Immortal Muse (56 page)

Ana placed the landscape, unmatted and unframed, on the bed. She counted out twenty francs from her purse, and laid the bills on the coverlet. “There,” she said. “Now we're both happy,
oui
?”

Lotte smiled at her. “
Oui
,” she answered.

“Good. I'll have this framed; it will look lovely and dramatic on the wall above my bed. I can look at it and imagine I'm a gull flying in that storm. Do you often go to the beach to draw and paint?”

“Sometimes,” Lotte said, “or I'll go to the market, or up into the hills. There's so much beauty around here, and so many artists. I'm such a poor talent, compared to some of the others.”

Ana took a step toward Lotte, taking the woman's hands in her own. Their gazes caught, held. Ana could feel Lotte's soul-heart, the emerald tendrils of it rising and curling toward her. She took them in her mind, let herself taste them, let herself strengthen them so that the radiance filled the air around them like sunlight through new leaves. “No,” Ana said. “You mustn't say things like that. Lotte, you have no idea of the talent inside you.”

She smiled at Anaïs, and Ana felt herself want to take the woman in her arms and hug her, but Lotte pulled her hands back shyly. “It's nice of you to say.”

“It's the truth. I've known many painters, and . . .” She took a breath. “You've something few of them have, Lotte.”

She turned away, though she looked at the paintings on the wall. “
Arrête, s'il vous plaît.
”

“I mean that sincerely. I'd like to go with you tomorrow, and watch you draw and paint. Would you let me do that? I promise I won't interrupt you.” She put her hand on Lotte's shoulder, feeling the soul-heart reach out toward her touch. Lotte turned.

“I think I'd like that,” Lotte said.

 * * * 

They would meet the next day, then often during the following weeks. Lotte seemed to enjoy the attention that Anaïs lavished on her. Ana had the sense that Lotte had few other friends, of her age or any other. Ana never pushed her to talk, never probed too hard about her past or her feelings. She'd linked herself with several women artists over the centuries; she'd even found the relationship becoming sexual as well: with Artemisia Gentileschi, with Paolina's mother Maria, with Radclyffe Hall. Those she loved, she loved without reservation. But she had the sense that if she pushed Lotte for that kind of intimacy, she would find Lotte pulling away.

If it happened, it would happen.

Instead, Ana concentrated on Lotte's green soul-heart, letting herself sink into that energy so that she could loosen it and allow it to grow outward. That was enough; she found that, slowly, over the days, Lotte began to talk to and eventually confide in her. She would lean against Ana's side as they conversed, or her hand might touch Ana's tentatively. Lotte began to paint more furiously, portraits and landscapes that were more experimental and less commercial: images that seemed to spring out from the deep well inside her.

For her own part, Anaïs pulled away from the group of artists on which she'd been feeding. Lotte was enough for now, and she found herself far more comfortable with Lotte alone than with all of the others. For the first time in a few decades, Anaïs found herself with the desire to buy chemicals and continue her quest for the second half of the Philosopher's Stone, to pull out her own paints and brushes, or to play the piano and find the songs inside herself.

Lotte's green heart began to slowly pull Ana from her own fallow period.

“I worry that I'll end up like Momma and Grossmama,” Lotte confided to Anaïs one late May morning in 1940 as the two of them ate a picnic lunch on a cliffside overlooking Nice harbor and the lighthouse there. “I'm afraid that I'll give in to despair and just leap out of a window like they both did.”

Sitting near the steep, boulder-strewn edge tumbling down into the blue water below, Anäis moved closer to Lotte and put her arm protectively around the young woman's shoulders. She could feel the young girl trembling, though she wondered if it wasn't the intimacy of the contact. “You're not your mother, or your grandmother,” Ana said. “Because
they
did something doesn't mean that you must also end up the same way.”

Lotte nodded, almost furiously. Her shivering stopped, and yet she made no move to leave Ana's embrace; instead she leaned her head into Ana's shoulder. “I understand that. I do.”

