Bridal Chair (3 page)

“All right. You’re eighteen. Not a great age, Idotchka.”

“When you were eighteen, you were already engaged to
Papochka
,” Ida retorted.

Bella nodded.

“Yes. But I understood the world. I had studied drama in Moscow. I knew how to take care of myself, how to live among strangers, how to prepare my own food and manage my own money. Your life has been very different.”

“Because you made it different,” Ida countered. The lightness of her tone masked her latent bitterness.

She remembered the days she had stood alone at the window of their Paris apartment and watched girls her age walking home from school in their uniforms, their arms linked, their heads bent close as they exchanged secrets and laughter. She had no school mates. She was taught by her mother or by the sad-eyed tutors who sat beside her at the dining room table.

“We tried to do what was best.” Bella’s voice was lightly tinged with regret. “You are so precious to us. Ah, Ida, we had seen so much danger, so much suffering. We wanted to protect you. That is what we still want.”

“I understand that. But now you must let me grow into my own life.” She spoke soothingly, but her cheeks were flushed.

“I know.” Bella smiled thinly. “After all, you are eighteen years old.”

Together they walked back to the veranda where Katya had placed tall glasses of freshly squeezed lemonade on the wrought iron table. They sat opposite each other, Bella taking tiny sips, Ida draining her glass and tilting it so that the last granules of sugar slid across her tongue.

“You’re so like your father. Sweets and more sweets. The first time he came to my parents’ home, he ate every cake on the table and sucked three lumps of sugar.” Bella laughed at the memory, but almost at once, her expression changed. “Of course that was because there were never any sweets in his own house. They were so poor, his family, always struggling. There was barely enough food on the table. Oh yes, herring. Always herring because your grandfather Chagall worked for the herring merchant.” She wrinkled her nose, as though the remembered stink of the herring soured the air of their beautiful garden. She reached for another cherry and lifted the sunflower the maid had placed on the table. “Do you know what I noticed today, Idotchka?” she asked as she plucked one petal after another. “I saw that sunflowers turn their faces away from the sun when they reach full bloom. Isn’t that curious? I would have thought they would derive their strength from the sun and seek out its warmth.”

Ida smiled. “But I am not turning my face away from you,
Mamochka
,” she said softly. “I am just trying to grow up, to become my own person.”

“You will. And all too soon. Life will see to that,” Bella replied. “Come. Let us see how Katya is managing with the lunch.”

As they left the garden, Marc Chagall emerged from his studio and stared after his wife and daughter, their colorful skirts swinging about their legs. He saw them as graceful sylphs, gliding through rays of sunlight toward the wide-windowed house.

Marc and Bella awakened early on the day of Ida’s departure for the encampment. The sun was a pale orb, barely visible in the steel-gray sky. Bella wandered into the garden and stared up at the ominous dark clouds. It was just as well, she thought, that Ida was still asleep. The weather might unnerve her. She herself was an uneasy traveler, haunted by paralyzing migraines, and she ascribed the same frailty to her daughter.

She shivered and went into the kitchen where Marc sat over his coffee, his chin cupped in his hands, his forehead wreathed in lines of worry. He had set aside his charcoal drawing sticks and the pad of coarse butcher’s paper on which he had made preliminary sketches. His attention was focused on the radio newscast, the announcer’s somber voice drifting through the dimly lit room.

“It may rain,” Bella said worriedly as Katya filled her cup. “Perhaps Ida ought to travel later in the week when the weather is better.”

He waved her into silence. He was listening with pursed lips to a broadcast of an Agence France-Presse report from Berlin summarizing a vicious speech by Adolf Hitler, announcing new boycotts against the German Jewish community.

“It is Hitler we should be worrying about, not a rainstorm,” he said bitterly, switching off the radio. “Trains do not stop running because of bad weather. Of course Ida must leave today. Let her laugh and sing and be with friends. Who knows for how long it will be possible for her to do that? He is mad, this Hitler. Dangerous and mad.”

“Don’t be so foolish, Marc,” Bella retorted harshly. “Hitler is across the border in Germany. We are in France. We are safe. Our Ida is safe.”

She spoke with a certainty she did not feel. They had so often in the past felt themselves to be secure and then been deceived. She had not forgotten their optimism after the Communist revolution and their suffering when the ideological dream morphed into a nightmare. One day Marc was celebrated as Commissar of the Arts in their native Vitebsk and then, without warning, they were refugees, seeking elusive safety in one urban enclave after another, always barely escaping the mobs that had traded hatred for the czar for hatred of the Jews. Always holding Ida close, always atremble with fear, they had boarded trains, crossed borders, traded languages, told lies until they had at last reached Germany.

