Lisette's List (18 page)

Dressed in clean clothes, I boarded Maurice’s bus for the surprise he had promised me when he had walked me home from their
veillée
. As we descended into patchy veils of fog below Roussillon, Maurice told me to keep secret what we did and whom we saw. That only made me more curious, and I said, “Fog is the right atmosphere for clandestine activities.”

“Truer than you think. If we’re stopped by Mayor Pinatel, or anybody else, say that I’m taking you to visit Pascal’s sister.”

“He didn’t have a sister.”

“All the better. He won’t find out any information.”

Shortly after the narrow road to that circle of ancient stone huts he called bories, Maurice turned right, up the switchbacks to Gordes, and parked the bus just below the village. We walked up more than a hundred uneven stone steps and passed along the back of the château and the apse end of the church, then took a crooked route down the opposite side of the village, where the narrow streets seemed to descend forever, sometimes so steeply that flat stones had been placed at intervals down the middle of the incline to make steps, while the sides had been cobbled into two ramps to accommodate wheels. Not a soul was about. I turned my ankle and grabbed hold of Maurice. For the rest of the way, he held on to my upper arm to steady me.

A spring trickled gaily through strings of chartreuse moss and fed a stone washing basin. Maurice said it had been used by a tannery for the once active shoemaking trade of Gordes. In this quiet quarter of houses, I peeked in windows discreetly, trying to see through lace curtains whether there were cushions on the settees.

Curiously, a three-story building had no door onto the street.
We turned in at a narrow, rock-strewn alley that led to a courtyard behind it. The stone lintel bore the name of a girls’ school.

“So you think I ought to go to school?” I whispered.

“In a way, you will, but it hasn’t functioned as a school for a long time.” He pulled the cord on the school bell.

A beautiful woman with dark hair cut as short as mine looked out an upper window. I caught a glimpse of a white lace collar against a violet dress.

“Ah, Maurice! You brought her!” she said. “One moment.”

“You told her about me?” I whispered.

I heard the rattle of keys and latches as she let us in. “He is working upstairs.”

I knew at once why Maurice had brought me here. Paintings! Hanging, leaning, stacked everywhere. Bizarre, fantastical images in strong colors. Nothing like I had ever seen.

Maurice pushed me up the stairs. An artist was painting in a studio. A real artist!

He introduced the couple as Marc and Bella Chagall. “This is my friend Lisette, whom I told you about. She will keep your presence here a secret.”

Why was that necessary, I wondered.

Unruly tufts of curly brown hair, silver at his temples, cascaded around the man’s large ears. He was a small man wearing suspenders and a collarless shirt. More than any other feature, his eyes attracted me, blue as precious stones from a faraway land, almond-shaped and wide-set. There was a similarity in their angular faces such as older couples attain, but they weren’t at all old.

“Maurice told us that you’re interested in art,” Madame Chagall said.

“My husband’s grandfather …” I stopped. “Yes, I am.” I turned to Maurice. “How did you come to know each other?”

“He rode my bus to Avignon to buy art supplies. Of course.”

“Now I give him a list and he buys what I need and delivers it.”

Monsieur Chagall spoke French with a foreign accent I couldn’t identify.

“A true chevalier of the roads,” I said.

“But this chevalier must tend to another sort of delivery, so I’ll come back in an hour or so to take you home.”

He pointed to a large painting lying on the floor in which a green-faced fiddler was playing a violin on a snow-covered rooftop, his knees bent outward, one foot in midair, dancing. As Maurice passed it, he did a little jig with his knees bent outward too.

Madame laughed. “You have an animated friend.”

“As jolly as that fiddler,” I said absently while the painting held my gaze. “Nothing is as it should be.”

“Yet everything is as it must be,” monsieur said.

“But these three little men are no taller than the fiddler’s knee.”

He tipped his head in gentle forbearance. “You’re being rational. Throw rationality out the window when you come here. Bella, instruct her. Then we’ll talk.”

Monsieur turned to the unfinished painting on his easel. On his palette, he worked paint into his brush and swirled a wide path of crimson onto the canvas. I gasped. What was he going to do with
that
? I couldn’t stay to watch because madame was waiting to take me upstairs.

