Bridal Chair (11 page)

The farmhouse would provide refuge in the event of a German invasion. The landlord, despite his aversion to Jews, was a man who could be bribed into silence.

She found herself alone in Paris because Michel, suddenly and without warning, was drafted into the French army. He came home on a brief leave, and Ida stared at him in his ill-fitting uniform, his thick hair tamed into a military cut that emphasized the narrowness of his face. Their eyes locked, but they did not speak.

Slowly they undressed and came together in silence, their intimacy laced with sadness, complicit in their loneliness. She stood at the window when Michel left and watched him walk down the street, his back bent beneath his duffel bag. She struggled to remember the graceful, dreamy youth in the leather cloak who had walked by her side through the alpine meadow. She turned to her mirror, loosened her hair, and wondered if he saw her still as the enchanting young girl who had walked beside him in the waning days of summer. She shook her head wearily. How foolish she was. Of course they had changed. They were no longer young lovers, their bodies drenched in golden sunlight. They were a married couple facing a world grown dark and unfamiliar.

“I love you,” she whispered to her absent husband, the youth become a man, the student become a soldier, and she knew that to be the truth. But she knew too that the love she felt for him was no longer forged by ardor; rather, it was a tenderness drained of passion.

* * *

She visited Michel’s parents and helped them organize the depleted stock in their small store, helped his mother to sort through her collection of tattered photographs—sepia prints of Michel’s grandparents, snapshots of Michel as a small boy, of Michel on his graduation day from the Lycée, Michel and herself on their wedding day, posed beneath her father’s painting of the bridal chair.

“I had thought that one day I would have a photograph of a baby, your baby and Michel’s,” Masha Rapaport said daringly.

She had envisioned a grandchild with Ida’s bright hair and Michel’s soft, thoughtful eyes.

“Perhaps one day,” Ida replied gently.

It was not impossible, she told herself as she walked home in the late afternoon. She and Michel might yet have children. She had been careful, ever mindful of Elsa’s advice, but she would not always have to be so cautious. A love that had changed could change yet again. But not now. She would not have a child when the clouds of war darkened the sky. And not here. Not on this continent that she knew would soon be engulfed in flames.

She paused in the Tuileries Garden and watched a group of children at play. A very small boy wearing a sailor suit rolled a large blue ball toward her. He was fine-featured, with deep dark eyes, and his hair was a mass of carrot-colored curls. She rolled the ball back to him and smiled at his young mother.

“How old is he?” she asked pleasantly.

“Almost four,” she replied.

“He is a handsome child,” she said and walked on, her heart heavy with a sadness she had long forbidden herself.

Her calculations were simple, their implications clear. The child she might have birthed would have been almost four and, like that merry boy who chased after his ball, such a child might have had deep dark eyes like Michel’s and hair like her own.

The reflection came unbidden, unwelcomed. She had, from the moment she left the clinic in Neuilly, willed herself not to think of what might have been. She had done what she had to do; she and Michel had decided on that together. They had thought then that there was no other choice, and perhaps they had been right. They never spoke of the
avortement
, the abortion that she had exiled from memory. She had not wept in the Neuilly clinic; she had not wept on her wedding day. But at this twilight hour, as she walked alone through the darkening street, tears filled her eyes. She allowed them to fall; sorrow was the smallest of luxuries. She wept for herself and for Michel, for the unborn child, and for Masha Rapaport, who treasured memories and photographs but had yet to stare lovingly at a snapshot of a grandchild.

Michel, aware of her growing despondency, wrote encouraging her to visit her parents in the Loire Valley.

“They surely miss you and you miss them. And I know that you want to see your father’s new work. It is still safe to travel to the south,” he added cryptically, and she wondered if he had real intelligence about the probability of an invasion.

