Yasunari Seiko, blanched.

  Men still converged on Etienne Brême’s studio where they slept, practised, sat around cleaning their instruments. Sometimes Gypsies came, dark, silent men, oiling handguns and rifles while Brême spoke with numb discretion of how his people were being forced to flee. Women settled there, too—students, au pairs, starlets—who had come from Tahiti, Fiji, the Philippines. They took over Brême’s studio and set to work barbering, laundering, cooking. The scent of strange spices wafted down halls and into the streets so that, just by lifting their heads and sniffing, folks knew where to find the “island crowd.”

  Seeking out corners and niches, women set up boundaries with hung sheets, like a steerage hold. They drank and danced and slept with their men in this cavern resembling a watery ballroom hung with marine life and nets. And in leisurely ways, they let Brême use them as cogs in his network.

  “Don’t be polite,” he instructed them. “Parisians don’t understand manners.”

  With their sinuous walk, their sloe-eyed gaze, women sat in offices of French bureaucrats, flirting and dickering over entry visas, exit visas, cartes d’identité, working papers, papers for non-French-speaking Gypsies. They crossed their legs asking in
nocently for blackmarket tips, more ration cards, introductions to border guides. Sometimes they slept with immigration clerks in order to get what Brême needed. They put themselves in danger, doing anything he asked; times were perilous, everyone a little mad.

  One night Sunny delivered forged papers to a woman who paid her with an emerald brooch. The stone bought extra ration cards for three French families whose men had been mobilized to the Northern frontier. Walking two miles across Paris girdled with electrical wiring for an Underground radio to be set up in a church, she was struck by how she seemed to have entered Paris by the back door.

  Before she had climbed the Tour Eiffel or seen the interior of the Madeleine, she had found herself wrapping masterpieces in the basement of the Louvre. She had barely glimpsed the white cupolas of Sacré Coeur before she was running errands for the Underground—bartering forged papers, stapling leaflets for clandestine printing presses. The raw energy of the city, people arguing communism and fascism in a dozen languages, even their underlying terror, galvanized her. She came in from the streets trembling with new schemes to beat back the Nazis.

  Yet she had only to glance at Keo to know when he needed solitude. He would put his horn to his lips and step out of a frame into his private chaos. Sometimes he came back from that place and looked round their room, wanting more, more money, more acclaim.

  “I work day and night, don’t I deserve it?”

  Such thoughts turned him morbid, even despotic. Often, while practising, he lowered his trumpet.

  “Damn clock ticks too loud.”

  She put the clock away.

  He still complained. “We’re not supposed to hear time.”

  She went to a street where people bartered, trading the clock for an old brass-stemmed hourglass. Keo was pleased, liking how time was now under his control, how hours stood still until he turned the glass chamber over.

  “Do you remember,” Sunny asked, “our beautiful word for hourglass? Anahola. To measure the hour. Time set aside.”

  Still, there were days he ignored her, giving the best part of himself to the frightful lucidity of his talent.

  “I don’t feel you’re with me anymore,” she said. “Even when we make love. You’re not even in the room!”

  They would argue in deadly confrontation, Sunny smoking a Gauloise, one hand supporting with affected attitude the elbow of her smoking arm, her fury emptying itself in smoky exhalations. She would turn her back on him, high heels making her walk with excruciating elegance. And she would leave, leaving him empty. Later while he played she would show up at the club, looking miserable. He would smell her cologne across the room and close down the set, wanting her.

  So caught up with his life, the lack of everything but jazz, Keo didn’t see that something lovely and unrepeatable was being squandered. Something she kept offering him was being pushed aside.

  PARIS STREETS GREW DESERTED, THE AIR UNBORN. A MAN HUNG by his neck from a lamppost.

  “Collabo,” someone whispered. “Partisans strung him up.”

  Dew’s voice suddenly had the cadence of a girl. “Spread the word. All my poker winnings for a berth, third, fourth, any class, on any ship heading to America. If you’re smart, you’ll come, too.”

  Then France surrendered and overnight Paris became a fugitive. Even the landscape disappeared. Boulevards blank, days unmodulated hours. Only jackboots marching in the streets, the crunch of tank treads. Night was not allowed. People lay holding each other fully dressed, wondering what came next. At 3 A.M. black-booted men in black sedans. Like harvesters amongst the human grain, sometimes they harvested all night. Dragging families into streets. Machine guns stitching. Syllables of human cries. And then it would be morning. A woman’s corpse sitting in a doorway. A child’s foot in its melancholy sock. In Brême’s studio, men assembled homemade bombs.

  Banners flying, red swastikas snapping in wind, each day, while German bands played “Deutschland über Alles,” antennaed vans prowled streets, feeling the air for Morse encoders, radios. Posted handbills announced public executions of members of the Resistance, for blowing up railroads, for murdering German officers. In reprisal for one Nazi commander, forty civilians were tortured and shot. Brême walked the streets ripping down handbills, his face like something hardened in a kiln.

