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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?
There are moments when the filament of time bends, loops, blurs. The present becomes permeable; the past leaps forward and insists itself upon us without warning. The orderly progression of our days reveals itself to be a lie, and the sensemaking brain flounders. What was he supposed to call this impossibility that insisted itself before him as reality?
Since childhood he’d lived in an adversarial dance with his own mind, filling it with whatever seemed impossible, daring it to prove him wrong.
For every problem there was a solution, either within his extant knowledge or within his ability to seek it out. He knew he’d taken on his current mission in France not just for humanitarian reasons, though those were foremost, but also for the thrill of its difficulty.
But the port exerted its magnetic pull, the ocean lapped seductively at the shore; you could touch it and know that America was just on the other side.
He wanted not to be in charge of any of this, wished himself home in his own white sheets in Manhattan, Eileen in the other room with the Times, the drape of her linen skirt just visible through the bedroom door as she read in the chair by the window.
He’d experienced a deep sense of mattering, a sensation rare in the face of his mother’s capricious illness and his father’s constant and all-consuming work.
They taught him, through persistent love, to see himself as inherently valuable.
But to them, Impostor Grant was simply Grant, and life, unbelievably, went on.
When he ran from music, he was running from that problem; when he sent away for the Harvard application, wrote his essays, and sat for the entrance exam, it was in flight from who he’d discovered—in fact, had always known—himself to be.
He was a man, God help him, just a man, with a bad gut and a red-wine headache; he was a man who had stayed up all night in a bed in Cerbère, under the shadow of the Pyrenees. And there he lay awake into the dawn, listening to the lap and luff of the sea on the ash-blue shore.
No bolt from the sky was going to save him, no godly hand was going to lift him out of this. He got to his feet and went in.
To be honest simply about the confusion seemed weak. To do otherwise would be to lie. But was a sin of omission better than one of commission? Both could be lethal.
A few hours earlier, less than a single day, Walter Benjamin’s mind had existed intact; then, sometime in the night, he’d opened a bottle of pills, put one on his tongue, and another, and had swallowed, and repeated the process until he knew he’d had enough. Then the drug had gone to work, shutting down the intricate machinery of the body, breaking its fine linkages, silencing its humming wires, dimming the electric light of the brain until it went dark. That beautiful brain ceasing to send its beacon out into the night.
Grant took from his messenger bag a thermos of espresso and a slender flask of whiskey. He placed a book on his knees for a bar counter, decanted an amber dram from flask to thermos, then drew out a tiny glass bottle of absinthe and added ten drops. The top of the thermos contained two nested silver cups; he divided his mix into them
Like Eileen riding the road toward the Croton Aqueduct, he looked, above all, brilliantly alive.
Love worked on him like a clarifying drug, like a finer and sharper cocaine. And it was working now.
Varian searched her eyes. “But I am afraid, Mary Jayne. Aren’t you?” She slid her espadrille along the rail. “I used to be, I suppose. Most often when I was flying. I used to look down at the ground below and imagine what it might feel like to hit the dirt at a thousand miles an hour. Tchow! Instant death. Would it hurt?” She shrugged. “But we all have to die one way or another. In the meantime I mean to live.”
“There, now,” she said. “That’s what I call a proper goodbye.” And she pressed his hand and ran to the other room to find Mary Jayne, leaving Varian to wonder at the circumstances that had landed a woman like that in his life for a short time, ignited this friendship between them, then took her away again, perhaps forever. The European continent, he thought, must be full of such fleeting connections, fierce brief amities to burn in the face of all the enmity.
But here was Grant now, a message that consisted of his physical being. A chance for Varian to repair what he’d broken when he’d climbed into that boat. An invitation to walk forward into a trackless shadowland, a place whose existence might be defined by their occupying it. Varian didn’t dare make a move or a sound; he scarcely dared breathe. Half-dreaming, he willed a square of sun to avoid Grant’s face. The sun obeyed. Grant slept, and Varian kept watch.
He knew by now the toll of living that way, as an incomplete and insincere version of himself.
But the pinky of his left hand twitched, Varian could not help but notice; and though, once the captain had closed and locked the door of his secret compartment and replaced the key in its painting, he sat down at the chess table again and handily placed Varian’s king in checkmate, Varian knew that he himself had once again won the game. ________
“What do you propose to do with these?” Varian said. Zilberman raised his cap to smooth back his hair. “Liberate them from France. Get them to the States. The artists have agreed already to donate the work. Chagall has many friends in New York, and my wife has contacts in Boston. Let us transport these works to America, stage a series of exhibitions. Show everyone what’s at risk. What may be lost. Do you not think money can be raised, Monsieur Fry? Perhaps we can make lithographs, a set. The Flight Portfolio, we could call it.”
At times, circumstances conspire to make us believe the lies we tell ourselves. Everything—the weather, the season, the fall of light—sets the stage for our play; we find ourselves, instead of acting, becoming the characters, moving into a reality in which we’re inseparable from our roles.
If she left the toast untouched, if she looked abstractedly at the newspaper without seeming to read what was printed there, it was clear they were not to comment upon any of it. And when, after a time, she got up to leave, they both rose with her wordlessly, letting her pass between them like a queen parting pawns.
“There’s a time to run,” Varian said. “And a time to pause. If there’s one thing I’ve learned here in France, it’s that sometimes it pays to wait.”
“Truly, I don’t envy your position, Mr. Fry,” he said. “You’re like the boy in the German proverb, the one who carries the pails of milk.” “What proverb?” Varian said. Zilberman lowered his arm. “Oh, it goes something like this: Who’s most important, the farmer who feeds the cow, the cow who makes the milk, or the girl who milks the cow? None of them. The most important is the boy who carries the milk to market. One wrong step, and the work of all the others is lost in an instant.” Varian smiled ruefully. “That sounds about right.”
