The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  Werfel drained his glass of wine and began to explain. He and Alma had just been conferring with the Manns; they had sat together a long while. In the course of their discussion, Mann had mentioned—and Werfel hoped he’d misunderstood!—that the other clients who had recently crossed the border had traveled not by train but on foot, over treacherous mountain terrain, in the company of an uncertain type, a sort of demi-cowboy named Ball. Was this what Monsieur Fry intended for the Werfels and the Manns? Did not Monsieur Fry understand that he, Werfel, was unfit for an adventure of that sort—that he’d experienced cardiac troubles lately, shortness of breath, disequilibrium? And was Mrs. Werfel, eleven years older than her husband and unaccustomed to strenuous exercise, meant to undertake the same journey?

  “With luck, you won’t have to take that route,” Varian said.

  “So we’re to rely on luck?”

  Alma straightened the lapels of her jacket and inclined her head toward Varian. “Franz exaggerates my fragility, perhaps. But we must consider his own.”

  “Alma, you insult me,” Werfel said.

  “Not at all. I protect you.”

  “And in doing so, you insult me.”

  “Lass uns nicht streiten, Franz.” She gave him a stern look, then turned its equivalent on Varian. “My husband must have a doctor along for the journey, Herr Fry. Otherwise, his fate is in your hands.”

  “We can’t bring doctors along,” Varian said. “We have to assume that Mr. Werfel’s undertaking the trip will be safer for him than staying in France.”

  “But what good is it to escape if I perish on a mountain path?” Werfel said. “My heart is very weak. I might well write, like Proust, ‘Dear Friend, I have nearly died three times since morning.’ ”

  Varian wished Lena were present to say Il ne faut pas exagérer. “The path leads over a foothill,” Varian said. “Not a strenuous trek. I wouldn’t advise you to go if I thought it would cost you your life.”

  “You are not a doctor, Monsieur Fry.”

  “You’re right, Franz, of course. Well, then, we’ll have to have your health certified in advance by someone who knows more about these things than I do. In any case, we can’t leave just yet. Your papers aren’t quite in order.”

  “And when can we expect them to be?” Alma said, still holding Varian’s gaze. He could see, or could extrapolate, how she’d managed to fascinate the geniuses who had lived and died for her. Before Werfel she’d been married to the architect Gropius, with whom she had deceived her first husband, the composer; hence her name, a miniature history of her life as a fertile but fickle creative muse.

  “We’re awaiting only your French exit visas. I expect them imminently. Our friend Harry Bingham at the consulate has put me in touch with a sympathetic person at the Préfecture, someone who might facilitate our contact with the visa office. I’ll meet with him tomorrow afternoon. And if that fails, we know of a good forger.”

  “Excellent,” Mrs. Mahler-Werfel said, smoothing her immaculate white skirt. She hadn’t touched the sandwiches; Varian had never actually seen her eat. “And in the meantime, we must have Franz’s heart examined. That will reassure us all.”

  “Indeed,” Werfel said. “Though no doctor can turn aside the hand of Atropos.”

  “I’ll try to round one up who can,” Varian said, and smiled.

  And that seemed to satisfy the Werfels, at least for the moment. Alma stood, tucked a slim white calfskin purse beneath her arm, and allowed Werfel to escort her to the door. Watching them cross the room, Alma on her sculpted heels and Werfel unsteady in scuffed brogans, Varian couldn’t help wondering whether by leading them toward the border he was ushering them to their doom. But they were doomed here in France, he told himself, just as doomed as the refugees who’d already lost their lives in the camps or along the road. And then he went downstairs to announce that he was open for business again, but the hotel lobby was eerily empty; he learned in short order from the concierge that while Monsieur Fry was having his lunch, all the refugees had been rounded up and hauled off to the Préfecture.

