Immortal Muse (57 page)

Ana found herself terrified that this would be her last image of Lotte.

 * * * 

In the end, it would not be, though it would take nearly every
centime
that Anaïs could scrounge to ensure that.

She did follow Lotte, eventually, but first she went back to the familiarity of Paris. Anaïs had a f
ew of Klimt's canvases squirreled away there, thinking that—a century or more later—she might be able to sell them for large amounts. She sold some of them now instead, though she received far less for them than she had hoped; with rumors that the Third Republic's days were numbered and that Marshal Philippe Pétain, the great Victor of Verdun in the first Great War, would head a new government and sign an armistice with Germany, there were few buyers for luxury items like paintings. Still, the sale put funds in her pockets, money that could be used to grease her way into bureaucratic offices, to retain lawyers who could decipher the byzantine regulations that governed the relocation of foreign-born Jews, to pay the bribes necessary to see high-level officials in the government and to convince those officials to follow their own rules.

There were other bribes she had to pay as well, ones that involved no money at all. She did what she needed to do, as quickly as she could, telling herself that she been with enough men that these encounters meant nothing at all. In the midst of it, she imagined Lotte's face when she brought her out of the encampment.

It took until August and several negotiations with the Vichy government under Pétain, but Anaïs was finally able to leave Paris with a sheaf of stamped, official documents to deliver to the French Commandant in charge.

The internment camp was near the town of Gurs, in the Aquitaine region. The facility had been built in 1939 to house Spanish refugees fleeing Francisco Franco's regime, many of them combatants in that struggle. A year later, at the start of the German hostilities, the camp contained not only the Spanish, but German prisoners and those from the other Axis powers, as well as French nationals suspected of being Nazi sympathizers. When the Vichy government signed their armistice with the Germans, the war prisoners had been released, though the camp still held many Spanish refugees.

And now . . . The Vichy government held foreign Jews here, along with others suspected of being troublesome: leftist union organizers, pacifists, even ordinary criminals.

Gurs was a sleepy village alongside a river snaking through the foothills of the Pyrenees. The encampment was placed well away from the village, like someone holding a soiled diaper at arm's length. The smell hit Anaïs as soon as she left the car she'd hired in the village: the ripe scent of human excrement and corruption. She felt a growing disgust as she approached the administrative building for the camp, looking at the crowded facilities beyond the doubled barbed wire perimeter. There was a single paved street, on either side of which the land was divided into parcels, which were in turn packed with several small triangular huts. The ground was soaked from the frequent rains off the Atlantic, which turned the earth into soupy clay. She could see the inmates: they were everywhere, ragged pants soiled to the knees with the gray spatters from the ground, many of their bodies thin and skeletal. The men were separated from the women and from the entrance, Ana could only see the males; she could only hope that Lotte was somehow being treated better.

The French Commandant peered myopically at the documents that Ana presented him, harrumphing and stroking his bearded chin as he read the words, and glancing up at Ana from time to time. “These do appear to be in order,” he said finally, tapping the paper with a thin forefinger, “but M'mselle must understand that there are many people here. To locate this grandfather and granddaughter and complete all the reports necessary, well, there is only so much time that I have and so many responsibilities. And in this time of national crisis . . .” He clucked his tongue, shaking his head sadly.

“I understand the times, Commandant,” Ana told the man. “If it would help the Commandant, I am willing make a substantial donation to your camp operating funds. Perhaps then the Commandant could find the resources necessary to expedite this? A hundred francs?” She watched his face. “Or perhaps two hundred? I could give you the funds directly, Commandant: in cash today, so you can put the funds yourself into the proper hands . . .”

Half an hour later, a thin and pale Lotte was ushered into the Commandant's office. Her hair was matted and dull, her cheeks hollowed, but her face brightened as she saw Ana. Her green heart was nearly brown and vanished, wrapped far inside her and covered over. Yet Ana felt it stir, still alive, as the two embraced. Ana whispered the words of a small charm she remembered to stir the energy, subvocalizing the Arabic words so that Lotte wouldn't hear them, and sighed as she felt the energy connect again to her.

