Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  “Paris,” he said out the window of Maurice’s bus.

  “Paris,” I echoed.

  KNOWING THAT SOMEDAY I would see the Seine again, hear lively talk in the cafés, peer at beautiful displays in shop windows, and listen to accordion music at a métro station loosened the grip of isolation and exile I had been feeling and, curiously, allowed me to appreciate my home more.

  The daylight lingered; I could enjoy our playful mural of stick figures outside, and Cézanne’s still life of fruit in the evenings. The joyfulness and humor of the tipped plate amused me. Maybe it had been wrong to hope that all the paintings lying between the boards would be waiting for me to snatch them up in one fell swoop. Seeing them all at once might have been too much. I might not have paid any attention to the single pear. I had to get reacquainted with each canvas as with an old friend—in unhurried moments, until it was secure in my heart before another would take my attention away.

  My gaze went from Cézanne’s fruit to Maxime’s marzipan fruit. What would prevent me from making my own marzipan? I would have plenty of almond meal come winter. Sugar. Sugar was still expensive. But if I bought small amounts from time to time and drank tea with Maurice’s honey instead of using sugar in coffee, by Christmas I would have enough to make marzipan gifts for my friends. And after that, Odette could sell them in the boulangerie or Jérôme Cachin in his épicerie. And over time, I could earn my rail ticket to Paris.

  In the meantime, I would have to find ways to make natural dyes and try them out on white potatoes. During the next several weeks, I roasted my carrots in embers, scraped and mashed the skins, and dried and pulverized the residue. Mixed with a few drops of water, it turned a skinned and boiled white potato a beautiful orange.

  I tried acacia blossoms for yellow, but they turned the potato bitter, and I spit it out. I went to Apt and found yellow saffron threads at the spice table. They were expensive, but I bought a minute amount. I needed yellow to blend with orange for a peach.

  The leaves of my beets distilled into yellow-green for pears. I boiled my smallest beet root to make a rich reddish purple juice for red grapes. I tried a bee orchid, but it yielded a grayish mauve, suitable only for a mildewed plum. Yellow dandelions produced a pale urine color. But wild heliotrope blossoms made a deep purple, just right for dark grapes.

  I remembered from the time I took chèvre to the refugees living in the windmill that there was a pomegranate tree there. I would have to wait until November for the hard fruit to develop seeds and ripen. I felt sure that the juice would make a deep, ruby red for apples.

  But how to make the almond paste? One afternoon, I took the four marzipan fruits in the little box to the boulangerie and opened it in front of René.

  “Have you ever made marzipan?”

  “Oh yes. In Italy. Almond paste and sugar.”

  “What else?”

  “A couple of eggs. You’ll need some cream of tartar to stabilize the egg whites and give a creamier texture. For my cake frostings, I get it from the sediment produced in the process of making wine. Émile Vernet will give you all you’ll ever need. Just a pinch.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Trial and error. And patience.”

  WITH AS MUCH PATIENCE as I could manage, I watched the soft green almond pods turn hard, their surfaces becoming pocked like cork. Finally November came, time of the almond harvest. As I had done before, I flung a rope around the lower branches and shooed Geneviève away, but she stubbornly refused to move.

  “You’ll be sorry,” I sang out to her, and I remembered Bernard Blanc saying those same words in this very courtyard. I yanked the rope sharply until the nuts rained down on us, which brought an angry baa and an unmistakable glower as she scampered away.

  Then came the tedious task of setting them on edge one by one on a flat stone and tapping them open with André’s mallet. I ate the first one and choked on the skin. I would have to blanch them in boiling water to remove the skins. I burned the shells in the stove to heat the water—the Provençal principle of no waste.

  Following René’s instructions for almond paste, I pulverized the blanched almonds, heated the sugar slowly, added Émile’s substitute for cream of tartar, boiled it for three minutes, put the saucepan in cold water, stirred until it thickened, stirred in my almonds, added egg whites, stirred again for two minutes over low heat, and spooned the mixture onto a board dusted with powdered sugar. It was not hard to knead it into balls, but the taste—! Blah!

  I went back to René. “It’s tasteless,” I said.