The bright Mediterranean sun warmed them, and Lotte snuggled deeper in Ana's embrace. Ana could smell the fragrance of her hair, and she bent her head to kiss Lotte where her hair was parted. They remained there, caught in the lazy sun, in the salt breeze, in the susurrations of the waves against the rocks far below, for a long time: not moving, not speaking, just enjoying the feel of each other's closeness.

They climbed back down to the city a few hours later, and Ana walked with Lotte back to the house where she and her grandfather were staying. He must have been waiting for her; as they approached, he came toward them leaning on his cane, waving a piece of paper that snapped angrily with his gestures. “Have you seen this?” he half-shouted in French, ignoring Ana. “Twenty years I have been here in France, and this is what our world has come to, this is how I'm to be treated.”

“What are you talking about, Grosspapa?” Lotte asked, glancing back at Ana with a worried look.

“Here! Read!” He thrust the paper in her face and stalked away, the paper fluttering nearly to the floor before Lotte managed to catch it. Ana watched her scan the words there, unable to read the print. She heard Lotte gasp.

“Oh,” she said. Wordlessly, she passed the paper to Ana and went to her grandfather, who was sitting in a frayed fabric chair, muttering to himself. Ana watched Lotte crouch beside him, whispering to him in German, then she turned back to scan the paper. The words threatened to blur as she read them.
All foreign-born Jews in the Côte d'Azur must report for internment instructions in the next week . . . transport to an encampment beyond the Pyrenees . . . compulsory . . .

Ana glanced over to Lotte, stricken. “I don't know what to say. This . . . this is horrible. There must be some way to fight this.”

Lotte's grandfather sniffed derisively. “You're not Jewish,” he said to Ana. “You don't understand. Ask Lotte; she's seen the infection firsthand in Germany. Now it's spread here, and soon it will be everywhere. Everywhere in the entire world.”

Anaïs glanced at Lotte, who nodded as she clung to her grandfather. “He's right,” she said. “I'm sorry, Ana. He's right.”

“No,” Ana insisted. “I won't accept that. There's something we can do. You'll see. There has to be . . .”

 * * * 

Ana tried to halt the deportation. She contacted everyone she could in Nice and the surrounding villages, but few in authority would even listen; if they pretended to do so, they only shook their heads sadly
and shrugged thin shoulders, lifting their hands palms upward. “You must understand that it's this terrible, terrible war,” they would say. “These measures are for our own protection, and for theirs as well. If the Jews are held in camps, then no one can accuse them of doing anything against us. It's only temporary, only temporary. You do know that some of them are helping the Germans as fifth columnists, don't you? Besides, they'll be treated better there than they are here.
C'est la vie.
It's for everyone's welfare . . .”

It was the same story everywhere, repeated from a dozen throats. Anaïs could feel the emptiness of the words. No one would do anything to stop the removal from taking place. If anything, Nice seemed pleased to have the “Jewish problem” removed from them; they would gladly give their fate into the hands of others.

This is only what you deserve,
a part of her railed inside.
This is your punishment for letting yourself become involved this deeply with someone once again. Even without Nicolas, the fates punish you. You shouldn't have let yourself get this close and this vulnerable. Have you learned nothing at all over the centuries?

She had no good answer to the internal accusation.
I do it because it makes me feel whole.
That was the only response she could give.
I do it because this is my addiction. I do it because I must.

The world was prepared to mock her. The morning that Lotte was to be transported, Anaïs angrily snapped open her paper to see if the orders might have, miraculously, changed. On the front page was a photo of SS officers at a meeting in Berlin. She wouldn't ordinarily have done more than glance at it, but the grainy, black-and-white face of one of the German officers snagged her gaze and stole her breath. The man was short—the shortest of those in the photograph—and there was the way he peered at the camera lens with his head slightly tilted to the left, as well as the heavy-lidded contempt that seemed to radiate from him. She
knew
who he was, knew by the unseen fist that grabbed her intestines and twisted them violently, that turned the croissant to ash in her mouth. Her mouth voiced his name silently:
Nicolas
. She scanned the picture's caption: he was identified as SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner, but she knew he was no more Alois Brunner than she was Anaïs Dereux.

