The Lost Carousel of Provence

by Juliet Blackwell

  “You know,” Cady said, studying the fat volumes, “these books might be worth real money, Fabrice. A lot of these are signed first editions.”

  “What do I care, at this point? I guess Jean-Paul will sell them all off, soon enough, when he sells this place.”

  “And what do you think about that?”

  There was a long pause as the espresso machine hissed and spit. When Fabrice finally set a tiny cup of coffee in front of Cady and answered her, his tone was muted. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “This place defeated me, and it would do the same to him,” he said, growing agitated. “At least maybe he’s smart enough to get out from under it right away, make a life for himself back in Paris.”

  She decided to change the subject. “I wanted to ask you: Would you mind if I developed the film cartridges I found? They’ve been exposed, but not developed.”

  He gave her a blank look.

  “In other words,” she tried again, “there might be photos that are salvageable.”

  “After all this time?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Old film is resilient; they found some from Shackleton’s expedition to the Antarctic in a block of ice, and developed them one hundred years later.”

  “Do whatever you want. What do I care?” He went back to reading his newspaper.

  “You’re not curious? There could be photos of your family.”

  “Some things are better left as they are.” He made a dismissive gesture. “Take them if you want, but I don’t want to see them.”

  “So it’s okay with you if I have them developed?”

  He shrugged. “Build a fire with them, for all I care.”

  The question was where and how to develop them. What Cady wouldn’t give for access to her old darkroom. France was more old-fashioned than the United States, and Avignon was a fairly large city, so there might still be film-developing services available. But could she trust such precious film to a commercial lab? She longed to do it herself. Just the thought of the chemical smells made her nostalgic for long afternoons spent in darkness, listening to audiobooks as she dipped sheets of specially treated paper into their chemical baths, one after another, watching an image appear where once there was nothing.

  Those solitary afternoons had been a salve to her soul: first as a teenager, when she was just learning, and later as an adult, when photography became her living.

  “When are you going shopping?” Fabrice asked.

  “This may come as a surprise to you, Fabrice, but half the day doesn’t have to be taken up by shopping. A person could buy enough for several days and not go to the store every day.”

  He looked at her.

  She smiled. “But I had planned to go this morning.”

  “I want fish for dinner,” he said, handing her a list.

  “Fish it is. Oh, hey, guess who I ran into in town yesterday?”

  “I give up.”

  “Johnny.”

  “Johnny Clement?”

  “He’s a Clement? The teenager who was here, throwing rocks?”

  “The town’s full of Clements.”

  “So I’m learning. Anyway, he’s coming over to work after school.”

  “Work where?”

  “Here. He’s going to clean up the mess he made.”

  Fabrice snorted. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  “He’s clearly going down a bad path,” she said to Fabrice. “You need to reach out to him.”

  “Why me? He vandalized my place.”

  “I know that. But I have a little experience with this sort of thing. I was a bad kid myself. As were you, unless I miss my guess.”

  He glared at her.

  “Kids need a lifeline. He might be a lost cause, but it’s worth a try. Sometimes it takes just a little help. Look, I’m an outsider. I don’t have any authority here. But maybe if you talk to his father, tell him he’ll be coming here to work it off . . .”

  “Hand me the damned phone.”

  “Remember how you told me you didn’t have a phone that first night?” she teased as she grabbed the old-fashioned landline. It had a cord long enough to cross the kitchen.

  “Didn’t want to be bothered. Besides, there was no one to call.”

  Cady smiled as she watched him look up the number, running his gnarled finger down a long list of handwritten names and numbers in a battered old address book.

  She imagined the “C” section of his address book was full indeed.

  * * *

  • • •

  Cady was perusing the limited fish selection at the grocery store when the cashier, Annick, waved her over.

  “If you are looking for fish you should buy direct from the trout farm. It is a business that has been run by the same family for generations. There’s a lovely fromagerie on the way there as well.”

  Cady bought the rest of her groceries and followed Annick’s directions down a winding mountain road along the river. She arrived at a clutch of stone buildings, one of which was clearly a large private home, with picture-perfect lace curtains in the windows and a fat cat lazing on the porch in a shaft of April sunshine.

  Inside the shop, a plump, red-faced woman greeted her with “Ah oui, you are the American staying at the château?”

  Word had spread.

  “How is Fabrice doing?” asked the woman. “I hear he hurt his ankle.”

  “He’s doing better, thank you. I’ll need two trouts for our dinner.”

  “The fish here is very special, you know,” the woman said as she used a large net to scoop a wriggling trout out of the tank, laid it on the table, and knocked it out in one smooth move. Cady grimaced and focused on the view of the emerald green river through the window. It was fun to think about buying fish at the source, but Cady was most definitely a city girl, more comfortable with buying meat under plastic at the market.

  “The river Sorgue comes out of the belly of the mountain in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. Not a small spring, mind you, but an entire river, flowing just like that, out of the rock. This is why it is always very cold, even during the hottest summers. No one knows where it comes from; no one has been able to reach the bottom.”