  Even defeated, Paris resumed, nightlife resumed. Clubs and cabarets were packed. Behind blackout drapes, British agents wearing lime cologne sat at tables with gun-running Gypsies. Gestapo clapped their hands, keeping time with the Underground. All jazz maniacs, begging for more. At dawn, exhausted jazzmen shuffled home without after-curfew passes, hiding in doorways at the sound of marching boots.

  That summer of 1940 the going was still good, though they thought it was bad. Cigarettes could be had on the black market. Watered-down Scotch and gin. Yet, each night he played, Keo felt something waiting in the shadows, something awful blinking its eyes. Even in dreams he glanced over his shoulder. In occupied Holland another musician, Freddy Johnson, the Negro pianist, had been arrested. Nazis found him too outspoken. His sax man and drummer had gone underground.

  One day while the band practised in a borrowed studio, the door was splintered by men in black leather.

  “Jam sessions sind verboten!” the leader screamed. He and his thugs broke every bit of furniture, though they didn’t touch the musicians or their instruments.

  “They’re friends,” Brême said. “It was a warning. The concierge of that building is a collabo.”

  Days later, the same Gestapo man showed up at Brême’s, terribly excited, carrying a recording of Stan Getz smuggled in from Sweden. When Brême told him Getz was white, the German cursed, disgusted.

  “Take it. I only collect Negroes.”

  Brême shook his head. “You people are murdering so-called inferior races, yet you worship Negro jazz. Where is your logic?”

  The German looked down. “Logic? There is only madness.” He stepped closer. “Be careful, my friend. You’re drawing attention to yourself.”

  That night Brême asked Keo to join him for dinner. When he arrived, Brême was sitting with Yasunari Seiko, former Japanese consul in Belgium, now at the consulate in Paris. Keo was shocked that they knew each other.

  “In these times, nothing is coincidence.” Seiko smiled. “I hope you and your fiancée are well.” A subtle reminder that he had eased Sunny’s entry into France.

  By now Goebbels had banned jazz from radio and was trying to ban jazz and “swing” altogether. Still, jazz-loving Germans—industrialists and the very rich—had grown insistent that more Negroes undertake a German tour.

  “It would be very good,” Seiko said, “if you could do a short tour. The Berlin Hot Club, for instance. There is someone there waiting for . . . documents.”

  Keo studied him. “Someone important?”

  “Extremely,” Brême said. “Fans are begging for Dew Baptiste. If you could persuade him to join you, we might find him passage home.”

  That night during an air raid Keo lay facedown in the metro, inhaling plaster and debris. At home, he woke Sunny.

  “Tonight I found myself in a French subway being bombed by English planes. Earlier, I had dinner with a Japanese diplomat and a Gypsy spy who want me to go to Nazi Germany because someone needs papers.” He took her hands. “This is not the life we planned.”

  “This is life,” she said. “I’m going with you.”

  “No. You’re staying here.”

  IN FRANKFURT AND HAMBURG, THE GERMANS WERE IMPECCABLE. Keo and Dew and their band were treated like royalty. The Lili Marlene Club in Frankfurt was packed three nights running, crowds begging for more, men and women in evening dress, drinking champagne, Armagnac. Their tastes sedate, more swing than hot jazz. “Sophisticated Lady.” “Stardust.”

  Berlin was wild, crowds rushing headlong to destruction. Outside clubs, students listening from the streets drank hair cologne, cheap perfume. Some were anti-Nazi “swing kids” who shrieked when Dew and Keo c
horused “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” When the Guadeloupean drummer went berserk, they tore their clothes off.

  Even older crowds were reckless. Glasses overflowed. They drank champagne and brandy straight from bottles. Keo had the sense of a crown glittering with jewels whose settings were rotting. Outside clubs, women in furs and gowns threw themselves at the band, beckoning from Daimlers and Mercedes. For the first time in his life, Dew demurred.

  Seiko had had papers sewn into the shoulder pads of one of Keo’s jackets. One night, returning to his dressing room, he found the shoulder seams ripped open, documents gone. Heading back toward the German-French border, they played one more night in Stuttgart. The next afternoon they were driven to the train, where the band split up into two compartments.

  At a small town the train was stopped by troops of German soldiers. After an hour, black sedans pulled up with Nazi officers wearing the full insignia of the Totenkopf, the Death’s Head Squadron of the SS. All passengers were ordered onto the platform. In that moment Keo resolved to admit his guilt if he were interrogated about the documents. He would give his life for Dew.

  Soldiers lined up more than two hundred men, women, children, German and French, heading back over the border. They stood holding out their papers, their transit visas. The commandant, strolling the platform, moved to a young man and slapped his face repeatedly. The SS surrounded him. A popping sound: one of them collapsed. The young man had fired a pistol. His body leapt and jitterbugged as bullets hit him from all sides. Not one word was uttered by the SS.

  As it grew dark, spotlights were lit, blinding them, while officers barked orders. Soldiers moved up and down the platform, machine guns poised, spotlights haloing helmets, reflecting off black, shiny boots. People cast their heads down. To make eye contact was to die. Randomly, rather casually, officers pulled individuals out of line, checked their papers, slapped or questioned them. Women fainted. Boots stepped over them.