Hirschman rose from his chair to refill Varian’s glass, and Lena’s; then he drained the last centimeter of whiskey himself. “I’ll be seeing you, as they say in the movies. Perhaps we’ll rendezvous in New York.” “Oh, Albert!” Lena said, stricken. “Oh, Albert, nothing,” Hirschman said, and kissed her on both cheeks. He donned his overcoat, put his hat on his head, and took his briefcase in hand. Varian got to his feet, and for a moment they stood face-to-face in silence. “Drop us a line from Lisbon,” he managed to say. “And Albert—don’t get arrested at the border, all right? And don’t try to
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They couldn’t aspire to stop the Nazi machinery from advancing across the European continent; they couldn’t hope to see Hitler stripped of power, or the triple fences of Vernet fall. But here or there, a life could be saved; and the lives they were saving might save others. Small effects multiplied. That was what kept them at the work. And whether or not the Nazis occupied southern France, whether or not the Spanish borders remained open, the work would go on, at least as long as Varian could find a way to stay in France.
As Vinciléoni executed the last of his tallying, Varian’s eyes traveled the network of maps that lined the walls, a portrait of the black market: those red arrows and black dotted lines, the ones that connected the European continent to the African one, represented a vast, well-lubricated circulatory system of contraband goods. Now they also represented paths of escape, means of saving human lives.
“The fact is, Skiff, I don’t know how to live as what I am.” Grant laughed again and fell back onto the bed, his hands open at his sides like empty shells. “Tom,” he said, in a voice so intimate as to cause Varian’s caffeinated heart to fibrillate. “Tom. Wake up. You’re already doing it.”
Nothing at all to change: what a thing to want in the midst of a war. But where else could he feel, with such certainty, that there was no dinner table more brilliant or more savage, and nowhere else in the world he’d rather be? Where else could he know himself so clearly and not wish to be someone different?
Murchie shook his head. “I suppose I’d better have a drink, then,” he said. “What’ll you have?” “Wine,” Varian said. “It’s the closest thing they have to food.” He had not the least desire to drink, but when their waiter set the glass before him, the fragrant Bordeaux presented itself as a compelling substitute for dinner.
“Thanks, Lev,” Varian said, and closed his eyes against that green view. He sat for some moments at the painter’s side, both of them in silence; a complicated measure of birdsong ascended from the valley, and the scent of lavender blew into the garden on a current of cold-edged wind. Deep exhaustion bloomed in his bones, so profound he thought he might never move again.
Varian thanked him and walked him downstairs, wanting to ask if they had stepped back from the precipice.
there seemed nothing sadder at that moment than the terrible asymmetry of the transatlantic mail, the uncommunicating letters winging back and forth across the ocean, deaf to each other’s news.
“I made a mistake,” Varian said. “A terrible mistake. About Zilberman.” Chagall took Varian’s hands in his own, waited until Varian met his gaze. The look of condemnation was gone; all he saw now were those deep-set, deeply lined eyes, the ones that had struck him, on their first meeting, as being capable of seeing more than mortals’ eyes could see. “The true mistake would have been not to come at all. To stay in New York with the rest of the New Yorkers. Not to have tried.”
It struck him then that this was all really happening, what he’d sworn would never happen again: they were saying goodbye, letting each other go. If Grant walked through the door of that restaurant, if he took a train to Lisbon tomorrow morning, nothing would ever be resolved between them; the terrible question in his mind would never be answered, or would be answered only in favor of Grant as liar. But how could that be, how was it possible, when the last nine months had seemed the only truth-telling of Varian’s life? How could he wake up tomorrow knowing that Elliott Grant, that particular
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“Those people are my people,” Varian said. “If I don’t help them, no one will.”
The guard nodded and released him, and he started down the drive toward the station; it was time to pack his things. But not for home, not yet: he was headed to Vichy.
Instead he walked down to the water, night after night, in town after town, bending to touch the surf with his bare hands, feeling the pull of the ocean, reasoning that since its every molecule was, in a way, connected with every other, if he touched this wavelet he would be in contact with the continent where Grant now walked.
All he could do was to remain invisible, there in the South of France. He lay in the long grass, held its sharp-edged blades in his hands, letting his mind drift upward into the surrounding buzz of nighttime insects. He was nowhere, he was out of the world, de Rodellec du Porzic could not touch him, nothing could touch him, he was swept clean of feeling, he was hardly a man, hardly alive at all. ________
What seemed clear to him was that, as ignorant as he’d been when he’d arrived, his work would have been a disaster on a grand scale if it hadn’t been for the others. If he’d had any success at all, if he’d managed to succeed far beyond his original mission, it was due to Hirschman’s fearless ingenuity, Miriam’s intelligence and expertise, Bingham’s proud refusal to follow the consulate’s line, Mary Jayne’s audacity and generosity, Danny and Theo’s sympathy with his cause, Jean’s knowledge of six languages, Gussie’s willingness to stay up all night, the surrealists’ aptitude for mounting
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When the train whistle sounded again, Danny drew him closer, his mouth against Varian’s ear, and whispered something no one else could have heard: Have no regrets. What you could do, you did. “But Zilberman,” Varian said. “And the Flight Portfolio—” Danny shook his head. “Don’t do this, Varian.” “The Flight Portfolio has to be somewhere. If we can find it still—” “You saved more than a thousand lives,” Danny said. “There’s your Flight Portfolio. It’s already doing its work in the world. The rest is gone. Leave it.” And he did.
