“This is the most beautiful city,” Gogo said. “I hate to think of leaving it.”
“I can’t leave. I’m going to show my paintings at the Rosenberg Gallery.” That, and I still hoped I might see Otto again. Both he and von Dincklage seemed to have left Paris. “They’ll be back,” Bettina said, always in an ominous tone. “And they won’t be alone. The army will be with them.”
“If the gallery stays open,” Gogo said. “And now you look sad. Like you’re missing someone.”
“My brother. Ania.”
“And Otto. Don’t forget Otto,” Gogo said. “A German soldier.” Her eyes were judgmental. And I didn’t blame her.
I hadn’t told her about my affair with him, only that he had been at the Ritz the last time I had seen Ania there, and something in my face had given me away. I told no one about our meeting in Montmartre, what Otto had told me.
“He’s a musician,” I said. “He plays Chopin and ragtime.”
“Interesting combination. But he’s still a German.”
“All the young men were called up in Germany. No choice. In France, too.”
“Let’s go for that drink,” Gogo said.
We walked back by way of the Champs-Élysées and stopped at a café on the corner of rue Marbeuf. Gogo paused in the doorway. It was smoky inside, and only a few tables were occupied, all by men who were middle-aged or older, since the young men had been called up. They turned and stared at us, then quickly looked away, obscuring their faces with their coat collars.
“We shouldn’t have stopped here,” Gogo said, closing the door. “This is one of the places.”
“What places?”
“Where they meet. People who say they will resist. Who will fight the Germans here, in Paris. Who will fight your Otto.”
Colors sometimes fade or disappear completely if the pigment used to make the color is too fragile, or its medium is not well prepared. Cadmium yellow, when exposed to sunlight, fades to beige; van Gogh’s beautiful flowers will, in time, be faded and pale, not at all vibrant like the flowers he saw and painted in the fields of Provence. Sometimes, the color survives only in our memories.
My life in Paris was falling apart, piece by piece, and I couldn’t stop it.
“I think this waiting is the hardest part,” Bettina said one evening several weeks later, downstairs in Schiap’s twenty-four-hour canteen. She rolled pieces of bread into balls that she lined up on the table like miniature white cannonballs. A cold, heavy rain had been falling for days, an omen of a hard winter to come, the greengrocer who delivered our vegetables said. Even in Schiap’s monkish cellar we could hear it pounding down.
“Believe me, it will be worse, much worse, soon,” Schiap said. She gave me a knowing glance.
“I know. We must leave soon,” I said. I remembered the night that Gogo had been followed from the train station, Schiap’s constant fears that something would happen to her. Once the Gestapo was in Paris, arresting communists, anybody who might oppose them, neither Schiap nor her daughter would be safe. “This means no exhibit for me, doesn’t it?”
Schiap recognized in me the same hunger that, years before, had compelled her to make her mark in fashion, to change what had been before her.
“We will hope for the best.” She crossed her fingers.
“You and those paintings,” Bettina said. “Rosenberg will have closed the gallery before you are gone. He is Jewish, remember.”
Gogo and I by then had made several trips north for the Motor Transport Corps, driving supplies up, returning with wounded soldiers or crates whose contents we didn’t ask about and weren’t told. There was so much fear we could taste it, yellow-sour in our mouths and nostrils, the fear of what war could do to tender flesh and, for me, the continuing fear of simply driving, the grinding of the clutch, lurching forward, the possibility of slick roads, trees ahead.
In the morning, we received our orders, drove north and east of Paris, close to borders where the war had already arrived, to villages and farmhouses, to transport the wounded to field hospitals where they could be treated. Sometimes we carried messages as well. Pieces of paper stuck into books with underlined words, a grocery list, a single word we memorized, to be spoken only to a certain person, or not at all.
We drove in silence, dreading the day ahead of us. Some of the people we transported to field hospitals were missing limbs; some were missing parts of their faces. On some, we couldn’t see the actual wound, and those were the ones I found most frightening.
