The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

If we could pin down the moments when our lives bifurcate into before and after—if we could pause the progression of milliseconds, catch ourselves at the point before we slip over the precipice—if we could choose to remain suspended in time-amber, our lives intact, our hearts unbroken, our foreheads unlined, our nights full of undisturbed sleep—would we slip, or would we choose the amber? Would he have chosen at that moment to live forever in a time before that message, intact but unchanged? Would he have chosen to turn around and walk out of the Splendide, out of his life in France?

Decisions

hand-delivered the names of contemporary artists in trouble: Duchamp, Lam, Chagall, Lipchitz, Zilberman, Ernst, Masson. Thomas Mann, writing from California, sent lists of German poets and writers: Mehring, Hertha Pauli, Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Wolf. Jules Romains and Jacques Maritain sent volumes of French literary names. Jan Masaryk, the exiled Czech foreign minister and a personal hero of Varian’s, insisted that Franz Werfel make the top of the list, but then the New York Post had reported Werfel dead, shot by the Gestapo in Paris. The list was a lacework, many

Iist

civet.

chronic disease, the man who had revealed himself to Varian over the past nine months as no one

wife who adores him and a son who depends on him. The boy’s already