In Berlin, they had yet again thought themselves safe. Marc’s paintings hung in distinguished galleries and they were welcome guests at fashionable salons. There was money and recognition. Their émigré status gave them an esoteric cast; their beauty and style were much admired. They had dressed for their roles. Slender Bella, her jet-black hair framing her delicate face, wore loose-fitting silk dresses in vivid shades. Marc sported dashing hats and the high-collared, belted shirts of the Russian peasant. Ida was an adorable child in her ruffled white dresses, her bright hair crowned with the mob caps and bonnets that Bella fashioned to amuse herself. Their lives in Germany were pleasant, laced with prosperity.

But they were vigilant. Conditioned to danger, they recognized that a haze of anti-Semitism hovered in the air, its stink growing stronger each day. Their friend Paul Cassirer was denounced by Hitler as a corrupt Jewish millionaire. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg arrived at their home pale with terror. He had passed several homes on which the words “Death to the Jews” had been painted.

“The handwriting is on the wall,” he told Marc.

“And on the doorposts,” Marc agreed wryly.

He and Bella had stared at each other in mute agreement. The safety of Berlin had been illusory. They moved to Paris.

France was different, Bella had assured herself then, and now again. It was the land of
liberté
,
égalité
,
fraternité
; Paris was the City of Light. They would make France their home. And she had not been wrong. Paris welcomed them, celebrated them. Marc’s work was appreciated. Writers and poets, intellectuals and diplomats visited their home. They sat beside Picasso and Matisse in the Café de Flore where waiters greeted them by name, kissed Ida on both her cheeks. Surely they were safe. They had to be safe. She was too exhausted to take flight again, and the ominous clouds passed. They did not always signal the onset of tempestuous storms.

Though her husband’s pessimism on this grim morning angered her, she too felt apprehensive. She had awakened in the night, her heart pounding, and rushed into Ida’s room. Staring down at her sleeping daughter, she tried to recall the traveler’s prayer her orthodox father had recited when she journeyed from their Vitebsk home to the university in Moscow. Still, she would not share her nocturnal fears with Marc. She would not feed the fire of his anxiety, even as she herself felt its heat. They were survivors. They would be fine. Ida would be fine.

“We will be safe,” she repeated defiantly.

Marc refilled his coffee cup, ran his fingers through his thick thatch of irrepressible curls. Bella noticed for the first time that his hair was tinged with streaks of gray, and that new recognition saddened her. They were growing older, the two of them.

He took a long sip of his coffee and added sugar.

“Jews are never safe, Bella,” he said. “We are the children of Isaac, always in danger of the sacrificial knife.”

She saw then that the sketches he had been working on were studies of the biblical patriarch Isaac, bound for sacrifice on Mount Moriah. He had been working on illustrations for the Bible intermittently since their journey to Palestine, an odyssey undertaken three years earlier in celebration of Ida’s fifteenth birthday. The landscape of the holy land had inspired him. He had wept in Jerusalem and then apologized for his tears, as always ambivalent about his Judaism.

It occurred to Bella that his biblical drawings were his answer to Hitler, his graphic assertion that the Jewish people would survive even as Isaac had survived. She touched the drawing, then lifted her finger, smudged by the charcoal, to Marc’s face, stroking it gently.

“But we will keep Ida safe,” she repeated.

“Of course we will keep our Ida safe,” he assured her.

“You have no need to worry. I will keep myself safe!” Ida’s voice lilted with gaiety as she burst into the room and dashed up to her parents, her face radiant, her hair brushed into a fiery blaze. She was already dressed for the journey in a white linen dress, a green traveling cape draping her shoulders. She hugged them both, planted kisses on their cheeks, as though determined to infuse them with her own joyous excitement, and snatched a croissant from the table.

“Katya, fresh coffee,” she called, taking a seat between them.

She crammed strawberries into her mouth and chattered excitedly about her plans for the weeks ahead. She wanted to hike a mountain trail. There was a wonderful café in the town near the encampment. She hoped that the friends she had made the previous year would be back. Oh, the mountain nights were so beautiful. Star-studded heavens. She had her watercolors with her and she might even try to work in oils. It must be exciting to paint at night.

Her exuberance ambushed them, briefly banishing their fears.

Katya brought her a cup of coffee to which she added one teaspoon of sugar after another in imitation of her father’s cravings. She nodded absently as Bella advised her to take a seat on the train near the window, to keep her portmanteau always on her lap, to make sure the purse that held her money was buried at the bottom of her bag.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be careful. Don’t you trust me?”

