Bridal Chair (15 page)

“And that is what I did. I found you,” he said triumphantly and held her close.

There was a light knock, tentative, hesitant. Ida and Michel lay very still and said nothing as the door opened. Bella and Marc, avian figures enveloped in their oversized, wide-winged nightclothes, stood in the doorway. They stared at their daughter and her husband.

“Michel came last night,” Ida said.

“Yes. We heard him,” Marc said. He held out his hand, and Michel lifted himself up and grasped it. “
Shalom
aleichem
. Peace be with you.” Marc offered the traditional greeting one Jew extends to another.

“
Aleichem
shalom
,” Michel replied dutifully.

“Welcome, Michel,” Bella whispered.

They left the room as silently as they had entered it.

Michel reflected on the brevity of their greeting. They had not asked him a single question about where he had fought and what he had seen. He understood that they did not want such knowledge. They preferred that the war remain an abstract. Its reality was too frightening.

He sighed and turned to Ida, grateful to lie beside her in this strange, oddly constructed house. He thought of how they had stood together in the moonlit darkness, how she had melted into his arms. It was enough that their reunion had been suffused with affection and gratitude, with touch and caress. It was of no importance that it had been oddly devoid of passion.

“Because we are so tired, so very tired,” he said aloud and wondered if he believed his own words.

* * *

The two couples settled uneasily into their shared life in Gordes, entangled in a familial snare, trapped by bonds of love and resentment, their roles defined.

Each morning Marc retreated into his wide-windowed studio. He had furnished it with a large table, wicker chairs plundered from a garden shed, and a small cot. It was flooded with sunlight throughout the day and he was reluctant to leave it, even for meals. More often than not, he ate alone, barely acknowledging Ida when she set the tray of food down on the table cluttered with brushes soaking in turpentine. She cleared away pots of paint and linseed oil, carefully capped distorted tubes. Painting supplies were in short supply, and she guarded them closely, aware that they were as necessary to her father’s survival as food and drink.

Bella continued to work on her memoir, filling notebook after notebook with her memories of Vitebsk. She wrote of Sabbath dinners at the candlelit table, of festival preparations, the scent of the citron at Sukkot, the crimson wine stains on the white Passover tablecloth. Sleeping and waking, she heard her parents’ voices, her brothers’ boyhood quarrels. She occasionally wandered into the studio and shared a meal with Marc. They spoke softly in Yiddish and sang half-remembered songs, occasionally with Ida. Never with Michel.

“It is not that I do not like your husband,” Marc told Ida one day as she cleared the dirty dishes and glasses from the studio table. “It is simply that he does not interest me.”

Ida was silent. She did not tell him that for Michel, the reverse was true. He did not like Marc, but he found him intriguing. But of course, who would not be intrigued by her father, that elfin narcissistic genius whose imagination soared and whose faith in his own power and prestige was indomitable? After all, she herself had revered him as an artist, marveling at the enormity and eclecticism of his talent. It had taken her years to confront his flaws, to recognize his foibles and frailties. She loved him still, but she saw him with a disturbing clarity.

When the two couples were together, they discussed only the progress of the war. The news was never good. Britain stood alone against the Nazis. The German war machine moved steadily across the continent, and with each fascist victory, the Jews of Europe were increasingly endangered. The rumors of concentration camps were no longer rumors. They were stark reality. The neutrality of the United States was bewildering.

A letter from Elsa offered a glimmer of hope. “We worry about you and Michel, but there may soon be good news. A letter will come to you from the American Consulate in Marseilles. Read it carefully.”

In yet another letter, Elsa wrote of a man named Varian Fry.

Elsa’s cryptic words gave Ida hope. She continued her own daily routine of constant correspondence, her walks into Gordes, occasionally accompanied by Michel whose presence attracted dangerous attention.

“We must be careful,” she told him, but he had left his fear in the trench, drowned in the blood of the sixteen-year-old boy who had never kissed a girl or passed a razor across his chin.

“What will happen will happen,” Michel said. “I am done with running.”

Daringly he traveled to Nice to visit his parents. The resort city was crowded with refugees. Bewildered throngs of sad-eyed families teemed through the narrow streets. Their clothing was worn, their bodies unwashed. Hunger soured their breath. The refugees slept beneath the boardwalk, in abandoned cabanas. Whole families shared a single room in dismal
pensiones
.

Michel’s parents, veteran survivors, had somehow found a hovel in which to live and scavenged scraps of food. They urged him to bring Ida and join them.

