Lisette's List (30 page)

“How ungrateful of you. After all I’ve done for you. You’re stubborn as that goat of yours. You persist in being morose, and I know why. You’re still grieving over losing a few paintings, and you’re taking it out on the world.”

“I’m still grieving over losing my
husband
.”

“You surprise me, Lisette.”

“Madame Roux.”

“I wouldn’t call promenading in the country with a strange man in broad daylight grieving. More like frolicking.”

“He isn’t a stranger. If you must know, he was my husband’s closest friend.
They
fought in the war together. They did not stay home and watch.”

“Except for his sunken eyes and his missing teeth, he wouldn’t be a bad-looking fellow to frolic with, if he had a little meat on his bones.”

That was too much. I jabbed the shovel into the pit and drew it out wet and heaping, lunged toward him, and flung it at him. He backed away, but not fast enough. He stood there stunned for a moment, looking at the splatter on his polished boots and pant legs, his jaw dropping.

“You’ll be sorry for that.”

“Get out of here!”

He had his own flinging to do. In spite of our mutual anger, together, for an instant, we watched that string of precious sausages arc through the air and over the cliff before he turned and left.

I took pleasure in imagining his humiliation as he walked home through the village with shit on his precious boots.

A
WEEK LATER
, I found a surprise in my lavender pot—a bar of lavender soap stamped with
L
’
OCCITANE
, as I’d seen in the Apt market, and wrapped in paper with a few handwritten words:
You might find this useful for the kind of work you do
.

Exasperated again, I held the soap to my nose. It smelled divine. For all his bluster, he apparently had the capacity to forgive.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE WOODPILE AND THE LIST

1946

I
N
M
ARCH
I
CUT MY OLD GATHERED PEASANT SKIRT INTO TWO
equal halves to make a curtain, then tacked it up above both sides of the window in Pascal’s bedroom, for Maxime’s arrival the next day. I had already washed the sheets at the faucet in place de la Mairie; the stone half-bowl there had a ridged inner curve that served as a washboard. Then I’d washed André’s best shirts to give to Maxime. They were about the same size, medium chest, although Maxime was a little shorter.

On the way home with my wet laundry, I couldn’t help peering in the direction of the woodpile. Because I had seen André’s blank canvas that night with the Germans, I was sure the paintings would be under the top piece of plywood. Soon they would be in the house, and Maxime and I would put them in their frames and hang them in their rightful places. What a grand celebration we would have, the two of us surrounded by paintings.

The morning of his arrival, I fashioned a small wreath of dried lavender I had saved from the summer. Where to hang it? Over the base of the stairs? No. Somewhere in Pascal’s bedroom. That way, Maxime would know it was meant expressly for him. Its fragrance
was faint, so he would more likely catch its scent if I hung it above the headboard. It looked lovely there. All was ready.

As an afterthought, I began to empty out the top drawer of Pascal’s dresser for Maxime to use. I sorted the contents to take usable items to the giveaway center in the
salle des fêtes
. At the bottom of a tangle of cravats, I found two yellowed pieces of paper written in Pascal’s hand and sat down to read them.

“They’re driven, both of them,” Madame Fiquet, Cézanne’s
compagne
, said.

“They’re madmen, both of them,” Madame Pissarro said. “That’s what the critics say.”

“And you agree?” I asked.

“One critic wrote, ‘Seen close up, his landscapes are incomprehensible and awful. Seen from afar, they are awful and incomprehensible.’ ”

“That’s snide,” I said. “Camille doesn’t deserve that injustice, but I am untrained and don’t know how to trust my feelings.”

How could Pascal have remembered such a conversation and his reactions? Of course, he might have written this down a long time ago, maybe shortly after hearing it. His handwriting here was much steadier than it was in his more recent notes.

“Will they paint the same thing today?”

“Most likely,” Madame Pissarro said.

“But their paintings will turn out differently,” Madame Fiquet said with an air of boredom.

Madame Pissarro nodded. “Camille dabs.”

“Paul smears,” Madame Fiquet said.

“Camille touches.”

“Paul presses.”

“Camille is light.”

“Paul is dark.”

“Camille mixes colors on his palette.”

“Paul doesn’t mix. He buys.”

“Camille is fussy, if you ask me.”

“Paul is simple, if you ask me.”

Amusing, this passage. Like a duet.

“They are good friends anyway?”

“The best of friends,” Madame Pissarro said.

“Paul says he has learned heaps from Camille,” Madame Fiquet said. “He idolizes him, calls him the great Pissarro, my master. They all look to Camille. He sustains them all.”

“That may be, but Camille is so obsessed that he makes me crazy. One more painting, one more. We have hundreds that have not sold, yet he is forever looking for something new to paint. This will show them, he says, and his face shines with such hope that out of love I have to keep silent and let him go on.”

“Paul gazes at something outdoors until I think he’s in a trance, and then paints in a frenzy. More often than not, when he finishes, he leaves the painting there, right in the weeds or leaning against a rock, and comes home in a daze without it. It’s exasperating.”

“Camille would never do that. He’s desperate to sell every canvas, and well he should be with a family to feed.”

“Paul is either in that trance or he’s fidgety or he’s pacing. He’s terribly moody. Bad weather makes him agitated. Only good painting calms him. He goes to bed early and wakes up in the night to examine what he painted that day. If it pleases him, he wakes me up, excited to share it with me. Then, as an apology for having awakened me, he lures me to play a game of checkers.”

“You do agree that they’re both great painters, don’t you?”

“Time will tell,” Madame Fiquet said.

“Be honest, Hortense. You know they will both become famous someday. We cannot have suffered in vain. We go without so the world will have them. That’s our lot.”

“True enough, but if I were married to Camille, I would tell him to stop fooling around with landscapes. He should paint portraits. At least you get paid for those.”

