The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  “I suppose you heard about our fiasco at the border,” she said.

  “I heard it all,” Varian said. “I’m so sorry, Theo.”

  “Perhaps we ought to have waited. Maybe if you’d been here—”

  “Nonsense. You had bad luck, that’s all. We’ll do our utmost for you now, and you’ll try again. But in the meantime, your husband will have to keep a low profile.”

  Theo glanced at Danny. “Did you hear him?”

  “I’ve got nothing if not a low profile,” Danny said, and pressed his wife’s hand. And then he and Varian moved farther into the office, followed by a stream of clients, and their work began again as if it had never stopped.

  * * *

  ________

  Their staff was reduced, their funds depleted, their relations with the consulate near-nonexistent, but that week they worked harder than ever; they had to. Dozens of refugees arrived at the offices every day, nearly all of them Jewish, desperate at the news that had made its way to the South of France from Germany, Austria, and Poland. There were rumors of Jews having been loaded by the thousands onto trains, jammed like livestock into cattle cars, then sent across Europe to camps; there were rumors of Nazi troops machine-gunning men and women on the banks of rivers, or into open graves dug by the victims themselves. Jews had been locked into barns, which had been set afire; others were starving to death in ghettoes. The news collected in the air of the Centre Américain like ash from a fire, darkening everything it touched.

  Every night when Varian arrived home at Air Bel, he stripped off his clothes and dove straight into the deep bassin, converted to a pool. He would lie on his back in the still-warm water, staring at the gray clouds against the black sky, willing it all to wash away. But no amount of soaking could strip the terrible news from his body, nor relieve him of the conviction that despite it all, despite the fact that his work seemed more necessary than ever, he had to get home to New York. He had to be ejected from France now; he didn’t see any other way he could justify leaving.

  On a Friday afternoon a week after his return from Cannes, as he and Jean and Danny and Theo sat in the front office sorting through a new set of intake forms, a knock came at the outer door—not the tentative knock of a client, but the unmistakable rap-rap-rap of the police. The four of them looked at each other in silence; there was no way to know which of them the police wanted. But Varian motioned Danny and Theo into the back office, where they closed the door. Then he opened the outer door to find the young soot-haired officer who’d conducted him to the Sinaïa some months ago. The officer touched his hat in greeting. Jean got to his feet and went to Varian’s side, assuming a footballer’s wide-legged stance.

  “Monsieur Fry,” the officer said. “I come with an order from Captain du Porzic.”

  “I was afraid you might say that,” Varian said.

  “I’m to accompany you to the Evêché,” the officer said, raising his snow-blue eyes to Varian’s; at the corner of his mouth, the merest trace of an intimate smile.

  “All right. Let me get my things.”

  “Take everything you might want later,” the officer said. “You’ll not be permitted to return.”

  “What does that mean?” Jean said, crossing his arms. “Why not?”

  “I’m not authorized to discuss Monsieur Fry’s case.”

  “Is he to be expelled from France?”

  “I’m not authorized to say.”

  Jean turned to Varian. “Tell me what to do. How can we stop this?”

  “I’m sure there’ll be a procès,” Varian said. “Papers to be signed. I’ll be in custody overnight, at least. And then there’s the matter of visas.” He met the young officer’s glacierlike eyes. “They’ve all expired, you know. I can’t be expelled from France at the moment, not legally.”

  “That will be the commissioner’s concern.”

  “Shall I come along?” Jean asked.

  “That’s not permitted,” the officer said, and then to Varian, “Dépêchez-vous.”

  Lucie produced a box; Varian retreated to his office to gather his papers. Danny and Theo, who had been listening, now helped him, ashen-faced and silent. Here was the moment they had known would come, the one that had nonetheless seemed infinitely postponable: Varian’s departure, his exit from the Centre Américain. Into the box went personal letters and cables, dozens of them. In went the photograph Grant had taken at Arles: Varian standing before the ancient amphitheater, the tiers of seats rising behind him, an expression of dazed wonder on his face. In went a stone from the Coussouls de Crau; photographs of Varian with the staff; a red leather box from the leather-goods merchant on the rue Grignan; the silver-framed photograph of Eileen on the beach at Southampton. When the box was full, Danny tied it with string and put it into Varian’s arms.