“Nice is farther south than Gordes, closer to Marseilles, and the port of Marseilles is still open. There would be more hope for you here,” his father pleaded as his mother continued to fold scraps of red crepe paper into the poppies she sold on the street.

“I have heard that the American consul in Marseilles is sympathetic to Jews and has granted visas on compassionate grounds to French citizens. You and Ida might be eligible,” she said, twisting a wire about the flimsy paper blossom. “Once in America, you would be able to help us, to help Ida’s parents,” she said. “You might as well try. What is there left to lose?”

The wire pierced her finger, but she ignored the droplet of scarlet blood.

“I doubt that we would qualify for such visas, but even if we did, Ida would never leave her parents, and the Chagalls insist that they are safe in Gordes,” Michel said sadly.

And he, of course, would never leave Ida, not to save his own life, not to save the lives of his parents. Ida was his bride, his wife, his love, whom he soothed in the darkness of her dream-haunted nights.

He kissed his mother’s hand and tasted her blood upon his tongue.

As the summer dragged on, the bad news grew worse. Anti-Semitic legislation in Vichy, the arrests and deportations of prominent Jews, the German advances and victories, thrust the Gordes household into a paralyzing depression. Bella moved like a somnambulist, a silent, spectral figure in her flowing white gowns. Marc exploded in anger at the slightest annoyance. A tube of paint disappeared; he could not find his palette scraper. He shouted and cursed until Ida soothed him and restored order to his studio, coaxing him into a calm that she herself did not feel. She cajoled her mother into taking short walks, persuaded her to eat a bit of cheese, to drink her morning café au lait. She brought Michel an English primer, offered to teach him the language.

“You will need English when we go to America,” she said, smiling bitterly at the hopelessness of her hope.

Michel marveled at her strength, although he knew that she too was unnerved by the uncertainty of their days and nights. Her dreams, like his own, were tumultuous. They awakened and clung to each other, entangled in the sweat-stained bedclothes, listening as the rustling wind brushed the silver leaves of the olive trees that rimmed their garden.

“We must do something, anything, Michel,” Ida whispered to him one night as they lay awake in heat-heavy darkness. Her voice was barely audible against the rumble of distant thunder, a teasing storm that threatened but did not arrive.

He threaded his fingers through her hair, drew her closer, but she lay passively in his embrace. He turned his face to the wall. She was right. They had to do something, anything.

“I will try,” he said at last. “I will go to Marseilles. My mother heard that the American consul there is sympathetic to Jews.”

“We have nothing to lose,” Ida said, but her voice, like his own, was devoid of optimism.

He left for Marseilles early the next morning and traveled through the brutal heat to the port city, grateful that the journey, however futile, offered a respite from the palpable tensions of Gordes. The mutual uneasiness intensified with each passing day.

Once in Marseilles, he headed immediately to the American consulate. The tall American marine who stood guard at the gate, aglow with health, his posture erect, his uniform immaculate, looked at him dispassionately. Michel, in his dust-spattered trousers, worn army boots, and ragged brown serge student jacket, observed him with envy.
How
wonderful
it
must
be
, he thought,
to
be
an
American, a citizen of a country that was secure and unthreatened.
He approached the marine tentatively and lowered his voice to the respectful tone of the supplicant in search of even the flimsiest document of hope.

“I want, if you could arrange, to speak to someone about a visa?” he asked in his broken English.

“This is the consulate. The visa department is in Mont-Redon,” the marine replied and then, to Michel’s surprise, he smiled reassuringly. “Mont-Redon is not far,” he added helpfully. “And the trolley just across the street will take you there.”

Michel understood only the words “Mont-Redon” and “trolley.” Ida was right to insist that he learn English. It was the language of survival. Once in America, he thought whimsically, he would learn English and learn to smile broadly and confidently. He recognized the absurdity of his fantasy. It was unlikely that he would ever reach the United States. His future, if indeed he had one, was obscure and uncertain.

He nodded gratefully to the marine, raced across the street, and boarded the blue-and-cream-colored trolley that had announced its arrival by blowing a foghorn. The plaintive sound reflected his own deflated mood. He fumbled for the fare and stumbled toward a window seat. He gazed out at the narrow streets, his attention riveted to the colorful crowds that surged in great waves of purposeful humanity, each hurrying passerby seemingly intent on an important errand, a defined destination.

