“Why don’t you come visit me at my house? You could eat a fat, juicy sausage every night.”
His chuckle told me he intended the innuendo.
“Crassness will not win me, Constable, nor will your gifts, your authority, or your shiny boots. I do not want any more of your gifts with assumptions attached.”
“I suspect that your war widow’s pension does not go far with food prices the way they are now. Why can’t you accept a gift as a kindness?”
“Because there is no kindness in your voice.”
“A man can’t help how his voice sounds.”
“Yes, he can!”
He took a few steps toward me and kept swinging the sausages. I kept shoveling.
“You haven’t told me. Did you like the stockings? I haven’t seen you wear them. I dream of seeing those dark seams down the backs of your shapely legs.”
“That’s your own foolish fault.” I pushed in the shovel with my foot and hurled its contents over the cliff. “You will never see them. I burned them.”
“How ungrateful of you. After all I’ve done for you. You’re stubborn as that goat of yours. You persist in being morose, and I know why. You’re still grieving over losing a few paintings, and you’re taking it out on the world.”
“I’m still grieving over losing my husband.”
“You surprise me, Lisette.”
“Madame Roux.”
“I wouldn’t call promenading in the country with a strange man in broad daylight grieving. More like frolicking.”
“He isn’t a stranger. If you must know, he was my husband’s closest friend. They fought in the war together. They did not stay home and watch.”
“Except for his sunken eyes and his missing teeth, he wouldn’t be a bad-looking fellow to frolic with, if he had a little meat on his bones.”
That was too much. I jabbed the shovel into the pit and drew it out wet and heaping, lunged toward him, and flung it at him. He backed away, but not fast enough. He stood there stunned for a moment, looking at the splatter on his polished boots and pant legs, his jaw dropping.
“You’ll be sorry for that.”
“Get out of here!”
He had his own flinging to do. In spite of our mutual anger, together, for an instant, we watched that string of precious sausages arc through the air and over the cliff before he turned and left.
I took pleasure in imagining his humiliation as he walked home through the village with shit on his precious boots.
A WEEK LATER, I found a surprise in my lavender pot—a bar of lavender soap stamped with L’OCCITANE, as I’d seen in the Apt market, and wrapped in paper with a few handwritten words: You might find this useful for the kind of work you do.
Exasperated again, I held the soap to my nose. It smelled divine. For all his bluster, he apparently had the capacity to forgive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE WOODPILE AND THE LIST
1946
IN MARCH I CUT MY OLD GATHERED PEASANT SKIRT INTO TWO equal halves to make a curtain, then tacked it up above both sides of the window in Pascal’s bedroom, for Maxime’s arrival the next day. I had already washed the sheets at the faucet in place de la Mairie; the stone half-bowl there had a ridged inner curve that served as a washboard. Then I’d washed André’s best shirts to give to Maxime. They were about the same size, medium chest, although Maxime was a little shorter.
On the way home with my wet laundry, I couldn’t help peering in the direction of the woodpile. Because I had seen André’s blank canvas that night with the Germans, I was sure the paintings would be under the top piece of plywood. Soon they would be in the house, and Maxime and I would put them in their frames and hang them in their rightful places. What a grand celebration we would have, the two of us surrounded by paintings.
The morning of his arrival, I fashioned a small wreath of dried lavender I had saved from the summer. Where to hang it? Over the base of the stairs? No. Somewhere in Pascal’s bedroom. That way, Maxime would know it was meant expressly for him. Its fragrance was faint, so he would more likely catch its scent if I hung it above the headboard. It looked lovely there. All was ready.
As an afterthought, I began to empty out the top drawer of Pascal’s dresser for Maxime to use. I sorted the contents to take usable items to the giveaway center in the salle des fêtes. At the bottom of a tangle of cravats, I found two yellowed pieces of paper written in Pascal’s hand and sat down to read them.
“They’re driven, both of them,” Madame Fiquet, Cézanne’s compagne, said.
“They’re madmen, both of them,” Madame Pissarro said. “That’s what the critics say.”
“And you agree?” I asked.
“One critic wrote, ‘Seen close up, his landscapes are incomprehensible and awful. Seen from afar, they are awful and incomprehensible.’ ”
“That’s snide,” I said. “Camille doesn’t deserve that injustice, but I am untrained and don’t know how to trust my feelings.”
How could Pascal have remembered such a conversation and his reactions? Of course, he might have written this down a long time ago, maybe shortly after hearing it. His handwriting here was much steadier than it was in his more recent notes.
“Will they paint the same thing today?”
“Most likely,” Madame Pissarro said.
“But their paintings will turn out differently,” Madame Fiquet said with an air of boredom.
Madame Pissarro nodded. “Camille dabs.”
“Paul smears,” Madame Fiquet said.
“Camille touches.”
“Paul presses.”
“Camille is light.”
“Paul is dark.”
“Camille mixes colors on his palette.”
“Paul doesn’t mix. He buys.”
“Camille is fussy, if you ask me.”
“Paul is simple, if you ask me.”
Amusing, this passage. Like a duet.
