“We’ll manage,” Grant said. He produced the key and handed it across the table.
“What about my luggage, all my things?”
“We’ll arrange for everything to be brought here. It’s best if you don’t go out again before we leave tomorrow.”
Zilberman got to his feet and shook Varian’s hand, then Grant’s, thanking them again in German and in English. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’ll go upstairs and lie down now.”
“Of course,” Varian said.
Zilberman gave an awkward half-bow, touched the brim of his straw hat, and left them there at the courtyard table. They sat there for a long moment, letting the air settle. The fountain played and splashed, brown Arlesian birds sang songs in French, and in one of the rooms above, someone whistled.
“Well, damn me,” Varian said. “Lev Zilberman.”
“And now what?” Grant said.
What indeed? Send Zilberman back to Marseille on the train with Lena. Quit his job and retire to the French countryside. Divorce his intelligent and forbearing wife. Eat lotus. Stay here forever with Grant. “Now we send someone for his things. And then we see Breitscheid and Hilferding.”
The whistle came again. There in a third-story window, leaning out over a geranium-heavy flower box, was yesterday’s blond Edouard.
“There’s our errand boy,” Grant said, and whistled back.
* * *
________
Having sent off Edouard to collect Zilberman’s things, they went to see Breitscheid and Hilferding, who were enduring their house arrest in a large white-stuccoed villa at the edge of town. The roof was of paprika-colored tile, the façade fanned with bougainvillea; beside the tall front doors, gardenias grew in jade-green pots. They approached and knocked tentatively, not wanting the inhabitants to believe them to be the police. A long moment elapsed. Then a sliver of an aperture appeared between the double doors; and in the aperture, the glint of an eye.
“Who is it?” a voice whispered.
Varian explained.
The door opened another centimeter, and now Varian and Grant could see a narrow slice of a woman’s face. “Go away,” she said, in a smoke-laced alto. “You’ll get us all in trouble!”
“On the contrary,” Varian said. “We’re here to get you out of trouble.”
“We can’t receive visitors. And we’re not in need of an advocate.”
“That’s not what I heard,” Varian said.
“Go away!” the woman said in her sandpapery whisper. “I’m closing the door.”
From inside the house, another voice, a man’s: “Who is it, Erika?”
The door closed abruptly. Through it came a volley of voices, rising to the muffled sounds of an argument. Grant and Varian exchanged a look.
“You’d think I was selling life insurance,” Varian said.
“Aren’t you?” Grant said, and laughed.
A moment later, the door swung open and there was Breitscheid himself in a crimson smoking jacket, his reading glasses perched on his loaf-shaped nose, a newspaper under his arm. His downturned mustache gave him an expression of severe disapproval; between the bat-wings of his collar hung the narrowest of ties, as though his person required only the minimum of decoration.
“Mr. Fry,” he said. “What are you doing here? And who’s this?”
“That’s Mr. Grant,” Varian said. “And I’m here to help you out of this mess.”
Breitscheid glanced back into the house. “I’d hardly call it a mess,” he said. “We’re rather comfortable, in fact.”
“Comfortable?” Varian said, a flush scaling his neck. “To me it looks like you’re stuck in that house, waiting for Vichy to ship you back to Germany.”
Breitscheid shook his head. “Our plight has been much exaggerated, I’m afraid.”
“I understood that you were under house arrest.”
“I suppose we are, if you want to use that term. But really, it’s more of a gentlemanly arrangement. You might say the police are protecting us.”
“Protecting you,” Varian repeated.
“Yes, Mr. Fry. This idea that we’re in imminent danger—it’s a rather colorful depiction of our situation. One that might excite the foreign press. But it is not based in fact.”
“That’s what you told me a few weeks ago, Mr. Breitscheid, when I suggested you not discuss your business aloud at Marseille cafés. And now here you are.”
“Mr. Fry, the rules that apply to the common refugee do not pertain to us. Our stature—”
“Oh, yes,” Varian said. “I’m familiar with that line of argument.”
Breitscheid’s look grew sterner. “We will certainly call upon you if the need arises.”