“And if I were married to Paul,” Madame Pissarro said, “I would tell him to stop painting that same mountain again and again. People are bored with it. He should paint fruit. People like fruit.”

“Can’t you say something good about them?”

“Yes, I can.” Madame Fiquet thought awhile. “Paul’s paintings have a timeless grandeur that makes me contemplate life.”

“And Camille’s have a radiance of color that lifts my spirit,” Madame Pissarro said.

“We accept their obsessions because we love them.”

Oh, those dear, long-suffering women. I wondered if this conversation might be valuable. Probably not. Who would care that an old man, an untrained pigment salesman, jotted down a conversation that must have happened fifty years earlier? It might not even be true. Still, I saved it as a curiosity to show Maxime.

M
AXIME ARRIVED IN THE AFTERNOON
, lost in his beaver-collared overcoat. With hardly a greeting he practically shouted, “He took me back! Monsieur Laforgue!”

“Teeth! You have teeth now.”

He grinned, showing them off.

“
Mon Dieu
, what a handsome man you are!”

He blushed like a boy.

A flood of words poured out. “He said I could work whenever I am able to, but he can’t pay me as much as he did in the past. His gallery was looted, and now his paintings are scattered God knows where in the tangle of corrupt dealers. It infuriates me that the Nazis called stolen art
Biens sans maîtres
, ‘goods without owners.’ Monsieur Laforgue said that Pétain called them ‘artworks collected for safekeeping.’ It’s despicable.”

Still holding his valise, he continued, “He isn’t a major dealer of priceless treasures, but he is honest and fair. I was offered a better-paying position with a disreputable dealer who bought looted art at cut-rate prices and sold it quickly at a hefty profit. I told him no. ‘Plunder pirates,’ Monsieur Laforgue calls them. It will take a decade for him to rebuild his stock.”

“Slow down, Max. Take a breath. Sit,” I told him. Say hello, I thought.

“He intends to reopen by selling his private collection, which he hid in a meat locker of the
boucherie
below his apartment. It’s a huge personal sacrifice.”

“What about the woman apprentice?”

“He chose to rehire me over her.”

My hope sprang up.

“I am to assist in the search for the lost paintings.”

“And here too, Maxime. For my lost paintings,” I said urgently.

“Yes. Here too.”

At last he seemed to notice me.

“We’ll do it tonight. I wouldn’t think of letting you be anxious another day.”

Finally. A softer voice, a direct look, an embrace—our second, more natural than the first, when he had arrived at my door unannounced four months earlier.

“Do you have a wheelbarrow for the wood?”

“Yes, and an oil lantern.”

“Too cumbersome. I brought a battery torch.”

I prepared my standard meal for him, omelette with chèvre, beets and carrots from the root cellar, and a tin of sardines I had been saving.

“I wish I had something better to give you, but it’s winter.”

“I can tell. The house is cold.”

“I’ll put more than a few sticks in the stove when we come back. Keep your coat on.”

J
UST AFTER TWILIGHT
, we went to the woodpile and loaded what little wood was left into the wheelbarrow. I was so excited that I dropped the coins on the ground instead of into the slot in the tin can. They rolled downhill, bouncing on the cobbles, and I had to scramble after them in my clackety wooden-soled shoes.

We checked uphill and down. No one was around. People went home early in winter. Only a few seconds and I would see my gallery. I clapped with tight fists and lifted off the canvas. Maxime tipped up the top sheet of plywood.

Nothing was there!

Again, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I shined the light in the far recesses. Not a single painting. Maxime tipped up the bottom sheet of plywood. Only the dirt of the ground was visible in the circle of yellow light. He lay the bottom sheet of plywood down and was about to lay down the top one.

“Wait!”

Along the forward edge I noticed some pencil marks. I shined the light there and recognized them as André’s patterns, which he often penciled out on the plywood that rested on his sawhorses, the preliminary step in his carving. I dropped to my knees and ran my fingers over his beautiful arabesques, acanthus leaves, and fleurs-de-lis. My throat filled with sawdust. It took a few moments before I could say, “This board was André’s. He hid the paintings here. But they’re gone, Max. They’re gone.”

I lowered my forehead onto an arabesque and wept, not just for me and the lost paintings but for André and Pascal. Max waited, his hand on my shoulder, before he laid down the plywood and helped me up. He replaced most of the firewood and lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow full of wood. “Let’s go home.”

O
NCE WE WERE INSIDE
, he said in a defeated tone, “Even a big war will have small-scale pillage. Your paintings will surface, but I’m afraid not in our lifetimes.”

Losing all sense of propriety, I flung myself at his chest, pounded my fists on his bony shoulders, and cried, “No! Why do you have to be so … so absolute? You will help Monsieur Laforgue, but what about me?”

He peeled me away from him. “If I help him, he will be more amenable to me when I remind him of you.”

That was some consolation.

“In Paris, we search documents, sales records of auction houses, the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, the Bureau des Biens et Intérêts Privés, banks that may hold paintings as collateral for loans, even pawnshops. And we look through the remaining works in the Jeu de Paume, where that scoundrel Rosenberg showed them off to Göring. It’s all coming to light now. There are ways. But here, we have nothing to go on.”

“That’s not true, Maxime.”

“What then?”

I was caught up short with nothing to offer.

“Granted, things are different here, but it’s not impossible.”

I strode over to the writing desk in exasperation, took a pencil and my list out of the drawer, slapped it on the dining table, and crossed out the word
Retrieve
in number eleven. I wrote
Find
above it, so that it read
Find the paintings
, and added the words
in MY lifetime
. I wrote with such force that my pencil probably gouged
the letters into the wooden table beneath the tablecloth. There. That was a vow I could not forget.