“Since you live in a village,” she said, “I’ll show you his paintings from our village of Vitebsk in Russia.”

“Russia!”

In a classroom without furniture, dozens of paintings lay on the floor, with only narrow spaces between them.

“He doesn’t sell them?”

“Oh, yes. He does. But he paints so many, working day and night, that they accumulate. He likes to be surrounded by them.”

One captured my interest instantly. In it, a milkmaid was stretching far forward on her stool to milk a cow whose legs were also stretched impossibly forward. A violin rested on the cow’s back leg.

Of course. Why not? Doesn’t every cow own a violin? Beyond a fence, the same cow was upside down, with another violin. The girl leaned forward, and her breasts hung down at the same angle as the cow’s teats did. I couldn’t say that I understood it, but it delighted me.

The paintings weren’t detailed or realistic. The figures were childlike, soft-edged, done in a naïve style, innocent and lovable. In one painting, two goats walked toward each other on a narrow plank over a chasm, heads down. An impasse. Which one would give way?

I laughed. “These are delightfully droll. They couldn’t be memories. They have to be fantasy.”

“They could have been dreams or Russian legends or Jewish stories or children’s folktales. He experienced them so intensely that they are still a part of him.”

The painter’s disregard for the relative sizes of things was humorous, but one in this vein suggested something to me. A large recumbent rooster enfolded in his wings a small woman, as though keeping her safe from a village aflame behind them. It reversed the order of humans caring for domestic animals, and it made me glimpse that Maurice and Louise had known that Geneviève would help me through dark times in more ways than by giving milk.

One painting had a haunting quality. A giant man in a black overcoat with a bulging sack slung over his shoulder was suspended in the sky diagonally over a snow-covered village and a large building that resembled the synagogue I had seen in the Marais quarter.

“Tell me about this one.”

“In our Jewish upbringing, the Yiddish idiom ‘goes over the houses’ represents a beggar; it means a message from God could come in the form of a beggar.”

“Is the message good or bad?”

“Good. Oh, so good. What you see as a stiff old beggar worn by years of deprivation and sadness is not all there is to see. It isn’t his
misery or exhaustion or loneliness that touches me in those paintings. It’s the spiritual force that keeps him aloft despite all gravity—that’s what I find moving.”

She was so gracious that I dared to ask her, “Is that part of Jewish belief? Keeping aloft despite forces that pull you down?”

“Part of Jewish history, I would say.” She reflected for a moment and then ventured a question of her own. “Do you know about Kristallnacht?” Her voice fell as she spoke.

“Yes. We read a newspaper clipping. We were shocked and sorry.”

The worry in her voice made me worry too, for how the war might affect them. I understood now why they were here in this remote place, and why Maurice delivered monsieur’s painting supplies from Avignon. I wondered if other Jewish artists were hiding in the rural south.

Despite our solemnness, I was hungry to grasp more of her husband’s artistic whimsy. Madame directed me to look at a large painting she called
I and the Village
, in which a man’s green profile faced a cow’s head almost nose to nose. From the man’s eyeball to the cow’s eyeball ran a fine thread, connecting them. It had to be the thread of love, I decided.

Laid over the cow’s jaw was a tiny woman milking a cow her size, and in the background, a peasant with a scythe over his shoulder was walking toward an upside-down woman. Behind them was a row of houses, some also upside down.

“Separate moments,” I said.

“But a single vision.”

“Why are some things upside down?”

Apparently she sensed that this wasn’t criticism, only inquiry, because she tried to explain. “There is a contradiction to every statement, the questioning of belief, and often the shattering of everything we hold to be certain.”

So I glimpsed that the upside-down woman and houses represented
contradictions, the rooster cradling a woman questioned the belief of size and the capacity to protect and comfort, and the man in the sky shattered the certainty of gravity.

“Then he has a reason for everything.”

“I can’t say that for sure. Sometimes he baffles even me.”

