Lisette's List Read online

  He could be anywhere along the lane—in the café, at the terrain de boules, inside the boulangerie, talking to Odette and René, who often gave him a warm slice of olive bread. I hurried downhill, poking my nose into places where I might find him. The quarries were beyond the lower end of the village, somewhere in the ochre canyons. I went uphill first, past the cemetery to the entrance to the canyons, then down into them a short way. I understood why he wanted to see them at this time. They did glow golden ochre, orange, and the red of paprika. If he went too far, it would be hard to find him, and he would have trouble climbing back.

  I slipped on the places still wet from the recent rain, and stained my shoes with orange mud. Frightened, I called his name. He was nowhere. I needed the help of Constable Blanc, so I turned back to ask for him at the mairie, the town hall.

  Passing alongside the graveyard, I had a hunch and peered between oleander bushes, then entered through the iron gate by a tall, lone cypress, which cast a gray, shroudlike shadow across the closest tomb. Wind whistled through the tops of pines and rustled the leaves in the olive orchard above and behind the tombs. Every Roussillonnais family knew their place of rest. Alongside a small oleander whipped by the wind, the Roux family vault lay in full sunlight. With both palms on the stone slab to support himself, Pascal was leaning forward, breathing hard.

  I approached cautiously. His shoes were not filmed over with ochre dust or orange mud. He either had been afraid to venture down or had gotten distracted.

  “You shouldn’t have followed me,” he said, sensing my presence, still looking at the tomb, “but I knew you would.”

  “I was worried, Papa. I’m not strong enough to help you get up if you fall.”

  “You can’t control everything, Lisette. There is a time to let things be.”

  He patted the stone tomb and chuckled. “I’m not really going to be in this box. Instead, I’m going to follow Cézanne wherever he goes and carry his easel and canvas and paints, so he can paint unencumbered the glories of heaven. So vast, so infinite that making a frame around them is impossible. The other side has beautiful colors that we can’t imagine on this side. Cézanne said so. Oh, happy days ahead.”

  FATIGUÉ PASSED INTO TRÉS FATIGUÉ, and it was hard to get Pascal out of bed to go to the outhouse. I tended to him where he lay, using a bedpan.

  “Such love you show me. Like a daughter’s. It will make the end easier.” He let out a quavering sigh. “But there’s more to tell. About Cézanne especially. Can you find my list?”

  When I brought it to him, he said, “Eh, bieng,” in the Provençal accent he used when he spoke about Cézanne. “The painting called The Card Players. I haven’t told you about that. Two Provençaux playing belote at a small table with a bottle of wine between them. Maybe that was the prize for the winner. I liked the game, but I never seemed to pluck the right cards from the stack, so I wasn’t any good at it.”

  Maurice came that afternoon to bring us honey from his hives. “Here. This will make you feel better. My bees are descendants of those buzzing around the rosemary in the garden of the pope’s palace in Avignon.”

  “Ah, holy bees. Imagine that.” Pascal chuckled.

  Maurice pulled a chair up to the bed to play a hand of belote. Their teasing about who would win and who had won the last game rolled gently, soft-voiced and mellow.

  “Did I ever tell you? I posed for one of Cézanne’s card players. The one with a chamois hat like mine.” Pascal reached for my hand as I set a bowl of almonds on the bed, and I saw that the month-old bruise on the back of his hand had turned yellow-green.

  He grabbed my wrist. “You do believe me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “Eh, Lisette, such a good woman.”

  PASCAL DIDN’T COMPLAIN WHEN he felt nausea or pain. He simply said, “Bring me the third Pissarro” or “I want to see the still life,” and I knew he wished to lose himself in a painting. I suspected that his absorbed study, his searching for something in each painting he had not noticed before, allowed him to rise above discomfort. I would have to hold the painting up for him, frame and all, at the foot of his bed while he pored over the scene until my arms ached.

  When I held up Pissarro’s red roofs, the largest painting, Pascal murmured, “Such a pretty orchard. You know, those globs of paint protruding from the canvas, they catch light on their upper edges and create small shadows beneath them. That’s not an accident, Lisette. That’s genius.”

