Lisette's List (31 page)

“What’s that?” Maxime asked.

I hesitated. “Just a list I’ve been keeping.”

“About what?”

“It’s a list of promises to myself. I call it Lisette’s List of Hungers and Vows.”

“May I see it?”

“Oh, no.” I held it to my chest. “It’s just for me. Something I do. I learned it from Pascal. It’s not important to anyone else.”

“To me, it would be. If it reveals something about you that I wouldn’t know in any other way, then it’s very important. I won’t make judgments.”

I read over the list silently in order to consider each item and what Maxime might think of it.

1. Love Pascal as a father.

2. Go to Paris, find Cézanne’s
Card Players
.

3. Do something good for a painter.

4. Learn what makes a painting great.

5. Make a blue dress, the blue of the Mediterranean Sea on a summer day with no clouds.

I started to cross out number five. It seemed inconsequential now. Maxime put his hand on my wrist to stop me. “Don’t change it for my sake.”

6. Learn how to live alone.

7. Find André’s grave and the spot where he died.

8. Forgive André.

9. Learn how to live in a painting.

10. Try not to be envious.

11. Find the paintings in MY lifetime.

12. Learn how to be self-sufficient.

13. Do something good for Maxime.

He turned his hand over, palm up. “Please?”

I could not deny him. If I were honest with myself, I would have to admit that I wanted him to know me better, but I could never bring myself to speak these things. I slid the paper—the gossamer fragility of a new intimacy—across the table, clasped my hands together in front of my mouth, and held my breath. He read slowly—thinking about each item, it seemed. The muscles of my shoulders relaxed. I realized that laying bare my soul was not as hard as Maxime laying bare what had happened in the trench.

“Maybe I can help you with number two, Cézanne’s
Card Players
.”

“I would like to discover it myself.”

He read on. “You did something good for a painter. You brought him food. Something every painter needs.”

“I wish I could have done more.”

“What makes a painting great?
Oh là là
. Every dealer and every painter has a slightly different answer.”

“You have already helped me with that one.”

He smiled at something, maybe the dress.

He didn’t comment on either of the items having to do with André. Certainly the situation with the paintings was not what André had anticipated. I was proud of his willingness to go to war. Neither required any forgiveness. I could cross off that item.

“Living
in
a painting? Hmm. Pure Lisette.”

I felt myself blush.

“Who are you envious of?” he asked gently.

“Bella and Marc Chagall. They have such a perfect, complete love, sharing everything with each other, thinking each other’s thoughts. I can’t imagine them having any secrets from each other. And he painted that love in exuberant fantasies and in tender, private moments. It seemed so rich, their love.”

“Don’t call it envy. You don’t wish them not to have that ideal love. Call it longing. Call it grieving. Call it hoping. Call it waiting. Any of these, but not envy.”

With embarrassment I admitted, “I haven’t done most of the things on that list.”

“You
have
done something good for me.”

“Socks don’t count for much.”

“I didn’t mean the socks.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

LAPUSHKA

1946

I
N THE MORNING, THE COURTYARD WAS BLANKETED WITH POWDERY
snow. On it, bright winter sunshine sparkled in flecks of light. The long shadow of the outhouse stretched toward the west in the palest lavender blue. Pascal would have noticed that, his eye trained by Pissarro.

“Look, Maxime. How beautiful. I hate to spoil it with my footprints, but—”

“You don’t have to.” He swept me up in his arms and I lost touch with the earth as he carried me, laughing and making spumes of breath-clouds, and set me down at the outhouse door.

“I would have flown you here, like a Chagall painting, if I were capable of it.”

Despite the cold, we stood outside for a few moments after I came out, to enjoy the view. All the rough edges of fence posts and rooftops were softened, and the round cap of the windmill across the ravine looked like a mound of whipped cream, but it wouldn’t last. Some roofs already showed surprise patches of red tiles where the weightless snow had blown off. Bare grapevines threaded the hills in dark lines.

“The vines are like ranks of thin men in the prison yard holding out their arms to each other,” Maxime said.

“You have to train yourself not to think those thoughts. Look at the beauty of the land instead. Look at the foothills of the Luberons. Don’t they look like the humps of white elephants praying on their knees?”

He smiled at me. “If you think so.”

The change of seasons reflected the timelessness of the land, which had endured whatever storms or armies had passed over it. A black-and-white magpie landed on our fence rail. His white shoulder feathers lifted in a breeze.

“A Monet painting,” Maxime said, so softly that the quiet lying over the valley and over us was not disturbed. “It’s peaceful here. I’m glad you were here during the war years.”

We waited until the magpie warbled, which made us laugh because it sounded like a puppy whining. When it flew off, Maxime swept me up again, and I felt Bella’s exuberance in being freed from gravity. He was careful to walk backward, stepping in his own footprints, as he carried me to the house.

I had just started milking Geneviève when the exultant clucking of Kooritzah Deux announced that she had just laid an egg.

“That’s chicken language for ‘Pick it up.’ Go inside her coop and find it before it freezes.”