  “Help it along with some almond extract. Jérôme sells it.”

  “Now you tell me. I’ve wasted sugar.”

  Odette looked at me with compassion, smacked a baguette on her glass counter, and waved away my coin. I left discouraged, until I thought of trading almonds for almond extract. Monsieur Cachin drove a hard bargain, but I got it.

  I used the ruined batch to practice making the shapes and testing all the colors. I made balls, squeezed them at one end for pears, pressed in a crater at the top and bottom for apples, rolled them into an oval for grapes, carved and smoothed a groove for peaches. In a strangely satisfying way, this reminded me of André gouging grooves and carving leaves to decorate frames.

  “Look, André,” I said out loud. “I carved a peach!”

  THE END OF NOVEMBER was harvest time for pomegranates too. I was lucky. There were more on the tree by the windmill than I would need. Feeling like a thief, I twisted three off easily and was working on the fourth when I heard a door bang. I dropped them all and scurried away, sure that I would be chased off with a pitchfork.

  No one followed me. I waited awhile, crouching behind an overgrown rosemary bush. The banging happened twice more. I peeked out and saw the door of the windmill swing open of its own accord and slam shut. Of course! Windmills are built where there is wind.

  I crept back and gathered my four pomegranates. Thinking that the refugee family might still be living there, I knocked politely and heard nothing. This was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I propped open the door with rocks so I could see inside. It was clear that people had been living on the ground floor, but there was no evidence of the family’s belongings. A barrel had been turned upside down for a table. Empty sardine tins and wine bottles and crows’ feet—refuse from their meals—lay scattered. How bizarre it would be to live in a circular room without being able to see across it because of the mechanism and the circular stairway around the central shaft.

  I moved every dust-covered thing that would move, tipped the barrel sideways to look beneath it, turned every grain sack inside out, and found nothing but a dead mouse.

  I climbed the stairs, through cobwebs, to an octagonal landing. A wheel with ratchets was mounted there, intersecting with a smaller one with spindles. I moved every piece of wood, every tool.

  A ladder led up higher. When I stepped on the first rung, it cracked and gave way, but I was able to pull myself up, hand over hand. Just under the rounded roof cap, in a narrow space, I saw that wooden wedges had been stacked neatly. In the dim light, I counted the rows so I could put them back exactly as I’d found them. They had been stacked on what appeared to be a canvas! I brought it down into the light of the doorway.

  Pissarro’s La Petite Fabrique—the paint factory in Pontoise!

  What if I were seen leaving with it? I wasn’t the thief. Why shouldn’t I have it? It made no sense to be cautious, but something told me to come back and get it after dark. I put it in a flour sack beneath the upturned barrel and grabbed my pomegranates. It was difficult holding on to four at once, so I lifted my skirt and made a hollow to put them in and hurried away, looking at the uneven ground to avoid tripping, until I saw two freshly shined boots in front of me. I stopped short.

  “If you wanted pomegranates, I could have reached more in the tree than you could.”

  The constable stood in the road with his feet apart, a colossus. Would I never be rid of him? Had he seen me co
me out of the windmill just now, trespassing?

  “Oh! I … I … just wanted a few.” Certainly saying that wouldn’t antagonize him.

  “Your underskirt is lovely, but I would prefer to see it in a bedchamber rather than in the roadway.”

  Biting my tongue, I brushed down my skirt, and the pomegranates tumbled. I crouched to gather them, and he did too. Our arms tangled. He pushed me onto my back, then lowered himself onto me, holding me there face-to-face. I struggled to free myself, until his eyes widened, taking on a startled look, and he raised himself, helped me up, and let me go.

  “THE DEVIL TAKE THAT MAN!” I cried as soon as I got home, relieved that I hadn’t been holding the painting. I stomped upstairs, flung myself onto my bed, and waited for the early darkness—my excitement coming in waves despite the encounter with Bernard. His alarmed expression seemed to indicate that he had shocked himself. I hoped he was even now feeling remorse.

  As soon as night fell, I went back to the windmill. In the darker darkness inside, I reached out for the barrel and found the sack beneath it.