  * * *

  ________

  A rafle. That was what they called it. It happened periodically and without warning: the Sûreté Nationale would show up at the Splendide and transport everyone to the Evêché, current seat of police power, where their imperfect papers would be scrutinized and they would be threatened with deportation. Then the police would squeeze them for information about the Emergency Rescue Committee and about what exactly Varian the American was doing in Marseille. The refugees had little information that could have been of use to the police. The purpose of these raids, as far as Varian could tell, was to demonstrate that the police were aware of Varian’s doings; also to keep tabs, for Vichy’s benefit, on the Nazis’ persons of interest. Bingham had told him how it worked: the Marseille police had to give the little gift of information periodically to Vichy, who passed it along to the Nazis, who used it to maintain their lists; they all existed in a strange equilibrium, the French apparently having not yet decided whether they ought to round up all these inconvenient types and hand them over to the occupiers directly, or let them trickle over the border and cease to be a French problem.

  The Evêché, called that because it had once been the bishop’s palace, was a Baroque confection, overbaked and over-iced; it welcomed visitors through an arched stone entryway crowned with the legend HÔTEL DE POLICE on a lozenge-shaped shield, surmounted by coquilles and flanked by lush fronds of Provençal greenery rendered in bas-relief. The portail seemed to suggest a police force characterized by its tenderness and clemency. But at the reception desk he learned that Bingham’s friend Robinet was out and could not receive him until tomorrow; without the least hint of tenderness, the officer at the desk suggested that Varian clear out until then. When Varian refused, the officer made a series of grudging telephone calls, then marched him to a walnut-paneled waiting room. Half an hour later, a wizened functionary called Varian’s name. He was, he learned, to have an audience with Captain Villand, secretary-general of the Préfecture of the Bouches du Rhône. The functionary led him to a door carved with fleurs-de-lis, where he was received by Villand, a round pink-skinned person in military dress, his Midi French muffled by a winglike white mustache.

  “Please explain, Monsieur Fry,” began Villand, sitting down at his inlaid mahogany desk. His tone was inquisitive, not unkind, but the look in his eyes was unyielding. “Why it is that so many paperless refugees have been observed to gather outside the doors of your hotel on the boulevard d’Athènes, and what service it is exactly that you’re rendering?”

  “I represent an American refugee aid organization,” Varian said, though of course Villand must have known that by now; on the desk lay a fat dossier labeled with Varian’s name. “We provide money, contacts, and visa help. We’ve got friends at the American consulate.”

  “The consulate disavows your actions,” Villand said, lacing his fingers. “We take note of that sort of thing and draw our own conclusions.”

  Varian smiled. “I suppose it depends on who you talk to at the consulate.”

  Captain Villand opened his desk drawer and took out a narrow cigar. He made a show of trimming it with a miniature clipper, then reached for a gleaming brass pineapple whose fronds flipped backward on a hinge to reveal a lighter. Villand seemed to enjoy Varian’s observation of his smoking; though he made no move to offer Varian a cigar, there was something intimate in his actions, as though they were relaxing at his club rather than sitting in adversarial positions on either side of his massive desk. “Monsieur Fry,” Villand said. “The eye of the French law observes your activities at all times. If I were to receive intelligence that your organization was engaged in contralegal activities, I would have to order you immediately expelled from France. Frankly, I would find that distasteful.”

  “Fortunately for both of us, there
’s no reason to expel me.”

  “And yet,” Villand said, drawing and releasing a bolus of smoke, “those who appeal to you for aid always happen to be the refugees whose papers have expired, or who’ve been imprisoned in concentration camps, or who have been turned back at the border for trying to cross illegally.”

  “I consider all cases,” Varian said. “I have no control over who comes to me.”

  The captain harrumphed, tapping the ash from his cigar. “We always control the company we keep.”

  “I’m not keeping company. I’m providing aid to refugees. And if you don’t mind my asking respectfully, Captain Villand, I’d greatly appreciate your not hauling them down here for questioning. If there’s anything you want to know, I invite you to ask me.”

  “I’ll thank you to let me do my job as I see fit, Monsieur Fry.”

  “I don’t see how it’s necessary to frighten nursing mothers and babies, or two-bit painters who’ve heard that I’m dispensing aid to artists.”

  “That’s sufficient,” the captain said, rising from his chair. “You are dismissed from my presence, Monsieur Fry. Consider yourself cautioned.”

  “And what about my refugees?”

  “They’ve already been released. They were useless, just as you said.”

