The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  “You see,” Bingham was saying to the Chagalls, “your daughter isn’t the only one who thinks it’s a good idea for you to come to the States. I wrote Mrs. Roosevelt some months ago about your situation, and I’ve just had a letter from her this morning. She’s taken the matter in hand. She believes she can convince the State Department to expedite your visas. And Alfred Barr proposes to raise the money for your securement.”

  “You should use those advantages for my friend Zilberman,” Chagall said.

  “Those offers are specifically for you, I’m afraid.”

  “But what about Ida and her husband?” Bella said. “How can we go to the States if we don’t know our daughter’s fate?”

  “I can work on Ida’s behalf here in France. Her visa case may be more difficult, but we’ll try. And once you’re there, it may be easier for her to come.”

  “Well, then,” Chagall said, clasping his hands together in a gesture of doleful resignation. He looked at Bella. “Do we capitulate?”

  Bella’s plate of parsnip and carrot was untouched; she had grown more angular, almost gaunt, since their sunlit lunch at Gordes. “Every day I read the papers,” she said, turning her thin pale hands over each other. “Jews banned from the press, from the army, forced out of industry. So many arrested! And then there are the others, the ones who destroy themselves—I’m thinking of Benjamin, you know. A few months ago, I believed we were above it all.” She worried the edge of her linen napkin with her thumb. “Had we listened to you in September, Monsieur Fry, we might have been in the States by now.”

  “If you’re giving your consent now, we’ll do our utmost.”

  “But what must we do?” Chagall said. “How must we conduct ourselves?”

  “I’d advise you to return to Gordes tomorrow morning,” Varian said. “The city’s being cleared in advance of Pétain’s visit. You’re not safe here.”

  “We planned to spend the week arranging transport for Marc’s work,” Bella said. “Ida is to meet us here in town to help us. I understand it may take some time.”

  “Pétain comes to town in two days,” Bingham said, in a diplomat’s tone: low, reasoned, entreating. “We don’t want your husband to be made an example of.”

  Bella’s forehead contracted into a fretwork of lines. “Would they do that?”

  “It’s not impossible.”

  “Do you think he’s in danger now? Have we stayed too long already?”

  “Be calm, Bella,” said Chagall, laying a hand over hers. “No one is breaking down the door.”

  But just at that moment the air seemed to crack open into a hollow-throated wail: an air-raid siren, followed by another and another, keening into the night like a pack of mechanical wolves. The diners looked about in anxiety. The maître d’, compact and efficient, with a gleaming pate and a batlike bow tie, whispered a few orders to his staff; in unison they drew the blackout curtains. In the streets the air-raid wardens blew their whistles, and there were shouts and the sound of wooden carts overturned, of boot heels pounding pavement. The door of the restaurant flew open and a warden leaned in.

  “To Gare de Noailles,” he shouted. “Quick!”

  The response was polite, orderly, as if French dining conventions must be observed even under the threat of bombing. Bingham led the Chagalls through the door and Varian followed; they joined a mass of Marseillais hurrying toward the tram station. As they descended the stairs to the underground platform, the drone of bombers seemed to follow them into the darkness. It wasn’t Varian’s first air raid; in late August there had been two on consecutive nights, and a month later a munitions plant north of town had been bombed. At the time he’d almost welcomed that clear evidence of the war, the sheer immediacy of danger, not, as Eileen might have accused, because it brought drama to his work, but because it made it easy to communicate the urgency of the situation to the donors back home. Don’t take our word for it, America: here’s evidence of the bombs dropping, here’s wreckage where a factory stood, here are the smashed city blocks where civilians lost their lives.

