Many of their friends, such as Elsa and Leon, had to forfeit their radios and cameras to the government because they were German nationals, but at least, Vera thought, they weren’t interned in camps like the Japanese, which sent a chill through her when she pored over the photographs in the Los Angeles Examiner of Japanese families standing in line at Union Station, saddled with their suitcases and their children, to live in the Santa Anita Race Track, where primitive barracks awaited them. The mothers, neat and dainty, appeared calm; they stood upright, holding their children’s hands, trying to convey safety, but the children, dressed in their little suits and dresses for the journey, stared out at the crowd with fearful eyes, wondering why they had to leave their old lives so suddenly. Each time Vera saw one of these photographs, she felt a stab of recognition before folding the paper away.
Vera knew they were the enemy, of course; in every grocery store or gas station a poster commanded patrons to keep quiet because the Japs might be listening, but she couldn’t help being revolted by the pamphlets that arrived in the mail about how to tell the difference between the Japanese and America’s Chinese allies, with various anatomical descriptions, including a crude illustration of a Japanese body, pointing to the nose, the eyes, even how the feet were apparently different. She threw these things out immediately, not wanting to look, her stomach turning, knowing that in Germany and many other parts of Europe, the same types of images circulated, but of Jews.
A sense of suspicion hung over the city, and now everyone proceeded with an uneasy calm; Leon and Elsa did not speak German in public, and the Japanese disappeared, the flower markets shut down, Little Tokyo a sudden ghost town. Even knowing this, she admired the soldiers in their pressed khaki uniforms striding down the street, such confidence pouring off of them, reminding her of the man from the pier the day of Pearl Harbor. She had lingered there with him, longer than she should have, the sun dipping into the flat ocean, the light sliding into a golden pinkish hue that made everything appear softer, more fluid and malleable, and wondered if she would ever feel like herself again. Sometimes, when she read Ernie Pyle’s column about troop life in Europe, she feared what had happened to him.
* * *
• • •
The war consumed Vera. She tracked every news story, especially those about France, and listened to every radio news broadcast, which often followed a lovely piece of classical music. Yet many of their friends appeared entirely unfazed, or at least pretended to be.
Today, the papers announced: “France Is Overrun: Nazis Reach Marseilles after Hitler Scraps Armistice Pact.” The free zone no longer existed, or as the reporter put it: “The last vestiges of a ‘free’ France disappeared from the map of Europe today.”
When Vera read it, she felt sick and furious. Furious that Max had only frowned and then kept chewing on the heel of a baguette, brushing the headline away as easily as he brushed the crumbs from his lap, his only comment being that once again, they exaggerated events to sell more papers.
Vera stopped short on the stone-lined path leading to Salka Viertel’s house, recalling Max’s stoic reaction this morning, a renewed sense of indignation bubbling up inside of her. The door, painted a deep red, was ajar. People had already arrived for the Sunday cocktail party, the yellow light warm and inviting through the picture windows, the smell of heavy cigar smoke and strong perfume lingering on the footpath. Salka always insisted they come over on Sunday afternoons for goulash and endless rounds of Ping-Pong, as if her “European salon,” as she called it, could compensate for the inherently ghostly quality of Sundays in Los Angeles.
“It’s temporary,” Max said, referring to the broken armistice. He lightly stepped onto the next moss-covered stone.
“You don’t know that,” Vera retorted, recognizing Renee, the dermatologist from Paris, walking in front of them, carefully holding her son’s hand.
“Roosevelt will fix it, you’ll see,” Max replied.
Vera shrugged at the pointlessness of thinking anyone could fix anything.
* * *
• • •
At the party, no one mentioned the broken armistice. They gossiped about Alma Werfel’s Bénédictine addiction, and that Heinrich Mann had recently moved into a shabby apartment house on Montana Avenue, which resembled derelict barracks. “Tragic, considering that his own brother lives in a veritable paradise on San Remo Drive,” Elsa whispered to Vera.
Vera sighed, used to the routine gossip and intrigue, even enjoying it at times, but then she noticed Renee, who sat quietly next to her son on the living room couch. Vera hadn’t seen her since New York, and remembered that her son had been injured in an air raid. He sat very still on the couch, his head cocked at an odd angle.
Arnold Schoenberg’s severe voice cut through her thoughts. “I wrote to my son-in-law, who just arrived in New York by way of Cuba, don’t get mixed up in anything political. Don’t contradict anyone, don’t argue, just keep your head down. And don’t talk about what you’ve seen in Europe. No one wants to talk about that.”
Vera turned to him, catching Max’s look of alarm before she spoke. “If we remain silent, what will happen to our families and friends left behind? Shall we just watch them perish while we drink champagne?”
Schoenberg’s large nostrils flared. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean then?”
“What I think he means is that Americans don’t debate the way we do, about politics and such, and it could create unnecessary tension in certain situations, for example, at the studio.” Max paused, looking over at Michel for encouragement. “At the studio, we do not discuss the political situation in Europe, no matter how dire it seems. It’s simply not done.”
“I see,” Vera said, the heat crawling up her neck, but she didn’t see, and felt betrayed by the way Max always sought to smooth things over.
