Lisette's List (32 page)

“—because Lisette’s paintings would have been considered too modern, what the German chief of culture, Goebbels, called degenerate art. So if the thief intended them as a gift to a German cultural officer, he would have made a mistake.”

“Can we at least look in the mine?”

“There are many mines. The earth under the commune is riddled with passageways,” Maurice said.

“It’s not smart to go into a mine you don’t know, Lisette,” Maxime warned. “I would have to go with you.”

“Puh! You don’t know them either.”

“The closest mine stopped its operations when the war started. Only a small exploitation of one area has begun again,” Maurice said. “We can’t go where they are working, but we can explore other areas in it.”

“How do you know where?” Maxime asked.

Maurice pantomimed wielding a pickax at imaginary walls to his right and his left. He tapped his chest. “Ambidextrous. You are, my good man, looking at a miner of progress, the forward-most miner of Team Three at the Bruoux Mines. Aimé Bonhomme worked directly behind me. Being a left-hander, which was rare, he was paid more than right-handers. Miners of progress were paid by the distance we picked in a day. One meter was a good day.”

Louise waved her hand as though she were sweeping away a fly. “All right, all right, Maurice. They don’t need to know that. You will have to excuse him, Maxime. The miners of Roussillon are proud men.”

“I know the portion of the mine excavated by 1920, but not after that,” Maurice said.

“Would there be safe places to hide paintings there?” I asked.

“Some. There are wall niches we axed out for statues of Sainte
Barbara, patron saint of miners. A couple of the miners were talented at carving them. Paintings could be hidden behind the statues. The question is whether I can remember where they are. It’s been twenty-five years. I won’t go in without thinking it out.”

“You shouldn’t go in there in winter anyway,” Louise said. “Lisette would freeze. Wait till summer.”

“In the meantime, I’ll work on a map.”

Another wait lay ahead.

I
N THE MIDDLE OF
the night, I heard Maxime yell, “The timber! Get out!” I ran into his bedroom and found him in the throes of a nightmare, gasping and choking and thrashing around in his bed. I grabbed his arms to bring them to his sides.

“You’re here in Roussillon. You’re not in a mine. It was a bad dream, but you’re all right now. I’m here.”

He turned away from me and covered his head and drew up his knees. I sat on the edge of the bed and threw my arm over him until his shuddering stopped.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I poured Maxime’s
petit noir
into a small cup as if we were in Paris, rather than into a bowl, which was the Provençal way.

“It’s enough that I go with Maurice,” I said. “You don’t have to.”

“I can’t let you do that. I’ve got to be there.”

“No, Max. I’m not going to put you through that. There’s no sense in fueling more nightmares.”

He shrank at the reminder and looked so ashamed that I was sorry I had said it.

“This is it, Lisette. This is as good as it gets. I’ll never be clear of it. Accept it.”

“I don’t believe that,” I whispered.

He lifted his shoulders in a shrug.

“I might never be whole enough to live without attacks of fear or fury. I even raged at my mother.”

“A little at a time, Max. Roussillon has taught me how to wait.”

“How long will you stay here?”

“I told you. Until I find the paintings.”

“What if they can’t be found? What if they’re not here?”

It was my turn to shrug. How could I know?

“Can you stand the cold enough for us to take a walk?”

He answered by putting on his coat.

The snow had melted off the cobblestones but had left them wet and slippery. We took the downhill with caution, holding on to each other. In the lower village, we stopped at the bakery to buy two brioches. Maxime pulled out the moist center knob of his and fed it to me. We ate them as we walked toward the end of the village.

“I want to show you something extraordinary, the only thing in Roussillon worth visiting.”

“You are worth visiting. I didn’t come to see any sights. I’m not a tourist.”

“This sight you’ll never forget. People who hope for tourists call it the Sentier des Ocres.”

We passed the cemetery, walked along a ridge edged with pines, and descended a little way into a bowl or basin with its high walls grooved and striped in all the shades of ochre.

“Originally, the walls were scooped out by centuries of mistrals, which exposed the ochres, and then miners went at them with their pickaxes. Pascal said they are sixty meters high.”

Pinnacles and cliffs surrounded us. The red-orange glowed in the morning light, and deep green pines shaded patches of snow.

“It’s as though waves of color swirled against the canyon walls and then froze,” Maxime said. “Someone should paint this.”

“Apparently, it is even more magnificent farther on, but the paths are treacherous when they’re wet. We can come back in the summer and bake in the heat reflected off the walls.”

“I wouldn’t mind some of that heat now.”

We both shivered at once and turned toward home. What I had to tell him weighed heavily on my mind as we trudged uphill. I resolved to tell him later, after we had onion soup and felt warmer.

Stalling, I took a long time selecting the onions in the root cellar. Back in the house, I sliced them very thin, then sautéed them, poured in water, and dropped in three beef bouillon cubes. I cut three slices of baguette at an angle, floated them on top of three bowls of the soup, then grated some ricotta over them. After kindling a fire in the firebox, I set the three servings in the oven to toast. “Why three?” he asked.

“You’re going to have two of them.”

Then I sat down to watch him eat.

“I have something to tell you,” I said softly.

He waved his spoon aloft. “Tell on,
lapushka.
”

That nearly dissolved my resolution.

“Remember when we were coming back from the borie?” I began. “A lorry stopped and the driver offered us a ride.”

“Yes. He glared at me suspiciously.”

“The
garde champêtre
, Bernard Blanc. An arrogant fellow they call the constable. He’s extremely moody, veering from kindness to aggressiveness. Without my asking, he gave me things I needed during the war. A stewing chicken, seeds to start the garden, wood. He implied that in accepting them, I owed him something. Some feminine favor. Twice he grabbed me in a forced embrace.”