  Now he and Bingham formed a protective wedge in front of the Chagalls, who huddled before a tiled column inlaid with Noailles’s stylized N. A crowd pressed against them from all sides, men and women and children. Chagall put his arms around his wife. Bella touched a pendant at her neck: a gold hamsa, the protective hand. A high-pitched whine arced down from somewhere above, then the station floor juddered with the shock of anti-aircraft guns. A moment later, the reverberating crash of strikes. They must have been far off, up on the hill near Notre Dame de la Garde from the sound of it, but the vibrations fell into the bowl of the city and rolled down toward Noailles, its lowest point. The crowd shifted. A child complained of thirst. Bella Chagall edged closer to Varian, as if he might shield her from the next blast. What a change, he thought, from her stark dismissal in the garden at Gordes. But he felt no pleasure in her trust; it seemed unearned, misplaced. Why should she believe he could keep her from harm? Chagall himself—possessor of an imagination that transformed roosters into intelligent-eyed sages, that shot brides and bridegrooms upward through skybouquets of roses, that made Christ on the cross into a figure of Jewish suffering, surrounded by a chaos of burning synagogues, fleeing refugees, soldiers advancing with their banners flying—that man, that mind, stood at the base of a column in a threatened tram station and trusted him, Varian. But how was he keeping anyone safe now? How was he helping anyone escape? The border was still closed. His clients were essentially trapped at the villa. Tobias Katznelson was bound for a camp. And meanwhile his thoughts had been on Grant, always on Grant. And where was Grant now? Was he safe, or menaced by these bombs? The thought occurred to him that if he, Varian, died that night underneath the city, if this station fell and crushed him with Bingham and the Chagalls and the thirsty child and all the members of this crowd, at least Eileen would never be the wiser, at least he’d never have to tell her the truth.

  “Look,” Chagall said, and gestured toward the opening of the station. Across an oblique triangle of sky, streams of searchlights swept and crossed and double-crossed, weaving an illuminated fabric against the stage-black of the night. The painter stared, recording. A yellow-white explosion shot into the frame and disappeared; the shock came a second later, and they all fell to their knees and covered their heads as plaster drizzled from the ceiling. Planes droned far above. They waited and waited, watching the triangle of sky. After a while, voices began to rise in the station; someone ran up the stairs to see what was happening. Then the all-clear sounded. They went out into the street to find the neighborhood unchanged; the nearby bomb had fallen into the harbor and destroyed nothing but a few unmanned boats.

  “Well,” Bingham said. “Everyone all right?”

  No one answered. Chagall studied the street as they walked back toward the hotel. He and Bella would need no further convincing. “How long will it take?” he said, when they’d reached the doorway of the Moderne. “The visas, and all the arrangements?”

  “We don’t know,” Bingham said. “It could be a matter of months.”

  “We’ll go back to Gordes in the morning, as you suggest. And you’ll let us know when we are to return to Marseille?”

  “We’ll be in constant touch. We’ll let you know how things are getting on.”

  Bella pressed the hamsa between her fingers. “You won’t fail us,” she said.

  “Not on your life,” Bingham said in English. And the phrase—she must have heard it in a movie, Varian thought, must associate it with cowboys or salty Frisco detectives—made her smile for the first time all night.

  “Thank you, dear Mr. Fry, Mr. Bingham,” Chagall said, and touched his hat. And then he and Bella stepped into the narrow entry hall of the Moderne, and Varian and Bingham started back the way they came.

  “What are their chances?” Varian dared to ask.

  “B
etter than most.”

  “But now the border’s closed. And the Préfecture’s watching us.”

  “I didn’t say it would be easy,” Bingham said, and smiled. “Oh. I just thought of another. Twenty-four Water Street. Amorous screamer.”

  “Oh, one of those. We’ve all lived near one.”

  “Not like this one. Italian. Cultivated Milanese accent. Must have been a young classics professor’s wife, slumming with a student. I’ll never forget it. Più veloce, più veloce! Ecco, ecco!”

  Passersby turned, regarded the speaker, and smiled.

  “So are you saying, Harry, that this made your living situation unpleasant?”

  “Well, I wasn’t the one in bed with her.”

  “Ah, yes. Alas.”

  “I did renew the lease, though.”