It was a relief to travel south. Paris was slowly becoming a fortress, its windows shuttered, its museums surreptitiously emptied, the shelves of groceries stripped by housewives preparing for a siege. Ida relaxed as she stared out the train window at the sylvan landscapes untouched by the prospect of war. The branches of trees swayed against the gentle breezes, and the foliage shimmered in the bright sunlight. Farmers tended their fields, and flocks of sheep meandered lazily through meadows rich in purple clover. It was difficult to believe that this was a country on the threshold of disaster.

Marc and Bella were elated at her arrival, delighted with the wine and cheese she had managed to coax from reluctant shopkeepers.

“Ah, Idotchka, we can always depend on you,” Bella said.

Ida smiled and wondered when it was that their roles had been reversed, their dependencies transposed, the pampered daughter become the concerned caregiver.

In the farmer’s outbuilding her father used as a studio, she marveled at his new works.

“I paint my way out of sadness,” he said drily.

She wandered through the makeshift studio where the odors of damp hay and manure mingled with the studio scents of turpentine and linseed oil, fascinated anew by the varied worlds on her father’s canvases. He had reverted to the circus motif that had always intrigued him. Once again, he created graceful acrobats and leering clowns, exotic figures whose implied innocence seemed to render them incapable of evil. The circus paintings, executed in charming pastels, contrasted with the main focus of his larger works. During the recent months of heightened existential terror, it was the Judeo-Christian theme that engaged him; crucifix and sacrifice haunted his thoughts, invaded his dreams, sprang to life in his paintings. Daringly, in an impasto of layered oils, he commingled the testaments, Old and New, Jewish and Christian. The two religions collided with each other in a riot of colors and phantasmagoric imaginings. He mined the biblical sources and melded them with modern images, the suffering of ages past corresponding to the suffering of his own world, past and present coequal, evil matching evil.

He had been named for Moses, but it was Christ he painted. Ida studied his
White
Crucifixion
, a portrayal of the suffering Christ on the cross, his emaciated body covered by a
tallit
, a Jewish prayer shawl, his lips and eyes closed in death. Above his halo was a Hebrew inscription—“Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”—and at his feet, weeping mourners knelt, surrounded by fearsome enemies. He painted modern storm troopers and uniformed soldiers brandishing red flags, chasing after terrified women and vulnerable children. It was a chaotic scene of fleeing Jews burdened by awkward bundles, the scavenged remnants of their endangered lives. Marc’s message was clear. History moved on, but suffering and persecution remained.

There were other crucifixion depictions, fanciful and disturbing, in which he painted his own image as that of a suffering Jew. “Marc Chagall, King of the Jewish Artists,” was scrawled angrily across one such canvas.

Ida moved from one painting to another, pummeled with memories, overwhelmed with sadness. That night, for the first time in years, lying in her narrow bed, the nightmare recurred. Once again, she ran the desperate race to freedom, but she was no longer a child clutching her parents’ hands. Dressed in a bridal gown, clutching a bouquet of wilting white roses, she was a solitary fugitive on an unfamiliar road, surrounded by threatening strangers who spoke mysterious, incomprehensible languages. When she awakened, her cheeks were wet with tears. She lay very still and wondered if she was destined to run for safe haven all the days of her life, in wakefulness and in sleep. Oh, she was tired, so very tired. Fatigue weighted her body. She closed her eyes but feared to sleep, feared that invading dream of chaos and terror.

“Did you sleep well, Idotchka?” her father asked the next morning. He glared at Katya who had managed to stain the tablecloth as she poured the coffee. The maid ignored him.

“Very well,” Ida lied, but she met her mother’s gaze, saw the sadness in her eyes, and knew that Bella, who sensed her every mood, had guessed the truth.

Ida’s vivacity, her aggressive determination, did not deceive Bella. Ida was her daughter, inheritor of her moods and fears although better equipped to combat them. Of course Ida had not slept well. Michel, her husband, was a soldier during a time of war. Ida was alone in Paris, struggling to find a way to save all their lives. How could her sleep be undisturbed? In this frightening time, no one slept well.