She found that she was not surprised to see him there, to find him among the SS in Germany. She thought she could hear the fates laughing at her at the serendipity on this day of all days, and it was also altogether fitting that Nicolas would be enmeshed with the Nazis, whose cruelty was already being whispered about. It was as if Nicolas, somehow, could interfere with her even when they were in countries at war with each other, even when, for half a century, he had seemingly abided by his promised truce in Vienna and left her alone.

The voice inside her laughed bitterly. Ana crumpled the paper in her fist, as if she could remotely obliterate Nicolas with the gesture. She pushed herself away from the table, leaving her breakfast untouched. She left the house and hurried down the hill to l'Ermitage, wanting to be with Lotte.
Needing
to be with her.

A hired car was idling in the driveway, but she found Lotte still there. Lotte was sitting in the dreary and dark communal dining room, with a single, ancient valise at her feet and a frayed, thin coat draped over the back of the chair in which she sat. Farther back in the house, Ana could hear Lotte's grandfather quarreling with someone over the disposition of the remaining furniture—the owner of the house, Ana supposed.

“Lotte?”

The young woman looked up, her face drawn and wan. She managed the barest of smiles for Ana, who knelt in front of Lotte and took her hands in her own. “You didn't need to come, Ana,” Lotte said. The young woman's soul-heart was wound so tightly inside once more that Ana could barely pluck at its ends, could only sip at its potential richness.

Ana was suddenly frightened, afraid that this was the end, that she would never see Lotte again, never be able to taste the fullness of her creativity, never again feel her talent lifting Ana's own potential. She might never feel the softness of Lotte's touch, hear her surprising laugh when she was amused, never catch the floral scent of her hair nor linger next to the heat of her on a cool day.

She would never witness Lotte fully unleashing the gift inside her.

“I'll go with you,” Ana said, clutching at Lotte. “I'll follow you. I'm a French citizen; they can't stop me from traveling. I'll find some way to get you out, you and your grandfather. Lotte, there's so much you have inside you. You can't ignore that. I won't let you.”

“Ana,” she said, and there was a finality in her voice. She leaned down, enveloping Ana in her thin, frail arms. “You've been such a sweet, kind friend; more than I could ever have wished for and more than I even knew I wanted. I love you for that. But this . . . You can't stop this.”

“Of course we can't, if we're not willing to try,” Ana answered. “Lotte, you could stay with me. We could buy new identity papers, ones that say you're only German, not Jewish. For you and your grandfather both. We could go somewhere else, where you wouldn't be known . . .”

“You want me to deny myself and my faith?” Lotte gave a small shake of her head, her brown hair swaying around her face. “Then I
would
be lost, Ana. No. We have to go. And it's time.”

She stood, and Anaïs rose with her. “Grosspapa!” Lotte called out into the interior of the house. “The car is ready!” Then, more softly: “Ana, I will miss you most of all. You've been such a good friend. I never thought I . . .” She stopped and hugged Ana suddenly and hard. Ana's arms tightened around Lotte. She tried to memorize the feel of her, the smell. Emerald tendrils sparked and flared, wrapping about Ana like a second set of arms. Anaïs blinked back tears.

“I'll go with you to the station at least,” she told Lotte, but Lotte was already stepping back from her and reaching for the handle of her valise.

“No,” Lotte said. For a moment, Ana thought Lotte would cry, but the young woman sniffed and straightened. “Ana, please don't. It would be too hard, for both of us. Just let me remember you this way, right here.”

“I won't give up on you, Lotte,” Ana said furiously. “I won't.”

“You must,” Lotte answered, stroking her cheek with her free hand. She let the hand drop then and picked up her coat. “Grosspapa!”

Her grandfather came from the other room. He grunted at Ana, then pulled at Lotte's arm. Ana watched them leave, walking with them out to the courtyard where the hired car sat.

Lotte waved to Ana as she got into the car, before sliding in and closing the door behind her as her grandfather entered from the other side. Lotte pressed her hand against the glass in a last farewell.