  “I’m going to go up to Vichy,” Danny said. “See if I can intercede.”

  “No, don’t do that. The risk is too great.”

  “I haven’t committed any new crimes lately. I don’t see what grounds they’d have to arrest me.”

  “They won’t care about that. They’ll do it anyway.”

  “I refuse to let them simply march you out!”

  Theo, at Danny’s side, nodded her assent. “I intend to see Monsieur Blount myself.”

  “He’ll never help,” Varian said. “This is precisely what he’s been waiting for.”

  “Then I shall give him a fine piece of my mind.”

  “Thank you, Theo,” he said, and pressed her hand. And then he followed the soot-haired officer through the door and down the stairs, and together they walked the few blocks to the Evêché.

  * * *

  ________

  In France, no administrative process unfolded with speed. He waited all night at the Brigade des Rafles, and at dawn he washed his face in a lavatory reeking of ammonia and dead mouse. At eight o’clock the soot-haired officer brought him a dry croissant and a lukewarm cup of faux coffee; at nine thirty he was called at last to an interview with Captain Villand, who told him that he was to be refoulé from France, which was not quite the same thing as being expelled. He could return legally in the future, provided he could get a visa. The look on Villand’s face, as he detailed this impossibility, was one of deep satisfaction. He went so far as to offer Varian a farewell cigar, lighting it himself with the pineapple lighter.

  Villand did him the further service of providing a car, a long black Citroën with twin sidepipes and an old-fashioned leather-strapped trunk at the rear. In the company of the soot-haired officer and his partner, a tall bearlike man who introduced himself as Garandel, they went to the Villa Air Bel so Varian could pack his things. Into his long-suffering suitcase he loaded his six correct shirts, now practically in ribbons; the blue Moroccan slippers Grant had given him; the Yeats he’d been reading; the Faulkner poems. Into another box he loaded surrealist drawings and paintings rolled into tubes; two tiny surrealist assemblages; maps, lists, schematic drawings. Countless notebooks, a half-filled sketchbook, a stray linen handkerchief belonging to Mary Jayne. He looked around his emptied room, expecting to be filled with grief; what he experienced instead was the push of inevitability, the feeling of the sea at Le Dramont as it shot his body toward the light. By long-standing habit he looked under the bed, under the dresser, under the nightstand. And there in the dark lay one of Grant’s nautilus cufflinks, abandoned where it must have fallen the night Grant had left Air Bel in haste, carrying his single suitcase. He took out one of his own cufflinks and replaced it with the nautilus.

  On the way out, Madame Nouguet met him at the door with a fragrant rolled pancake wrapped in brown waxed paper. If he was to be refoulé, she said, he must not go empty-handed. He accepted the package, demanding to know where she had gotten sugar and butter; she only smiled, protecting the household mysteries. Varian shook her hand with grave propriety, and
she gave him a rare look of unmitigated approval.

  Then they drove down to the station, where the soot-haired officer presented Varian with all the necessary papers and wished him a good journey. He regretted, he said, that he could not see Varian to the border; he hoped his partner, Garandel, would make a good companion.

  “Thank you,” Varian said. “I know you’ve been my ally more than once.”

  “All to the glory of France,” the officer said, and gave him a lascivious wink.

  * * *

  ________

  At the Gare St. Charles, Garandel permitted Varian a single phone call. He rang the office, and Theo answered; when she heard Varian’s voice, she shouted for Jean to pick up the extension. There was no stopping his deportation, he told them. But what would they think of a little junket to the border? Could work be interrupted for an afternoon?

  Theo promised they would come at once, all of them. She would stop along the way to cable Danny at Vichy; perhaps he could meet them at Narbonne.