“Oh, we trust you, Idotchka. It is the rest of the world we don’t trust,” Marc replied wryly.

Bella said nothing but placed a neatly wrapped packet of food in Ida’s portmanteau.

“Pirogen. The potato ones that you like. Don’t let yourself get hungry.”

Ida smiled and pressed her mother’s hand to her lips. “You must not worry about me,” she said. “I know how to take care of myself.”

The sky grew lighter as they drove to the station. Bella’s heart sank at the sight of the train impatiently belching forth black clouds of smoke, its whistle screeching angrily as it lurched to a stop. The conductor stood imperiously at the carriage door, waiting for the passengers to board. An insistent premonition caused Bella’s hands to shake, her throat to grow dry. The pain at her temple intensified. She felt that she must do something, anything, to keep Ida with them. Perhaps she could grip her arm and plead with her not to leave. But of course she would say nothing, do nothing. Her irrationality shamed her. Her heart beat faster; she rested her head on Marc’s shoulder. The train whistle shrieked again. Ida’s arms encircled them in one last embrace, and she scampered up the iron steps behind the porter who carried her small trunk. She waved to them from the window of her carriage as the whistle emitted another long, angry blast and the train sped away, staining the air with its coal-dark fumes.

Bella remembered an old woman in Vitebsk who had claimed that she could read the future in trails of smoke. She was an ugly hunchbacked woman with warts on her hands and sour breath, but her predictions had almost always come true. The infertile wife, whose happy future she had read in the smoke of her Sabbath candles, conceived. The sick child, whose death she had predicted, died. Bella sighed and studied the wisps of gray that streaked the sky as the train sped away. She wondered sadly what those vagrant strands might reveal about Ida’s future and their own.

Settled in a window seat in her first-class compartment, Ida removed her cape and undid the top buttons of her white linen dress. She looked at herself approvingly in the window of the speeding train, removed a silver compact from her bag, and lightly rouged her cheeks and her lips. She replaced the compact, fumbled until she found a small vial of perfume, and dabbed a droplet behind each ear. The aroma of lilac wafted through the air, and the plump older woman who sat opposite her smiled benignly.

“They say that lilac is the scent of lovers, mademoiselle,” she said.

“Do they?” Ida asked and opened her copy of
Eugene
Onegin
. She did not want to dilute these precious moments of solitude with casual conversation.

When the train stopped at Lyon, she handed the packet of food her mother had prepared to a tramp who lingered on the platform and bought herself a baguette and a café au lait at the station buffet. The simple transaction delighted her. She counted out the coins carefully, reveling in her independence. She sipped the coffee and ate half the baguette on the train, carefully rewrapping it because she was certain that Michel would be hungry when they met.

As they had planned, he was waiting for her on the platform in Embrun, the tiny hamlet nestled in the shadow of the Hautes-Alpes. Her heart skipped a beat at the sight of him, so tall and handsome in his high astrakhan hat and the loose dark leather cloak favored by Sorbonne students. He did not see her at first, and his eyes, dark with disappointment, scoured the platform.

“Michel!” she called.

He rushed toward her, his arms opened wide. “Ida!”

She rushed into his embrace, and he held her close. The baguette she clutched in her hand was crushed, and they laughed as crumbs snowed down onto the gritty platform.

“And I was really hungry,” he said ruefully.

“Never mind. I will buy you another. A truckload of baguettes, if you like,” she promised as he thrust her small trunk into the cab he had engaged to drive them to the encampment. She leaned against him. They were reunited, their yearnings of the past year realized. The cab skittered dangerously on a mountain pass and he held her close. Smiling, she relaxed into the protection of his embrace.

* * *

“What do you think your parents are doing right now, at this very moment?” Michel asked her the next day as they walked together down a mountain path into a glade where edelweiss glinted whitely against the rough, dark alpine grass. The easy rhythm of the previous summer had been effortlessly resumed.

“My father is painting and my mother is posing for him, dreaming all the while of her childhood, dreaming a poem, dreaming a story,” Ida replied without hesitation.

She remembered that she had once asked her mother why she so often closed her eyes when she posed.

“But you must close your eyes if you are to dream,” Bella had replied.

Ida had understood. She knew her mother’s dreams were translated into stories and fragments of poetry, which appeared in Yiddish script in the copy books she kept in the drawer of her escritoire. Bella’s every reverie became a short narrative, the warming flame of memory captured forever in the graceful strokes of her pen.

“And what are your mother and father doing?” she asked Michel teasingly in turn.

