Bridal Chair (14 page)

Spring ended and the heavy heat of summer descended on Gordes, broken now and again by a teasing wind, sea-scented and cruelly brief. Marc painted in his underwear, sometimes working indoors and sometimes beneath a palm tree, in the shade of its heavy fronds. His body glistened with pearls of sweat that mingled with the droplets of paint that fell from his brush. The tales of suffering as hordes of refugees fled Paris, the news of concentration camps and deportations, impacted his work. He painted with anguished ferocity, mixing his colors carefully, creating an odd albescent white, the noncolor of innocence, for his painting of
The
Madonna
of
the
Village
. He saw Gordes as Calvary and the Jews of Europe as martyrs at the stations of the cross. In his febrile imagination, France became the Holy Land beleaguered by barbarians. Paris was Jerusalem, Hitler was Pontius Pilate, and the Jews, like their coreligionist Jesus, were once again the victims.

He ignored Bella’s pleas that he wear proper clothing. It worried her that the goyim of Gordes might see him at work outside in his dingy underwear.

“Are we expecting company? Are we entertaining the artists of Paris?” he asked sarcastically. “Who comes to see the pariah Jewish artist in this primitive town? I will paint naked if I want to.”

Bella sighed and offered no further argument. She dressed each day in the colorful, long, loose gowns of gossamer fabric she had favored in Paris, but she knew it was useless to argue with him. She spent hours on the chaise lounge beneath the window. The aroma of the newly blossoming lemons and citrons wafted toward her. With a damp cloth covering her eyes, she drifted into a melancholic daze, anesthetized by sadness and despair.

Each day, Ida walked into the village. She posted her own letters and hoped for a letter from Michel or even a response to one of her urgent appeals for help. She would not let her hope die. Each day, Yvette, the weary young postmistress, shook her head sadly, and each day, Ida nodded and shrugged her shoulders.

“
À demain
,” she said. “Till tomorrow.”

“
À demain
,” Yvette agreed.

They were coconspirators, she and the slender postmistress, whose thin fingers sorted through stamps and aerograms. They were engaged in a pact of mutual reassurance, convincing themselves that perhaps the next day or the day after that would bring news that would lighten their hearts. Yvette’s husband was also a soldier and, like Michel, his whereabouts were unknown. Ida knew his name. Pierre. His picture, taken in uniform, stood on Yvette’s counter, just as Michel’s photograph stood on her bureau. The faces of their absent husbands vested the young wives with memory and hope.

Ida struggled to recall the sound of Michel’s voice, the scent of his body, the power of his passion. She said his name as she looked at his photograph. “Michel. Michel,
mon
mari.
” She imagined that Yvette turned to her own husband’s picture from time to time during the day and murmured, “Pierre,
mon
mari
—Pierre, my husband.”

Always she walked home slowly, savoring the peace of the village and her own solitude. She stopped at the shops to scavenge provisions for their dinner. Vegetables and fruits, fish and meat were scarce. Hoarding had followed the news of the defeat of the French army. Flour, sugar, and coffee had disappeared from the shelves of the grocery store, but Ida smiled engagingly at the greengrocer, batted her eyelashes at the baker, and complimented the fishmonger on the beauty of his newborn daughter. With luck, she arrived home with wilted greens, a stale baguette, and a pale fillet of sole. A farmer whose picture she sketched, telling him how handsome he was, sold her eggs and confided that he had a fondness for redheaded women. She thanked him and whispered coyly that her soldier husband shared his taste.

“Survival by seduction,” she told herself bitterly as she prepared their dinner.

They ate in silence. Bella no longer cooked. She ignored the food that was set before her, managing a few bites only when Ida insisted. Marc greedily emptied his own plate and then scooped up the remnants of Bella’s meal. He wondered each evening why Ida could not have managed at least a small sweet for dessert.

“I will try,
Papochka
,” she said coldly. “But there are no sweets in Gordes.”

Her annoyance curdled into a silent anger. She would not try. He asked too much of her.

He returned to his studio after dinner, and Ida and Bella sat in the dimly lit room and listened to the gloomy newscast. Italy was allied with Germany. London was being bombed. The Vichy government was intensifying its anti-Semitic agenda. Pétain redefined French citizenship, nullifying the papers of all individuals who had been naturalized since 1927. The Chagalls’ precious and hard-earned passports and identity cards were invalid. They were classified as “undesirables.”