“They are good friends anyway?”
“The best of friends,” Madame Pissarro said.
“Paul says he has learned heaps from Camille,” Madame Fiquet said. “He idolizes him, calls him the great Pissarro, my master. They all look to Camille. He sustains them all.”
“That may be, but Camille is so obsessed that he makes me crazy. One more painting, one more. We have hundreds that have not sold, yet he is forever looking for something new to paint. This will show them, he says, and his face shines with such hope that out of love I have to keep silent and let him go on.”
“Paul gazes at something outdoors until I think he’s in a trance, and then paints in a frenzy. More often than not, when he finishes, he leaves the painting there, right in the weeds or leaning against a rock, and comes home in a daze without it. It’s exasperating.”
“Camille would never do that. He’s desperate to sell every canvas, and well he should be with a family to feed.”
“Paul is either in that trance or he’s fidgety or he’s pacing. He’s terribly moody. Bad weather makes him agitated. Only good painting calms him. He goes to bed early and wakes up in the night to examine what he painted that day. If it pleases him, he wakes me up, excited to share it with me. Then, as an apology for having awakened me, he lures me to play a game of checkers.”
“You do agree that they’re both great painters, don’t you?”
“Time will tell,” Madame Fiquet said.
“Be honest, Hortense. You know they will both become famous someday. We cannot have suffered in vain. We go without so the world will have them. That’s our lot.”
“True enough, but if I were married to Camille, I would tell him to stop fooling around with landscapes. He should paint portraits. At least you get paid for those.”
“And if I were married to Paul,” Madame Pissarro said, “I would tell him to stop painting that same mountain again and again. People are bored with it. He should paint fruit. People like fruit.”
“Can’t you say something good about them?”
> “Yes, I can.” Madame Fiquet thought awhile. “Paul’s paintings have a timeless grandeur that makes me contemplate life.”
“And Camille’s have a radiance of color that lifts my spirit,” Madame Pissarro said.
“We accept their obsessions because we love them.”
Oh, those dear, long-suffering women. I wondered if this conversation might be valuable. Probably not. Who would care that an old man, an untrained pigment salesman, jotted down a conversation that must have happened fifty years earlier? It might not even be true. Still, I saved it as a curiosity to show Maxime.
MAXIME ARRIVED IN THE AFTERNOON, lost in his beaver-collared overcoat. With hardly a greeting he practically shouted, “He took me back! Monsieur Laforgue!”
“Teeth! You have teeth now.”
He grinned, showing them off.
“Mon Dieu, what a handsome man you are!”
He blushed like a boy.
A flood of words poured out. “He said I could work whenever I am able to, but he can’t pay me as much as he did in the past. His gallery was looted, and now his paintings are scattered God knows where in the tangle of corrupt dealers. It infuriates me that the Nazis called stolen art Biens sans maîtres, ‘goods without owners.’ Monsieur Laforgue said that Pétain called them ‘artworks collected for safekeeping.’ It’s despicable.”
Still holding his valise, he continued, “He isn’t a major dealer of priceless treasures, but he is honest and fair. I was offered a better-paying position with a disreputable dealer who bought looted art at cut-rate prices and sold it quickly at a hefty profit. I told him no. ‘Plunder pirates,’ Monsieur Laforgue calls them. It will take a decade for him to rebuild his stock.”
“Slow down, Max. Take a breath. Sit,” I told him. Say hello, I thought.
“He intends to reopen by selling his private collection, which he hid in a meat locker of the boucherie below his apartment. It’s a huge personal sacrifice.”
“What about the woman apprentice?”
“He chose to rehire me over her.”
My hope sprang up.
“I am to assist in the search for the lost paintings.”
“And here too, Maxime. For my lost paintings,” I said urgently.
“Yes. Here too.”
At last he seemed to notice me.
“We’ll do it tonight. I wouldn’t think of letting you be anxious another day.”
Finally. A softer voice, a direct look, an embrace—our second, more natural than the first, when he had arrived at my door unannounced four months earlier.
“Do you have a wheelbarrow for the wood?”
“Yes, and an oil lantern.”
“Too cumbersome. I brought a battery torch.”
I prepared my standard meal for him, omelette with chèvre, beets and carrots from the root cellar, and a tin of sardines I had been saving.
“I wish I had something better to give you, but it’s winter.”
“I can tell. The house is cold.”
“I’ll put more than a few sticks in the stove when we come back. Keep your coat on.”
JUST AFTER TWILIGHT, we went to the woodpile and loaded what little wood was left into the wheelbarrow. I was so excited that I dropped the coins on the ground instead of into the slot in the tin can. They rolled downhill, bouncing on the cobbles, and I had to scramble after them in my clackety wooden-soled shoes.
We checked uphill and down. No one was around. People went home early in winter. Only a few seconds and I would see my gallery. I clapped with tight fists and lifted off the canvas. Maxime tipped up the top sheet of plywood.
Nothing was there!
Again, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I shined the light in the far recesses. Not a single painting. Maxime tipped up the bottom sheet of plywood. Only the dirt of the ground was visible in the circle of yellow light. He lay the bottom sheet of plywood down and was about to lay down the top one.