He stopped eating. Broth spilled from his spoon.

“Max, please understand. I gave him no indication that I was interested in him. In fact, I have been rude.”

“How?”

“I closed the door in his face once. Another time, he came right into the courtyard, entering by the side gate while I was shoveling out the outhouse. He taunted me by swinging a string of sausages and saying something crude, trying to tempt me into going to his house, where he would provide a sausage every night. When he said
I was frolicking with you instead of grieving over André, I couldn’t bear it, and I dug the shovel into the outhouse pit and drew out a big pile and flung it at him.”

Maxime laughed, a buoyant, guilt-freeing laugh that exploded and filled the room. “Served him right.”

“Then he flung the string of sausages over the cliff and threatened me. Seeing that string of sausages sail through the air was actually droll.”

“That’s something Chagall would have put in a painting,” Maxime said. “He has fish and chickens in the sky. Why not sausages?”

Chuckling, Maxime went upstairs and returned wearing a wry look. “After hearing how he tried to win you over with gifts, I hesitate to give this to you, but I brought it, so here it is.”

He placed on the table a small box, only about eight centimeters square, with gold letters spelling À
LA MÉRE DE FAMILLE
, the name of the oldest
confiserie
in Paris, on rue du Faubourg Montmartre.

I lifted the lid. “Marzipan! You remembered how I adore them.” I held the box’s lid to my chest and gazed down at four perfect fruits—an apple, a pear, a cherry, and a peach. “The colors of Roussillon!”

A man who would give a gift of marzipan would surely not have nightmares forever.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

OCHRES OF ALL HUES

1946

S
PLENDID SUMMER, AT LAST
! I
SUSPECTED THAT THE ENTIRE
département
of the Vaucluse was sweetly blooming. The passionflower vine climbing the side fence was covered with delicate, intricate blossoms—the pale green petals spread wide like a sunburst, a circular fringe of violet rays, a yellow center with a red ring within it, from which sprouted chartreuse filaments supporting pockets of pollen. The air in front of Louise’s house wafted fragrances of lavender and sweet pea. My almond tree was sprouting nuts as green as new parsley, their velvet casings taunting me to touch them, but if I ate one now, it would be as bitter as vinegar. Provence was teaching me to surrender to the seasons, and to wait with patience.

But when Maxime stepped through my doorway in the middle of August, I didn’t wait. I hugged him instantly. I had been patient long enough.

He looked healthier and had put on some weight. His chest was no longer concave, the skin around his eyes not so drawn. Even his wrists were not so thin.

He had come for the exploration of the mine, not to enter it, just to be here in case Maurice and I came home with the paintings.

T
HE
B
RUOUX
M
INES, WHERE
Maurice and Pascal had worked, were about six kilometers east of Roussillon, near the village of Gargas. Behind some rusty ore carts on rails, a row of mine entrances, tall rounded arches cut into a cliff, loomed ominously. Fifteen meters high, Maurice said. He took great pride in explaining that the width of each passageway—which he called a gallery, claiming that Roussillon did have a gallery after all—was measured by two miners, one right-handed and one left-handed, standing side by side and reaching out their outside arms with their pickaxes. By measuring frequently, they had made all the galleries the same width, which gave the ceiling vaults stability without the need for timbers.

“You mean there’s nothing holding up the arches?”

“Just geometry. It’s quite safe, and our accuracy made it beautiful. Six generations of miners have worked here. Ochres from this mine have been sent all over the world.”

We entered into the cool air of one of the entrances and heard the echo of pigeons warbling and trilling. As we walked the downward slope, it became darker, so we turned on our battery torches. Instantly a flock of bats flew out at us. I screamed and ducked.

“Oh,” Maurice laughed. “I forgot to warn you.”

“
Merci bien, monsieur le chevalier
. Are there any other creatures in here?”

“Only a fire-breathing dragon, but we tamed him. All the same, stay close behind me.”

Where I shined my torch, the walls were what Maurice called deep cadmium yellow and cadmium orange, but farther into the mine, some veins were the color of gold, and other bands were creamy white or maroon. It was all eerily strange and wondrous. I picked up loose rocks, wanting to show Maxime the colors, until I could hold no more.

Peering ahead, I could see the ribs of the arches diminishing in size the way they did in the nave of Notre Dame. In Paris, I knew them to be all the same height, so I assumed these must be also, although the farther ones did appear shorter. Here was a cathedral, excavated for the extraction of ores that made the beautiful paintings of the world. To be
in
the earth instead of
on
it thrilled me.

“Do you think any other woman in Roussillon has ever been here, inside the earth?”

“No. No woman would want to.”

No other woman was as motivated as I was.

Sometimes the ground dipped downhill sharply and I lunged forward, which brought my heart into my throat. The sound of water dripping made me uneasy, and some areas were muddy and slippery. Pillars of stone diminished in girth as I looked up, and white stalactites, wet and glistening, diminished in thickness as I followed them down with my eyes. We found a lake of sulfurous-smelling liquid and had to pick our way along its slick edge.

Every so often, a perpendicular gallery stretched to the right and left, and from these, other galleries had been opened parallel to the main gallery. I soon lost all sense of where I was. We walked each side gallery its three hundred meters until we reached the blunt, stepped ends, like giants’ stairways of blocks, each step about a meter high. Then, methodically, we returned to the main gallery, crossed it, walked the opposite gallery to its end, and came back.

Occasionally at the crossing of galleries, niches carved into the walls held eroded carvings of Sainte Barbara, which made the space seem even more like a church. In every instance, we looked behind her and removed loose rocks, but we found nothing.