Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  “Are we going to have a dessert?” Mimi blurted.

  “Shh, no, Mimi. You mustn’t ask,” Mélanie said.

  “I’m sorry, Mimi,” Louise said. “We must provide our sweetness by acts of kindness, not by sugary confections.”

  “My turn,” Maurice said quickly. “Come with me, Mimi.” His face, speckled with red sting marks from his beekeeping, wore the mischievous grin of a boy at play.

  He waddled out the back door, holding Mimi’s hand. When they came back inside, Mimi was leading a small goat on a rope.

  “Mimi and I think you should have a little goat, don’t we, Mimi?”

  Mimi led it right to me. “You have to take it, madame. See? She likes you.”

  “A goat! You’re being silly, Maurice.”

  He looked momentarily wounded, but he would not be swayed. “She’s a pretty thing, don’t you think? She gives more than a liter at every milking. Louise and I don’t need another goat. You do.”

  “Maurice, I’m a Parisienne! I don’t know the first thing about keeping a goat. Or milking one.”

  I remembered how at the orphanage, every third day, a goatherd had brought half a dozen goats. I had hopped with glee the moment I heard their bells in our courtyard. Their stuttering goaty noises charmed me. Sister Marie Pierre would hand me a pail, demanding to know what they sounded like, and I had to tell her in words, not by imitation. The goatherd would milk a goat while I held the pail steady beneath it until it was full. Sometimes I was brave enough to pet the smallest goat, the one without horns.

  “Milking is easy. I will instruct you.” Maurice’s eyes sparkled. “Just squeeze the teats to the rhythm of ‘La Marseillaise.’ Gently, so you don’t hurt her.

  “Allons enfants (squeeze a teat) de la (squeeze the other teat) Patrie (squeeze), le jour de gloire (squeeze) est arrivé (squeeze).”

  Soon we were all singing robustly “Aux armes, citoyens!” and squeezing imaginary teats. By the spirited refrain of “Marchons (squeeze), marchons,” we were all standing, and then we collapsed in laughter.

  “But what will I do with all that milk?”

  “You can make cheese,” Odette said. “Nice soft chèvre.”

  “It will be too much cheese for one person.” I felt a sting of sadness when I said “one person.”

  “You can sell me some,” René Gulini quickly said. “I will invent a pastry to put it in. A large round brioche with chèvre inside and apricots on top.”

  “Or apples!” I said.

  She was a white goat with black ears and a black tail and only nubs for horns. I petted her, and she looked up at me with liquid eyes that said, Take me. What leapt into my mind was Pissarro’s painting of the girl and her goat on the ochre path. I supposed it was a silly notion, but I suddenly felt that if I had a goat of my own, it would bring me closer to finding that painting.

  “Bien. I accept. Merci.”

  I decided then and there that I would add another item to my list:

  9. Learn how to live in a painting.

  “She has to have a name,” Mimi said.

  “A name. Hmm.”

  I thought of the goats we children had named at the orphanage. Jeanne d’Arc. Marie Antoinette. Empress Joséphine. Madame du Barry.

  “I know!” I exclaimed. “Geneviève! The patron saint of Paris! She became a saint because she led the prayers that stopped Attila’s Huns from conquering the city.”

  For an instant, the frivolity was dampened, but I pressed on. “Later, when a different band of warriors did conquer Paris, Geneviève convinced them to release their prisoners. Her statue is in the Jardin du Luxembourg.”

  I placed my hand on the goat’s head and declared, “I baptize you Sainte Geneviève.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE SECRET OF GORDES

  1941

  I LAY IN BED, AWAKENED BY MY OWN WEEPING AND BY THE slant of milky light passing between the shutters, conscious, as always, of missing him, of knowing he would not experience this new day. Why get up? Before, it had been to listen to news in the café at the other end of the day. Now a more urgent answer came in the small, bleating voice from the courtyard. Geneviève wanted milking.

  I threw on some clothes and washed the pail I’d found in the shed “Oh, you poor girl, thinking I had forgotten you.” I squeezed her teats and sang “La Marseillaise,” which lifted my spirits. We went down the hill outside the courtyard to find grass and thistles. “Look here. Oh, this looks good. Miam, miam.”

