Varian replaced the slip of newspaper in his pocket and extracted something else, a ship-to-shore communiqué that had landed on his desk that morning. He unfolded it now and flattened it against Zilberman’s worktable.
“Lev,” he said. “Do you remember my friend Deschamps, captain of the Sinaïa?”
“How could I forget?”
“This cable is from him. He says he’s to dock at the Port of Marseille in ten days. His message includes a code word we agreed upon, one that would indicate that the compartment in his captain’s chamber will be available for a client I select.”
“Ah, yes, the coffin,” Zilberman said.
“Not a coffin. The opposite. A box to carry you back into your life.”
Zilberman ran his thumb through the bristles of a fan-shaped brush, the sable emerging as white paint slid into the wastebucket. “I’m ready,” he said. “I would go now if I could. But what about my U.S. visa? Or have we decided that I must simply go where the Sinaïa takes me, and wait?”
“On the contrary,” Varian said. He bent down to open his briefcase, then withdrew an envelope stamped with the seal of the U.S. Consulate. Zilberman, seeing it, went perfectly still.
“What is that, Mr. Fry?”
“Open it.”
Zilberman cleaned his hands, then crossed the greenhouse to take the envelope from Varian. Inside was a single cream-colored sheet: a letter, signed and stamped by John Hurley, the consul-general, attesting to the fact that the German-born refugee Lev Zilberman had been granted official permission to enter the United States, provided he do so within thirty days of the issuance date.
Zilberman, squinting through his glasses, scrutinized the lines of print. “This is genuine?” he said. “Not a forgery by some clever artist?”
“Genuine,” Varian said. “Courtesy of Harry Bingham. And Barr put up the security for you, all three thousand, raised on the promise of your Flight Portfolio.”
Zilberman sat down heavily on a painted stool, one hand open on his chest. “My heart,” he said.
“Are you all right, Lev?”
“I will be.” He closed his eyes. “It’s only the palpitations.” He used the marvelously onomatopoetic German word for it: die Klopfen, like the hoofbeats of a horse. For a long moment he breathed deeply. Then, opening his eyes, he said, “It seemed to me just now that I could see my wife’s face. For months I’ve not seen it, not even in my mind’s eye. It was closed to my imagining. It’s been two years since we left Berlin, Mr. Fry. And Sara is a woman by now. Nineteen years old in May.”
“Write to them. Tell them you’re coming. I’ll find a way to get your letter into their hands.”
“And I’ll leave ten days from now?”
“Two weeks, if all goes well. The Sinaïa will resupply here.”
Zilberman closed his eyes again, as if to secure the timeline in his mind. But then he looked at Varian, a new concern rising. “What about Tobias?”
“He’ll soon leave by another route. I’m arranging the details now.”
“And he’ll travel to New York?”
“That’s right. Though I understand he’s eager to visit your daughter in Cambridge.”
“Yes, too eager,” Zilberman said, and sighed. “He intends to ask Sara to marry him. He’s already asked my permission. I gave it, though not without reservations. They’re both still children, really. What will they live on?”
“I suspect they’ll work that out. Cambridge will be a fine place for Tobias.”
“Let us hope. And you, Monsieur Fry? When do you propose to return to the States?”
“Not until I’m kicked out or killed, whichever comes first.”
Zilberman put a hand on the Flight Portfolio, the dense, foliated stack of it. “I want you to see these pieces on the wall of the Museum of Modern Art,” he said. “I want you to see what this work will do. I want you to see others perceiving and understanding our struggle. But more importantly, I suppose, I want this work to help you. I want it to lighten your load.”
“Getting you out of Europe,” Varian said. “That’s what’ll lighten my load.”
“Then tell Deschamps I will go,” Zilberman said. “Tell him I am ready.”