* * *
• • •
During dinner, she stepped out onto the veranda and inhaled the sea air, feeling the weight of the evening lessen slightly. It was good to be alone. She stared at the long strip of highway running beneath the bluffs, headlights beaming forward, hurtling into the night. A cool breeze brushed over her face.
She wished she could fold away her worry about the broken armistice, reminding herself that they were lucky compared to many other refugees who suffered much worse.
Through the French doors, she saw them all sitting around the dining room table, constantly reminding one another of their adaptability and happiness, spooning goulash into their mouths, her husband among them, while Europe burned. Part of her yearned to join them, to feel that temporary warm glow that held fear and doubt at bay, if only for a little while, but something within her wouldn’t allow it. She watched them half longingly through the glass. They were only trying to enjoy themselves, to make the most of things. To live.
She crushed her cigarette into the balustrade. The moon her only light, the dampness of the ocean crept over her while they toasted, sherry glasses raised, faces flushed, laughing at a joke, Max loosening his tie, settling into the convivial glow, free from the weight of her thoughts, the oppressive stream of which he could hear just by looking at her. Even Renee was laughing now, with her arm wrapped around her son, whose eyes fluttered closed.
And here I am, alone with the night, Vera thought. Time shuffled forward and back; her disorderly mind left her unable to control which memory arose when. A cerebral land mine.
The glow of the moon gave her pause. Did Lucie see the same moon through a farmhouse window while listening to the grim rumble of German troops advancing? Or did she fall asleep to the raspy breath of her puppy, warm fur coiled into the crook of her arm? Did she see her mother in the moon, as some of the children at Gurs had claimed they saw their fathers in its dimpled pale surface?
“Are you all right?” Elsa’s voice cut through the dark as she closed the patio door behind her.
Vera kept staring at the moon. “I don’t know anything. And I keep envisioning the Germans flooding into Oradour-sur-Glane.”
Elsa nodded, pursing her lips.
From inside, Oscar Levant, a student of Schoenberg’s, played the first chords of his new concerto, the melodious introduction floating through an open window.
Vera continued, her voice trembling, “And it’s so odd to see all the sunbathers on the beach, and the fruit piled high in the supermarkets, and golfers with their clubs sticking out of their cabriolets, and people drinking champagne, as if there isn’t a war.”
Elsa whispered, “What should we talk about, then? That people are dying? That they’re murdering all the Polish Jews while we sit here and sip champagne? It’s not that we don’t want to talk about it. We can’t.”
Vera wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
Elsa sighed, her tone softening. “Everyone here has a story to tell. So many stories. If we listened to them all, we would be flooded with sadness.” Her eyes flitted over Vera. “Try not to take everything so hard.”
A hot embarrassment coursed through her. She knew that she wasn’t the only one to leave someone behind, to mourn a country, a city, a daughter. An entire life. She was selfish, clinging to what she didn’t have, when everyone else had also lost so much and yet they managed to carry on somehow.
Or at least they were better pretenders.
She watched Elsa return to the well-lit dining room. Immediately, other guests surrounded her as if to close a gap in the air.
* * *
• • •
How will I even know if she’s all right?” Vera said, her voice hoarse, resuming the argument they had started before Salka’s party. They undressed, the massive floral bed between them. “As we speak, the Germans are most likely occupying Oradour,” she added, her head buzzing from too many Kir Royales.
Max faced her, his shirt unbuttoned, revealing his wooly gray chest the color of steel. “Just stop. Stop torturing yourself.” He motioned to her nightstand, where Vera kept the letters. About every four months a letter from Agnes arrived. It once took six months, which was agony.
“There hasn’t been a letter in months. Who knows what the situation is like now?” Vera snapped. She thought back on the last letter from July: a sketch of Lucie, bow in her hair, a frilly collar. Agnes wrote about apple picking, butter churning, that summer had arrived early, L. finding a dead finch under her windowsill, the mare about to give birth. Lucie named our new wobbly colt Vivi, after you.
Vera’s tears fell onto the navy ink, blurring it.
Vera also sent letters to Agnes, unsure how many were getting through, if any, and she was also careful not to reveal too much, just enough to paint a picture of their life here, for Lucie to understand.
“What I mean is, we are free and Lucie is safe, and soon we’ll be together again.” The strain of the evening was evident on Max’s face, despite his tan.
“The Germans are flooding into France. How are you so calm?” Her voice jumped at the end of the question, but she tried to keep it level, imagining Pauline and Conrad inadvertently listening in on their argument through the open windows.
Max hung his shirt on a satin hanger. “The precise wording of the article was that the Germans ‘did not appear to have made any gesture toward complete occupation.’”
“They have occupied the entire south. That means complete occupation,” Vera said, tugging on each finger of her silk glove before pulling off the whole thing.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Max unlaced one shoe and replied that of course the news was troubling, but the French people were not in support of the Nazis, not at all, and this was important to keep in mind. “In Lyon, the entire street emptied so no German would feel he had been ‘welcomed’ by the local population,” he added.