In the lassitude of rural Gordes, in the isolation and melancholy of the Chagall household, he had forgotten that there was a bustling urban world, vested with vitality and the urgent demands of daily life. Housewives carried net bags bulging with brightly colored vegetables, gleaming maroon eggplants and bloodred tomatoes, feathery wands of bright green dill. Baguettes were tucked under their arms. He envied them the normalcy of their lives and imagined them in their orderly kitchens, preparing soups and salads; the war had not yet invaded their lives.

At a crossing, the trolley paused and he caught sight of a fair-haired young woman walking arm in arm with an officer of the Vichy police. The tilt of her head, a peculiar clumsiness of her gait, seemed familiar to him.
Katya
, he thought instinctively, but the trolley moved on before he could see her more clearly. He dismissed the thought. Katya, who had not bothered to conceal her Nazi sympathies, had surely left France for Germany.

Refugees stumbled into the crowded car at each stop, obstructing the aisles, speaking too loudly in Yiddish and French, in German and Ladino. Their hair was matted, their weary faces inked with soot, and their unwashed bodies reeked of sweat. Michel gave his seat to a gaunt, large-eyed woman who held a small dark-haired baby in her arms. She whispered her thanks, and he saw the outline of a Jewish star on her threadbare gray jacket. She had, he surmised, escaped the precincts of the Vichy government where Jews were compelled to wear the yellow star of David and ripped it from her garment.

“
Tikvah
,” he said softly to her and wished he could offer her something besides the Hebrew word for hope.

“
Toujours
l’espérance
,” she replied softly. “Always the hope,” and he was comforted.

The trolley rolled on through limestone hills, into the shade of date palms, and then proceeded to the coast, its route ending at a driveway lined with plane trees. Beyond the manicured pathway was a fortress-like building. An American flag on its parapet fluttered in a gentle breeze. The trolley disgorged its ragged passengers and they surged toward the building, joining the crowd that already waited restlessly, desperate pilgrims all, jostling each other in their search for the holy grail, the magical visa applications that might grant them entry into the promised land. The refugees were indifferent to the beauty of the cerulean sea and the earth-colored mountains that bordered the consulate, indifferent to the heat of the day, indifferent to each other. Michel pitied them, an irony, he realized, because he himself was pitiable.

He looked up at the imposing entry to the building and watched as a slender, bespectacled young man wearing a beautifully tailored gray suit, a homburg perched on his dark hair, exited and hurried toward a waiting car. He was clearly an attaché of some importance, Michel supposed, and he turned away indifferently. He waited for an hour, and then another hour, until a consulate official stood on the steps of the building and bellowed through a bullhorn that the visa office was closing until later in the day. The crowd groaned, but Michel was relieved. He had, he decided, endured quite enough for one day.

He took the trolley back to the center of the city and, on impulse, entered a small sidewalk café on the boulevard d’Athènes. An aperitif was within his budget, he assured himself, and he ordered the anisette liqueur that Ida had favored during the clandestine meetings of their Paris courtship. The cloudy liquid was a reminder of dreamy hours spent in a distant land. The nervous youth he had been, the shy girl she had been, were strangers to him now. He touched the ragged edge of his worn jacket and remembered that he had once worn a leather cloak.

Sipping his drink, he stared across at the Basilica of Notre-Dame de La Garde and thought how easy it would be for the church fathers to hide endangered refugees in their vast fortress. Perhaps Marc could offer them one of his crucifixion paintings in return for a safe haven. He smiled bitterly. This was his day for absurd thoughts and haunting memories. He took another sip and turned his head and watched an elderly couple leave Le Splendide Hôtel, just across the way, and make their way across the street and hesitantly to the café. He wondered why they looked so familiar and suddenly realized who they were. Franz and Alma Werfel. He had seen them at the Chagall salons in Paris and more than once at the Sorbonne literary forums he had occasionally attended to please Ida. He stood hurriedly and approached them. They stiffened perceptibly. The elderly woman paled and her husband gripped her hand.

“Monsieur Werfel, Madame Werfel,” he said deferentially. “I did not mean to startle you. I hope you remember me. I am the son-in-law of Marc Chagall, Ida’s husband.”

They stared at him and the tension faded from their faces.

“Of course. You are Michel. Ida’s Michel. I do remember you,” Franz Werfel said. “May we join you?”

“It would be an honor,” Michel replied honestly.