  Even in this he was teaching me to notice details. But beyond that, he was saying goodbye to each of the paintings.

  After long thought, he said, “With Pissarro, I had looked for a story in his paintings. The girl with the goat, where was she going? Why was she alone? But with Cézanne, there was no story in the panorama or in the fruit. You see, the apples and oranges were important in themselves. I had to learn to regard them as products of the painter’s way of seeing. I made myself refuse to imagine which of the card players would win the game. The act of their playing was enough.”

  He squirmed in bed with agitation, a frustrated attempt to get out of bed on his own.

  “If I could kneel in adoration, I would. You kneel for me, Lisette. Get André.”

  I went to the courtyard. “You had better come in.”

  When André entered, Pascal said, “Kneel in front of Cézanne’s fruit. I’ll give you the words to say.”

  André and I glanced at each other, sharing the strangeness of the command. He knelt. I knelt. He took my hand.

  “Ah, yes. Now say, ‘We will, with all our hearts, love these paintings as we love each other.’ ”

  André’s expression showed that he was amused by Pascal’s ceremony, a vow so unnecessary. Despite that, solemnly, humoring his grandfather, he began and I joined in. “We will, with all our hearts …”

  Papa’s waxen face shone with joy. “There. Now they are yours. Hélène would be happy if she knew.” After a few moments he added, “Maybe she does.”

  Unable to speak, André kissed him on his bald spot.

  “One thing I have to ask you, André. Will you repair the kneelers in the church before you go back to Paris? Hélène often gets splinters from them.”

  I mouthed the question Who is Hélène? to André, thinking she might have been his wife. André merely said solemnly, “Yes, I promise.”

  He went back to the courtyard. Through the window I saw that he didn’t take up a mallet or chisel or even a pencil for quite a while.

  After a brooding hour, Pascal murmured, “I failed today, Lisette. Something that should have been first on my list. I haven’t shown you any love today. I have only loved the paintings and my memories. I have ordered you around. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right, Papa. I know you love me. Tell me more about Cézanne.”

  “Did I tell you that I went back to Aix again? I had saved some money and for once in my life I wanted to buy a painting outright, legitimately, with francs. I wanted to do something good for Cézanne. I knew which one it would be. The Card Players. I wanted to ask him to explain what made a painting great.

  “When I arrived, all his paintings were gone. His housekeeper was cleaning. She told me I was too late. He had died two weeks earlier. Apparently he was painting Montagne Sainte-Victoire again and had gotten caught in a rainstorm. He collapsed on the roadside, and the driver of a laundry cart found him. A week later, he died.”

  Pascal shook his head mournfully. “I asked her where The Card Players went. To the dealer Vollard, like all the others, she said.”

  Papa reached out a thin-skinned arm to me and wiggled his fingers, asking for mine. “Let that be a lesson to you, Lisette. Do the important things first.”

  THAT EVENING, WHILE PASCAL lay in a stupor watching me, and André was at the café for the men’s apéritif hour, the stillness in the house made me reflective. I took a sheet of André’s stiff paper and wrote at the top, Lisette’s List of Hungers and Vows.

  What was
most important?

  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.

  Looking up at the Pissarro, I noticed the blueness of the girl’s dress, so lovely alongside the white goat.

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

  After that, a period of dull waiting set in, and André and I held on to each other more tightly at night. I asked him, “What are the most important qualities a person should have to live a good life?”

  “Love and courage.”

  I knew I felt love and was richly loved, but did I have courage? Was being a witness to the ebbing of Pascal’s life a means of developing courage for something else to come?

  THERE WERE NERVOUS STIRRINGS in the local paper, Le Petit Provençal, after German troops took Czechoslovakia. We didn’t tell Pascal, but he probably read it in the newspaper in the café. Every letter from Maxime reported actions against degenerate art. We kept that news to ourselves as well. In one letter Maxime wrote:

  My dearest friends,

  I can only take a few minutes to write. Do you in the south know that the art of the Louvre is even now being sealed in cases to be hidden? One by one the galleries are systematically being emptied. I volunteered to help pack. It’s cold and dreary in the long galleries without my old friends hanging in their usual places. We work quickly and are bewildered and exhausted. Our dry voices echo against blank walls. We sleep only three hours a night. This will be the only chance in a lifetime to spend a night in the Louvre. Soon there will be more NO ADMITTANCE signs than paintings.

