The artist gave a rusty cough and opened his eyes. “Warsaw.”
“Forgive me, but I don’t know your work. Have you exhibited recently?”
The man’s eyebrows came together. “Exhibited?”
“Are you—or were you—affiliated with a university? Represented by a gallery?”
“What is this? An audition? An inquisition?”
“The Emergency Rescue Committee has limited funds,” Varian began. “Our mission—”
Rubasky’s eyes narrowed. “Professor of painting,” he said, slowly. “I was a professor. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. My work was exhibited in twenty countries. If not for the war, if not for my religion, I would have had a retrospective at the Prado this fall. And now I must argue my case in front of you, Mr. Fry, a mere boy!”
From over his left shoulder, Varian heard a quiet throat-clearing. It was Miss Davenport, eyes large and serious, hands clasped under her chin.
“Monsieur Rubasky?” she said. “Agnon Rubasky?”
The painter raised his head.
“Perhaps you should open your sketchbook for Monsieur Fry.”
At the sound of another American accent, Rubasky raised a skeptical eyebrow. But he agreed to do what she’d asked. He opened the book and laid it on his knee, flipping through the pages, and Varian caught glimpses of dense charcoalwork, human figures in frenzied motion, lines that suggested a cataclysm, a deluge. “Here, a study for a painting of an interior,” he said, of a densely hatched sketch of what looked to be a burning staircase in a collapsing synagogue. “And here, portrait of my wife and son.” Beside a series of scratches that might have been a rutted road, a desperate gesture in charcoal bent over a smaller scumbled shape, offering something—a black knot of bread, or a bowl of water. Varian drew a long breath.
“Monsieur Rubasky’s work was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris eight months ago,” Miriam said. “He’s revered by my professors at the Sorbonne. You see, don’t you, how his compositions borrow from the cubists but contain echoes of Caravaggio?” She pointed to the shading of the sketched woman, the swift dense flock of marks that gave her volume. “He’s a student of the symbolist Malczewski, but most critics seem to think he shares more with the surrealists. Writers like Richardin and Zabrest compare his work to that of Tanguy—and not, may I say, unfavorably.”
Varian looked from the painter to Miss Davenport, then back to the painter again.
On Rubasky’s face, a look of dawning relief. “Mademoiselle…?”
“Davenport,” said Miss Davenport.
“Mademoiselle Davenport, you are the hand of fate.”
“Not at all, Mr. Rubasky, your work would have spoken for itself.”
But Varian was not at all sure of that; his training was in classics and history, not in European art, and while he trusted himself as a critic of literature, he knew he would have failed utterly to see the influences of Caravaggio and Tanguy, much less of Malczewski, in the charcoal sketches in front of him.
“If Mr. Rubasky’s name is not on your list, it should be,” Miss Davenport said.
“Mr. Rubasky, forgive my ignorance,” Varian said. “I’ll urge my committee to take your case.”
The painter gave a grunt, smoothing his brushy mustache with one finger.
“Please see Mr. Hirschman, there,” Varian said. “He’ll take down all your information, and we’ll cable your name to New York tonight.
“Danke schön, Herr Fry. Sie sind wirklich freundlich.”
“At your service, Mr. Rubasky.”
The painter got up to speak to Hirschman, taking Miriam’s place; Miriam nodded her thanks to Varian and, having finished her business, edged toward the door. But Varian found himself calling her name, and she turned.
“Miss Davenport,” he said. “Would you perhaps be interested in a job?”
* * *
________
Sixty-three refugees. That was the number they interviewed before five o’clock that day, one after the next, more than half of them utterly hopeless—no papers, not a penny, nothing to render them of interest to the Emergency Rescue Committee in New York. Miriam, who had stayed for two more hours, left to arrange matters with Mehring and Pauli and Heiden; Oppy, the bookkeeper, had dropped in with a packet of sandwiches and a pile of bank forms for Varian to sign, but Varian hadn’t had a moment to stop and eat. By five, having had nothing but the dry toast at breakfast, he thought he might melt into a senseless jelly on the floor. His vision swarming with paisleys, his throat tight with dehydration, he got up to revive himself with cold water from the bathroom tap.