  Having an animal was a responsibility. I couldn’t think only of myself, couldn’t indulge in late, self-pitying mornings in bed. The January chill had set in, so I cut and gathered grass to store for her as she munched.

  “Now you’ll be happy until I get back.”

  “Baa,” she said, which I took to mean “Merci, madame.”

  Some mornings I had to congratulate myself just for functioning. This morning was one of them. I took account: I’d gotten up. I’d washed and dressed myself. I’d opened the shutters. I’d made my bed. I’d milked Geneviève. I’d gone to the boulangerie to see Odette—oh yes, for bread too. Now I heated water for hickory nut coffee, a milky substitute. I went through the steps, just as if André had sat down to sip his grand café from his grandmother’s bowl. I licked its edge where his lips had been.

  Dressed in clean clothes, I boarded Maurice’s bus for the surprise he had promised me when he had walked me home from their veillée. As we descended into patchy veils of fog below Roussillon, Maurice told me to keep secret what we did and whom we saw. That only made me more curious, and I said, “Fog is the right atmosphere for clandestine activities.”

  “Truer than you think. If we’re stopped by Mayor Pinatel, or anybody else, say that I’m taking you to visit Pascal’s sister.”

  “He didn’t have a sister.”

  “All the better. He won’t find out any information.”

  Shortly after the narrow road to that circle of ancient stone huts he called bories, Maurice turned right, up the switchbacks to Gordes, and parked the bus just below the village. We walked up more than a hundred uneven stone steps and passed along the back of the château and the apse end of the church, then took a crooked route down the opposite side of the village, where the narrow streets seemed to descend forever, sometimes so steeply that flat stones had been placed at intervals down the middle of the incline to make steps, while the sides had been cobbled into two ramps to accommodate wheels. Not a soul was about. I turned my ankle and grabbed hold of Maurice. For the rest of the way, he held on to my upper arm to steady me.

  A spring trickled gaily through strings of chartreuse moss and fed a stone washing basin. Maurice said it had been used by a tannery for the once active shoemaking trade of Gordes. In this quiet quarter of houses, I peeked in windows discreetly, trying to see through lace curtains whether there were cushions on the settees.

  Curiously, a three-story building had no door onto the street. We turned in at a narrow, rock-strewn alley that led to a courtyard behind it. The stone lintel bore the name of a girls’ school.

  “So you think I ought to go to school?” I whispered.

  “In a way, you will, but it hasn’t functioned as a school for a long time.” He pulled the cord on the school bell.

  A beautiful woman with dark hair cut as short as mine looked out an upper window. I caught a glimpse of a white lace collar against a violet dress.

  “Ah, Maurice! You brought her!” she said. “One moment.”

  “You told her about me?” I whispered.

  I heard the rattle of keys and latches as she let us in. “He is working upstairs.”

  I knew at once why Maurice had brought me here. Paintings! Hanging, leaning, stacked everywhere. Bizarre, fantastical images in strong colors. Nothing like I had ever seen.

  Maurice pushed me up the stairs. An artist was painting in a studio. A real artist!

  He introduced the couple as Marc and Bella Chagall. “This is my friend Lisette, whom
I told you about. She will keep your presence here a secret.”

  Why was that necessary, I wondered.

  Unruly tufts of curly brown hair, silver at his temples, cascaded around the man’s large ears. He was a small man wearing suspenders and a collarless shirt. More than any other feature, his eyes attracted me, blue as precious stones from a faraway land, almond-shaped and wide-set. There was a similarity in their angular faces such as older couples attain, but they weren’t at all old.

  “Maurice told us that you’re interested in art,” Madame Chagall said.

  “My husband’s grandfather …” I stopped. “Yes, I am.” I turned to Maurice. “How did you come to know each other?”

  “He rode my bus to Avignon to buy art supplies. Of course.”

  “Now I give him a list and he buys what I need and delivers it.”

  Monsieur Chagall spoke French with a foreign accent I couldn’t identify.