She had never met the Rapaports, although she knew that her parents had occasionally spoken with them at the gatherings of Jewish Russian émigrés at the Temple of Montmartre that they attended with feigned reluctance. Marc and Bella went to such soirees, Ida knew, because they yearned to speak their native langue, to scavenge news of friends and relatives in their abandoned homeland. Marc, always intent on weighing the achievements of others against his own, returned happily from such evenings, satisfied that his own accomplishments, his fame, exceeded those of all the other attendees. He, the son of a man who had hauled herrings and a woman who ran a tiny grocery store, could afford a life in Paris that could not be attained by the now dispossessed sons of Russia’s most privileged classes, the bankers, attorneys, and doctors, those who would have scorned him during his student days in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Ida had asked him, oh so casually, if he had ever met the Rapaports.

“Bourgeois Muscovites. They once had a town house in the capital, a dacha in Zaloshe, but now they have a small shop in Le Marais and live in a flat in its rear. Shopkeepers. That’s all they are. Shopkeepers,” he had replied derisively.

“It’s no crime to be a shopkeeper. Your own mother was a shopkeeper,” Bella had protested mildly. His prejudices amused her.

Ida was not amused, but she said nothing. She did not want her parents to question her interest in
la
famille
Rapaport. She waited patiently for Michel’s reply.

He glanced at his watch.

“Let me see. It is ten thirty in the morning. My mother is probably bargaining with a customer who wants to buy a length of fabric for half the price she is demanding. My father is reading
Le
Monde
, checking the prices on the Bourse, looking for ways to invest money that he doesn’t have,” he said ruefully.

Ida laughed. They were, both of them, the wise and protective children of foolish parents who remained uneasy with their new lives in France. Michel’s parents relied on him to study law diligently so that he might restore the family to their lost prosperity and prestige. The Chagalls depended on Ida to energize them, to fill their lives with joy and beauty, to replace the families that had been lost to them.

“Ten thirty,” Ida said musingly. “The hour when father interrupts his work to listen to the BBC broadcast. If you want to know what Adolf Hitler had for dinner last night in Berlin, ask Marc Chagall the next morning.”

“He takes the ugly little Austrian seriously then?” Michel asked.

“I think we should all take him seriously,” Ida replied soberly.

Michel leaned against a juniper tree. He did not want to discuss Hitler. They were on holiday from sadness. “Perhaps we should go back. The lecture on literature will begin soon. A professor of Russian from the Sorbonne is speaking,” he said.

“I don’t want to hear another word about Turgenev or Tolstoy. And I don’t want to listen to those boring girls who only talk about dances and parties and their dreams of becoming pharmacists or teachers. I don’t want to be a pharmacist. I don’t want to be a teacher. There is no one here who interests me.”

She made a face, a charming moue such as she had often practiced before her mirror and that Matisse himself had applauded when she trained it on him in a café. The girls in her dormitory, the ordinary, conventional daughters of Russian émigrés, wedded to respectability, had probably never heard of Matisse. Their whispered intimacies at bedtime irritated her. Uneasy with their bodies, they undressed beneath the bedclothes, while Ida, who had posed nude for her father, walked about the dormitory room unclothed. She listened to them speak of Ivan and Boris, Natalya wondering if she should allow Ivan to touch her breasts, Anna confiding with great solemnity that Boris had kissed her. “On the lips,” she reported in a rapturous whisper.

“Silly geese,” Ida had muttered to Elsa, the doctor who served as a resident adviser in the girls’ dormitory.

“Not silly. Just young,” Elsa had replied.

“No one in the entire encampment interests you?” Michel asked teasingly.

“Perhaps Elsa.”

“And no one besides Elsa,” he persisted mischievously.

“All right. You interest me. I don’t know why, but you do.” She laughed and tossed her head so vigorously that her bright hair whipped her face. Her beret fluttered off and was caught up in a sudden wind.

They sprinted after it together. Pouncing upon it, they fell to the ground, his body heavy upon her own, her fingers gripping the beret and then releasing it so that her hand was free to touch his cheek and trace the curve of his mouth, the arch of his eyebrow.

“Ida,” he murmured.

“Michel.”

Their names were pledges that fell from their lips, lips that met softly at first in tender friendship, and then with a rousing urgency. There, in the alpine meadow, for the very first time, they shed their clothes. There beneath the juniper tree, he spread wide his leather cloak and they came together in joy, her cry of pain subdued by the sudden explosion of pleasure that caused her to cry out in rapture. Their hearts beat against each other in wild rhythm. Exhausted, they stared up at the cloudless sky. She thought of her foolish classmates who giggled as they spoke of stolen kisses, tentative touches.