The roads, unused to such heavy traffic, were rutted with mud and lined with an unending line of refugees fleeing ahead of the armies, the battles.
A skipping child, her arm full of dolls. An old woman leaning against an even older man, their faces masks of tragedy. A lovely dark-haired woman in a tea gown, carrying a birdcage with two canaries in it. Hollow-eyed adolescents; husbands leading their wives. Thousands of refugees. Sometimes it felt like we were driving to hell.
The trucks and ambulances, noisy green-and-khaki vehicles, were immense. Tiny Gogo had to sit on a pile of pillows to be able to see past the steering wheel. She took a lot of teasing from the doctors and the other drivers, but if the teasing went past her tolerance level she gave her tormentors a glare able to silence even her fearless mother.
And then, after a day in hell, we would return to Paris. That was how close the war was. We could commute to it. Schiap would cook spaghetti for us, try to make jokes, talk about her next collection, talk about anything other than the danger Gogo had faced during the day.
“I would die for my daughter. I would do anything to keep her safe,” Schiap hissed at me one night.
Once, we were sent to Crouy-sur-Marne, where the hospital had been set up in a barn staffed with two doctors, eight nurses, a cook, and all the personnel needed to set up an operating room and take it apart again in six hours. This was the nearest to the front we were supposed to go, about ten kilometers or so from the northern fighting.
When we left in a convoy of three trucks, we passed a farmhouse that had been set ablaze. The farmer and his wife and four children stood in a row, watching mutely. The farmer still held a torch in his hands.
“They set the fire themselves. Too close to the border,” said Gogo. “They would rather destroy their homes than let them be occupied by the Wehrmacht. They’ll probably end up in Paris with the other refugees.”
I watched the flames, the red and orange and blue in them, the hint of turquoise at the edges, the black smoke rising into the clear blue sky now receiving its burnt offering.
Gogo and I never discussed these trips in front of her mother, and Schiap seemed to have made peace with Gogo’s work. She was so grateful that I was driving with Gogo that to show appreciation, she gave me dozens of pieces from her collections: day dresses, gowns, culottes, even a fur wrap.
“And where am I supposed to wear these?” I asked when she had given me a pair of pink silk satin boots striped with green and gold. “It will be difficult to use the truck brakes when I’m wearing these.”
She laughed and pinched my cheek. “Save them for a special day,” she said.
And then one day, when the rain had stopped and Schiap and Gogo had taken an automobile trip to the south, they were strafed by a German airplane. They had to abandon the car and take cover in a ditch. Gogo, when the plane had disappeared into the clouds, picked up some of the cartridges and kept them as a kind of talisman, a reminder of how close death had come.
“God, how loud it was. And flying so close to the ground. I could see their faces, and they were laughing. Still, they couldn’t hit us,” Gogo told me, when they had returned to Paris.
“They tried hard enough.” Schiap trembled with outrage and fear. We were having another spaghetti supper in the cellar. None of us had much appetite.
“Well, I’d better get some sleep,” Gogo said, ri
sing. “I’m driving tomorrow. Day shift with the Motor Transport Corps. You, too, Lily.”
Schiap turned white. “I don’t feel well,” she said. “Gogo, do I have a fever?” She took her daughter’s hand and pressed it to her forehead.
“A little,” Gogo admitted. “But it’s just the shock. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“No,” Schiap said. “No, I won’t. I’m certain I won’t.”
In the morning, she wasn’t better. She was coming down with something, she insisted. Worse, she’d had a dream.
“You have to stay home,” she told Gogo.
Gogo bit her lip. She studied her mother, the almost supernatural calmness of her gaze, and knew she would not win this battle.