  “A true chevalier of the roads,” I said.

  “But this chevalier must tend to another sort of delivery, so I’ll come back in an hour or so to take you home.”

  He pointed to a large painting lying on the floor in which a green-faced fiddler was playing a violin on a snow-covered rooftop, his knees bent outward, one foot in midair, dancing. As Maurice passed it, he did a little jig with his knees bent outward too.

  Madame laughed. “You have an animated friend.”

  “As jolly as that fiddler,” I said absently while the painting held my gaze. “Nothing is as it should be.”

  “Yet everything is as it must be,” monsieur said.

  “But these three little men are no taller than the fiddler’s knee.”

  He tipped his head in gentle forbearance. “You’re being rational. Throw rationality out the window when you come here. Bella, instruct her. Then we’ll talk.”

  Monsieur turned to the unfinished painting on his easel. On his palette, he worked paint into his brush and swirled a wide path of crimson onto the canvas. I gasped. What was he going to do with that? I couldn’t stay to watch because madame was waiting to take me upstairs.

  “Since you live in a village,” she said, “I’ll show you his paintings from our village of Vitebsk in Russia.”

  “Russia!”

  In a classroom without furniture, dozens of paintings lay on the floor, with only narrow spaces between them.

  “He doesn’t sell them?”

  “Oh, yes. He does. But he paints so many, working day and night, that they accumulate. He likes to be surrounded by them.”

  One captured my interest instantly. In it, a milkmaid was stretching far forward on her stool to milk a cow whose legs were also stretched impossibly forward. A violin rested on the cow’s back leg.

  Of course. Why not? Doesn’t every cow own a violin? Beyond a fence, the same cow was upside down, with another violin. The girl leaned forward, and her breasts hung down at the same angle as the cow’s teats did. I couldn’t say that I understood it, but it delighted me.

  The paintings weren’t detailed or realistic. The figures were childlike, soft-edged, done in a naïve style, innocent and lovable. In one painting, two goats walked toward each other on a narrow plank over a chasm, heads down. An impasse. Which one would give way?

  I laughed. “These are delightfully droll. They couldn’t be memories. They have to be fantasy.”

  “They could have been dreams or Russian legends or Jewish stories or children’s folktales. He experienced them so intensely that they are still a part of him.”

  The painter’s disregard for the relative sizes of things was humorous, but one in this vein suggested something to me. A large recumbent rooster enfolded in his wings a small woman, as though keeping her safe from a village aflame behind them. It reversed the order of humans caring for domestic animals, and it made me glimpse that Maurice and Louise had known that Geneviève would help me through dark times in more ways than by giving milk.

  One painting had a haunting quality. A giant man in a black overcoat with a bulging sack slung over his shoulder was suspended in the sky diagonally over a snow-covered village and a large building that resembled the synagogue I had seen in the Marais quarter.

  “Tell me about this one.”

  “In our Jewish upbringing, the Yiddish idiom ‘goes over the houses’ represents a beggar; it means a message from God could come in the form of a beggar.”

  “Is the message good or bad?”

  “Good. Oh, so good. What you see as a stiff old beggar worn by years of deprivation and sadness is not all there is to see. It isn’t his misery or exhaustion or loneliness that touches me in those paintings. It’s the spiritual force that keeps him aloft despite all gravity—that’s what I find moving.”

  She was so gracious that I dared to ask her, “Is that part of Jewish belief? Keeping aloft despite forces that pull you down?”

  “Part of Jewish history, I would say.” She reflected for a moment and then ventured a question of her own. “Do you know about Kristallnacht?” Her voice fell as she spoke.

  “Yes. We read a newspaper clipping. We were shocked and sorry.”

  The worry in her voice made me worry too, for how the war might affect them. I understood now why they were here in this remote place, and why Maurice delivered monsieur’s painting supplies from Avignon. I wondered if other Jewish artists were hiding in the rural south.

  Despite our solemnness, I was hungry to grasp more of her husband’s artistic whimsy. Madame directed me to look at a large painting she called I and the Village, in which a man’s green profile faced a cow’s head almost nose to nose. From the man’s eyeball to the cow’s eyeball ran a fine thread, connecting them. It had to be the thread of love, I decided.