The instant Maxime bent down and entered, Kooritzah let loose a fury of squawking and wing flapping at the stranger in her domain.

“Vite! Vite! Vite!”
I said. “It’s under her.”

He mustered his courage and snatched it from beneath her. “I’ve got it!” he shouted, cupping it in his hands.

“Bravo, you city boy.
Eh bien, lapushka! Merci.
”

“What does that mean,
lapushka
?”

Feeling myself blush, I said, “Something like ‘darling.’ It’s Russian.”

G
LAD TO BE INSIDE
, I laid the pages Pascal had written in front of Maxime at the table. “It’s Pascal’s handwriting. I found them in one of his drawers yesterday.”

As he read, silently at first, then punctuated with murmurs of interest, I went to work making cheese. “This will be ready for you to take home with you.”

“Lisette, this is priceless! Is it true? Did this conversation happen?”

“I don’t think he could have made up such detail.”

“Monsieur Laforgue should see this. Do you mind if I take it to him?”

“I was hoping to do that myself someday.”

“You’re right. You should be the one.”

I served him
un petit noir
made with real coffee and laid a round loaf of René’s
pain d’épeautre
on the table, explaining that it was a traditional bread made with primitive wheat grown near Sault, a village to the north.

“You’ve learned a lot about this region.”

“I should think so. It has been nine years.”

He broke apart the loaf and tore off big morsels and ate them one after another. I was sure Provençal bread would make him hearty again.

He stopped eating long enough to concede that there might be ways to find the paintings in rural Provence that he didn’t know about.

“Is there anyone here you trust who might help you?”

“Yes. Maurice. The bus driver. And ‘madame his wife,’ Louise. My best friends.”

“Let’s go see them.”

W
HEN WE ARRIVED AT
the Chevets’ house, Maurice welcomed Maxime robustly, pounding him on the back, and Louise insisted that we join them for cream of potato soup, boiled beets, and red rice from the Camargue. In a rush of words I spilled out why we had gone to the woodpile and what we had discovered there.

“I’m certain André put the paintings there. Why else would his boards be there but to make a double platform to keep the paintings flat and dry?”

“A pretty poor hiding place, if you ask me,” Maurice said.

“It does have a roof,” Louise responded.

“That’s irrelevant now,” Maxime said. “Who could have found them? The wood gatherer?”

“Not likely. He has the round eyes of a goby,” Maurice said.

“What’s a goby?” Maxime asked.

“A useless little fish in our rivers here. Not worth the hook to catch him,” Maurice said. “A simpleton.”

“Could they be in someone’s house?” Maxime asked.

Maurice blew a puff of air. “Nobody would hang them in their house. This is a small village, monsieur. We have all been in each other’s houses. No house is private. Everyone knows the paintings belonged to Pascal.”

“It is possible that he hid some under the woodpile and others elsewhere?” Louise ventured.

“Where? Where is a likely place?” Maxime asked.

“If it were Pascal and not his grandson, I would say in the Bruoux Mines,” Maurice said.

“That still could be André’s hiding place,” Louise said.

“Or someone else’s who found them in the woodpile and hid them again until they could be sold outside Roussillon,” Maxime said.

That seemed more likely. “Who?” I asked.

“Who has contacts outside Roussillon?” Maxime asked.

“The mayor, Aimé Bonhomme, but he is honorable. He would
never do anything underhanded. The whole village respects him,” Maurice said.

“We were trusting of Monsieur Pinatel when he was mayor,” Louise said, “but his fleeing on the night Hitler committed suicide has cast suspicion on him. He has contacts outside Roussillon.”

“Then I suppose it might have been him,” I remarked. “Monsieur Voisin complained early in the war that Monsieur Pinatel had taken all the wood, down to the platform, but I had thought he was just exaggerating. He could have lifted the top plywood and have taken the paintings
anywhere
,” I wailed.

“No,” Louise said. “I can’t picture him creeping around at night to steal them.”

“But I
can
picture him telling that German lieutenant,” I said.

I thought of one other person who had contacts outside the village, and I was surprised Louise didn’t mention him. The words “you’ll be sorry” echoed in my mind. Bernard was enough of an enigma that he might be the one.

I was about to say so when Maxime launched a speculation. “Let’s assume, for the moment, that they were stolen with selfish intent. You probably know that Hitler, Göring, and other high-level Nazis amassed huge collections of art that were found in salt mines, particularly Altaussee, in Austria.”

“We heard. We’re not that isolated here.” Maurice sounded peeved. “There is a radio in the café.”

“Surely the mayor would have had knowledge of that. So he might have hidden Lisette’s paintings in a mine near here until such time that he could sell them to a German officer or government official, who would then ingratiate himself with a gift of art to someone of higher position. The paintings could have traveled up the ranks. Paris is buzzing with such stories.”

“Pascal’s paintings in German hands!” I cried.

That possibility silenced the four of us. Privately I thought how devastated André would have been.

A few minutes later, Maxime said, “It would have to be someone not very knowledgeable about art—”

“No one here is knowledgeable about art,” I muttered.