She was not such a girl. She was a woman, the woman she had told her mother she would become. She was her parents’ daughter, proud of her body, delighting in the caress of wind and sun upon her bare skin, delighting in the freedom and power of her feelings for Michel, of his feelings for her.

He took her hand in his own, kissed her fingers one by one.

“You’re not sorry, are you,
ma
chérie
?” he asked softly.

“Sorry? Why would I be sorry?” she replied and placed her head on his shoulder, pressed his palm to her cheek.

They dressed swiftly then and walked back to the encampment, where the discussion of Turgenev had ended and lunch was being set out on long wooden tables.

* * *

During the remaining weeks of the holiday camp, they were inseparable. They sat side by side at the few lectures they attended. They spoke the requisite amount of Russian, learned the songs of the Volga boatmen and the folk dances of Ukrainian peasants. They sat in the front of the room on the day an impassioned poet discussed the work of Sholem Aleichem. He read selections aloud, not in the author’s lyrical Yiddish but in an awkward Russian translation favored by pretentious intellectuals.
A
stupid
conceit
, Ida thought.

“Do any of you know the work of Sholem Aleichem?” he asked the young people, who did not bother to hide their boredom.

“I do. My father painted the sets for the Jewish Theater when his plays were performed in Moscow,” Ida volunteered laconically.

The poet looked at her with interest.

“Your father? Are you Marc Chagall’s daughter? His Idotchka. I remember seeing you when you were a little girl. Perhaps in Berlin. Yes, surely in Berlin. You, of course, do not remember me, but please give my regards to your dear parents.”

He peered at her over the podium, perhaps seeing in his mind’s eye the impish auburn-haired child who had been the pampered pet of their small community.

“Idotchka.” Her nickname was whispered derisively through the room. Her classmates pointed at her and nudged each other.

Ida ignored them and shrugged indifferently.

“I will do that, monsieur le professeur,” she assured him.

She knew that in all probability her parents would not even recognize his name. He was not famous enough to be included either in their circle of intimates or in their roster of acquaintances whose names and phone numbers they inscribed in a black leather address book. One never knew who might one day prove useful. Their peripatetic life had taught them as much.

The elderly professor beamed at her.

“Ah, little Ida,” he murmured and turned back to his notes.

“Ah, if only he knew how grown up his little Ida is,” Michel whispered into her ear.

“Perhaps I will tell him how grown up I am. Perhaps I will tell everyone,” Ida teased, suppressing her laughter.

But of course she would tell no one, nor would Michel. They delighted in the secrecy of their sweet intimacy.

Each afternoon, they escaped the activities of the encampment and dashed across the meadow to an abandoned shepherd’s shack. And each day their lovemaking was slower, more deliberate.

“We must be careful,” Michel had cautioned, and she had nodded in agreement and laughed. She was the daughter of enlightened parents. Bella had explained the monthly cycle to her the day her menses began, blushing only slightly but determined to be a modern woman, a modern mother. No shtetl ignorance of her body for her Ida,
la
fille
Parisienne
.

“I know what I’m doing, Michel,” she had assured him. “My body is my friend. We understand each other.”

They undressed each other, Michel always fumbling with the buttons of her dresses as she had known he would. She knelt to remove his boots and to stroke his long, pale feet. They examined each other with knowing eyes and tender touch. Naked, they raced across the earthen floor, their games of tag ending in tumultuous and merry surrender. They played house, offered each other pretend meals of alpine grass and acorns. They built themselves a bower, a canopy of tangled vines, and Michel fashioned a soft bed out of the branches of conifers over which he spread his long leather cloak. Bright green pine needles glinted in her copper-colored curls, and she plucked them out carefully one by one as they walked very slowly back to the encampment.

Her sleep was untroubled, her dreams pleasant but unremembered. She awakened smiling and serene.

She went to the communal shower house late one evening and was toweling her hair dry when Elsa sat down beside her. Ida smiled at her. She liked grave-eyed Elsa, who was so unlike the other girls. Orphaned in Moscow, Elsa had made her way to Paris with the help of Jewish relief organizations and had stoically taken control of her own life. She had studied medicine while working at odd jobs and managing scholarship grants that provided her with modest stipends. Somehow she had found time to fall in love with André, a young surgeon. She had shown Ida his photograph. He was rotund, prematurely bald, his nose prominent, his eyes narrow.

“He is not handsome, I know,” she had said frankly. “But then I am not beautiful. We love each other for who we are, not for how we look. He is faithful and diligent, brilliant in his work. And he cares for me. It has been a long time since someone has cared for me.”

“And you? Do you care for him?” Ida had asked.

“I love him,” she had replied without hesitation.