This, at least, was something he could report on happily when he returned to Gordes. The Chagalls would be duly impressed by the fact that Michel had shared a table with the world-famed Franz and Alma Werfel. Franz Werfel was a distinguished novelist and his wife, the legendary Alma, was a famous beauty, an enchantress who was previously married to Gustav Mahler, the composer, and Walter Gropius, the architect. She was said to have been the mistress of Oskar Kokoschka, the Austrian painter of whom Marc spoke half admiringly, half contemptuously.

As Alma Werfel sat opposite him, Michel saw vestiges of her legendary beauty in her flashing dark eyes and her haggard, fine-boned face. Franz Werfel, on the other hand, was short and potbellied, his pate a shimmering pink beneath a very thin layer of gray hair. Marc, so proud of his own abundant curls, who always compared himself to others, would be pleased to learn that Werfel was balding, Michel thought.

He wondered why the Werfels were in Marseilles. Their fame should have shielded them from the Nazis, but then, of course, Ida was right. No Jew, no writer or artist, no matter how famous, was safe in German-occupied lands.

“Is your Ida still so beautiful?” the writer asked benevolently.

“She is indeed,” Michel replied. “The war, of course, has been very difficult for her. Difficult for all of us.”

“And for us as well,” Alma said, her voice husky and sensual, her eyelashes brushing her high cheekbones. Her tongue shot out to moisten her thin, carefully painted lips. Michel understood how she had served as muse to so many men of genius. She exuded a feral sexuality, a confident awareness of her own magnetic charisma.

“We escaped from Austria, just ahead of the arrival of the storm troopers, and somehow we managed to reach Paris. From there we went to Lourdes, but no miracle awaited us there and finally we came to Marseilles,” she continued.

“Are you safe here?” Michel asked.

“No. Who is safe in Nazi-occupied territory? But we are hopeful. We have American visas, but we do not have French exit visas so we cannot leave France legally,” Franz Werfel said. “We are like Alice who was lost in a not-so-wonderful wonderland, but like her, we may yet find our way through the maze.”

The waiter hovered, staring too closely at them, and Franz Werfel ordered brandy for Alma and himself, the sustaining liquor of the weak and elderly. As their drinks were placed on the table, Michel saw the dapper American who had left the visa office at Mont-Redon take a seat at a nearby table. He nodded almost imperceptibly at Franz Werfel and turned his attention to the
International
Herald
Tribune
.

“Who is that man?” Michel asked.

The writer leaned closer and lowered his voice. “He is the source of our hope and possibly of your own. His name is Varian Fry. He is an American who represents a committee organized by American Jews who hope to rescue writers and artists trapped in Europe. He will establish an American Relief Center here in Marseilles, and he has a list of those who are endangered and a fair amount of cash to be used as he sees fit. Mostly for bribes and to pay counterfeiters, I would assume. Alma and I have already met with him, and he has promised to assist us.”

“But then you must introduce me to him. Perhaps he can help our family,” Michel said eagerly. He half rose from his seat, but Alma Werfel placed a restraining hand on his arm.

“We dare not approach him or even acknowledge him in public. All his activities are secret, and the Vichy police and their informers are everywhere.”

Michel glanced at their waiter, a young Algerian, and noticed for the first time that his eyes were everywhere as he absently wiped off a nearby table. It was true. No one could be trusted. But it was desperately important that he contact Varian Fry.

“I will give you some reassurance,” Alma said gently. “When we met with him earlier in his room at the Splendide Hôtel, the American vice consul in Marseilles, a Mr. Harry Bingham, came in to see him. A very handsome man, I must say, this Mr. Bingham. Such wonderful eyes. Wasn’t he handsome, Franz?” She smiled teasingly.

“I did not notice Mr. Bingham’s eyes. I was concentrating on trying to save our lives,” the novelist said drily.

She shrugged and continued. “This Mr. Bingham had a letter that he showed to Varian Fry. I glanced at the letterhead. It came from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”

“My wife has the unfortunate habit of often glancing at documents that do not concern her,” Franz Werfel observed and smiled the smile of a man amused by his beautiful wife’s unfortunate habits.

She ignored him again. “Although they spoke very softly, I heard a single name mentioned. Mr. Bingham said that the daughter of Marc Chagall had written repeatedly to Alfred Barr, the museum curator, pleading that he help her parents. He was speaking of your wife, Ida, was he not?”

Michel nodded. “I know that she has written more than once to Mr. Barr,” he said and smiled bitterly. “She has written more than once to everyone in the world who might help.”

“Then, of course, the Chagalls must be on Mr. Fry’s list,” Alma Werfel concluded.