  Cady remembered Jean-Paul mentioning the town; Fabrice’s “Minette” was from there, and supposedly it had been home to a dragon, once upon a time.

  “I’ll take a pack of smoked trout as well,” Cady said on impulse, as the woman handed her a bag along with a small piece of paper with a recipe for truit Provençal, made with classic herbes de Provence.

  Next, a “quick stop” at the fromagerie turned into a forty-minute tasting odyssey, as the cheesemaker introduced her to the local fromages. A goat cheese called Banon was small, round, and pungent, wrapped in chestnut leaves and tied with raffia. Another, Brousse du Rove, was considered petit lait, and came in tall little tubes covered in woven wicker.

  She splurged, buying two of each, in addition to a wedge of Roquefort, a small round of Camembert, and a jar of onion compote.

  Back home in Oakland, Cady hadn’t been one to give in to impulse. But she was in France, after all.

  * * *

  • • •

  Cady carted the groceries into the kitchen and found Fabrice in his favorite chair in front of the fire. Despite railing at the doctor’s advice yesterday, he had been following directions, putting his ankle up and icing it frequently throughout the day.

  “How’s your ankle?”

  “A little better, maybe,” he said, watching her unpack. “Where’d you get all that?”

  “From an amazing fromagerie on the way back from the fishery.”

  He glared at her. “Only idiots buy at fromageries.”

  “I never claimed not to be an idiot.”

  “Speaking of idiots, Johnny will com
e after lunch.”

  “Why is he so mad at you?” Cady asked.

  “He didn’t bring me what I wanted. So I fired him.”

  “And then the grocery store fired him.” Cady unpacked the brown paper bag from the trout farm.

  Fabrice eyed the packages as they came out of the bag. “The trout woman talked you into buying too much.”

  “She didn’t talk me into anything; I bought just as much as I wanted to buy. And anyway, I’m paying for the groceries today, so don’t worry about it.”

  “Mais ça coûte les yeux de la tête.” Which literally meant that it cost the eyes from the head.

  She took a deep breath, gesturing at him with a knife she had picked up to wash. “Look, old man, this is my first and probably only time I’ll ever be in France, and I was at a Provençal trout farm in the mountains. So if I want to buy myself some smoked fish, then it’s nobody’s business but mine.”

  He raised his eyebrows as if to say Sheesh, and turned his attention back to his newspaper.

  “Could I ask you something?” Cady asked.

  “Seems like that’s about all you do.”

  “You’re forever reading the paper. Why are you so interested in the world if you won’t take part in it?”

  “The paper gets delivered. I didn’t ask for it, but as long as it shows up, I might as well read it.”

  She smiled. “Today the fish woman told me about the town called Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. You mention it in Le Château as well.”

  “It’s a famous place. Pétrarque lived there. He wrote some of his most famous verses while there.”

  “He was a poet, right?”

  “You don’t know Pétrarque? He is credited with inventing romanticism.”

  “I didn’t realize there was ever a time without romance.”

  Fabrice snorted in an almost-laugh that delighted Cady. “I meant in literature. It was in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse that he wrote his most famous lines, for his beloved Laura: ‘The waters speak of love, and the breeze, the oars, the little birds, the fish, the flowers, and the grass all together beg me to love forever.’”

  “And did he?”

  “Did he what?”

  “Love forever?”

  “Yes. Yes, he did,” Fabrice said in a somber tone. “Now what are you smiling about?”

  “You,” said Cady, heating water for coffee. “You act like a cranky old grump, but you’re such a romantic underneath it all.”

  He snorted. “You remind me of . . . someone I knew when I was a teenager.”

  “This was during the war?”

  He nodded.

  “Jean-Paul mentioned that you worked with the Résistance.”

  He inclined his head, just barely, a far-off look in his eye.

  “I saw some plaques in Paris; I wasn’t sure what they were about, but Madame Martin told me they were in memory of guerrilla fighters with the Résistance.”

  He nodded. “I fought in combat only at the very end. A terrible clarity occurs when a person has nothing left to live for.”

  “You had nothing left to live for?”

  “My family had been taken away by the Gestapo.” His tone was matter-of-fact, but his mouth twisted slightly as he stared at the nonexistent fire in the hearth.

  Cady tried to think of some response adequate to the situation, but words failed her. Then she remembered the people who felt compelled to say something about Maxine’s death, and decided to hold her tongue, to sit silently and share the moment, however uncomfortable.

  “I would like to go back to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse,” Fabrice said suddenly. “I would like to see it one more time, before I die.”

  “Would you like me to take you?”

  He got up and started to walk out of the room, but at the doorway he turned and said: “Yes. In a day or two, when my ankle is better, we’ll go to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. And . . . if you still want, I’ll show you that damned carousel.”

  “Really? Now?”

  “Your little friend Johnny is due any minute. You deal with him, and take this dog out, and then make dinner, and if I still feel like it, we’ll look at it after a whiskey.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  1944

  PARIS

  Fabrice

  A blue scarf hung in the window of Dr. Duhamel’s office.

