Bridal Chair (17 page)

However, he greeted the Americans with the charm usually reserved for dealers and patrons. He minced gracefully toward them, his narrow face wreathed in a smile that was oddly boyish. His blue eyes glinted as he shook their hands, his grasp strong, as though to demonstrate that he had eluded the weaknesses and ravages of age. He spoke in French, which both the Americans understood.

“Monsieur Fry, Monsieur Bingham, how good of you to come to our humble home in this little village,” he said with mock humility.

Bella stood beside him, her overly rouged cheeks emphasizing her pallor, her dark eyes encircled with kohl. Her black hair framed her delicate face, and she wore a flowing rainbow-colored gown. She smiled shyly as Marc introduced her with disarming pride.

“This is my beautiful wife, Bella. It does not surprise you that Marc Chagall has such a beautiful wife, such a beautiful daughter? He has been blessed with such beauty because he is a creator of beauty. I say this only because it is true.”

Ida winced and Michel frowned, but Marc was unembarrassed by his own vanity.

He invited them into his studio, and they looked about the large disorderly room, taking note of the huge kitchen table piled high with brushes and paints, the smocks and oversized oil-stained shirts that dangled from battered wooden chairs. A screen encircled two easels, works in progress on each. The room was heated by an inefficient coal stove, and finished canvases leaned against every wall. Marc chose several and placed them on the floor to be scrutinized.

“Are they not magnificent? Are they not beautiful?” he asked proudly.

He held up one crucifixion painting after another then, grinning mischievously, he led them to his more lighthearted depictions of circus life, the still lifes of fruits and vegetables, and his large and fanciful portmanteau scenes dominated by sad-eyed bovines.

“See my wonderful cows,” he exulted. “They dance on rooftops; they glide through the heavens. Cows are my favorite animals. They are so placid, so accepting. I paint them again and again. Perhaps because I understand them. They are like myself, like my family, like my people. They are wonderful creatures whose survival depends on the will of others. They are so dignified, so lovely, these dumb beasts who are led to pasture, who flood buckets with the sweet milk of their udders. We too, we Jews, must follow those who would herd us, who would milk us dry. The milk of cows nourishes those who drink it just as my paintings nourish the imagination. My wife’s writing will nourish the thoughts of those who will read her words. We are very productive cows, my Bella and myself. In your America, we too will be dumb animals, our tongues muted. How will we talk? How will we be understood? We speak no English. Will Americans understand Yiddish? Will they understand French? Tell me, are there cows in your America? How will I live in a land without cows, my very own compatriots?”

He laughed derisively. He had spoken not to amuse his visitors but to amuse himself.

Varian Fry coughed delicately into his silk handkerchief and answered quietly. “I can assure you, Monsieur Chagall, that there are many cows in my country.”

“I am relieved to hear that. Perhaps I will soon see those cows. My daughter, Ida, is now the manager of our lives. She insists that we leave Europe.” His voice suddenly broke, and the two Americans looked away in embarrassment.

In the evening, they sat in the salon and sipped tea that Bella brewed on the samovar, sweetening it with the last of the honey from the hive at the bottom of their garden. The village grocer refused to sell them sugar, claiming that it was forbidden to sell comestibles to “foreign people.”

Michel stirred his tea and asked the question that had teased him since the Werfels had first told him about Varian Fry’s courageous and hazardous campaign. “May I ask you, Mr. Fry, why a man like yourself is concerned with the difficulties of our people?”

The American stared at him as though surprised by the question. He replied in the flat tone of a teacher explaining the obvious.

“Perhaps you should ask how it would be possible for a man like myself, a Christian American, to ignore the suffering of those who are the victims of injustice and cruelty, Jews as well as non-Jews. I did not come to this work suddenly. Back in 1935, I was a journalist working in Berlin. I was walking down Kurfürstendamm when suddenly a crowd attacked an innocent Jew, an ordinary man who had simply been shopping. He held a gift-wrapped parcel, perhaps a birthday present for his wife or his child. The hoodlums knocked him to the ground, kicked him, and then turned against any passerby they assumed to be Jewish, even pulling drivers out of passing cars. They beat them with clubs and shouted words that I had never heard before. ‘The best Jew is a dead Jew.’ They sang their anthem: ‘When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, then everything will be fine again.’ The street was red as though a rainfall of blood had fallen. That gift-wrapped parcel was soaked by the blood and trampled on by booted feet. I could do nothing on that day. I was alone and no match for a mob. I knew then that not only were the Jews of Germany in mortal danger, but all of civilization was also threatened. As a civilized man, as a Christian, as a fortunate American citizen, I knew that I had to do something. Artists and writers are the guardians of our civilization. They must not be victims of the barbarians at the gates. That is why I am in France as part of the Emergency Rescue Committee. Here in France, in 1941, I have the opportunity to do what I could not do in 1935. You speak of ‘your people,’ Michel, and you mean the Jewish people, but my world is not divided between Jews and gentiles. I see only human beings, men and women who must be helped. That is why I am here in Gordes. Does that answer your question, Michel Rapaport?”