* * *
• • •
So, I drove without Gogo that next day, with a different woman from the motor corps, one even worse at driving than I was, so I was the driver for the trip. I got into the truck waiting for us at the Champ de Mars staging area, turned the ignition, and jounced into first gear. We were to pick up the wounded at a site the nurse had memorized. No maps allowed. We were especially to try to find Pierre. Only a first name and one shared by more and more Frenchmen, it seemed. It was code for don’t ask questions. We would be driving into an area where there had been fighting the day before.
“Who is he?” I had asked, and in the office they grew suddenly deaf and dumb, and I realized I shouldn’t have even asked. Some of the soldiers in the north were go-betweens for the Free French, led by de Gaulle in England, and the Resistance.
“Well done,” said the nurse sarcastically, when I stalled the truck just trying to get out of first.
“Just keep your fingers crossed,” I said, turning the ignition again and shifting, first into second, then third, spraying gravel from the spinning wheels.
When wounds are fresh, blood has a touch of blue in it. When the wound is older, the blood dries to a rust color, burnt sienna or hazelnut, or a deep ocher.
Both events are to be dreaded. If the wound is fresh, there is a chance that you won’t be able to stop the blood flow; if it is already ocher, and especially if there are streaks issuing from it, infection has set in and possible blood poisoning. Pierre’s wounds were fresh when we found him five hours later, just about where the office thought he might be, fainted and crumpled by the side of a road close to the Belgium border.
His wounds were so fresh they were still bleeding, which the nurse said was a good sign in that dead people don’t bleed. When she cleaned the clots of mud from his face he opened his eyes and after a moment was able to focus on us. “Friend,” he said. “Over there.” We were surrounded by open field, and there was nothing in sight but field, mud, road, and, in the distance, an old stone barn.
“We’ll have to drive there,” the nurse said. “If there’s another wounded one, we can’t carry him this far.”
“Drive through that?” The field was pockmarked from explosions, and a sickly yellow mist hovered over it.
“No choice,” she insisted.
Pierre was able to walk, if we supported him on both sides, so we helped him into the back of the truck and wedged him between crates of supplies.
I drove slowly at first, to avoid the ruts and pits and craters, the stone barn coming closer and closer. And so was the noise of battle, the clamor and shouting and a buzz of angry motors not yet seen approaching.
“I think we need to go a little faster,” the nurse said.
I went faster, at one moment even closing my eyes so that my foot would have the courage to press down more heavily on the gas pedal.
We reached the barn, and it took an hour before we got the other man into the truck. His wounds were bleeding—a good sign—but they were severe enough that they had to be stanched before he could be moved, and then sewn shut and wrapped in sterile cotton, before we could carry him to the truck.
“Time to go,” the nurse said, when the soldier had been wrapped in blankets and made as comfortable as possible, next to Pierre.
“Right.” Turn on the ignition. Shift. Ignore the noise coming at you, the louder engines of tanks coming close to the horizon of the field. Ignore the twilight, the fog. Drive. And hurry, while you’re at it.
The nurse saw the horse before I did, an old gray plow horse released from someone’s burning barn, a horse so tired and confused and hopeless that when it saw the truck it stood its ground, waiting, blinking its long-lashed, empty eyes at us.
“Stop!” she screamed.
Instead, I swerved, knowing that a full stop at my current speed would send the wounded men in the back of the truck headlong into a steel partition.
The horse stood and looked at us, watching with calm disinterest, and the truck veered wildly to the left, into a four-foot-deep trench. I hit my head and felt something warm trickle down my forehead.
Before blackness comes, unconsciousness, there is a red-out, when blood rushes to your head. I saw red, flashes of it, all shades, turning darker, darker. I saw Allen again, falling out of the car, his head wound fresh and bleeding, and together, we fell into the red turned black. Hi, Allen, I said. I missed you. You’ll be okay, he promised.
* * *
• • •
The shrill scream through the black sky was followed by a loud boom and an explosion of color. The muddy French countryside under us shook. Magenta, I decided. Definitely magenta. The one before had been more of a crimson.