  Varian laughed. “Wisely done.”

  They walked shoulder to shoulder, through the crowds streaming through the shaken streets, until they reached the offices of the Centre Américain. A light was on; in the window, Grant’s silhouette. Relief made Varian lightheaded. He had to put a hand against the doorframe for support.

  “All right?” Bingham said.

  “A little unsteady on my feet, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Glad to know I’m not the only one. Do you want a drink or something?”

  “No, Harry, thanks. I’ll be fine.”

  “Talk to you tomorrow, then.” Bingham touched his hat and went off down the street, whistling. And Varian climbed the stairs to the office, where he found his staff unbombed and unharmed, picking up fallen papers and sweeping up plaster dust. And there among them was Grant, whose arms he could not rush into, whose shoulder he could not crush his face against. But Grant met his eye and held it, and Varian read what it said: here they were, both of them, still alive for now.

  18

  Sinaïa

  The next day he couldn’t bring himself to go to the office. Relief at his own survival, at Grant’s survival, his clients’, had undone him. He was pressed flat by exhaustion, his insides afire. But he couldn’t rest, and couldn’t bring himself to eat, not that there was much to eat anyway. The night before, he hadn’t gotten home until well past midnight, then couldn’t sleep; he found himself writing a feverish note to Eileen in which he confessed everything. Then of course he tore up the note and burned it in the grate. Upon which he wrote another note, identical to the first, and burned it, too. Finally, some time after the birds had started their dawn racket, he’d fallen into bed, slept disastrously, and woken with a terrible headache. He sent word that Lena was wanted at the villa. He must work at home, and would she be so kind as to come out and take dictation?

  While he waited for her, he forced himself to shave and take a bath in the swan-footed tub. Afterward he went down to the kitchen in his dressing gown and slippers; at the counter he ate the heel of a brown loaf and drank the gritty burnt brew that passed for coffee. From the window he could see Zilberman down in the garden, studying the flora with his magnifying glass. For some time Varian watched his slow progress from weed to shrub to flower; Zilberman crouched over his specimens, his eye close to the glass, and then scratched in a notebook at his side. Verbena officinalis, Varian imagined him writing in his small block print. Life in miniature: the opposite of what he threw, building-wide, onto walls in Berlin. A discipline, a meditation. A means for practicing humility. Varian washed his cup and saucer, then went to stand in the block of sun that fell through the back door. For some time—he wasn’t sure how long—he merely leaned against the doorframe and took in that flood of light, receiving what felt like absolution. But then he heard foosteps on the gravel drive, and here was Lena arriving at last, her shorthand pad in hand, handbag over her arm, her hair in its customary state of disarray. At the door she nodded to Varian, and together they went into the library. Lena deposited her things on a marble table below a large gilt-framed mirror, then conducted her hair into place like a maestro, using a series of hairpins as batons.

  “And what kept you?” Varian said. “I thought I might avoid work all day.”

  Lena turned from the mirror. “Ce n’est pas grave. I was arrested, that is all.”

  “Arrested? By the police, you mean?”

  “Bien sûr, by the police. Certainement I did not arrest myself.”

  “What happened?”

  “Just as you predicted, it is because of the Maréchal’s visit. They arrive at the hotel at five this morning and nearly knock down my door. Everyone downstairs! they shout. No time to dress. We are marched to the station in nightclothes, I myself wearing nothing more than a chemise and bedroom slippers, imagines-ça! And with metal cuffs upon my wrists. Ten of us they lock in a cell while they look at our papers. What makes them decide one way or another, I do not know. I am lucky, c’est tout.”

  “Lena! What an ordeal. And here you are, ready to work.”

  “Of course! Il ne faut pas exagérer. It was an inconvenience, nothing more.”

  “What about Hirschman? He hasn’t been arrested, has he?”

  “Mais non, Albert went down to Cerbère last night to see Lisa Fittko and her husband. Perhaps they discuss a new way over the border. We have not heard from Leon Ball in six, seven days. We think he may have been arrested too. I believe Albert will stay away until after the Maréchal’s visit.”