Michel nodded, awed by his courage and his humanity.

Varian Fry smiled the thin, modest smile of a teacher, satisfied that a lesson has been learned. He opened his briefcase and removed a sheaf of papers. “I have good news for you,” he said. “We have managed to obtain American visas for both Monsieur and Madame Chagall. You know that my government requires a bond of three thousand dollars for each new immigrant, and Hilla Rebay has convinced Solomon Guggenheim to guarantee most of those funds. She was very moved by a communication she received from Madame Rapaport.”

Ida clasped her hands and breathed deeply. Her letter to Guggenheim’s artist mistress had been answered, not with words but with action.

“Hilla Rebay. We knew her in Berlin. She played with watercolors. Her work was interesting. Some of it,” Marc murmured disparagingly.

Michel frowned. It was like Marc, he thought bitterly, to disparage a woman who was now his benefactor. He had not thanked Harry Bingham and Varian Fry for their strenuous efforts on his behalf, nor had he acknowledged Ida’s persistence. Marc Chagall, the self-proclaimed emperor of art, was an indifferent recipient of their tribute.
Damn
him
, Michel thought.

“It is very good of Madame Rebay,” Marc said stiffly and rose from his seat to shake hands, first with Varian Fry and then with Harry Bingham.

“I am also pleased to tell you that money has been raised in America for your passage. There were generous contributions, including several hundred dollars from Madame Helena Rubinstein,” Varian Fry continued. “But now that all this is in place, there is no time to waste. You must travel to Marseilles immediately and be ready to leave France as soon as we can arrange passage to Lisbon for you. The visas have an expiration date.”

Marc stood and pounded on the table, his cheeks flushed with anger.

“Do you expect us to leave without our daughter?” he asked. “Why have you not arranged a visa for Ida?” He waved his arms, an imperious spoiled child whose will would not be denied.

Harry Bingham glanced at Varian Fry, who patiently assembled his documents, indifferent to the artist’s outburst.

“We are still working on behalf of your daughter and her husband,” the American consul said coldly. “And we are hopeful that we will obtain both the visas and the funds that they will need. But you cannot wait for this to happen. Time is of the essence. You are in danger in France. The Vichy government speaks of establishing a department of Jewish affairs. That is the first step toward the deportation of French Jews. You do not want to risk deportation, Monsieur Chagall. We all know what happens in those concentration camps.”

They fell silent. Marc sat down¸ his shoulders slumped in defeat.

“But what about my paintings?” he asked in a broken voice. “How can I abandon my life’s work?”

Ida placed her hand on his shoulder. “Do not worry about your paintings,
Papochka
. Michel and I will take care of them. We will somehow manage to get them out of France and bring them to you in America,” she said. “I promise.” She spoke in the patient cadence of a mother soothing a spoiled child with a promise that she might not be able to keep.

Michel stared at her. He turned away so that she would not see the anger that darkened his face.

“You promise us that?” It was Bella who asked—Bella, so fragile and withdrawn, who summoned the strength to impose her will on her daughter.

“I promise,” Ida said solemnly. “We both promise, don’t we, Michel?”

He nodded because he did not trust himself to speak, suffused as he was with resentment. He knew that all their resources, all their energies, would be directed to the rescue of Marc’s work. Ida seemed to have forgotten that he too had parents, a gentle mother, a weary father, who needed their help. They too were vulnerable, and Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee would do nothing for them. They were not, after all, guardians of civilization. They were only ordinary Jews, struggling to survive. Were their lives less important than Marc’s canvases?

“Very well then,” Varian Fry said, snapping his briefcase closed and polishing his steel-framed spectacles, their lenses clouded by the steam of the samovar. “Everything is settled. We look forward to your speedy arrival in Marseilles. I will arrange for lodgings.”

“
Merci. À bientôt
,” Ida said very softly, and she stood beside Michel as the two Americans left the room.