  The Entartete Kunst, that “Degenerate Art” exhibit last year when people shouted epithets at the paintings, that was only a beginning. It recently leaked out to the volunteers here that 16,000 contemporary paintings have been purged from German museums to be auctioned in Lucerne. I fear for France.

  I need to get back to packing. The Comédie-Française lorries are waiting like dark maws for crates to be loaded. Take good care of each other.

  Maxime

  Whatever monster lurked on the horizon, André hoped it would hold back its claws until Pascal had gone. Pascal knew that the German army had marched into Austria and had taken it last spring, and it plunged him into a state of despondency. From then on, for a whole year, we didn’t mention anything to him about the world beyond Roussillon. Better that he pass in peace.

  One May morning in 1939, after I had known and loved Pascal for two years, André and I sat on both sides of him while he struggled to get his tongue to work. “Give my boules to Maurice. Remind him that at one time, I could make him bite the dust.” His mouth twitched in a slight smile. After a long period of waiting for his next breath, he murmured, “A good life. Take care of each other. And let the paintings care for you.”

  It seemed like the passing of time halted for a moment while the larks made their mournful song. Poised in perfect peace between past and future, which blended into an eternal now, he added, “But some, I think, belong in Roussillon.”

  Then, with a soft, contented breath, he slipped through and traveled on.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MAXIME’S LETTER

  1939

  AN OUTING ALL BY MYSELF! WITH MORE COINS IN MY DRAWSTRING bag than I ever had on market day in Roussillon, I approached place du Pasquier, where people boarded Maurice Chevet’s bus for the short trip to the Saturday market in Apt, the larger town to the east. Behind his funny-looking bus, Maurice hauled a wagon for engine parts, petrol cans, furniture, rabbits in cages, anything a person would want to transport.

  We had been grieving over Pascal, and André had hoped that a trip on my own to a large market would lift my spirits. He had been paid for repairing the enormous carved dining table in the Palais des Papes in Avignon and was still working on the twenty-four matching chairs, a profitable project that kept us in Roussillon. For the first time since we had come here, he felt free with money, so I was bursting with anticipation.

  OUTSIDE HIS BUS, MAURICE SAID, “Adieu, Lisette,” with the enthusiasm of a long absent friend. “You go to buy pastis today?”

  “You guess wrongly, monsieur.”

  “Then a new dress for madame? A pair of espadrilles?”

  “A cotton tablecloth.” I wanted to replace the discolored oilcloth, cracked and torn from age where it bent over the edge of the table.

  “Eh, bieng. A Provençal tablecloth! Go to all the stalls before you buy.”

  In the bus, Aimé Bonhomme, Pascal’s boules partner and the secrétaire de la mairie, lifted his bowler hat off the seat beside him and beckoned to me. I took his invitation. He and Mayor Pinatel, who was sitting behind him, agreed with a jolly laugh that they had official business in Apt, but it was Saturday, so I didn’t believe them. I suspected that they just wanted to get out of Roussillon for a day. It was more believable that Monsieurs Cachin and Voisin had business there—stocking the store and the café.

  “We’re going to buy corks,” chirped Mimi, the little daughter of Mélanie Vernet, the vintner’s wife. “Lots of corks.”

  The bus rattled down the winding road, swaying around the curves, everyone knowing instinctively when to brace themselves. In anxious voices, they speculated whether Hitler would stop with Poland or whether France would be next. To change the subject, I asked Monsieur Bonhomme how long Apt had held a weekly market.

  “Oh, just short of eight hundred years.”

  “You’re teasing me, monsieur.”

  “Oh, no, madame. The Romans built the arcades where the tables are set up. Crusaders provisioned themselves there. Feudal lords, purchasing agents of Provençal counts, papal underlings when Avignon was the center of the church, they all went to Apt to buy or trade or just socialize.”