As he leaned over the sink and looked at himself in the glass—the indoor pallor of his skin, the hammocks of exhaustion beneath his eyes—it came to him that he hadn’t yet canceled his meeting with Grant. He sat down at the edge of the bathtub and put his head between his knees. What had led him to agree to that meeting, what had possessed him? Alcohol, panic, sheer surprise? He saw Grant’s cool, composed face again, the scar above the eyebrow, the long fingers devoid of their wished-for cigarette. God. Already the heat was gathering in his chest, already he felt he had to see Grant again, whatever the consequences. Stop it, he told himself. Stop it at once. He stood up from the bathtub edge so precipitously he nearly fainted again, and had to put a hand on the doorframe to steady himself. When he managed to open the door, Hirschman was waiting behind it.
“Excuse me,” Hirschman said. “We’d better draft our cable.”
Varian glanced at his watch. “Oh, God. I lost track of time.”
The wire to New York had to be dispatched by six. Hirschman had already cleared the room of refugees, and Lena sat at her desk with her steno pad at the ready.
“All right,” Varian said, and took a seat again in his spindly chair. “Lena, Albert. Let’s have the names.”
Lena and Hirschman called out, one by one, the names of the refugees they’d interviewed that morning, and Varian wrote them on a large newsprint pad. Each day they sent nearly two dozen names to the office on Forty-First Street; he’d been strictly discouraged from sending more, short-staffed as they were at the New York headquarters. For each one of those names, someone would have to open a visa inquiry, a process that involved trips to three different federal government offices and the painstaking completion of a stack of forms in triplicate. Mehring’s and Heiden’s names must go on the day’s cable; so must Rubasky’s. Varian circled those three in red. Then there were all the others—none of them on Varian’s list, all of them artists or writers or political refugees of some achievement and reputation, all of them in danger of arrest and deportation.
Hirschman looked down despairingly into his sheaf of papers. “Perhaps we should be using a numerical rating,” he said. He drew a handkerchief across his brow, pushing a ridge of hair high onto his forehead.
“Numerical!” Lena said. “How to rate sculptor against philosopher, or composer against Social Democrat?”
“Anyone who’s been in a concentration camp must go into the cable.”
Lena glanced through the forms. “But you’ve had eleven former inmates today. And not all of them we could call artists.”
“This is a moral disaster, nothing less,” Hirschman said.
Varian cleared his throat. “Look,” he said. “Every afternoon for the past three weeks we’ve had to make this decision. We’ll do it again today. If we don’t, the list doesn’t go at all.”
“Absolument,” Lena said. “On ne faut pas exagérer. Forgive me, Mr. Fry.”
“It’s no use trying to express any refugee’s situation in quantitative terms,” Varian said. “And though I hate to put it this way, New York didn’t say the aid was to go to those who’d suffered the most.”
“The office must allow us to send more names,” Lena said. “That is all.”
“Truly, Lena, they don’t have the money or the staff.”
“Money, staff, they can get! Write to your wife. She will tell Paul Hagen what must be done.”
“But what would happen,” Hirschman said, “if the New York office did allow us fifty? A hundred? How would we get them all out?”
Varian looked at him in silence. This was the essential problem, insoluble now. Even if he could manage to get every refugee a passport, stamped with all the necessary visas, all of them with coordinating dates, all valid—the refugees still had to find a way across the border without being arrested and deported, and then through Spain and Portugal and across the ocean. All of it took luck, money, connections, time. And what did he have? What the Spanish called ganitas. Desire.
“Lena, pick ten names,” Varian said. “Albert, you pick another ten. We’ll send those with the three I mentioned. And then we’ll strategize.”