Bella knelt before Marc, her head resting on his lap. She sobbed quietly as he stroked her dark hair. “I cannot bear it. I cannot flee again,” she whispered. “I am not strong enough. How can I leave France? How can I leave Europe?”

“You must accept it,
ma
chérie, ma belle Bella
,” Marc said. “If we are to live, we must leave France.”

With his hand still resting on her head, he sang softly in Yiddish. It was a song Ida remembered from her childhood, a mournful song about a calf being led to slaughter. He sang chorus after chorus until Bella no longer wept but added her trembling voice to his. Arm in arm, still singing, they left the room.

Days after Varian Fry’s visit, Yvette, the sad-eyed postmistress, Ida’s only friend in Gordes, beckoned her into her office. Their embrace was tentative. They were awkward confidantes whose intimacy had been forged in shared grief and anxiety during the early days of war when their soldier husbands fought on distant battlefields.

“It will be all right,” they had assured each other then, but for Yvette, it had not been all right. On the day that Ida saw the black bunting on the window of the post office, she had wept, and that evening, she had carried a casserole and a bouquet of primroses and lavender to Yvette’s home, where a votive candle flickered in the window. The young widow had clutched the flowers to her breast.

“Pierre. His name was Pierre,” she had murmured, and Ida had thought that but for the grace of God, their positions might have been reversed and she would have been such a mourner, whispering, “Michel. His name was Michel.”

Yvette shuttered the small window, blocking any view from public space. She turned to Ida and although they were alone, she spoke softly, glancing fearfully toward the closed aperture.

“Ida, my father has a cousin in the Vichy police. He told him that they are rounding up younger Jews and sending them to Camp des Milles. They say that from there, they will be deported to work camps in eastern Europe. They are offering a reward to anyone who leads them to such Jews. There are those in Gordes who are poor enough and hungry enough to betray even their own families. Your parents are too old to interest them, but you and Michel are in danger. I have heard your names mentioned more than once. You must leave this village as soon as you can.”

She handed Ida a letter and glanced nervously at the shuttered window. Through the slats, they heard the impatient muttering of villagers annoyed at the delay.

“Yvette should be attending to her duties instead of gossiping with that redheaded Jew,” a woman said querulously.

Ida overheard her and shook her head sadly. “Is it now forbidden to speak with Jews?” she asked.

Yvette smiled wanly. “Goodness is forbidden. You see what is happening, Ida. Do not delay.” She fingered the small silver cross that hung about her neck. “I will pray for you.”

“And I for you,” Ida said and wondered to whom she would offer her prayers. She was the daughter of a man who painted crucifixion scenes in the morning and portraits of sad-eyed rabbis in the afternoon. The crucifixion scenes frightened her; the sad-eyed rabbis filled her with tenderness. She knew only that she was a Jew, daughter and granddaughter of Jews. The God in whom she might believe but to whom she would pray was, for her, a Jewish God.

The two friends embraced and kissed each other’s cheeks. Ida hurried out through the rear door. She licked her lips and tasted the salt of Yvette’s tears.

The letter Yvette had given her was from Varian Fry. “The weather is turning treacherous,” he wrote cryptically. In view of the changing climate, he had arranged for the crating and transport of certain valuables to Marseilles. “The truck driver and his helpers who are in my employ are reliable,” he assured her. “Do not be alarmed if they arrive very late at night. Their routes are complicated. They will take you and Michel to Nice. It really is important that you have a holiday before the storms begin.” His signature was indecipherable and there was no return address.

Ida told Michel what Yvette had said and showed him the letter. He read it and handed it back to her.

“We know what those storms will be. Varian Fry is telling us that we are in danger,” he said, confirming what she already knew. “We must be on that truck.”

“But it will mean leaving my parents here. How are they to get to Marseilles without our help?”

“Will we be able to help them if we are in a concentration camp in Poland?” he asked harshly. “You cannot protect your father’s work if you are deported from France. Yvette knows that there are those in Gordes who will betray us for a few sous or a dozen eggs. Your parents will be safe. They are protected by both their age and their fame. If Varian Fry made arrangements for us, he has surely made arrangements for them.”

She nodded. His arguments could not be ignored. Both Marc and Bella agreed with him.

“We are not novices at escape, Idotchka,” Marc said. “We managed to get from Russia to Berlin, from Berlin to Paris. Surely we will manage to go from Gordes to Marseilles.”

