Immortal Muse

by Stephen Leigh

  Anaïs could have left then, before the German army turned and invaded France, making a mockery of the Maginot Line, but she did not. She stayed. She stayed because of yet another soul-heart.

  *

  Anaïs had settled into one of the old quarters of Nice on the rue Neuscheller, a steep lane high above the Mediterranean, bordered by the remnants of shabby old mansions from the 19th century that had been parceled out into gloomy and musty apartments. Rue Neuscheller was inhabited largely by families whose fortunes had declined sharply during the economic upheaval of the 1930s, and also by an influx of Jews fleeing the rising oppression in Germany. Refugees had been coming to France since the mid-30s, but the violence of Kristallnacht—the 9th of November in 1938—had transformed that trickle to a flood. It was becoming common to hear German or German-accented French being spoken as one walked along the street.

  The final week of April of 1940 was warm, with a briny sea breeze wafting inland off the coast, sweeping the hills that spilled down into the azure waters. Anaïs walked slowly down the avenue, enjoying the feel of the sun on her face and the ocean’s scent, and anticipating what she’d buy at the market there—bread, certainly, and early vegetables in from the local farms, if they were available, and maybe some fish for dinner. Unfortunately, good food was becoming harder to find and more expensive to buy. As she neared the square with its little shops, she glimpsed a young woman in a blue sweater sitting on one of the benches in the grassy central park, hunched over a tablet of drawing paper and sketching furiously with a pencil.

  Anaïs had found artists enough in Nice, most of them with talents pale and subdued. Collectively, they represented enough food for her, but a feast that was bland and without sharp flavors: a gruel of mediocre art. They could sustain her, but couldn’t rouse in her the flame that Lucio or Antoine or Gustav had. Ana was drifting in the currents without making headway, and she knew it: in fact, she intended it. The world was at war, but that was still possible to nearly forget in Nice, which hadn’t been touched by the screaming of bombers and the chatter of gunfire. Still, it was safer to put down no roots at all in an uncertain world and be attached to no one so that she could flee at need. Nice pretended that it remained a destination for the tourists; that people came for the sea air, for the dramatic views, for relaxation and leisure. Nice pretended that nothing had changed.

  It was a pretense that fooled no one, but the mask remained stubbornly in place despite the news.

  Ana understood that. She pretended such things herself, pretended that she had eluded Nicolas forever, pretended that she would never see him again, pretended that she could sip from weak soul-hearts and be content. But Ana couldn’t alter her character, couldn’t fail to pay attention to the hunger within her for more, more, more. She saw the young woman and she stopped: the soul-heart within the girl … It was coiled tightly inside, held as closely to her as her body language might have suggested. Yet it glowed even in the sunshine, the potential of it stabbing deep within the girl, the coils writhing as if aching to be released.

  And Ana found herself aching in concert with them. Give her enough time and she could unleash everything inside this one; she could let those coils pulse outward to find the inspiration and expression that this mossy potential wanted so desperately. This was not like Gustav’s talent; no, Gustav’s energy had been constantly in motion and could barely be contained: the taste and feel of this young woman’s was different, but it was no less solid and real. Her soul-heart had already known pain, had been nearly suffocated and lost entirely. Ana tasted the radiance with her mind; the heart tightened even more in response, as if frightened.

  Ana’s fingers slipped between the buttons of her blouse to briefly touch the cameo. The sardonyx felt slick under her touch. Do I dare do this again? Then: It’s been over three decades since you’ve seen Nicolas. He’s done what he said he would do. You’re safe.

  Standing behind the girl, she glanced down at the sketchpad. There, reproduced in gray, firm pencil strokes, were the shops across the way, with a flurry of quickly-sketched figures moving along the sidewalk. “That’s a nice rendering,” Anaïs said, and the girl started dramatically, nearly dropping the pencil and grabbing at the sketchpad that threatened to tumble from her knees to the ground. She gaped up at Anaïs, her eyes wide. She was plain in features, with undistinguished brown hair cropped at the shoulders and pulled back with a pale blue ribbon from her face. She appeared to be older than Anaïs had first supposed, maybe about twenty; her body was thin and waif-like, and perhaps that had contributed to the impression. “I love the sense of movement in the sketch,” Ana continued into that face’s apprehensive stare. “I can feel the people scurrying about.”