“Still, it is better than being called an enemy alien,” Ida said dryly.

So-called enemy aliens were being rounded up and confined to secure prison camps. Ida knew that Feuchtwanger, the great novelist, was at Camp des Milles, a former tile and brick factory, now a fortress ringed with barbed wire. She shivered. Camp des Milles was only kilometers from sleepy, gentle Gordes, where lemons were still peacefully harvested and stamps were offered for sale in a well-run post office. Her family’s daily existence was surreal. Her daily reply to Yvette, “
À demain
,” till tomorrow, might well be “
Jamais
,” never.

Bella remained in the salon each evening until Marc returned from his studio. Ida left her sitting in the half darkness, pleading fatigue.

“I am tired,
Maman
,” she said. She kissed her on both cheeks, always saddened by the papery texture of her mother’s pale skin.

“Sleep well, Idotchka,” Bella murmured each night.

She did not sleep well. Once again, frenetic dreams caused her to toss and turn, to awaken gasping for breath, her body awash in the sweat of nocturnal terror. In that nether world, she was racing, as always, but she was no longer a child clinging to her parents’ hands. It was her adult self, grown to a monstrous size, who propelled her much-diminished parents forward, their slow and belabored pace hampering her own progress. She lurched forward, hobbled by the burden of her father’s rolled canvases and the small awkwardly shaped bundles of her mother’s sorrows strapped to her back. Now and again, she tried to run, stooped though she was beneath her burdens, fearful of her pursuers who grew closer and closer. The hooves of their horses pounded as they gained ground.

“Don’t leave us, Idotchka. Don’t abandon us,” the parents of her dream pleaded. Their voices were wisps of sound drowned out by a sudden storm. Rain fell and lightning exploded in a blaze of light. A thunderbolt crashed deafeningly as the dream ended. Always she awakened then, relieved that the night was, after all, quiet, that the storm’s crescendo had no reality. She touched her face then and understood that the raindrops that fell upon her face were her own tears, that her flight was illusory, that she was safe in a bed scented with lavender.

On a hot July night, when her room was silvered by moonlight, she again awakened to the familiar cacophony of that imagined storm. But the dream’s ending was altered. There was now an unfamiliar and insistent knocking, the sound of iron against wood. She opened her eyes, thrust herself into dream-free wakefulness, but the pounding continued. It was real. Someone was knocking at the front door, repeatedly, desperately.

She glanced at her clock. It was two in the morning. Her heart beat rapidly as she sprang from her bed. There had been frightening reports of nocturnal home invasions by the Vichy police, sometimes accompanied by Gestapo troopers. Such terror squads were in fierce pursuit of “enemy aliens” or “undesirables,” who were summarily arrested, thrown into trucks, and transported to the prison at Camp des Milles.

“Jews,” the townspeople whispered to each other. “That’s who they’re after.”

The good citizens of Gordes assured themselves that they were safe. It was only the Jews and the gypsies who were in danger. They whispered about rewards offered for information about such alien undesirables.

Ida knew that it was common knowledge her family was Jewish. Gordes was a very poor village. Anyone might betray them for the price of a dozen eggs, a bushel of potatoes. And it seemed that someone had.

The knocking continued, louder now. She trembled and ventured toward the window. A tall man, the epaulettes of his uniform glinting in the moonlight, stood there, his arm extended, his booted foot kicking the heavy oaken door.

He pounded once with great ferocity and then again. She imagined that her parents were cowering in their bedrooms, fearful and trembling. Swiftly, she brushed her hair, shrugged into a peignoir, choosing one that was sheer enough to reveal her breasts. With shaking hands, she applied lipstick, perfume, a dash of rouge.

She hurried to the front door, freezing her face into a mask of indignation, struggling to rehearse the indignant words she would hurl at the invader. “How dare you disturb decent people’s sleep at such an hour? Have you no consideration for my elderly parents who are not well? Leave at once.”

Or perhaps she would smile in beguiling confusion. “Surely you have the wrong address. But would you perhaps like a cold drink on such a hot night?” She would smile and toy with the ribbons of her dressing gown.