“You're free,” Anaïs said to her. “You've been released so you can care for your grandfather back home in Nice.”

“You did this?” Lotte asked Ana, who could not stop herself from grinning in delight at Lotte's gratification and pleasure. “How?”

“That's not important,” she told her. “What's important is that you can go home, and you can start working again.”

With that, Ana felt Lotte's green heart pulse once, lifting almost as in relief from its burial place inside. “Good,” Lotte said. “I know now what I need to do. I've been thinking about this.”

 * * * 

I
n the wake of the Vichy armistice, the Germans had taken direct control of northern and western France, with the Vichy shadow government controlling the so-called “Free Zone” of southern France, but Nice and the Côte d'Azur had been placed in Italian hands. There were swirling, wild rumors of mass numbers of German and French Jews being arrested and handed over to the Nazis by the French Vichy government, of the Jews in the Gurs encampment being emptied into a greater camp outside Paris called Drancy, run by the Gestapo Office of Jewish Affairs, and of those interned in Drancy being ferried eastward to forced labor camps in Germany.

However, the Italians seemed more tolerant and
laissez-faire
than the Germans—though there were demonstrations against the Jews in the Côte d'Azur, there were no reprisals and no mass roundups, and the Italian military permitted the Jews to remain in their homes. The gossip that Anaïs heard was that German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop was complaining loudly and often to Mussolini that “the Italian military lacks a proper understanding of the Jewish question.” Unlike the Jewish population of Vichy France or Germany, no Jews here were forced to wear the Star of David on their clothing as identification.

It was almost as if, for the moment, Ana and Lotte could ignore the war—if one could forget the short food and gas supplies and the barrage of news, both good and bad, coming from the various fronts.

Lotte's grandfather, already querulous and difficult to live with, only became more so after their return to Nice, and Ana was able to help Lotte move away from his sour, negative presence to the La Belle Aurore, a hotel a few towns away from Nice toward the Italian border. Ana also moved to the La Belle Aurore to be with Lotte, and it was there that Ana was able to finally and entirely unleash Lotte's green heart.

Lotte had told her some of what she wanted to do as they'd returned to Nice from the Gurs encampment, though Anaïs hadn't understood half of it. The project had burst from Lotte almost as soon as she moved to La Belle Aurore—as if a volcano had finally been unleashed from deep inside her. Lotte began working furiously, so focused that Ana was almost frightened by the intensity—and, she had to admit, almost jealous of the attention that Lotte lavished upon her project. “No, I can't go to the beach today,” she would say, if Ana suggested that the two of them relax together. “I want to finish this painting. Maybe tomorrow . . .”

But tomorrow there would be a new excuse, and the next day as well. Lotte barely noticed Ana bringing her food, or sitting down to watch her work.

Still, Ana reaped the benefits as well: she and Lotte grew increasingly close, and Lotte's creative energy fueled Ana's own efforts. She had set up a laboratory in the village and her experiments were proceeding well—she was trying to reproduce her and Nicolas' previous success in turning mercury to silver. Ana was painting also, in the same room as Lotte, and if she wasn't entirely pleased with the results, she found them satisfactory.

If Lotte and she were still not lovers, well, she was with Lotte nearly every day. That was pleasure enough. Had it not been for the war, she might have been happy.

“What
is
all this?” Ana asked her, shuffling the sheaves of paper on Lotte's table in her room. “I don't mean any criticism, my dear—these are wonderful images—but what exactly are they
for?”
The paintings were rough but yet evocative, bold strokes of gouache with a muted palette, sometimes with words painted directly on them. There were notes on presentation, notes on music: Ana couldn't decide whether this was a series of paintings or the storyboard for a play or movie. There were nearly two hundred of the paintings already, in less than a year; Lotte seemed to be interested in little beyond her feverish work.