  “Danke,” the young woman began, then swallowed hard. “I mean, merci. I’m glad you like it.” Her French was good, but flavored like so many others with a slight German accent. That alone told Ana that she was one of the refugees.

  Ana came around the front of the bench, though she didn’t sit. “I’m Anaïs Dereux. I live just up there,” Anaïs said, pointing back up the rue.

  “I’m Lotte,” the young woman said. For a moment, Anaïs thought that it was all she would say. She clutched her pad and pencil and seemed prepared to bolt. She shivered, visibly. “Charlotte Salomon,” she said finally. “I live with my grandpar …” Again she stopped. “With my grandfather,” she finished. Anaïs was certain Lotte had been about to say “grandparents,” and that sparked a memory of an article in the local paper a week or so ago: a Jewish refugee from Germany, an older woman, had fallen from a high window and died, the story freighted with the heavy intimation that the incident had been no accident but a suicide, though that was never directly stated in the newspaper report.

  “May I see your other sketches?” Anaïs asked. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t bother you, but I’m curious …”

  Ana thought that Lotte would refuse. She hugged the sketchpad to her skinny frame, clutching it with a strange desperation, then abruptly handed it to Anaïs. Ana took it gently, and looked pointedly at the bench; Lotte scooted over to make room for Ana to sit next to her. Ana set the sketchpad on her own lap, carefully lifting the page, nodding as she went back through the sketches: landscapes with the trees of Nice and views of the harbor, a few sketches of buildings, and a larger, more finished portrait of an old woman, who appeared to be sleeping while her likeness was captured.

  That one made Ana pause. The curled fingers near the head, the shadows of wrinkles on the face and down the neck, the quiet relaxation of the figure, the lines of her nightdress, the blanket wrapped to her waist: the portrait was evocative and stunning. “Who is this?” Anaïs asked Lotte.

  The young woman glanced quickly at the paper and away. “That’s Grossmama—my grandmother.”

  “It’s a lovely sketch of her. Does she like it?”

  “I never showed it to her.”

  “You should.”

  Her mouth tightened, and she looked away from the sketch. “I can’t. She … died.”

  “That happened recently?”

  The response was the ghost of a nod from Lotte, and Anaïs was quietly certain that her suspicion was correct.

  “I’m very sorry,” Anaïs said. “That’s hard, losing someone you’ve known all your life. I didn’t mean to pry. I’m sorry for that, too.”

  That earned Anaïs another nod, but the green heart remained wrapped tightly inside and Anaïs could only barely feel it now that Lotte had stopped drawing. Had she not felt it earlier, she might have missed it entirely. “It’s all right,” Lotte said. “She … She wasn’t happy. Being here was hard for her.”

  “I’ve read the papers,” Anaïs said. “I understand.” The vitriol in the newspapers toward the Jews was increasing, with articles claiming that the German refugees were in fact a “fifth column” responsible for the loss of French troops against the onrushing German army in Denmark and Norway, and angry letters insisting that the government must do something abou
t the traitorous Germans on their soil. Posters for the propaganda film Jew Süss, depicting a lecherous Jew defiling a pure Aryan girl, adorned the walls around Nice. To be German was bad enough; to be Jewish and German was worse.

  Ana let the pages of the sketchpad fall back and handed it to Lotte. She pressed it to her chest as if she’d never expected to have it returned to her. “Do you paint, too?” Ana asked her.

  A shrug. “Sometimes. I have some landscapes and some figures that I’ve done recently.”

  “I’d really like to see them,” Ana said. “I might even want to buy one. Could we meet so I could look at them, maybe tomorrow? I could come to your house, perhaps.”

  The green heart throbbed once. Ana plucked at its tendrils, prying them loose and tasting them at the same time. Her own mood brightened with the feel of them. “That would be fine, I suppose,” Lotte told her, and the corners of her lips twitched with a hint of a shy smile.