  Fabrice spotted it at the last moment and ducked into the entrance of the apartment building next door, pretending to search the buttons for a name, as though he were visiting a friend.

  His heart hammered in his chest. This was like being searched on the train, but worse. Fabrice had come to think of the doctor’s office as not so much his sanctuary as his escape from the boredom and grueling sameness of living under Nazi occupation: It was the source of glamour and intrigue and romance.

  Slowly, very carefully, trying to regulate his breathing, he peeked out from the doorway. He prayed that he’d gotten it wrong, that perhaps his eyes were fooled by a trick of the golden evening light glinting off the window.

  He was not wrong. The maid Carine had hung her blue scarf in the window. It was the prearranged signal of a mousetrap. The Gestapo would descend upon the headquarters of a cell, then remain within, quietly waiting for others to appear: couriers, messengers, anyone related in any way to the others in the cell.

  What now? The instructions were clear: If you saw the signal, you were to melt back into the non-shadow world. And wait.

  But he had to find Paulette.

  He ran to Claude Frenet’s home. They had grown closer through their shared goals, but nonetheless they remained more colleagues than friends. Still, for want of someone else to share with, Fabrice had confided in Claude his love for Paulette.

  Claude’s mother tearfully informed Fabrice that Claude had disappeared; she hadn’t seen or heard from him since the night before. Now Fabrice was pierced by another fear: Would Claude betray Paulette? And the rest of them? Had he already? For all Fabrice knew, Claude might have been an infiltrator all along; he might have been the one to turn the cell in, to reveal the work of the doctor and his wife.

  And Paulette? Had she been taken? Fabrice didn’t even know her last name. The reality chafed him, the fear stabbed. He should have insisted, should have forced her to tell him. He should have foreseen the possibility of something like this.

  Frantic, Fabrice searched Paris for her: from cafés to bookstores to the neighborhood he had followed her to once, where he thought she lived, near the Moulin Rouge. Nazis flirting with Parisian women outside the nightclubs made him sick, but he smiled and waggled his eyebrows at them to avoid suspicion. People said the prostitutes were guilty of collaboration horizontale, essentially collaborating on their backs. But what choice did they have? Fabrice was doubly disgusted by the bankers and businesspeople becoming wealthy under the German occupation. And the ones who moved, cowlike and docile, into the new Nazi reality.

  Fabrice spotted a red beret on short, honey-colored hair. In a spasm of relief he grabbed the woman’s arm and spun her around, but it was not Paulette.

  The German officer with her berated him, but Fabrice hardly registered the words. He wandered off and headed to the only other possible rendezvous point he could think of: the printshop.

  * * *

  • • •

  The shop had been ransacked, the door left ajar, the precious machinery destroyed. Fabrice stood in front of the broken printing press, defeated, then heard a footstep behind him.

  He turned to find Claude pointing a gun at him.

  “You?” Fabrice demanded. “You’re the traitor?”

  “No,” Claude insisted, shaking his head vehemently. “It wasn’t me. I barely escaped with my life. I can’t go home, I—”

  Claude had let the pistol droop in his hand. Fabrice knew that he was afraid of guns, and in a calculated move,
he leapt on his former comrade. The gun fell from Claude’s hand and skittered along the ink-stained wooden planks, and Fabrice dove for it. The men grappled, rolling on the floor, and though Fabrice was younger and smaller, he was the better fighter, more willing to be vicious.

  He stood and loomed over Claude, pointing the gun at his head.

  “It wasn’t me!” Claude yelled. “It was her!”

  “Who?” Fabrice demanded.

  “Michelle.” Paulette’s nom de guerre. “Your girlfriend, the one you love so much.”

  It was falling off a cliff. It was drowning. It was being lined up against a wall and shot, the bullet tearing into his gut.

  “Wh-what are you talking about?” Fabrice stammered.

  “She was the collaborator. They got to her family, in her village in Provence, and threatened them. She betrayed us.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Ask the doctor, or the maid—Carine was one of the first to suspect.”

  “I can’t. Everyone’s gone.”

  “Think about it, Fabrice. How did the Gestapo know about Pierre and Françoise, or Monsieur R., or any of the others who went off on missions and never returned?”

  Fabrice tried to think. Everything hurt. The scrapes and bruises from grappling with Claude were nothing compared to the pounding in his head, the sick sensation behind his eyes, the belief that his heart was actually shattering into shards that were crowding his chest and tumbling, bleeding and broken, into his gut. He fought the compulsion to vomit.

  “Remember when you went to take the photos outside of Nantes?” Claude continued. “The doctor told her you had been sent to Brest. He had his suspicions about her even then.”

  Fabrice remembered: Paulette had seemed shocked to see him when he walked into the office after returning from his trip to Saint-Nazaire. At the time he thought she was overwhelmed with relief, full of emotion upon his return. That was the first time he had held her in his arms. Could it be possible that she had intended to send him to his death?