Ida’s sleep was restless during the nights that followed. The dream recurred, altered yet again. Her desperate race toward a mysterious refuge was solitary. Unprotected by her parents, Michel a ghostly shadow trailing behind her, she ran, wearing her mother’s diaphanous white gown and fearful that she might trip over the long skirt. Her hair was in disarray, a tangle of copper-colored curls tossed by a vicious wind. She clutched the painting of the bridal chair to her bosom, the wooden frame cutting into her tender flesh like the nails of a crucifix, but she did not loosen her grasp. She awakened; her trembling hands felt her breasts and she sighed with relief to find them firm and unbloodied.

She was lost in that dream on the night that Varian Fry’s truck driver arrived. Bewildered by the sound of the heavy truck on their gravel path, she leapt out of bed. Michel was already dressed and busily thrusting their documents into a worn leather briefcase.

“Hurry, Ida,” he urged. “We must be ready to leave when they have finished crating and loading your father’s works.”

She dressed quickly and removed the painting of the bridal chair from the wall, wrapping it carefully in the woven purple coverlet from the bed that had been so briefly her own.

The driver showed them Varian Fry’s card, but he did not reveal his own name. Anonymity was a protection against betrayal. They stood uneasily in the doorway until all the crated paintings were carried into the vehicle.

Marc and Bella did not weep. They embraced Ida, whose eyes were tightly closed, locked against the threatening flood of her sorrow. Bella held Michel’s face between her trembling hands and kissed him on each cheek.

“You will take care of our Ida,” she said, her words a plea.

“Of course I will,
Maman
,” he assured her. He had never before called his wife’s mother
Maman
.

Marc shook Michel’s hand absently, his eyes riveted to a crate that he did not deem securely closed. The driver added a nail and another hasp and Marc grunted his satisfaction. He did not wait for the truck to lumber out of the yard but took Bella’s arm and went into the house, now divested of his work, every wall bare, every corner vacant, its soul gone. It had ceased to be their home.

Neither Ida nor Michel looked back, nor did they speak as the truck continued on to Nice where Michel’s parents awaited them.

* * *

Every morning, Masha Rapaport mopped the stone floor of the tiny, sparsely furnished hovel in an endless battle against the rats and vermin that haunted the port city. She roamed the streets all day, hawking the paper flowers she crafted and the bits of lace she tatted by the light of guttering candles. She sold the sad bouquets on street corners to Italian soldiers and to the owners of cafés and restaurants who placed them on the tables they could no longer afford to cover with proper cloths. Michel’s father had mysteriously become a cobbler, mending the Italian soldiers’ boots and replacing the heels and soles of children’s shoes.

“Who taught you to mend footwear?” Michel asked him.

“Necessity is a wonderful teacher,” his father replied as he lifted the well-honed knife and sliced into a bit of leather.

The Italians were benign occupiers. They offered Masha vegetables from their battalion kitchens, and they brought pungent cheeses when they reclaimed their mended boots. The Rapaports learned their names. Masha brewed coffee with chicory and offered steaming cups to Marcello and Luigi and Guido who, in turn, showed them pictures of their wives and children. She mended their uniforms and washed their shirts and underwear. They rewarded her with stale baguettes and smiles and a few francs.

“We will not starve,” she said as she prepared watery stews with the vegetables and crumbled the cheese into a sauce. The Rapaports were veteran survivors.

Ida and Michel rarely ventured out. The beautiful city, the capital of the Maritime Alps, overflowed with refugees. Forty thousand Jews sought sanctuary in the coastal city. Families shared single rooms in unfashionable hotels. Desperate mothers brought their children to the seashore and bathed them in the surging waves, but still the rancid odor of sweating bodies and unwashed clothing mingled with the scent of orange blossoms. Ida averted her eyes from the large-eyed children whose lank hair hung about skeletal faces.

Occasionally, desperate for air, for the sight of sea and sky, they walked along the Promenade des Anglais, stared out at the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean, and paused to peer into shop windows. France was at war, but the merchants of Nice stoically maintained a facade of normalcy. Gowns of shimmering silk draped the blasé mannequins in the windows of stylish boutiques. Ida saw a cape of the exact blue of the cape she had bought in Paris all those years ago on an afternoon when her life had changed forever.

“Do you remember my blue cape?” she asked Michel.

He drew her close.

“Of course,” he replied and adjusted the sea-green silk scarf, his impulsive gift to her.

“I have it still, that cape,” she said wistfully.