When we went back to the big studio, we saw that her husband had progressed on the painting. The crimson swirl had grown larger, more rounded, puffy as a cloud, upon which a buoyant bride and groom embraced, the man’s hand drawing his lover’s head against his shoulder. Above them a huge rosebush loaded with white roses took up the width of the painting. If that curved spread of crimson was in fact a cloud, logically it should be above them and the rosebush at their feet. Likewise, the cloud should be white and the roses red. I hadn’t completely thrown rationality out the window. I sensed that the artist was playing with the viewer. The figures were suspended over a village, and cherubic heads were nestled between diminutive wings tumbling in the sky. A floating man was playing a violin, and a goat rested on folded legs.

“Your paintings sing, monsieur. Or maybe I should say they make me want to sing.”

“Even better!”

“You look right through reality in order to reveal something strange and wondrous and, if I might say so, childlike. Have you always wanted to be an artist? From childhood, I mean?”

“That word,
artist
, did not exist in my village, so I dreamt of being a singer, then a fiddler, which was more acceptable in my culture, then a dancer, and a poet.”

“May I ask—why are there roses in the sky?”

“Because they are not on the ground.” The smile that crept over his face wrapped me up in him like an uncle would wrap a child in a warm blanket.

“Why is that cloud red?”

“It’s my cloud. I can paint it whatever color I want.”

“Why are there angels tumbling?”

“Because I needed something to fill the space.”

“I don’t believe you. They are there to bless the couple.”

“If that suits you, fine.”

“You don’t just paint what you see in front of you, like other painters.”

“No, I paint what I see inside me.”

“Did you dream this couple?”

His amused expression slid into a wistfulness. “Maybe. Or maybe I remembered them. Or maybe Bella and I
are
the couple.”

“Memory makes everything beautiful,” I said.

“Indeed. It erases the ordinary and gives us the extraordinary, the essence of our experience.”

“They’re not scenes. They’re …” I moved my hands as though I were collecting things, drawing them toward me. “Collections of holy sparks.”

His arms flew up and his fingers burst apart. “Yes. Yes! That’s it! Assemblages of inner images that possess me.”

“Like those goats? Do goats possess you?”

“Yes, they do. There were goats in our Russian shtetl.”

I chuckled. “You must have liked them. They’re in a lot of paintings.”

“I do, and the cows and the chickens and roosters.”

“Maurice gave me a goat. I named her Sainte Geneviève, after the patron saint of Paris. I’m a
Parisienne
, even if you can’t tell.”

“Oh, but I can, in the elegant way you speak. A
Parisienne
with a Provençal goat.”

“My goat, oh, how I love her. She seems to know by how I touch her whether I am sad or happy. When I’m gloomy, she comes up to me and pushes her body against my leg. I think she’s trying to comfort me, like that big rooster holding the woman in his wings.”

“Then you understand the language of animals
and
the language of art.”

“Maybe I’m beginning to. When I milk my goat, I sing ‘La Marseillaise.’ ” I stifled a laugh at myself, for telling him this, but
he
didn’t laugh. “She likes that. She’s a patriot.” He nodded thoughtfully, as though recognizing something serious.

“Do you like Provence?” I asked.

“I love it. The wheat at harvest time reminds me of home. And I love the grapevines marching across hills in streams of green, and the light. Oh, the light. When I came to Paris, I thought that was light—ha!—until we came here.”

“Is that the reason you came to Paris, the light?”

“That, and to learn the language of art. After hundreds of years in Rome, in Toledo, in Amsterdam, Art settled in Paris. I knew I would feel the comradeship of other painters there. I wanted to bring my homeland to them. I haven’t really left Vitebsk. I haven’t painted one single painting that didn’t breathe its spirit.”

“To you, does Provence also have a spirit?”

“Oh, yes. I feel it when I go out in the early evening to smell the richness of the fields and to listen to the delicate resonance of the Angelus bell after it stops ringing.” His dreaminess lasted for only a few moments, and then his expression darkened. “I would be content to live here permanently,” he murmured.

I knew enough now not to ask him why they couldn’t.

W
HEN
M
AURICE CAME TO
get me, Monsieur Chagall wished him good health.

“Get home
safely
, God willing,” madame said.

In the bus, I spilled out all I had seen. “They are kind, gracious people. They said I could come again.”