  Varian got up before the secretary-general could say more. He quick-stepped across the waiting room, down an echoing hall, and out through the massive front doors. As he walked back to the Splendide, he thought with some pleasure of the brilliant forgery he’d seen at Moreau’s shop: all those beautiful visas, and especially the official stamp of the Préfecture of the Bouches du Rhône. He wished he knew the whereabouts of Bill Freier that very moment. He felt a new and urgent desire to defy France in general, and Captain Villand in particular.

  At the front desk, the clerk handed him an international cable. He ran upstairs to his room, sat on the bed, and tore open the pale blue envelope.

  CAN YOU ESTIMATE PROBABLE DATE YOUR RETURN MY PRIVATE INFORMATION ONLY I MISS YOU COME SOON REPLY IRVING PLACE LOVE EILEEN

  He lay back against the narrow pillow, one hand on his chest. How to reply? Impossible to estimate date of return. Escape operation imminent. Grant quartered with lover nearby. I am exhausted. Confused. Overwhelmed. But still yours faithfully, VARIAN.

  7

  On the Vieux Port

  The moment his operation moved to the rue Grignan, his room had become an oasis of quiet. The clamor of European languages, the tap and bang of the Contin, the heat of bodies pressed too close together, the tremor of desperation in the air: all had vanished, or had at least become displaced, leaving him the bed with its smooth white skirt, the spindly chair and desk, the block of sun falling through the window, the arpeggios of girls’ voices from the school below. In a luxury of solitude he prepared for his afternoon meeting, glad not to have to justify his casual dress, nor his mounting anxiety, nor the decision to ignore pressing responsibilities in order to meet a friend on the Vieux Port. At the thought of it—the thought of Grant traveling that moment by tram, heading in his direction, toward a point at which their paths would intersect—a familiar heat-lightning of shame flashed over him. But this wasn’t an errand of pleasure, he reminded himself; this was part of his mission, his work. And as he adjusted his collar in the mirror, smoothed his hair with a damp comb, and resettled his glasses on his nose, he told himself there was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to apologize for. Even Eileen would have agreed, knowing what she did about Grant, that this was a blameless way to spend an afternoon. He retied his shoelaces and stepped into the corridor. No one was waiting there. The coast, at least in this private corner of Marseille, was clear.

  Out on the street he walked with his newspaper under his arm, his mind pinned on a particular conundrum. He had always thought, given enough time, that he could crack any code, unravel any knot, unmaze any maze, master any beast, however venomous or wily. Since childhood he’d lived in an adversarial dance with his own mind, filling it with whatever seemed impossible, daring it to prove him wrong. He’d entered and inhabited the Latin grammar, eaten its conjugations and declensions for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Having consumed Latin, he turned to Greek, its alphabet a further goad (the tongue-parted teeth of theta, diminutive o-micron and its elder sister o-mega, the pointed fork of psi and the birdscratch xi, and all the others, who became like old lovers), and then he met and mastered Hebrew, learning, as he did, to appreciate the stark poetry of the Old Testament, its bold declaratives and absolutes, its numerical mysteries and nested meanings. On to German and French, and the derivatives thereof. And then there were the mazements of literature, particularly the modernists, whose efforts to make sense of chaos through language gave rise to other variants of chaos. Most recent evidence: Joyce’s new novel, Finnegans Wake, wherein, like a fluttering banner, his own name appeared (To funk is only peternatural its daring feers divine. Bebold! Like Varian’s balaying all behind me). For every problem there was a solution, either within his extant knowledge or within his ability to seek it out. He knew he’d taken on his current mission in France not just for humanitarian reasons, though those were foremost, but also for the thrill of its difficulty.