The danger both energized and calmed her. She braced herself, opened the door, and stared into the darkness at the tall, gaunt man whose clenched fist was raised high. Dizzied, she struggled for breath, steadied herself, and looked at him, unable to speak, unable to move.

He stood on the broad stone step. His creased and filthy uniform hung loosely on his gaunt body. His beret was askew. Roadside dust silvered his thick dark hair, and his narrow face was pale with fatigue. A duffel bag caked with mud was on the ground beside him. Her heart stopped. Her hands trembled.

“Michel,” she whispered, fearful that if she raised her voice he would disappear. “Oh, Michel, is it really you?”

He opened his arms wide and she collapsed into them. “Yes, my Ida.
C’est moi.
Michel.”

His voice was so soft she could barely hear him, but she lifted her hand to touch his lips, to trace the contours of his face, the roughness of his unshaven chin, the tiny scar at the corner of his mouth. The pressure of her fingers confirmed his reality. She remained in his embrace, her ear pressed to his chest so that she could hear the beating of his heart. He was alive; her prayers to the God she did not believe in had been answered.

She felt his lips on one cheek and then the other. She removed his beret, threaded his hair through her fingers, and led him to her room. They did not speak. They had no need for words. Their relief was palpable, their exhaustion profound. They stretched out across her bed and fell asleep in each other’s arms. No dream invaded her sleep that night. She was protected; she was safe.

* * *

She awakened the next morning to the gentle pressure of his hand upon her head. He smiled as she turned toward him. They spoke softly then, in the half-light of dawn, of all that had happened during the long months of their separation. She told him of the moves from the Loire farmhouse to Saint-Dyé, to Avignon, and at last to Gordes. She marveled that he had found them.

“My parents knew that you had been in Avignon. They managed to get a letter to me, so when I was demobilized, I went from one inn to another in Avignon until I found the hotel where your parents had stayed. The concierge there told me that you were in Gordes. There was no transport so I walked here, catching a ride for a few kilometers with a truck driver and for another few kilometers with a milkman. Short rides and very long walks.”

He rubbed his bare feet, and she saw the broken skin and angry blisters on his heels.

“Where are your parents?” she asked.

“They managed to get to Nice. They think that they will be safer there because it is under Italian occupation. There is a great difference between the Italians and the Germans.”

“Is there?” she asked bitterly. Mussolini, after all, had joined forces with Hitler, and the Italian army had laid siege to France from the south.

“No one is as brutal as the Germans,” he replied bitterly.

She cringed at the harshness of his tone, muted into sorrow as he spoke of his own brief and terrible war. He had fought in the triangle bounded by Amiens on the Somme and then in the Oise Valley. The German onslaught had been vicious. The badly trained, inadequately armed French troops had confronted a superior, well-trained force, an army without mercy.

“I had a rifle, but I barely knew how to load the magazine. I shared a trench with a boy named François, a sixteen-year-old from a farm near Le Havre. He had never shaved, never made love. He cried for his mother when he threw his grenades, sometimes forgetting to remove the pins.
‘Maman. Maman.’
I don’t think I will ever forget his voice. We both ran out of ammunition, but he had one last grenade. He stood up to throw it, and an enemy bullet hit him. He fell back, onto me, bleeding so heavily that his blood soaked my shirt. I touched his wrist and felt his pulse, very faint but still a sign of life. A German soldier tumbled into our trench and, without blinking, shot him in the head and then leapt out waving his pistol. The Nazis weren’t taking prisoners. I heard their officers shouting. ‘Shoot! Shoot to kill! No prisoners!’ And that is what they did. The bastards.”

Michel sighed and closed his eyes.

“And yet you survived,” Ida said wonderingly.

“Yes. Because I didn’t move and because I was covered in François’s blood, so that damn Boche assumed that I was dead. And at that moment, lying there, I wished that I was.”

But he had survived and somehow found his way to a base where he was issued a clean uniform, given a fistful of francs, and demobilized. He was on his own. A defeated France had no further need for its soldiers. He had concealed his demobilization papers in his underwear and set out to find his wife, his Ida. Her name had become his mantra.