  Garandel never left Varian’s side, but he allowed him to wait for his friends at the top of the broad steps that overlooked the city. Varian stood thinking of Chagall, of his opinion that the last look at a town was the most important. What would this last look crystallize for him, what could it contain of his time there? At the base of the stairs stood the Hôtel Splendide, its glass awning fanned like the petals of an Arctic flower. Beyond it was the Canebière, where he’d come across Breitscheid and Hilferding sitting at a café table, discussing their business aloud as if no danger existed in the world. Two blocks farther south was the office on the boulevard Garibaldi, stripped now of all his things. Then the market streets with their scent fog of curry and cardamom and cinnamon, and the narrow commercial passageway of the rue Grignan, where, at No. 60, the daughter of the concierge held court in her berry-stained dress. Farther still was the Dorade, where, nearly a year ago, the past had delivered its freight to the present. And there, beside the Vieux Port—he could just make out its sugar-white corner from where he stood—was the Hôtel Beauvau, and before it the docks full of little moored sailboats. All of it—the roofs, the sunburnt buildings, the scintillating surface of the port, the blue-white sky, the green ridge of the Marseilleveyre in the distance—became a single bright blur through his lashes, a landscape already receding into the past.

  His friends came up the stairs in a pack, and together they entered the station. They bought tickets at the usual barred window, and then, under the guardianship of Officer Garandel, they boarded the train, filling their section of the railway car with low talk and cigarette smoke. As they waited for the departure whistle, Varian directed his mind forward, envisioning the day’s journey: the grasslands and the marshlands and the coast, then the dark passage through the Pyrenees, territory he hadn’t covered since the exodus of the Manns and the Werfels last fall. Without warning, the train jerked forward and began to move toward the light. As they cleared the station roof, a brilliant plane of sun angled through the window; Varian, momentarily blinded, felt he’d been granted a kind of mercy, a respite from seeing what it would have pained him to see. The familiar streets were passing, receding, those buildings and squares and markets that had made up the landscape of his mind for the past twelve months. He refused to consider whether he had done what he had come here to do, whether he had succeeded at his impossible-seeming work. What seemed clear to him was that, as ignorant as he’d been when he’d arrived, his work would have been a disaster on a grand scale if it hadn’t been for the others. If he’d had any success at all, if he’d managed to succeed far beyond his original mission, it was due to Hirschman’s fearless ingenuity, Miriam’s intelligence and expertise, Bingham’s proud refusal to follow the consulate’s line, Mary Jayne’s audacity and generosity, Danny and Theo’s sympathy with his cause, Jean’s knowledge of six languages, Gussie’s willingness to stay up all night, the surrealists’ aptitude for mounting parties and exhibitions when others were in danger of losing hope, Madame Nouguet’s talent for producing food for a dozen people from an empty pantry, and—though he could hardly bear to think of it—Zilberman’s hand on his shoulder, his voice like a father’s, perceiving Varian’s exhaustion and relieving him of it for some brief moments. And Grant: but he couldn’t think of that either, refused to consider it. What seemed true, what seemed the only truth, was that the work must go on, whether he was the one doing it or not.

  * * *

  ________

  When Danny boarded the train at Narbonne, his expression was grim. He edged between Varian and Theo, removed his silver-framed glasses, and reported that the officials he’d seen at Vichy had refused to do anything at all. Only the expired visas could delay Varian’s departure now.

  “That is of no concern,” Garandel said, waving the idea away. “Monsieur Fry is a personne d’importance. The usual strictures do not apply.” He adjusted himself in his seat, turning his shoulders as if to shield Varian from the general gaze. It was clear he felt no small pride at having the charge of such a person, even though his orders required him to eject his charge from France.

  Another hour’s travel brought them to Perpignan. They disembarked together, and Garandel led Varian into the glass-walled customs building. His friends lined up outside, standing along the window as if preparing to sing an a cappella goodbye. But the officer in charge of border control raised an eyebrow at Varian’s papers and took them into an office to be inspected by his superior, who informed Officer Garandel that his charge could no more legally cross into Spain than any paperless refugee.