Bella’s brother Yaakov wrote that his Paris medical practice was dominated by weary insomniacs in search of elusive rest. Yaakov dispensed sleeping pills and anodynes to exhausted men and women, but still they lay awake through the long nights. Hitler had murdered the sleep of the Jews of Europe.

Bella remembered their flight from Russia, their stays in hostels and inns where mothers and fathers approached nightfall uneasily, placing clean clothing, sturdy walking shoes, and winter cloaks near their children’s beds while they themselves lay awake, fully clothed. She and Marc had placed small Ida between them on narrow beds, her breath warm and sweet upon their faces. She remembered too the rituals of survival—jewels and money sewn into the hems and sleeves of garments or concealed in the insteps of shoes, documents blanketed in the linings of overcoats. Always they had been prepared for the inevitable moment when their lives would change forever and their wanderings would begin.

How foolish she had been to imagine that they were safe, that their Ida, raised in the City of Light, would be spared the fear that had rimmed their lives. She knew that her daughter’s sorrowful race to survival—and their own—was just beginning, and there was no comfort to be offered.

Ida lowered her head; her bright hair tumbled loose from its pins and curtained her face. Slender Bella, enfolded in a white robe worn almost to transparency, its wide sleeves waving across her arms like gossamer wings, moved across the room and embraced her. Ida melted into her mother’s arms, relieved to abandon her self-imposed bravura, her uncertain certitude, even for the briefest of moments. Together then, hand in hand, mother and daughter followed Marc into his makeshift studio. Bella was to pose for him that morning.

Bella took her place. Her white robe was supposed to be a wedding gown, but her face was so wreathed in sadness and her body was so inert and lifeless that the loose garment seemed more like a shroud. Marc was not deterred. He had decided on a bridal scene, and it was a bridal scene that he would paint.

“I will call it
The
Betrothed
,” he announced as his brush flew across the canvas.

“If it is finished before I leave, I will take it back to Paris. There is an American collector who pays in dollars. I am told that he is partial to wedding scenes,” Ida said.

They would soon need money, a great deal of money. There would be bribes to be paid, tickets to be purchased, visas to be negotiated. Portraits of brides were easier to sell than studies of corpses. The money in the Bank of Scotland was their only security, and she would not touch it.

She watched as he worked and wondered to whom, in her father’s artistic perception, her mother was being betrothed. Was Bella being consecrated to an unseen lover or to the invisible Angel of Death who might appear in a corner of the canvas, perhaps waving a swastika rather than a scythe? As always, her father’s imaginings remained impenetrable enigmas that both fascinated and frightened her. She struggled to anticipate him, but she knew that she could not match the pace of his brilliant and mysterious fantasies.

She went into the house to study the accounts, to speak with taciturn Monsieur LaSalle, offering him several hundred francs for the purchase of fresh eggs and butter for her parents.

She hugged Bella, kissed Marc on both his cheeks as she waited for the taxi that would carry her to the small rural train station.

“Take good care of
Mamochka
,” she whispered to her father. Bella’s pallor and listlessness worried her. “Tell Katya to prepare soups, cassoulets.”

Ida looked across at the fertile fields of the farm. The warmth of the late spring days would mean an early vegetable harvest, and the neatly plowed furrows were already covered with tender shoots. Beets sprouted and wild sorrel covered the verdant meadows.

“Borscht,” she added. “And schav.” The remembered sustenance of her mother’s childhood, the recipes she had treasured and cooked with pleasure. “Katya must prepare them for you.”

“That Katya,” he said dismissively.

Ida had noticed that the Polish maid was openly indolent, that she spent a great deal of time with the farmer, neglecting dirty dishes that accumulated in the scullery and not bothering to sweep the floor. It was time to get rid of Katya. She could not be trusted. A village woman could be found to take her place. She would deal with that on her next visit.

“
Au
revoir
,
Papochka
.”

She stood beside him, startled to realize that they were almost of an equal height. She had never before thought of him as a small man.