  For the first time, the young woman made full eye contact with Anaïs, and the smile finally widened. It made her features suddenly and strangely radiant, and in that moment, Ana felt herself connect, momentarily, with Lotte’s green heart. She gasped with the shock of the contact and with the depth of its potential.

  *

  “I think I like this one,” Anaïs said. “How much do you want for it?”

  The gouache painting of the steep, green hills outside Nice, falling down to an angry, storm-wracked sea, was competent but not overwhelming, little better than that of a hundred other artists working in the region. Ana could feel no stirring of Lotte’s green heart as the young woman looked at the painting: this was not a work of the heart; this was intended to be purely commercial, a piece for the tourists to buy so that Lotte and her grandfather could eat.

  Except that a German Jewess’ paintings were not particularly coveted by the French tourists in Nice.

  “Ten francs?” Charlotte’s voice was tentative, and the end of her sentence lifted into a question. Ana shook her head.

  “My dear, you undervalue yourself far too much. I’ll give you twenty, and I’m still getting a bargain.”

  Lotte smiled at that and nodded. They were in Lotte’s room on the second floor of the villa l’Ermitage, where her grandfather still lived even after the death of his wife—she was briefly introduced to the man, and she thought him both broken and unpleasant. Lotte’s room was small but airy, with white chintz curtains that swayed in the breeze off the Mediterranean. Her bed, with a coverlet embroidered with a trellis of vines and roses, was pushed against a wall, as if afraid to intrude too far into the space. A battered chest of drawers lurked in a corner. In the space that remained, Lotte had set up an easel, and her paintings were stacked against or pinned to the walls. To Ana, the room smelled of Lotte: of paints and perfume.

  Ana placed the landscape, unmatted and unframed, on the bed. She counted out twenty francs from her purse, and laid the bills on the coverlet. “There,” she said. “Now we’re both happy, oui?”

  Lotte smiled at her. “Oui,” she answered.

  “Good. I’ll have this framed; it will look lovely and dramatic on the wall above my bed. I can look at it and imagine I’m a gull flying in that storm. Do you often go to the beach to draw and paint?”

  “Sometimes,” Lotte said, “or I’ll go to the market, or up into the hills. There’s so much beauty around here, and so many artists. I’m such a poor talent, compared to some of the others.”

  Ana took a step toward Lotte, taking the woman’s hands in her own. Their gazes caught, held. Ana could feel Lotte’s soul-heart, the emerald tendrils of it rising and curling toward her. She took them in her mind, let herself taste them, let herself strengthen them so that the radiance filled the air around them like sunlight through new leaves. “No,” Ana said. “You mustn’t say things like that. Lotte, you have no idea of the talent inside you.”

  She smiled at Anaïs, and Ana felt herself want to take the woman in her arms and hug her, but Lotte pulled her hands back shyly. “It’s nice of you to say.”

  “It’s the truth. I’ve known many painters, and …” She took a breath. “You’ve something few of them have, Lotte.”

  She turned away, though she looked at the paintings on the wall. “Arrête, s’il vous plaît.”

  “I mean that sincerely. I’d like to go with you tomorrow, and watch you draw and paint. Would you let me do that? I promise I won’t interrupt you.” She put her hand on Lotte’s shoulder, feeling the soul-heart reach out toward her touch. Lotte turned.

  “I think I’d like that,” Lotte said.

  *

  They would meet the next day, then often during the following weeks. Lotte seemed to enjoy the attention that Anaïs lavished on her. Ana had the sense that Lotte had few other friends, of her age or any other. Ana never pushed her to talk, never probed too hard about her past or her feelings. She’d linked herself with several women artists over the centuries; she’d even found the relationship becoming sexual as well: with Artemisia Gentileschi, with Paolina’s mother Maria, with Radclyffe Hall. Those she loved, she loved without reservation. But she had the sense that if she pushed Lotte for that kind of intimacy, she would find Lotte pulling away.

  If it happened, it would happen.

  Instead, Ana concentrated on Lotte’s green soul-heart, letting herself sink into that energy so that she could loosen it and allow it to grow outward. That was enough; she found that, slowly, over the days, Lotte began to talk to and eventually confide in her. She would lean against Ana’s side as they conversed, or her hand might touch Ana’s tentatively. Lotte began to paint more furiously, portraits and landscapes that were more experimental and less commercial: images that seemed to spring out from the deep well inside her.