28
Exquisite Corpse
Evening was falling, descending along the Val d’Huveaune like a shadow cloak, like a tissue-thin eyelid hazed with veins. Varian stood at the open window, dressing for dinner; Grant, at the harpsichord downstairs, conjured a Handel suite for the arriving guests. A series of minor arpeggios mounted to Varian’s window and disappeared into the darkening sky. From outside came the scent of sage and wet earth; a rainstorm had tamped down the afternoon’s dust, and the mistral blew across the valley. A nightingale lit in the medlar tree beneath the window and launched into variegated song. It occurred to Varian that the combination of voices below—Breton’s baritone, Victor Serge’s tenor, Mary Jayne’s seen-it-all alto, Jacqueline Lamba’s rough-edged soprano—made a music soon to be lost forever. Tonight’s dinner was to be a farewell to the Bretons and Serges. Varian had managed at last to conjure their French exit visas, and to coordinate the dates with their U.S. entry visas; Ingrid Warburg herself had provided affidavits of financial support, and the State Department, for reasons mysterious, had at last capitulated on its refusal to let those reputed communists enter the country. A refitted cargo ship, the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, would carry them westward on Monday morning, the twenty-fourth of March.
For a moment he was certain that, by the time he went downstairs, it would all have vanished, leaving him alone in the house, the harpsichord silenced, the nightingale gone, the valley devoid of leaf or twig, the city below vaporized, nothing but empty space between the house and the sea. It all seemed grossly unfair. He wanted nothing at all to change. Wanted to descend each night to find Breton at the table, gesticulating wildly to Serge; Breton’s bright beetles in a jar on the mantel, Serge’s papers strewn disastrously across the library table, Jacqueline arguing softly to Mary Jayne, Vlady Serge cursing in Russian as Tobias checkmated his king. Nothing at all to change: what a thing to want in the midst of a war. But where else could he feel, with such certainty, that there was no dinner table more brilliant or more savage, and nowhere else in the world he’d rather be? Where else could he know himself so clearly and not wish to be someone different?
When he went down, Mary Jayne took his hand and led him to the window seat. She wore a peony-colored dress ironed into a thousand tiny pleats, like lines of force in a physicist’s diagram; her expression was bitter, her eyes shadowed underneath.
“You’ll have to serve as my date for the evening,” she said. “Killer’s pretending I don’t exist.”
“What happened?”
“Oh—it’s an awful thing, stupid on all sides. I lost a bracelet, a diamond-and-sapphire one—a pretty little bracelet, and I valued it, it was a present from my father to my mother years ago, she gave it to me before I went to school in Italy. Anyway, I misplaced it—and then I’m afraid I got rather sparkling on champagne, and accused Killer of nicking it. Well, that didn’t sit too well with him. So he’s in town tonight, probably with some whore. Some other whore, I mean,” she said, winking in the face of her misery. “The awful thing is, I think he really did steal it. And how sad that he thought he had to, when I would have just given him the money if he’d asked!”
“That little weasel. I’ll set the cops on him.”
“No, no, you can’t. He’s already outside the law. They’ll send him straight to a camp.”
“He’s a common criminal, Mary Jayne. He’s a danger to us all. How can you not see it, as intelligent as you are?”
“Maybe in some arenas I’m blind, or dumb. But I know he’s not mean-spirited. He can’t stand being dependent on anyone. He’s desperate, that’s all, and he doesn’t like to ask for help.”
“Well, you’re not to let him in if he comes back tonight,” Varian said. “Nor ever, frankly. I don’t want to see his pointy little face around here again.”
Mary Jayne’s eyes filled with tears. “But Varian—this is my home too, for the moment. You can’t throw Killer out of it, whatever he’s done.”
“Mary Jayne! Can’t you let him go? You deserve someone who sees what a goddess you are, and treats you that way!”
“I don’t want to be treated as a goddess. You must know that by now.”
“It’s just that I’m rather fond of you, and rather grateful to you, and—well, I’m sorry, that’s all. I’m sorry he would do such a thing. But you can’t let him in here again. He’s entirely without scruples. He’ll hand us all over to the highest bidder.”
“Let’s not talk about it anymore,” Mary Jayne said. “Let’s fete the Bretons and the Serges. Our family is breaking up. I’d like to drown my sorrows in drink, if you don’t mind.”