They walked on past shop windows that displayed slender vials filled with the heady perfumes derived from the bright floral beds that sparkled throughout the Riviera. It was strange, Ida thought sadly, that tender and beautiful flowers flourished amid the ugliness of war. Strange too that the sun continued to rise each day in a blaze of glory and sink so slowly into the sea, that the birds continued to sing. Nature was so oddly unperturbed by war.

One evening, they strolled beneath the arbors of orange and olive trees in the Albert I Garden where young people gathered for evening picnics. A giddy soccer game was in progress, the ball soaring high into a sky tinged with the melancholy pastel hues of a seaside sunset.

Ida looked at Michel, who was slowly and methodically stripping the frond of a date palm. The longing in his eyes matched her own. His youth, like her own, had been forfeit to war.
Pauvre
Michel. Pauvre Ida.
She pitied him even as she pitied herself.

“Michel,” she whispered and kissed him on the lips, a kiss of passion and yearning. He held her close, and hand in hand, they strolled to the esplanade that led to the sea where Ida plucked rose-gold primroses from a wild bush that hugged the rocky incline. She brought them back to Michel’s mother.

Masha Rapaport pressed a fragrant blossom to her lips, and a single tear crept down her withered cheek. “It is a very long time since I held something beautiful in my hand,” she said apologetically.

* * *

March drifted into April. A letter from Bella told them that they had, at last, arrived in Marseilles and were registered at a small hotel. Bella’s spidery script was blotted by tears.

“Your father is very unhappy here. Our room is small and ugly. We do have a balcony, but it is so narrow that if we stand on it together, we must press against each other. It is just as well because the view is so depressing. We look down on an alleyway where prostitutes walk up and down as soon as darkness falls. On every corner, horrid men stand selling pieces of paper to each other. Forged baptism certificates, forged exit visas. When will you come to us, Idotchka? Will we see you before we leave Marseilles? Mr. Fry tells us that we will have to go to Lisbon by train and you know how
Papochka
and I hate trains. Come soon, Idotchka. Come as soon as you can. Your parents need you. You must help us during these terrible days of waiting.”

Ida handed the letter to Michel, who read it, his face dark with anger. Bella’s complaints were trivial, her demand unconscionable. How could her parents consider placing Ida in such danger?

“You cannot go to them. It is too dangerous. The Vichy police have
rafles
, roundups of Jews in Marseilles every day. They say that young Jewish women who are arrested are sent to brothels,” he protested.

“I know, I understand,” she replied sadly. “But still…”

“But still, although you are my wife, you are first and foremost your parents’ daughter,” he completed the sentence, his words laced with bitterness.

He packed a small bag for both of them. He would go to Marseilles with her. He had to protect her.

He looked at his own mother and father, knowing that no matter what they felt, they would remain silent. His mother shrugged and prepared sandwiches for their journey. His father hammered a wooden heel onto a battered shoe and spoke very softly.

“You must be careful.” Grief edged his words of warning.

They were careful. They sat apart from each other in the crowded carriage of the train. “So many Jews on this train,” the heavy overdressed woman who sat next to Ida remarked. Her breath was sour. She pointed to Michel. “Look at him, so dark, so greasy. I can always smell them. And I am never wrong.
Parfum
de
ghetto
, we call their odor.”

“Yes. It’s disgusting,” Ida murmured and thought that she would like to kill the woman and throw her from the train. The ferocity of her own thought frightened her. Hatred had never been in her nature.

In Marseilles, they left the train separately as they had agreed. If one of them should be accosted by a Gestapo agent or the Vichy police, the other would escape. They raced down side streets, walking close to buildings and avoiding the lights of the street lamps until they reached the Chagalls’ hotel. A disgruntled concierge looked up from his newspaper and muttered a room number, waving them toward an unswept stairwell that led to the second floor.

Marc and Bella were huddled together on a narrow bed pressed against the wall of their tiny room. The dingy curtains were tightly drawn as though the darkness itself threatened them. Ida was shocked to see how profoundly they were changed. Marc had abandoned his role as the impudent, elfin artist, arrogantly confident of his ability to charm. He crouched on the unmade bed, his hands twitching nervously, his eyes darting from the window to the door. Bella, her delicate face waxen, her helmet of dark hair streaked with silver, embraced Ida too tightly. She complained of the journey from Gordes to Marseilles. She spoke nervously of all that had to be purchased before their departure for Lisbon and protested the need to go to Portugal.