She unclasped her necklace, the pearls spooling heavily into her palm. “So, the expectation is that the French will not cooperate. Is that it?” Transferring the pearls into her other hand, Vera added, “You know as well as I do what happens to people in wartime. They would steal food from a hungry child, a wife would sell her body for a few drops of petrol, they’d even sell their own grandmothers.” She replaced the pearls in the velvet-lined box on the dresser, recalling what the French police had told her in Nîmes. “You really believe that those petty French farmers will sacrifice more than they have to? Or the shopkeepers who used to cheat us, and the waiters who always recommended the most expensive wine on the menu, thinking to themselves, They are Jews, let them pay! Will they risk their lives for the Jews? Of course not.”
Now she was yelling. She couldn’t stop, even though the windows were wide open.
Max stared at her gravely and then went over to close the windows. “I didn’t realize you held such a low opinion of . . .” He paused. “Of people. French people.”
Vera unzipped her evening dress, letting the silky folds fall away from her shoulders. The war did this, she wanted to say. It changed me.
Overnight, they had become hunted pariahs, outsiders to their own lives.
She still felt a pang, remembering when they left Paris for Sanary-sur-Mer in the middle of May while the Nazis swept across Europe: Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland. Following each surrender, Max and Vera braced for when the Germans would reach Paris.
When they left their apartment, no one had helped them; no one asked where they were going. From her third-floor window, Madame Allard silently watched Vera and Max lug their suitcases into the courtyard. And the concierge, with feigned interest, wondered why they were leaving so soon for summer holidays, when he probably already was imagining what valuables they had hastily left behind that he could filch. When he adjusted the gas meter in their apartment, or stopped a leak under the kitchen sink, his eyes would rove, lingering over the crystal vases, the Persian rugs, the grand piano, and the antique violins hung up on the wall of Max’s office, the surroundings no doubt confirming his belief about Jews and their wealth.
Compared to many people they knew, Vera was aware, they had been smiled upon by Fortuna herself. Trying to lighten the moment, she remarked that Thomas Mann had managed to keep all six of his children so close he could swat them whenever he wished. She’d seen him routinely order Klaus under the dining room table when he disobeyed his father, treating the boy like a dog. “How unfair, that this man, who doesn’t even like his children, sees them every day, while we’re separated by oceans and continents.”
Max leaned on his side, regarding her from the bed.
She only wore a slip now.
“What are you smiling at?” she said, putting her hands on her hips.
“You’re beautiful. Ungodly beautiful. Say I’m not lucky, but I’m the luckiest man alive.”
She sighed and went over to him, straddling him on the bed. He still had all his clothes on, his fingers interlaced behind his head. “Everything will be all right.” He smiled faintly. “I promise.”
“You always say that.”
“But so far, we’ve managed to make a real life here. And Lucie is safe.”
“Yes, but . . .”
He drew her into him, the sharp hurt of the evening softening a little. She gazed down at him.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and then burrowed her face into his neck, breathing in his warm skin, her weight sinking into his weight. His hands spread over the small of her back, holding her in place, and a sweet, distant memory resurfaced: she was twenty-two again, honeymooning on the Venetian Lido with him. They sprawled over the fine warm sand, their bodies beaded in salt water. She held up a book as the only shade, the sound of seagulls and melodious Italian overlaying her thoughts. In the afternoons, a small plane from Bolzano ferried baskets of wild Alpine strawberries to the Lido, which they ate by the handful, the pink juice streaming down their wrists.
* * *
&nbs
p; • • •
The next morning, Vera woke with a start, and for a moment she glanced around, the surroundings blurred, before the paisley wallpaper reminded her this was Santa Monica, not Sanary, even though shadows from the trees played across the ceiling in the same pattern, with the familiar scent of orange blossoms bullying into the room. Her temples pounded from a hangover, and then she recalled having sex with Max, the blackout curtains drawn so tightly she could barely see him. He fell asleep quickly afterward, and Vera, her eyes adjusted to the dark, had stared down at her naked body splayed out on the bedspread, the side of her foot pressed up against Max’s warm, motionless leg.
She now listened to him puttering around in the kitchen, and she anticipated the rich aroma of coffee that filled the house on Sundays. The maid, Hilde, was off today, so it would just be the two of them.
As she turned onto her side, a dream resurfaced.
They moved through the floors of their Paris apartment in the birdcage elevator, all the way up to the top, Lucie clenching her hand more tightly during the surging acceleration before the elevator dropped down again and leveled, allowing them to exit. When they stepped into the foyer, her blurry image reflected back at her in the cloudy mirror, a wedding gift from her father that she had always found too ornate. She couldn’t see Lucie in the mirror, but she knew that Lucie was there from the feeling of Lucie’s hand in hers, slightly sweaty and warm, her grip slowly loosening as the elevator exhaled a mechanical sigh and clanged back down through the floors.
* * *
• • •
Vera went downstairs, tightening the sash of her silk robe.
Max sat in the dull light coming through the diamond-paned window. He had parts of the Sunday paper scattered over the breakfast table, and leaned over a section, his hand roving through his hair, as if trying to locate something in that mass of graying black.
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