“Beautiful colors,” I said. “Aren’t they?”
“Are you crazy?” asked the nurse huddled next to me. “They’re trying to kill us. Maybe your head injury is affecting you.”
“All the more reason to focus on the colors. Besides, they’re aiming west of us, over the border.” In the dark, I could just see her silhouette, the points of an upturned collar reaching for her chin, the bun low on her neck, the wisps catching enough remnant light to reveal the red of her hair.
“You’re an artist, aren’t you?” she asked, her tone suggesting that the single word explained much about me.
“I like to think so. Cigarette?” I held my packet out to her.
“We aren’t supposed to smoke. It’s blackout,” she said. I quickly withdrew the pack so that she couldn’t see how my hand was shaking.
“I think they know we’re here.” I lit one for myself, the match flickering as if in a strong wind although the night, except for the fireworks overhead, was still and quiet. That’s how much I was shaking, and my head was throbbing with pain.
Most people don’t like to smoke in the dark because they can’t see the smoke itself, which is a large part of the sensual enjoyment of a cigarette. Not me. In the dark, you can see the glowing tip even better, how the orange-red color changes to sienna as the ash at the tip lengthens. You can use the cigarette to scrawl designs in the dark, like we did as children with sparklers on the Fourth of July.
The whistling, exploding bombs lit up the night sky, and I knew that after this I’d never really be able to enjoy a Fourth of July celebration. I’d remember how the Luftwaffe had tried to kill me. Well, not me, personally. They were aiming for the French soldiers farther up the hill, the same hill we had been trying to flee.
After I’d come back to consciousness, the nurse and I had pushed, swearing, pushing again, our feet sucking ever deeper into the muck, for hours and that damn truck wouldn’t budge. It had turned from day to night and the fighting was moving closer, and we were stuck.
Another bomb whizzed and exploded. The nurse was shivering; her breath was shallow and quick. Was she going into shock?
“My husband is going to be furious,” the nurse said after a long while, after the night had grown dark and quiet again. “I said I’d be home early tonight.”
We laughed, and I was glad that she seemed to be getting her nerve back. Except for the pain in my head, I felt surprisingly carefree, as
if the worst had happened and soon all would be well again.
We were crouched in the mud, cold and sticky with it. Whenever I moved, there was a plopping sound from under my feet, as if the mud wanted to draw us down into it. I so much wanted to lie down in it, close my eyes.
“Don’t sleep,” the nurse said, shaking me awake. “You could be going into shock.”
“I’m wearing Schiaparelli, you know,” I said. “Under my overalls I’m wearing an Elsa Schiaparelli silk jumpsuit.” Schiap had insisted that we needed to continue dressing well, even if overalls covered our clothes. “It will help protect you,” she said. That theory seemed well disproven.
“Well, a silk jumpsuit will save the day.” The nurse laughed.
Another burst of red sparks west of us. I had been timing the shelling the way you time a pregnant woman’s contractions, the way children count between lightning and thunder. They were coming faster. They were coming closer. My eardrums ached from the assault.
“We really need to get out of here,” I said, as if we both hadn’t been thinking that same thought for several hours now.
“Hey!” I shouted as loudly as I could.
“Hey!” Pierre shouted from the back of the truck.
“How goes it?”
“I’ve had better vacations,” he shouted back. “When is the train leaving?”
Was he joking or becoming delirious? I thought he’d only been shot in the arm, but perhaps there were other wounds I hadn’t found.
“Soon,” I shouted back. Please, God, make it soon. Soon. Is there anything worse in the world than being able to do nothing but wait?
Another shell, closer, so close the ground did more than shake; it rose up in tufts and stones, pelting us. Maybe their aim wasn’t that good; maybe those bombs were crossing the border!
I forced my eyes open, resisting the urge to sleep. Yellow dots. In the distance.
“I see lights,” I said. “Coming this way. Headlights.”
The Last Collection Page 25