“My secretary cabled me in Lisbon to say you were in need now. I came back at once, specifically to help you.”
“You are very kind,” Breitscheid said, icily. “We appreciate your concern. And now I must ask you to excuse me, as I’d like to get back to my card game.”
“Your card game!” Varian half-shouted. “Herr Breitscheid—”
“Yes. When you arrived, you interrupted us at piquet with our so-called captors. You’ll forgive me if I don’t feel particularly threatened.”
“You can’t dissuade me,” Varian said. “I’m going to work on your behalf back in Marseille. At least we’ll see if our lawyer can get your house-arrest status lifted.”
“As I said, Mr. Fry, we appreciate your kind concern. Now, good day.”
The door closed. Varian stood beside Grant on the doorstep, trembling with rage. “For God’s sake,” he said. “Piquet!”
* * *
________
At the hotel that night, sharing Grant’s bed, he couldn’t find a path that led to sleep. But then he had never slept easily at Grant’s side; in college there had been the constant fear of discovery, no matter how soundly they locked and barricaded the door. And this despite the fact that they knew they weren’t alone in the practice, that similar pairings were occurring all around them in the rooms of Gore Hall and in the other dormitories. Later, after Eileen’s arrival in his life and before Grant’s departure, a low-level drone of guilt kept him awake; having met Eileen, he knew he had to keep her or abandon all hope of a life that at least appeared ordinary from the outside. Eileen understood. And not just understood, but participated. Like him, she desired a life that admitted sexual fortuity, occasional acts of self-indulgence, good cheap fucking; it seemed part and parcel of her intelligence, essential to her Weltanschauung. She seemed, at the time, the perfect solution to his problem. Once he’d realized it, he began to feel like a criminal in bed with Grant; after they’d spent an evening in tireless attack on each other’s bodies, Grant’s quiet breathing beside him seemed a confirmation of his guilt. And finally there was Maine, their last days. How he’d lain awake in the slope-roofed room they’d occupied together, how he’d watched the dawn come in at the windows, how he’d listened to the din of birdsong, dreading the change that had to come.
Now here they were again, Grant no longer on the other side of a hotel wall but here in his very bed, Grant’s flank stretched along Varian’s, not in teasing and fleeting contact but as a persistent fact; Grant’s familiar deep breathing, his familiar pulse, his heartbeat so slow that, as he’d told Varian, his boyhood physician had feared for his health. Oftentimes, during the long years of his absence and silence, Varian had thought of that heart and considered that Grant must be dead. But now he moved against Varian, inarguably alive, hard in sleep, his hand on Varian’s chest. In a moment they were both awake, and dawn pushed fingers of light through the break between the curtains, brutal bright weather for their return to Marseille.
* * *
________
Lena met them at the station with papers for Zilberman: a false passpo
rt with a half-convincing photo, a transit visa, a permit for temporary residence in Marseille. Zilberman accepted the documents with trembling incredulity and folded them into his breast pocket. He looked as though he hadn’t slept either; he was neatly dressed and combed, but his eyes were a raw insomniac red. He carried a portfolio and dragged a large metal trunk, the transport of which had cost Varian some five hundred francs.
Varian and Grant wore their cycling clothes, cleaned, ironed, and starched to the point of punishment, a reproof from the laundress. They talked little on the train. Varian sat knee to knee with Lena, reviewing a set of dismaying financial estimates Oppy had just delivered: how much the Centre’s next month would cost in terms of manpower, rent, refugee support, and bribes, based upon the previous month’s expenditures. It was, at least, a relief from the matter of the black Gitane, which he envisioned locked away in that convent like a novitiate—though by now it might be in the courtyard of the chief gendarme’s building, approaching defilement by the fifteen-year-old son. He and Grant had discussed the situation that morning, first in bed and then in a blinding hot shower. There was only one way to frame the situation to Madame Balansard: her husband’s bike had saved a man’s life. She had made a sacrifice for the cause of freedom. The ERC would compensate her for the loss.