  “You haven’t heard from Ball in a week?”

  “Pas du tout.”

  “The Fittkos have no idea what might have happened to him?”

  “None.”

  “God,” Varian said, and put his hands through his hair. “We’ve got to get to work. We’ve got too much to do. But, Lena, after all that—don’t you want a minute’s rest? Shall I ask Madame Nouguet to make you some tea?”

  “Non, merci,” she said, and opened her pad. “I have come to work, so we will work.” She sat down across from Varian, her pencil at the ready. But before Varian could speak a word, he heard a rising wail of sirens from the drive. Then Madame Nouguet’s shout from the kitchen. He got up and ran through the salon and into the kitchen, where Madame Nouguet stood staring through the window. In the drive was a police car, the double of the one that had come for Varian a few days earlier, and beside it a long black van with high barred windows.

  “Now what?” Varian said.

  Madame Nouguet turned. “I’ll hold them a minute,” she said. “Take care of your things, monsieur. Your papers.”

  Varian ran upstairs and into his room, where he looked around in panic, wondering what among his papers would be most incriminating. The answer was unfortunate and obvious: his address book, that fat and disorderly record of every contact he’d made since his arrival in France. Anyone who read it would know how to find his clients. Its back pages contained lists of figures, records-in-brief of his illegal dealings in foreign and French currency, and on its cover—he must have written it in a moment of distraction—the name T KATZNELSON, a waving flag.

  In the grate burned a small low fire, remnant of the one that had warmed his uneasy sleep the night before. He stood before it with the address book in hand. Why had he not copied those names, those addresses, into some other book, in code? How much of what he had in this book did Hirschman have, or Lena? But then a triple knock came at the door downstairs, and an unfamiliar French voice boomed into the echo chamber of the kitchen. Varian dropped the address book into the fire and watched it flare, curl, burn, and turn to ash. He poked the pile and it fell into an unidentifiable heap. Then he polished his glasses with his handkerchief, adjusted the lapels of his dressing gown, and went downstairs.

  In the black-and-white-tiled salon stood the Bretons and Serges; Mary Jayne and Killer, who looked like they had just extracted themselves from bed; Theo Bénédite with little Peterkin on her hip, a butterfly net in his hand; Madame Nouguet, who had donned her best apron as if for guests; and Rose,
the round-faced girl who made the beds and scrubbed the pots and emptied the ashcans, trembling in the far doorway. Three were missing: Danny and Jean, who had gone to town that morning; and Zilberman, who must have hidden in the root cellar beneath his greenhouse studio. There they all stood like congregants before the commissaire, a tall heavy-browed fellow Varian didn’t recognize. In his high collar and long black coat, the man could have been taken for an ecclesiast, though his military mustache spoiled the effect. His colleagues, three plainclothesmen, stood blocking the entrance door as if they feared someone might make a run for it. One of them, with sleek black hair and snow-blue eyes, looked strangely familiar to Varian; he searched his mind to remember where he might have seen the man.

  The commissaire cleared his throat. “Is this everyone, then?”

  No one answered.

  “Very well, then. Messieurs,” he said, turning to the plainclothesmen, “search.”

  “Excuse me,” Varian said. The commissaire turned, squinting down at him as if he were a few inches tall. “On what grounds are you conducting this search?”

  “Pardonnez-moi?”

  “I’m familiar with the laws of this nation. A search requires reasonable cause and proper documents. I’d like to see your warrant.”

  The commissaire drew himself up to his full height; his prodigious belly strained the buttons of his coat. With obvious pleasure, he produced from his breast pocket a letter, doubly and triply stamped with the official stamps of the Préfecture, authorizing the chief of police to conduct searches of all residences suspected of harboring communists. He read the letter aloud and handed it to Varian for inspection.

  “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong place,” Varian said, handing the document back. “There are no communists here.”