At that moment, Breton approached with an open bottle of champagne. “What sorrows?” he said. “No one is to have sorrows! This is a glorious night! Drink, drink!” And he filled their glasses and watched, like the doctor he was, as they took their medicine.
For their final revel at Air Bel, the surrealists had proposed an old favorite: Cadavre Exquis. The guests would collectively produce drawings or stories by passing a sheet of paper around, folded to reveal only a sliver of what the previous artist had produced; they would play the game at the dinner table, as a distraction from the fact that there was so little to eat. Breton led them all into the dining room and claimed his usual seat at the head of the table, rapping his wineglass with his fork to bring them all to attention. He took a deep breath, his face flushed above his red cravat; alone among them all, he had managed to look well fed after the winter. When he smiled, his expression seemed to suggest a private joke.
“Dear friends,” he said. “Victor. Max. Peggy. Wifredo. All of you! Tonight we celebrate the solemn rites of a funeral. We lay to rest five months here at Air Bel. Monsieur Fry, our savior, has proved he is not entirely a vaurien. He has redeemed himself by procuring, at last, our visas. On Monday we sail into the unknown.” He paused for effect, looking around the table, which was decorated for the occasion with two great glass vases filled nearly to the top with pondwater, teeming with live miniature frogs. “We’ve survived, by my count, five raids by the police, three nights on the S.S. Sinaïa, the unfortunate sight of Jay Allen’s naked corpus, and at least two hundred and thirty instances of my own pomposity. We have shed our illusions as to the limits of our own absurdity, an admirable achievement in any season. We have survived privations of food and excesses of liquor. And for all this we have to thank Monsieur Fry.” Breton raised his glass. “Let us pledge now to meet in New York. We will meet to celebrate the reassembly of this group on friendly soil. Monsieur Serge and I vow to disagree continually, as we have every day here at Air Bel, and Madame Lamba will shame us all with the unabashed beauty of her work. Monsieur Grant will play New York melodies for us. Monsieur Katznelson will feed us on something he’s scrounged from the forests of Central Park. And Monsieur Fry will lie about in leisure like a pasha, free to be a vaurien again, having already saved us all.”
“Let it be so, André,” Serge said, raising his glass.
“Hear, hear,” said Mary Jayne, raising her own. And then they made a chiming music around the table, each glass meeting a dozen others, and when at last they’d finished, they turned their attention to their plates. On each white circlet lay a few new leaves of pale green or purple lettuce, a few carrots slender as a child’s finger, Jerusalem artichokes sliced to a transparent thinness, a scattering of tiny black mushrooms like discarded glove-buttons. There was olive oil, and a sliver of bread to dip in it; there was contraband cheese, a shaving of it for each guest. Eating that minuscule salad, Varian felt as if he’d never been so full in his life, and never would be again.
They passed around paper and pen and ink. As Madame Nouguet and her helpers cleared the salad plates, the company wrote their absurd sentences. The elegant young countess / adumbrated the faults of / his nine sub-generals, all of them / hopelessly in love with / the tentacles of a pink octopus. And: A man’s true purpose is to uncover / the basket of rotten apples just beneath / his dignity, though he did not fail to / point out my favorite of the fire-eyed Furies. They drew Medusa hair with Maréchal Pétain’s face, connected to a giraffe neck, a three-armed torso, a centaur’s lower half, and military-booted feet. Victor Serge, assuming a Maréchalesque voice and mien, examined the drawing and professed outrage. Breton praised the ingenuity and skill of his fellow villa inhabitants, and proposed they give the products of their game to Varian as a parting gift.
No visit from the police interrupted their revel. No void opened in the earth to swallow Air Bel, to suspend it in some subterranean limbo where time would fail to proceed. The guests ate tiny squares of black-market chocolate, smoked their after-dinner cigarettes, and drank the last inches of a bottle of Armagnac. Then everyone walked out onto the terrace, where the rising wind made a disaster of the women’s dresses. No one seemed to care in the least; they were all too drunk to feel the chill. Varian stood at the terrace railing and looked down into the garden, at the shapes of the men and women drifting along the twisted garden paths like shadow puppets against a moon-illuminated sky. Grant stood beside him, radiating warmth and blocking the wind; he struck a match and bent to light his cigarette.