  We passed vegetable fields along the nearly dry Calavon River, and trellised green beans on the low hills. One abandoned hilltop village had a newer village at its base, as though it had cheerfully slipped down its hill intact.

  All the residents of Apt and the surrounding villages seemed to be out and about—petits bourgeois in suits and leather shoes, laborers in blue smocks, and women in flowered cotton dresses. Mélanie, a little older than I was, fell into step with me and told me to stay with her. I found that she was adept at elbowing her way through the crowds in front of fruit and vegetable stands and tables of herbs and spices, olive oil and vinegar, and cheese. Everything here was probably locally produced.

  “The trick is to buy early and quickly for items with a set price, slowly for items you can bargain over,” Mélanie advised.

  At a table where wooden utensils, string bags, lamp oil, and household goods were sold, I caught the sweet aroma of some handmade lavender soaps. They were without wrappers but stamped with L’OCCITANE, a curious name I wasn’t familiar with. Mélanie bought two gunnysacks of corks. The vendor drew a face on one cork and gave it to Mimi.

  After leaving the sacks in Maurice’s bus, Mélanie led me down a side street where table after colorful table displayed cloths. Oh, such colors, with prints of sunflowers, lavender, grapes, olives, wheat, even cigales. Pretending her cork was a little doll, Mimi danced it across the fabrics.

  “Which one shall I buy, Mimi?”

  “This one. No. This one. This one with the grapes, like Papa’s vines.”

  We discussed the merits of each, agonizing with delight over which one to choose. Finally I made a decision, and Mimi agreed. Yellow sunflowers, something we didn’t have in Paris. With Mélanie’s shopping recommendations, I had money left over. “Spend it all,” she advised. “You don’t know when you’ll get more.” So I bought a straw sunhat with Mimi’s approval, a pair of red espadrilles, and an issue of Modes et Travaux, which had sewing projects. There was nothing like a day of shopping to turn two women and a little girl into fast friends.

  Excited to show André my purchases, I burst
into the house, spread the cloth, and stood back to look. With a jolt, I saw only empty walls. No paintings. No frames. Confusion descended on me. André came in from the courtyard, and I demanded to know what he had done with them.

  He pulled a chair back from the table. “Sit down, Lisette.”

  “You didn’t sell them, did you?”

  “No. I would never do that. I hid them.”

  “Where? Why?”

  “They’re not safe here. Many people in the village have seen them. Pascal talked about them to everyone. I can’t fault him. It was innocent exuberance that made him want to share them, but these aren’t innocent times. People will need food and many other things. The black market will be rampant. Need and suffering can turn a person. Friends have secret friends who may be black market dealers. Art can be traded for items no longer available. Poof! The paintings will become untraceable. I can’t trust anyone.”

  “Even me? You can’t trust your wife?”

  “I trust you, but it’s better that you don’t know. An inadvertent glance at a hiding place might reveal it.”

  Pained by his secrecy, I scanned the empty walls and struggled not to cry.

  It wasn’t just that he was keeping the hiding place a secret from me. It was a darker ache—that he was a secret to me. He had secret thoughts, secret plans. No matter what he told me, there were things unsaid. Maybe he had sold them. Maybe they had been stolen and he was just appeasing me by pretending they were hidden. Was it wise for him not to tell me? To have made his plans without consulting me?

  He handed me a letter from Maxime.

  27 AUGUST 1939

  Comrade,

  Read this twice, then burn it. Hide your paintings. There are more than rumors here. Métro stations are being fitted out as air raid shelters. If the Germans penetrate France, God forbid, all of France’s art is endangered—the paintings still in museums and those in private hands as well. Every single museum in Paris closed its doors today. The art market here is in chaos. Every day the workers in the Louvre hear of cunning plans for quick sales to Germans and to anyone buying to save important paintings from destruction. At that auction in Lucerne, Monsieur Laforgue bid to save a Van Gogh self-portrait and Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker but was outbid on both. There was a frenzy of bidding for Matisses, Braques, Klees taken straight from Germany’s own museums, with proceeds to the Nazi Party.