  For her own part, Anaïs pulled away from the group of artists on which she’d been feeding. Lotte was enough for now, and she found herself far more comfortable with Lotte alone than with all of the others. For the first time in a few decades, Anaïs found herself with the desire to buy chemicals and continue her quest for the second half of the Philosopher’s Stone, to pull out her own paints and brushes, or to play the piano and find the songs inside herself.

  Lotte’s green heart began to slowly pull Ana from her own fallow period.

  “I worry that I’ll end up like Momma and Grossmama,” Lotte confided to Anaïs one late May morning in 1940 as the two of them ate a picnic lunch on a cliffside overlooking Nice harbor and the lighthouse there. “I’m afraid that I’ll give in to despair and just leap out of a window like they both did.”

  Sitting near the steep, boulder-strewn edge tumbling down into the blue water below, Anäis moved closer to Lotte and put her arm protectively around the young woman’s shoulders. She could feel the young girl trembling, though she wondered if it wasn’t the intimacy of the contact. “You’re not your mother, or your grandmother,” Ana said. “Because they did something doesn’t mean that you must also end up the same way.”

  Lotte nodded, almost furiously. Her shivering stopped, and yet she made no move to leave Ana’s embrace; instead she leaned her head into Ana’s shoulder. “I understand that. I do.”

  The bright Mediterranean sun warmed them, and Lotte snuggled deeper in Ana’s embrace. Ana could smell the fragrance of her hair, and she bent her head to kiss Lotte where her hair was parted. They remained there, caught in the lazy sun, in the salt breeze, in the susurrations of the waves against the rocks far below, for a long time: not moving, not speaking, just enjoying the feel of each other’s closeness.

  They climbed back down to the city a few hours later, and Ana walked with Lotte back to the house where she and her grandfather were staying. He must have been waiting for her; as they approached, he came toward them leaning on his cane, waving a piece of paper that snapped angrily with his gestures. “Have you seen this?” he half-shouted in French, ignoring Ana. “Twenty years I have been here in France, and this is what our world has come to, this is how I’m to be treated.”


  “What are you talking about, Grosspapa?” Lotte asked, glancing back at Ana with a worried look.

  “Here! Read!” He thrust the paper in her face and stalked away, the paper fluttering nearly to the floor before Lotte managed to catch it. Ana watched her scan the words there, unable to read the print. She heard Lotte gasp.

  “Oh,” she said. Wordlessly, she passed the paper to Ana and went to her grandfather, who was sitting in a frayed fabric chair, muttering to himself. Ana watched Lotte crouch beside him, whispering to him in German, then she turned back to scan the paper. The words threatened to blur as she read them. All foreign-born Jews in the Côte d’Azur must report for internment instructions in the next week … transport to an encampment beyond the Pyrenees … compulsory …

  Ana glanced over to Lotte, stricken. “I don’t know what to say. This … this is horrible. There must be some way to fight this.”

  Lotte’s grandfather sniffed derisively. “You’re not Jewish,” he said to Ana. “You don’t understand. Ask Lotte; she’s seen the infection firsthand in Germany. Now it’s spread here, and soon it will be everywhere. Everywhere in the entire world.”

  Anaïs glanced at Lotte, who nodded as she clung to her grandfather. “He’s right,” she said. “I’m sorry, Ana. He’s right.”

  “No,” Ana insisted. “I won’t accept that. There’s something we can do. You’ll see. There has to be …”

  *

  Ana tried to halt the deportation. She contacted everyone she could in Nice and the surrounding villages, but few in authority would even listen; if they pretended to do so, they only shook their heads sadly and shrugged thin shoulders, lifting their hands palms upward. “You must understand that it’s this terrible, terrible war,” they would say. “These measures are for our own protection, and for theirs as well. If the Jews are held in camps, then no one can accuse them of doing anything against us. It’s only temporary, only temporary. You do know that some of them are helping the Germans as fifth columnists, don’t you? Besides, they’ll be treated better there than they are here. C’est la vie. It’s for everyone’s welfare …”