  “But my protégé is a personne d’importance!” Garandel insisted.

  “I don’t care if he’s the Maréchal himself. His visas have expired.”

  “He must be refoulé today. Those are my orders.”

  “Then you’ve been ordered in ignorance, sir.”

  It soon became clear that Varian would have to wait while Vichy delivered new visas. The process, as they all knew, might take days, perhaps even a week. In the meantime, Varian must be held in police custody. The customs officer motioned to one of the guards who stood near the desk, instructing him to conduct Varian to the local jail.

  But Garandel stepped forward and put an arm across his protégé. “Jail!” he cried. “As if you had any authority, Officer, er”—he squinted at the customs officer’s name tag —“Molyneux, to tell me how to treat my prisoner! The local jail! We will not have it. Monsieur Fry is a personne d’importance. A hotel, that’s where we’re going. And not that flea-infested stable, the Trois Coquilles. We’ll be at the Roi de France, and if your superior doesn’t like it, he can go to hell!”

  The border control guard made no protest. A long line of travelers waited.

  “To the hotel at once,” Garandel commanded Varian. “At this hour, I generally take un whisky. You look, monsieur, as though you might be able to put one to use yourself.”

  The staff, of course, had to return to Marseille. But they promised to come meet Varian for dinner one last time, once the papers had come through.

  * * *

  ________

  This personne d’importance had endured purgatories before. His last week in France, he passed the time by working ceaselessly morning and night. At the Roi de France, in an ocean-facing room papered in gold fleurs-de-lis—with Garandel in the adjoining room, ready to be summoned at a moment’s notice if Varian should want to descend to the dining room or walk down to the strand for a breath of air—he sat at a faux Louis Quinze desk and penned letters on behalf of his clients. He disposed of a personal account he’d opened at a French bank by ordering its funds to be used for the purchase of a steamer ticket for Hannah Arendt and her husband; he cabled the ERC to request immediate support for Gussie Rosenberg’s new project, the establishment of a web of connections among members of the nascent French Underground, a venture he described in terms that he hoped would be clear
to the committee and yet perfectly obscure to the censors. He wrote the Manns and the Werfels, informing them of his imminent arrival, and cabled his contacts in Spain and Portugal to let them know he would be passing through. He sent daily missives to Danny about the progress of his correspondence, working with the knowledge that he would soon be out of reach of Marseille, separated from the office by hundreds of miles, then thousands.

  And in that way the days went by; the visas were granted, and there was no further impediment. Garandel informed him one afternoon that they would leave the following morning. And Varian called his friends and told them to come down and meet him at Cerbère for a farewell dinner.

  * * *

  ______

  They arrived together in a somber group, dressed mainly in black, as though this were a funeral. The feeling, as they sat together at a long table in the station restaurant, had nothing of the celebratory tone of their earlier trip by train; they all knew this was the end. Jean sat on one side of Varian, silent, his broad shoulders curled as he speared his lobes of pasta and drank dark wine. Theo sat on the other side of him, Danny beside her, both of them quiet, neither of them eating. Lucie Heymann alone created conversation, her high fluid voice a background elegy. When Garandel called for the bill, Theo pressed into Varian’s hands a bundle of things for Peterkin: a few small wooden toys he’d left behind, a new string of linked cardboard dolls, a pair of red woolen socks, a Fair Isle vest she’d made from one of her own sweaters.

  “I’ll see he gets these,” Varian said, his throat closing. And then the train whistle announced that his time in France had come to an end.

  On the platform Jean stood with his eyes downcast, his hands stuffed into his pockets. Danny put an arm around Varian’s shoulders and told him to take good care. Varian had never had a talent for farewells; he also hated any situation in which he was powerless. This was both. When the train whistle sounded again, Danny drew him closer, his mouth against Varian’s ear, and whispered something no one else could have heard: Have no regrets. What you could do, you did.