“It’s like the end of term at school,” Grant said, and took a long inhale.
“Right,” Varian said. “But without the prospect of next year.”
“Don’t you believe we’ll meet again in New York?”
“Do you?” Varian said, half-turning to Grant. “Tobias will be gone soon. You’ll settle Gregor’s accounts. And then what?”
“Yes, then what?” Grant repeated, more quietly, like the echo of a musical phrase. Together they looked down at Tobias Katznelson, watching him thread the path through the spring-wild garden; at its end he skipped onto a low stone bench and stood lightly on his toes, a slim parenthesis against the evening sky.
“Once Toby’s off the continent and that other work done,” Grant said, “I want to do more for the Centre Américain. I can become a regular member of your staff without worrying about what might happen if I’m arrested. Once I’ve acquitted myself of my duties to Gregor, I’ll be entirely at your disposal.”
Varian rolled the edge of his cuff between his fingers. “And when will you have acquitted yourself of your duties to Gregor? Don’t you owe him something more?”
“More than his son’s life?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean, Grant.”
Grant took a final drag of his cigarette, then extinguished it on the terrace stones. He put a hand on Varian’s elbow. “Can’t we talk inside?”
Varian followed him back into the house, toward the salon, where an abandoned fire smoked in the grate. Grant took the poker and broke up the coals, looking down into the flickering orange serpentines of light. When he raised his eyes again to Varian’s, his gaze was terrible, raw. He seemed his barest self, unguarded, stripped to the core.
“I wrote to Gregor this morning,” he said. “I told him I’m going to extend my stay. I said I didn’t know for sure when I was coming back.”
A void opened beneath Varian, a well of unexpected terror. In some deep part of him he’d always understood their life in France as existing in a separate space, a place outside of ordinary time. They could do what they were doing only in a France at war, the country dissolving around them, the Nazis advancing, the U.S. Consulate losing its patience. Grant’s eyes were on him, and, as ever, in their severe and penetrating light, Varian found it impossible to produce anything but the truth.
“I’ve told Eileen nothing,” he said, in a half-whisper. “What could I say
? We haven’t exactly talked about it, you and I.”
“Talked about what?”
“You know, Grant. What happens after.”
Still holding the poker, still moving the coals, Grant went on in the same low voice. “Gregor always assumed I’d come back once I found Tobias. He had no reason to think otherwise. I don’t know how he’ll take my letter. I didn’t mention your name, but he can’t help but guess. He knows something of what you were to me. I couldn’t keep it all from him.” Grant pushed the poker into the heart of a log, producing a cataract of glowing dice. “I don’t know what he’ll do. He’s not exactly surrounded by warm connections in the States. And he doesn’t know how to navigate any of the ordinary channels in the city, you know, the ways we find each other—our type, I mean. When I think of that letter making its way to him, I feel like a villain.” He looked down at the hearth tiles, scenes of a hunt, a brush-tailed fox eluding its pursuers. “But I had to do it. I’d be a liar otherwise. And not just to Gregor.”
Varian absorbed his look. He imagined Katznelson opening a mailbox in the lobby of his apartment building near Columbia, the rush and thrill of seeing the airmail envelope with Grant’s name in the upper left; he would take it upstairs, lay it on the kitchen table near the window overlooking the park, perhaps pour his coffee before he opened it. He was, Varian was sure, the kind of man who employed a small sword-shaped letter opener. He would unfold the pages with care, smoothing them against the polished wood of the table; he would take his spectacles from his waistcoat pocket and proceed to decipher Grant’s pointed, grasslike script. Dear Gregor. I feel I must inform you. And then a change of weather would seem to descend upon him, a wave of cold that would begin at the top of his skull and encase him as if in a shell of ice.
The Flight Portfolio Page 44