He and Grant. Grant and I. How long had it been since they’d existed in grammatical proximity? It was where he’d once lived every day of his life. Already they’d fallen into the familiar habit of public separation, the distance that masked its opposite. They’d ridden to Marseille side by side, but now Grant sat across the aisle with Zilberman, at an angle that robbed Varian of a means by which to catch his eye. In one hand Grant held a scholarly tome on his subject, late nineteenth-century verse; with a slender finger he tapped iambs against his knee. Would there be a cable from Eileen at the Splendide? Varian wondered. What would she have heard, what would she have written? After this weekend, what could he ever write to her again?
At the Gare St. Charles they retrieved the single bicycle and Zilberman’s bags. Lena went to install the painter at the Splendide, in Mehring’s narrow room, if Mehring agreed. Grant accompanied Varian to the intersection of La Canebière, where they stood for a moment on the corner, scarcely daring to look each other in the eye. All the enticements of Grant’s physical self—the texture of his skin, the indent of muscle at his waist, the strength of his hands—made Varian mad with recent tactile memory. He wanted to bite Grant’s collarbone, to take the heels of Grant’s hands and press them to his own eyes. He wanted to follow him to the Medieval Pile and pry his starched white shirt from its buttons, then defile him medievally upon a pile of ancestral rugs.
Grant tilted his head and smiled. “Your thoughts are transparent, darling.”
“Don’t call me darling on the street, darling. Not even in English.”
“Where shall I call you darling, then? Name a place and time.”
“Tonight,” Varian said. “Yours.”
“Eight o’clock,” Grant said, and touched his hat. Then he turned to go, and Varian watched until he’d disappeared from view. The feeling was something like having his entrails stretched from his body and dragged away. At last he continued along the boulevard Dugommier and crossed into Noailles, heading for the rue Grignan in a daze, his throat tight with the choking closeness that came from too little sleep and too much adrenaline. He wanted coffee, more cigarettes, a quiet and luxurious room in which to spend an hour in self-abuse. He wanted to be back in Arles. He wanted to be standing in the ruin of the amphitheater, inside those perfect arcs of stone that had caught the echoes of Roman voices two thousand years earlier; he wanted to be pressed against the ground in the Coussouls de Crau, a thunderstorm above, Grant’s body a bolt of blue electricity beside him. He remembered an argument he’d had with Kirstein in college, not long after Varian and Grant had become, in Kirstein’s parlance, boyfriends. “Oh, Varian,” Kirstein had asked, in the falsetto voice of Varian’s mother, “how can you compromise your studies for the sake of a piano player’s son from Philadelphia?” His criticism had been no less sincere for the playacting; he really wanted to know. Varian had argued that he wasn’t compromising anything; what existed between him and Grant would sharpen his mind, make him a better student, drive him to greater heights.
“Greater heights,” Kirstein had said, and laughed. “Now there’s a charming euphemism.”
Varian had told him to go to hell. And he’d been right: He did do better, he was sharper, with Grant to spur him on; they competed, they pushed each other. And, more important, the clamor of loneliness—the constant din that had driven Varian to commit great acts of wastefulness or excess or pointless lust—fell silent, leaving his mind free for other pursuits. Love worked on him like a clarifying drug, like a finer and sharper cocaine. And it was working now. As he walked through Noailles, down the boulevard and across the narrower streets, wondering what he might find at the office—the door barred, his papers confiscated, the State Department having shut him down for good—it came to him that the consulate would not have him thrown out of France. If they hadn’t by now, they never would. He was, he understood, a calculated liability. They saw him as basically ineffectual; they counted on him to conduct his illegal work on a manageable scale. He laughed to think of the conversation that must have taken place between the consul-general and the consul, in which John Hurley had to explain to Hugh Fullerton that Fry, inconvenient as he might have been, was a contained threat, and must therefore be tolerated. Old Hugh must have nearly burst a vein. But it must be so, the State Department must consider him an acceptable pest, even a necessary one; otherwise he’d have been on a plane back to the States weeks ago. Well, let them think it. Let them imagine that the current operation represented the full capacity of his work. He hardly needed a further goad, but now he had one.