  What troubled him as he walked along the north side of the Vieux Port, toward a boatslip near the rue Henri Tasso, was a problem of a personal nature, the same one that had dogged him since his Harvard days. How was it, he wondered, that a certain human being—for example, a pianist’s son from Philadelphia, remarkable perhaps for his own particular talents and intelligences but still, as far as Varian knew, an ordinary human being, one who breathed the same air everyone else breathed, who ate and slept and woke and pissed and shat just like the rest of humankind—how could this person evoke in Varian a series of feelings so uncontrollable as to seem a threat to his sanity? It had been true back then, twelve years ago, when what he’d loved most was to be behind the wheel of his long yellow Packard, in the company of some bright pretty boys and genteelly iconoclastic girls, well supplied with gin, en route to some amusement or other; and it was true of him now at thirty-two, true of the man he’d grown into, whose current mission was to rescue the intellectual treasure of Europe. Under the present circumstances, and considering the weight of responsibility he bore, how could he find himself thrilled like a plucked string at the prospect of meeting Grant at the Vieux Port? Why had it given him so much pleasure to receive Grant’s invitation? What could it matter? Why should he care? But he did care; he cared so much he could feel it like a fist beneath his breastbone, crowding the air from his lungs.

  It wasn’t just the still-fresh shock of Grant’s reemergence, not just the pleasure of being able to read the next chapter of a book that had seemed lost overboard years ago. It was something deeper, something permanent, a malady that called itself by Grant’s name, as if particles of Grant had passed into Varian’s blood and established a colony in his brain. After they’d met in college, it wasn’t long before every action Varian undertook seemed to refer to Grant, every decision to matter insofar as it might affect Grant’s regard for him. Knowing Grant was vain about his height, for example, Varian fervently wished to stop growing before he became taller than Grant. (He had.) He remembered choosing a striped tie one evening, not a solid blue, because Grant had said in passing that he favored stripes, then the next evening choosing the blue tie over the striped because he was angry at Grant and hadn’t wanted to wear what he liked. And hadn’t Grant behaved the same way? Hadn’t it mattered to him urgently what Varian thought? He knew it had, though the idea was difficult to keep in mind; what Varian felt for Grant seemed to close him in, to make him blind to everything and everyone else, even to Grant himself.

  And now that Grant had reappeared, here in France in the midst of a war, Varian’s existence had fallen again into the same pattern, the same concern over the smallest things. Take, for example, the care he’d given to his reading that mornin
g at breakfast, not because, he was ashamed to admit, he could yet make heads or tails of Joyce’s new novel, but simply for the thrill it gave him to remember the conversations he and Grant had had about Ulysses long ago, and to anticipate how they might talk about this longer and stranger work. The coincidence delighted him: for more than a decade, Joyce, in his Paris studio, had worked away at the honeycomb of this novel like a mad bee, packing its stacked hexagons with ideas, feeding them a nectar of words and images distilled from all of literature, flavored with his private pathology, and rendered in a mash of Western tongues; in May of last year the thing had come to light, and now he and Grant had reintersected here in Marseille, as if taught each other’s location by the secret language of the text. This was insanity, of course. He wasn’t so far gone as to be unable to see it.

  The Vieux Port was a knitwork of sailboat masts, their angled guy ropes crosshatching the brilliant steel blue of the water. You could walk almost from one side of the water to the other on the decks of boats. All manner of light craft swayed and kicked on the tide, rendered useless as toys by the new transit rules. Of course, at the Dorade or the other bars where black-marketeer captains made their deals, there were whispered promises of escape by sea; it hadn’t taken long for Varian to learn the value of those promises. Not long after he’d arrived, he’d booked places for the Werfels and Manns aboard an escape boat, the project of a loudmouthed labor leader named Bohn. He’d been sent by the American Federation of Labor to get its European counterparts out of France; Varian had met him on his first day in Marseille. Bohn, it seemed, had found a trawler and a captain willing to spirit refugees away by sea. Varian had lined up passengers and papers; an expected break in official vigilance, thanks to a national holiday, promised a chance for the boat to sail. But word must have gotten out: by the time his clients arrived at the dock, the boat had been impounded by the French authorities, its captain hauled off to the Préfecture. Varian was sure Bohn was to blame. He possessed no sotto voce, and talked about his work constantly, in private and in public. Varian was lucky he himself hadn’t been arrested. Altogether it was an informative disappointment. But the port exerted its magnetic pull, the ocean lapped seductively at the shore; you could touch it and know that America was just on the other side. He half-fancied that Grant had called him to this boatslip to introduce him to someone who might spirit his clients away in the night, in the hold of a silent vessel.