  Laid over the cow’s jaw was a tiny woman milking a cow her size, and in the background, a peasant with a scythe over his shoulder was walking toward an upside-down woman. Behind them was a row of houses, some also upside down.

  “Separate moments,” I said.

  “But a single vision.”

  “Why are some things upside down?”

  Apparently she sensed that this wasn’t criticism, only inquiry, because she tried to explain. “There is a contradiction to every statement, the questioning of belief, and often the shattering of everything we hold to be certain.”

  So I glimpsed that the upside-down woman and houses represented contradictions, the rooster cradling a woman questioned the belief of size and the capacity to protect and comfort, and the man in the sky shattered the certainty of gravity.

  “Then he has a reason for everything.”

  “I can’t say that for sure. Sometimes he baffles even me.”

  When we went back to the big studio, we saw that her husband had progressed on the painting. The crimson swirl had grown larger, more rounded, puffy as a cloud, upon which a buoyant bride and groom embraced, the man’s hand drawing his lover’s head against his shoulder. Above them a huge rosebush loaded with white roses took up the width of the painting. If that curved spread of crimson was in fact a cloud, logically it should be above them and the rosebush at their feet. Likewise, the cloud should be white and the roses red. I hadn’t completely thrown rationality out the window. I sensed that the artist was playing with the viewer. The figures were suspended over a village, and cherubic heads were nestled between diminutive wings tumbling in the sky. A floating man was playing a violin, and a goat rested on folded legs.

  “Your paintings sing, monsieur. Or maybe I should say they make me want to sing.”

  “Even better!”

  “You look right through reality in order to reveal something strange and wondrous and, if I might say so, childlike. Have you always wanted to be an artist? From childhood, I mean?”

  “That word, artist, did not exist in my village, so I dreamt of being a singer, then a fiddler, which was more acceptable in my culture, then a dancer, and a poet.”

  “May I ask—why are there roses in the sky?”

  “Because they
are not on the ground.” The smile that crept over his face wrapped me up in him like an uncle would wrap a child in a warm blanket.

  “Why is that cloud red?”

  “It’s my cloud. I can paint it whatever color I want.”

  “Why are there angels tumbling?”

  “Because I needed something to fill the space.”

  “I don’t believe you. They are there to bless the couple.”

  “If that suits you, fine.”

  “You don’t just paint what you see in front of you, like other painters.”

  “No, I paint what I see inside me.”

  “Did you dream this couple?”

  His amused expression slid into a wistfulness. “Maybe. Or maybe I remembered them. Or maybe Bella and I are the couple.”

  “Memory makes everything beautiful,” I said.

  “Indeed. It erases the ordinary and gives us the extraordinary, the essence of our experience.”

  “They’re not scenes. They’re …” I moved my hands as though I were collecting things, drawing them toward me. “Collections of holy sparks.”

  His arms flew up and his fingers burst apart. “Yes. Yes! That’s it! Assemblages of inner images that possess me.”

  “Like those goats? Do goats possess you?”

  “Yes, they do. There were goats in our Russian shtetl.”

  I chuckled. “You must have liked them. They’re in a lot of paintings.”

  “I do, and the cows and the chickens and roosters.”

  “Maurice gave me a goat. I named her Sainte Geneviève, after the patron saint of Paris. I’m a Parisienne, even if you can’t tell.”

  “Oh, but I can, in the elegant way you speak. A Parisienne with a Provençal goat.”

  “My goat, oh, how I love her. She seems to know by how I touch her whether I am sad or happy. When I’m gloomy, she comes up to me and pushes her body against my leg. I think she’s trying to comfort me, like that big rooster holding the woman in his wings.”

  “Then you understand the language of animals and the language of art.”

  “Maybe I’m beginning to. When I milk my goat, I sing ‘La Marseillaise.’ ” I stifled a laugh at myself, for telling him this, but he didn’t laugh. “She likes that. She’s a patriot.” He nodded thoughtfully, as though recognizing something serious.