* * *
________
Varian and Hirschman always went to the telegraph office together; they each carried a separate copy of the list, in case one of them was arrested en route. While Varian cabled, Hirschman waited outside. And then, as they always did, they stopped in at the tiny café-bar across the street, a dark place called La Coquille de Noix, and installed themselves at a back table where they could talk unmolested. Two glasses of excellent Irish whiskey appeared from some hidden stash; the owner of the bar, as Varian happened to know, was an avid supporter not only of de Gaulle, but also of the black market.
“What have you got for me, Albert?” Varian said, once the waiter had left them.
Hirschman reached into his leather bag and produced a folded newspaper, which he handed to Varian as if to share current events. Inside, Varian found a sheaf of small pink and green folders printed with official seals. He looked at them from within the newspaper’s V, fanned them with his thumb, squinted to make out the details. Polish and Lithuanian passports, more than a dozen of them, already filled with clients’ information, lacking only photographs.
“And more where those came from,” Hirschman said.
Varian folded the newspaper again, and with a single swift gesture, Hirschman made the packet disappear into his leather bag.
“How on earth, Albert?”
Hirschman shrugged, as if still surprised by his own success. “I asked myself who might be most sympathetic to our clients’ plight. First I tried the Lithuanian consulate, then the Polish one. I merely explained our situation to a few officials. Showed a facsimile of your letter from Mrs. Roosevelt. Mentioned a few names. Chagall’s. Mann’s. The Poles were only too glad to help, as you can imagine—anything to hoodwink the Germans—and the Lithuanians were easy enough to persuade, once I told them a little about our clients.”
“Do they understand the possible consequences?”
“They seemed, as I said, only too glad.”
Varian shook his head. “Albert, you’re a genius, do you know that? We couldn’t have gotten on much longer with those fake Czech passports.”
“It was easy enough, really. And that’s not all I’ve got for you.”
Varian raised an eyebrow, and Hirschman reached again into the leather bag. What he extracted this time was a book of matches from the Dorade: a gold-foil D on a black background, a diminutive gold-foil fish at its center. Varian thumbed the cover open. Inside, someone had written a name: Moreau. And an address on the rue Grignan.
“Who’s Moreau?”
“Someone who’s got an office he wants to unload. A proper office. Not a hotel room. A place to do our work.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know we can’t do business out of the Splendide anymore. We’re practically sitting in each other’s laps already, and now you’ve brought on Miss Davenport. And we both know your bribes can’t hold that concierge forever. Our people are too visible, waiting out in the street.”
“We can’t pay rent on an office. Every dime’s got to go to the refugees. Ask Oppy. We’re already shaving it too thin.”
“Moreau’s a leather merchant,” Hirschman said. “He’s got another four months on his contract, but he wants to leave town as soon as he can. He says he’ll cut us some manner of deal.”
“What sort of deal?”
“A generous deal. Talk to him.”
Varian turned the matchbook over in his fingers. “When?”
“Tomorrow at four.”
“Albert, I don’t know what to say.”
Hirschman smiled, lifted his glass, drained it. “Say merci. And give me the evening off. I’ve got a date with Betty from the Préfecture, and I’d better not be late.”
“By all means,” Varian said. “And thank you. Truly.”
Hirschman rose and gave Varian a salute in farewell, leaving him to contemplate his last sip of whiskey and the gold-stamped matchbook. An office! 60 rue Grignan. Not ten minutes’ walk from where he sat. A real place of business. Something more than a temporary space to park his makeshift organization. He would see it tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps he could convince Miss Davenport to accompany him; he sensed she had powers of persuasion and judgment that exceeded his own. He’d send her a message at once, as soon as he got back to the Splendide—as soon as he’d written to Grant to cancel their meeting, he reminded himself now.
He got up and threw some francs on the table, then went out into the lengthening shadows of the evening. The sun still hung on at the edge of the port; slanting bars of light followed him through the streets. At the Splendide, there was another message waiting for him at the desk. Not a telephone message this time: a handwritten note. Grant’s writing. And along with the note, a paper bag full of ripe figs. He must have just dropped them off minutes ago; when Varian reached into the bag he found they were warm, as if they’d baked all day in a market stall in the sun.