  On the roadway, I happened to kick something that might have been a pomegranate. I felt around on the ground until I found it, and reached home safely with sack and pomegranate both.

  IN THE MORNING, I found another flour sack at my door, filled with seven pomegranates. Bon Dieu! When and where would he turn up next?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  FRUITS OF CHRISTMAS

  1946

  I TACKED LA PETITE FABRIQUE ONTO THE SMALLEST STRETCHERS, rinsed it with water as Maxime had done with the still life, and put it in its small frame. It had hung between the two south windows where I had tacked Marc’s painting. Carefully, I took down the goat, the chicken, and me and moved it to the edge of the north wall where four paintings had hung. Positioning it close to the dining table, I could look at it while I ate.

  But before I hung the little Pissarro between the windows, I had to tell Maurice and Louise! I put it back into the burlap sack, raced down the street, and rapped on their door. Louise answered. Maurice was on the ledge halfway down the cliff where he kept his beehives.

  I shouted to him, “I have something to show you.”

  He scrambled up. Inside, at their dining table, when I had their attention, I slowly drew the painting out of the sack.

  They were as thrilled as I was and asked a dozen questions.

  “You realize what this means, don’t you?” Maurice said. “Each of the paintings is hidden separately.”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  “As a precaution. If someone came upon a hiding place, by intention or by chance, that person would find only one.”

  “Then the rest of them could be anywhere. It might take me years, unless Mayor Pinatel absconded with them. Then they would be lost forever. But why didn’t he take these?”

  “You could get lucky, like you were with this one,” Louise said, cheerful as always.

  “It isn’t my favorite painting—just a plain boxy building with a smokestack—but it meant a lot to Pascal. It’s a paint factory in Pontoise. He sold ochres there. He must have told you.”

  Maurice rolled his eyes. “At least a dozen times.”

  I remembered what Maxime had said about great paintings—that they had the power to command a trancelike state of communion with the image so that the viewer would come to know himself or the world more clearly. Now, looking long and deeply at the painting, I recognized a humbleness in that little factory doing its part to turn earth into beauty. The colors of Cézanne’s apples and oranges might have been made right there in that nondescript building.

  “There are two more windmills near here,” Louise offered.

  Maurice added, “Moulin de Ferre, this side of Joucas, and Moulin de l’Auro. It means ‘wind from the north’ in the Occitan language. It’s near Murs.”

  “Can you take me?”

  “Not so fast. We don’t have permission to enter.”

  “Who can give permission? Only the owners?”

  “The owners or, in lieu of them, Aimé Bonhomme, but he would be obliged to tell the garde champêtre, who has jurisdiction over the commune, so that Bernard won’t assume you are trespassing.”

  Bernard again! “No. Please don’t ask. I don’t want the constable to know.”

  “He’s the proper person.”

  “No. He’s the most improper person. He might even be the thief, for all we know. And I’ve been rude to him, so even if he isn’t the thief I’m sure he won’t want to help me. We’ll go without permission. At night.”

  “You are turning my good intentions of being a chevalier of the roads into the bad intentions of being a trespasser. But the trespassing of the knights-errant on their quests for the Holy Grail was forgiven because their motive was pure.”

  “The troubadours sang about them coming through Provence, didn’t they?” I asked.

  Maurice lifted his eyebrows. “Troubadours originated here, ma petite! From Provençal soil, when the whole southern region of France was called Occitania, all the way to two seas.” A grin slid over his face. “Chivalry! Courtly love, my lady! Knights undergoing dark dangers for their chaste lovers! Oh là là! Quelle aventure! Get Maxime back here, and we’ll go a-roving on a night when there is no moon to reveal us.”

  “Maurice! Be serious!” Louise commanded. “These are Lisette’s paintings at stake. This is not a game!”

  “She’s right, Maurice. It’s not,” I said, but there was no diverting Maurice’s well-intenioned desire to lighten the situation.

  “Oh, my lady,” he whined, stroking Louise’s cheek. “Would you deny me the pleasure of a dangerous pursuit for a noble cause?” Louise pursed her lips in exasperation. “You want me to be chivalrous, don’t you?” he asked. He nodded for her and said, “Òc, òc.”