“À bientôt.”
He kissed her on both her cheeks and waved her into the waiting taxi.

It was wonderful, Ida thought as she drove off, that the farewells of the French were optimistic pledges of anticipated reunions. The English “good-bye,” so heavy in its finality, always filled her with sadness. She relaxed on the train that sped her home to Paris. She needed to be alone, to recoup her strength, to resume her campaign of writing letters that she knew would remain unanswered. Still, she could not surrender hope. It was not in her nature. Perhaps there would be a letter from Michel, a loving letter assuring her that he was safe. She struggled to lift her own spirits, to fight her exhaustion. All she needed was a little rest, a brief solitude.

But there was no respite. Tragedy was compounded. A week after her arrival in Paris, Ambroise Vollard, the Chagalls’ art dealer who had been an important source of their income, was killed in a traffic accident.

The money that he owed them from sales already transacted would not be forthcoming until his estate was settled. The funds to which they had ready access were very limited. Her only comfort was the knowledge that their accounts in the Bank of Scotland were secure.

But there were new and more ominous developments. Ida trembled as she listened to the radio. German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Joseph Stalin had signed a horrific pact that ensured that neither country would attack the other nor would assistance be offered to any third party at war with the other. It was said that Lithuania, enlarged by the Vilna area, was assigned to Germany. The impossible had happened: fascism and communism, the strangest of bedfellows, had entered into a deadly and brutal consortium. Ida thought of her father’s naive fantasy of returning to Mother Russia and shuddered to think of his reaction to this new dark betrayal. Her heart was heavy as she journeyed southward again.

Her fears were not unfounded. Marc barely looked up when she entered the farmhouse. Pale and unshaven, he wore the bewildered expression peculiar to mourners struggling to assimilate the reality of a death. His blue eyes were faded as though hours of weeping had blanched their brightness. The news had overwhelmed him, reduced him to a sorrow he could not fight with brush and canvas. She placed her hand on his, lifted her fingers to his cheek, and brushed away a single tear.

“My Russia—it is gone forever,” he murmured.

He would never return to the land of his birth. The fate of Vilna compounded his desolation. He wept for the beautiful city that had welcomed him so enthusiastically only three years earlier. Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, the intellectual capital of his exiled people, was lost.

“Tell me it’s not so, Ida,” he pleaded.

Ida shook her head and spread the Paris newspapers across the kitchen table, pointing to one story after another that confirmed the sinister alliance.

“It is so,
Papochka
,” she said. “But it may not be as dangerous as you think. This Hitler-Stalin pact may only be diplomatic maneuvering. You know, a military game of chess.”

She did not believe her own words, but they were all she had to offer. She unpacked the baguettes and cheeses she had brought from Paris, the croissants her mother favored and the sweet cherries that had only recently appeared in the markets at Les Halles. She opened the icebox and frowned at the empty shelves. The sink overflowed with dirty dishes and the counters were slick with congealed fat. No meal had been prepared for her parents’ lunch, and she suspected that they might not have had breakfast.

“Katya!” she called angrily.

Her father shook his head warningly.

“Don’t call her. It is pointless. She does nothing for us. She spends all her time with LaSalle. They are plotting against us. They plan to murder us in our sleep and steal all our money. They plan to lead the Nazis to us when they invade.”

He spoke in a whisper and his blue eyes were wild with fear. He paced the room and pointed with a trembling finger to the door that led to the farmer’s quarters. Ida, who had entered through the garden, saw that he had pushed a bureau against it, erecting a barricade that was as futile as it was, in all probability, unnecessary. The farmer was unpleasant and patently anti-Semitic. It was likely that he and Katya, who was also unpleasant and anti-Semitic, were lovers, but she did not think they were murderers or thieves. She realized that her father, sleep-deprived and malnourished, had lost his grip on reality and submitted to a latent paranoia. Irrational fear obscured reason. But it was transitory, she assured herself.