Remembered you liked these, the note said. See you tomorrow 10AM.
“For God’s sake,” he said aloud. He took the paper bag to his room, closed and locked the door behind him like a fugitive, and ate the figs one after the other. They were pink and sweet and thready, their taste somewhere between pastry and strawberry, their crisp round seeds like firecrackers between his teeth. He ate them until they were gone, and wished for more.
4
Les Cyprès
The next day was bright and hard-edged, the wind from the Vieux Port smelling of ozone, as if from a storm out at sea. A black bird and its shadow jittered along the sidewalk ahead of Varian as he made his way toward the tram stop. Now and then the bird paused and cocked its head as if to listen for his footsteps, then walked onward, past the sidewalk detritus of cigarette butts and pistachio shells and discarded tram tickets. To be in Marseille, not Paris, still carried a certain novelty, a whiff of the unknown. If Paris reeked of sex, opera, art, and decadent poverty, Marseille reeked of underground crime, opportunism, trafficked cocaine, rowdy tavern song. Paris was a woman, a fallen woman in the arms of her Nazi captors; but Marseille was a man, a schemer in a secondhand coat, ready to sell his soul or whatever else came quickly to hand. If it hadn’t been for the war and the ERC, would Varian ever have crossed the borders of this town? Yet he felt oddly at home here, as if he’d returned to his grandfather’s Brooklyn, to the streets where growth and decay lived side by side, and where a quick word could earn you a dollar or a clout to the ear.
He caught the #14 tram, paid his twenty centimes, and took a seat by a window, leaning his head against the sun-warmed pane, trying to turn his attention toward anything but Elliott Grant: that sidewalk market with its curving rows of stalls like uneven teeth; the shadowy alleys where children raced along on scooters made from lemon crates; the graffiti scrawled in red on the sides of buildings, punningly substituting Putain for Pétain. Gradually the four- and five-story buildings gave way to smaller ones, then to freestanding houses with cramped gardens, and fina
lly to views of the sage-green countryside with its olive trees and almond orchards, its soaring scarf-strewn blue sky. At La Blancarde a crowd of schoolboys pushed onto the tram, their teacher lecturing them upon the geologic features of the landscape: There to the east, we see the Massif de Marseilleveyre, culmination of the Calanques, steep cliffs of limestone formed when the sea receded; a sample of that rock, boys, reveals infinitesimal marine fossils perfectly preserved.
At La Pomme he found himself straining to see if Grant was among the few young men waiting on the platform. He wasn’t, of course. Grant was late, he was always late, by ten minutes exactly, no matter how urgent the appointment. And Varian was always on time. He couldn’t help it. His father had taught him that the man who arrived first at a meeting possessed control. Thus far it had proved true, in all cases except those concerning Grant.
Ten minutes later he appeared from behind the station restaurant—Skiff Grant, still extant, rematerialized—with a book in his hand, as if he’d expected to read while waiting. Varian descended the stairs, and then Grant was before him, freshly shaven, in an open-collared shirt and a light wool suit correct for the season, smelling faintly of pastries and of the region’s famous milled soap. There was a certain rudeness in his substantiality, an insult that arose from the fact of his continued existence during all the years when he’d been a ghost to Varian. They had, for God’s sake, inhabited the same city, had breathed the same exhaust-scented air and ridden the same trains beneath the streets of New York; he had been as real as this all that time.
“And how was the ride?” Grant asked now.
“Full of schoolboys.”
“Oh, yes, the lycées send them out to see the countryside. It’s something, isn’t it, that view across the valley? And the Massif de Marseilleveyre—you can see halfway across the ocean from up there. You ought to go sometime.”
“You’ve hiked it?”
“Yes, Gregor and I.”
The Flight Portfolio Page 4