  “What’s òc òc?”

  “It means ‘yes’ in the old Occitan language, which developed here into Provençal,” Maurice said, “and it has secret powers for finding hidden paintings.”

  “Ouf,” Louise said. “You’re impossible.”

  “Òc, òc,” I agreed. “Impossible.”

  Despite Maurice’s insistence on turning the windmill search into a caper, and despite being no closer to finding the other paintings, I clutched the Pissarro to my chest and left the Chevets’ house with hope. A few days later I wrote to Maxime.

  4 DECEMBER, SAINTE BARBARA’S DAY, 1946

  Dear Maxime,

  Your drawing of the windmill has brought good luck. I found a painting there! All by myself. It’s the small Pissarro called La Petite Fabrique. It has given me hope. There are two other windmills here that we can search. Please come when it’s warmer and the threat of mistrals isn’t so great. Windmills are in windy spots. We need to search them without permission, at night.

  I am earning my way to come to Paris, but it’s going to take a long time. You can guess how if you like. I am inspired by your gift of marzipan.

  Geneviève and Kooritzah Deux miss you terribly and pine for the day when you will return. Not understanding that you are doing the work you should in Paris, Geneviève has become irritable and Kooritzah morose.

  Joyeux Noël,

  Lisette

  After I sealed the letter, I took out my List of Hungers and Vows. Number two, Go to Paris, find Cézanne’s Card Players, I realized, was a hunger. Number fourteen would be a vow:

  Earn my way to Paris.

  IN MY QUEST TO make perfect marzipan I took pleasure in thinking of its source. Except for the Spanish oranges, the fruit Cézanne painted had been grown in Provence and bought at a market in Aix. His paint used the ochres of Provence, and now my marzipan would be colored by the plants of Provence. The almonds were from my tree, growing on Provençal soil. Kooritzah Deux, my Provençal chicken, would provide the eggs. It was all of a piece. With a touch of amazement, I realized how important Provence had become for me. I was, in a truer sense than blood, Pascal’s daughter.

 
I started over, making very small batches so as not to waste the ingredients if they didn’t adhere or if the marzipan had no almond taste. I prepared juices, distilled carrot residue, and smeared the dyes onto my practice fruits. The colors came out too dark. I learned about diluting and using tiny amounts. It was an alchemy of nature, and I was fascinated, spending days poring over my precious fruits. The first time I gave a pale yellow peach a touch of ruby pomegranate juice and blended it with strokes of my wet fingertip to look smooth and natural, then used the juice full strength for the groove and the stem’s depression, I felt like an artist. More difficult to do were the threadlike red striations on yellow apples. I used a pine needle as an applicator. For pomegranates, I laid down a wash of orange from carrot scrapings and overlaid it here and there with diluted pomegranate juice. Inside the crowns, I used a drop of beet juice. I kept records of my experiments and made arrangements on saucers.

  When I had a successful batch, I took an apple and a peach to René and Odette in the boulangerie.

  “Too lovely to eat,” Odette said, and put the peach on a saucer on the counter.

  “Then how are you going to know what it tastes like?” René asked. He bit into his apple and rolled the morsel around in his mouth, sucking in his cheeks, nodding his head in approval.

  “It could stand a couple more drops of almond extract,” he advised.

  FOR THE HOLIDAY MARKET, the day before Christmas, I had plenty of marzipan fruits to sell, so Maurice let me share the vendor’s table where he sold his honey. I placed the candies in rows on a white napkin in a shallow drawer I had removed from the desk and wrote Twenty centimes each on a piece of paper, which I folded, then stood up like a tent.

  Although it was cold, the square was festive. People wrapped in mufflers were happy to engage in the old traditions. Chanteurs strolled by carrying candles and singing the sprightly carol “Il Est Né, le Divin Enfant.”

  When someone came to the table to purchase honey, Maurice said, “Wouldn’t you like to buy some of Lisette’s pretty marzipan?” And when someone came to the table to pick out a couple of marzipans, I said, “Wouldn’t you like to try some of Maurice’s delicious lavender honey?” Because marzipan was one of the thirteen desserts served traditionally at Christmas here, my little fruits sold well.