Ana felt Lotte standing directly behind her, watching her as she examined the paintings, and she reached back with her hands to Lotte's hips, pulling her closer to her. Lotte laughed once, kissed the nape of Ana's neck, and took a step back, as if the reverse embrace were too intimate for her. Ana turned to face Lotte. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what you're doing with all this.”

“This is my life,” Lotte told Ana earnestly. “All of it. Everything. If all the ghosts in their lives drove Momma and Grossmama to suicide, then I'm not going to allow them to do that to me. I'm going to capture those ghosts and bind them. I'm going to put them down on paper where they can't be hidden. I'll silence them by bringing them into the light—every last one of them, the good and the bad.” Lotte reached out to Ana's neck; she took the gold chain there and gently pulled the sardonyx pendant from underneath the collar of Ana's blouse. She held it for a moment, looking carefully at the piece of jewelry. “Why do you wear this?” she asked Ana.

“You already know; I've told you before—it's to remind me of what I went through in order to become who I am, so I never forget.”

“Well, just as this helps you to keep your memories fresh in your mind, that's what I'm doing with this. If I paint my memories, then they can't ever leave me, but they also can't ever hurt me again. I'll have rendered them harmless by binding them in paint. Do you understand?”

“No,” Ana admitted. “Not entirely, anyway.” She picked up a thick sheaf of the paintings and started looking through them, one by one. There: two male faces crowding the right side of the page, rendered in warm oranges and red; on the left, a female face protrudes, done in cooler hues, and in the middle, the words “Lieben sie mich eigentlich?”
Actually, they love me?
And here: as if the painter were hovering from a point well above and looking down, a family of men and women around a table, with a meal and bottles of wine set around them as they talk in groups. Many of the paintings had brushed dialogue or commentary accompanying them. “But my question still stands,” Anaïs continued. “What are all these paintings
for?
What are you planning to do with them?—I don't see you trying to sell them individually. And you've made all these notes about music, presentation, and stage directions; it's like you're putting together a performance. Is that what this is?”

“Maybe.” Again, Charlotte gave that musical, self-deprecating laugh. “I really don't know. It's just . . . since I've left Gurs—and since I've been around you, Ana—I feel like chains have dropped away from me. Everything inside me is flowing out and it's all I can do just to capture the vision before it's gone, it's coming so fast. I've never felt this way before. I'm burning inside and the only way to keep the flames from taking me is to paint and paint and paint . . .” She stopped, breathless and panting. “It's so wonderful, Ana. Wonderful and frightening and terrifying all at once. Do you understand that?”

Ana could only shake her head. “No,” she said simply. “I wish I did. But I've seen it before. And I wish . . .”

I wish that it could be me that has that passion, that drive, that intensity. I have some talent, and I've had centuries to work, but I'm not one of the great ones. That's not my task, that's not my fate. I'm mostly the daemon, the channel, the one who can take the soul-heart inside and make it all it can be, as long as that soul-heart is in another person. Sometimes, yes, I wish that I could for once be the great artist rather than the artist's muse, the creator rather than the inspiration, but that's not the gift that was given me.

“I've seen it before,” she repeated, and she took Lotte's hands in her own, pressing her fingers on hers, staring at them as if she could see the genius inside her glowing through the sinews. Lotte's soul-heart wrapped around her, shining as it never had before, so strong that Ana gasped at its touch. At that moment, she wanted more than ever to bring Lotte to her, to kiss her lips, to touch her . . . But she didn't. She only smiled at her and pressed her fingers. “It's enough for me that I've been some help to you,” she finished.

She wondered if Lotte could hear the double lie in the words.

 * * * 

For ne
arly a year, the war had remained a semi-distant distraction for the Côte d'Azur. But the world would change twice for Anaïs during 1943.

“I love you.” They'd both said those words to each other over the months, but Ana had always known that they meant something different to Lotte than they did to her. There'd been no physical intimacy between them beyond innocent cuddling and a few kisses such as two friends might naturally share. Yet they were together nearly every day and even some nights.