At number 60, Clotilde played jacks on the terra-cotta tiles of the entryway, all traces of raspberry bleached from her pinafore. Beside her on the floor was a depleted tin of candies of the kind called larmes d’amour: tiny pastel-colored spheres, each a different shade, each containing a single drop of fruit-flavored syrup. How she’d gotten them in the midst of a war he scarcely dared imagine. She raised her eyes to Varian. A shadow crossed the open doorway of the concierge’s apartment; the door filled with the figure of Madame Balansard, in a white apron and the blue work dress she wore for her tasks in the building. She took one look at Varian and slitted her eyes.
“Where’s the bicycle?” she asked, her voice low, threatening.
“Madame—”
“Where’s the bicycle, Monsieur Fry? Where’s the bicycle?” She crossed the entryway, taking off her work apron. In a low and measured voice she asked, “Where is Felix’s bike?”
“I traded it for a man’s life,” Varian said.
Madame Balansard drew back her hand and gave Varian a stinging slap, square across the jaw. “Liar,” she said. “Liar and thief. Give me the money.”
“There is no money.”
“Give me what you got for that bike, or I’ll report you to the police.”
“I didn’t sell it, madame. I told you. I traded it to save a man’s life. A refugee. I traded it to get him out of jail. He would have been sent to a concentration camp, or killed outright.”
“You traded my husband’s bike to save a criminal’s life!”
“Not a criminal. A refugee.”
“I see them come and go from your office,” she said, full of ice-cold rage. “I know what they are, and what you are! I know what you do.” She regarded him through her narrowed eyes; behind her, the girl repeated her expression. “I should denounce you to the police at once.”
He had to wonder for a moment what exactly she knew, or what she thought she knew; in any case, none of his illegal activities could be news to the police. “I’m deeply sorry, Madame Balansard,” he said. “I had no other ch
oice.” He took his ration book from his pocket and pressed it into her hand. “Take it for Clotilde,” he said. “The Centre Américain will repay you for Felix’s bike.”
Her hand shook. It was clear she wanted to throw the ration book at him, but Clotilde breathed at her side, a hungry fact; larmes d’amour would not satisfy her. “I’m going to call Monsieur Duverre,” she said. The landlord. “He’ll tear up your lease if I tell him to. Damn Moreau, that Jew, for bringing you in here!” She spat at his feet, then turned and went into the apartment, pulling Clotilde by the wrist behind her. In the doorway aperture, for an instant, the needle-blue flash of Clotilde’s gaze; then the slam of the door, the echo of it ringing in the entryway like a curse.
14
Basso’s
The little orchard at the Medieval Pile yielded fruit for weeks after Varian’s return. He would walk through the garden en route to the house, filling his pockets with sun-hot persimmons, anticipating the sight of Grant in a Chinese silk robe at the door; then, in the Pile’s dungeonlike kitchen, Grant would slice the persimmons open with a long sharp knife, prise the slippery flesh from the cartilage, and arrange the orange slivers on a plate like excised dragon tongues. Sometimes they would eat them there in the kitchen, standing hip to hip at the counter; other times they’d take the plate up to the bedroom and leave it on the bedside table for afterward, its sweetness a fresh shock after the salt of sex. Grant would rise naked, take the empty plate to the bathroom, and wash it at the sink; then, unfailingly, he’d bring Varian a glass of iron-flavored water, chilled by its transit through the ancient pipes. That solicitude, a remnant of their college days: it almost erased the fact that every moment they spent at the Pile, Gregor Katznelson was a silent third party.
The look that passed over Grant’s face when Katznelson’s name came up—a casting-down of the eyes, a slight softening around the mouth, a parting of the lips—was torture to Varian, the precise negative of the pleasure he felt in bed with Grant. He had always been prone to jealousy, though in former days he’d done his best to pretend he wasn’t; jealousy seemed parochial, retrograde, shameful. But Grant had always flirted at parties, liked to disappear behind draperies or into linen closets or bedrooms with dapper lads of twenty, slim-hipped dandies of thirty, lively professors of forty; he considered it as essential to the experience as his glass of scotch. Varian remembered watching those flirtations with a disastrous pull in his chest, a drowning chill, as if he’d gone through the ice of a frozen lake.
The Flight Portfolio Page 20