“Wait!”
Along the forward edge I noticed some pencil marks. I shined the light there and recognized them as André’s patterns, which he often penciled out on the plywood that rested on his sawhorses, the preliminary step in his carving. I dropped to my knees and ran my fingers over his beautiful arabesques, acanthus leaves, and fleurs-de-lis. My throat filled with sawdust. It took a few moments before I could say, “This board was André’s. He hid the paintings here. But they’re gone, Max. They’re gone.”
I lowered my forehead onto an arabesque and wept, not just for me and the lost paintings but for André and Pascal. Max waited, his hand on my shoulder, before he laid down the plywood and helped me up. He replaced most of the firewood and lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow full of wood. “Let’s go home.”
ONCE WE WERE INSIDE, he said in a defeated tone, “Even a big war will have small-scale pillage. Your paintings will surface, but I’m afraid not in our lifetimes.”
Losing all sense of propriety, I flung myself at his chest, pounded my fists on his bony shoulders, and cried, “No! Why do you have to be so … so absolute? You will help Monsieur Laforgue, but what about me?”
He peeled me away from him. “If I help him, he will be more amenable to me when I remind him of you.”
That was some consolation.
“In Paris, we search documents, sales records of auction houses, the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, the Bureau des Biens et Intérêts Privés, banks that may hold paintings as collateral for loans, even pawnshops. And we look through the remaining works in the Jeu de Paume, where that scoundrel Rosenberg showed them off to Göring. It’s all coming to light now. There are ways. But here, we have nothing to go on.”
“That’s not true, Maxime.”
“What then?”
I was caught up short with nothing to offer.
“Granted, things are different here, but it’s not impossible.”
I strode over to the writing desk in exasperation, took a pencil and my list out of the drawer, slapped it on the dining table, and crossed out the word Retrieve in number eleven. I wrote Find above it, so that it read Find the paintings, and added the words in MY lifetime. I wrote with such force that my pencil probably gouged the letters into the wooden table beneath the tablecloth. There. That was a vow I could not forget.
“What’s that?” Maxime asked.
I hesitated. “Just a list I’ve been keeping.”
“About what?”
“It’s a list of promises to myself. I call it Lisette’s List of Hungers and Vows.”
“May I see it?”
“Oh, no.” I held it to my chest. “It’s just for me. Something I do. I learned it from Pascal. It’s not important to anyone else.”
“To me, it would be. If it reveals something about you that I wouldn’t know in any other way, then it’s very important. I won’t make judgments.”
I read over the list silently in order to consider each item and what Maxime might think of it.
1. Love Pascal as a father.
2. Go to Paris, find Cézanne’s Card Players.
3. Do something good for a painter.
4. Learn what makes a painting great.
5. Make a blue dress, the blue of the Mediterranean Sea on a summer day with no clouds.
I started to cross out number five. It seemed inconsequential now. Maxime put his hand on my wrist to stop me. “Don’t change it for my sake.”
6. Learn how to live alone.
7. Find André’s grave and the spot where he died.
8. Forgive André.
9. Learn how to live in a painting.
10. Try not to be envious.
11. Find the paintings in MY lifetime.
12. Learn how to be self-sufficient.
13. Do something good for Maxime.
He turned his hand over, palm up. “Please?”
I could not deny him. If I were honest with myself, I would have to admit that I wanted him to know me better, but I could never bring myself to speak these things. I slid the paper�
��the gossamer fragility of a new intimacy—across the table, clasped my hands together in front of my mouth, and held my breath. He read slowly—thinking about each item, it seemed. The muscles of my shoulders relaxed. I realized that laying bare my soul was not as hard as Maxime laying bare what had happened in the trench.
“Maybe I can help you with number two, Cézanne’s Card Players.”
“I would like to discover it myself.”
He read on. “You did something good for a painter. You brought him food. Something every painter needs.”
“I wish I could have done more.”
“What makes a painting great? Oh là là. Every dealer and every painter has a slightly different answer.”
“You have already helped me with that one.”
He smiled at something, maybe the dress.
He didn’t comment on either of the items having to do with André. Certainly the situation with the paintings was not what André had anticipated. I was proud of his willingness to go to war. Neither required any forgiveness. I could cross off that item.
“Living in a painting? Hmm. Pure Lisette.”
I felt myself blush.
“Who are you envious of?” he asked gently.
“Bella and Marc Chagall. They have such a perfect, complete love, sharing everything with each other, thinking each other’s thoughts. I can’t imagine them having any secrets from each other. And he painted that love in exuberant fantasies and in tender, private moments. It seemed so rich, their love.”
“Don’t call it envy. You don’t wish them not to have that ideal love. Call it longing. Call it grieving. Call it hoping. Call it waiting. Any of these, but not envy.”
With embarrassment I admitted, “I haven’t done most of the things on that list.”
“You have done something good for me.”
“Socks don’t count for much.”
“I didn’t mean the socks.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
LAPUSHKA
1946
Lisette's List Page 22
