Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (36 page)

Picasso said, “It's a miracle that it doesn't take off and trot back to the pasture.”

I laughed to convey my admiration for his imagination, his creativity. Did it matter that I knew he'd said the same thing countless times before?

He showed me into a room whose walls were covered with tribal masks. He said he'd bought these “diplomats of the sacred” from an artist who'd gone mad. Like his idol Gauguin, the poor fellow had gone to live with a primitive tribe. But unlike Gauguin, he'd discovered that his new friends and family were hunting heads while he lived among them.

Was Picasso unaware that this anecdote was in my friend Lionel's
Make Yourself New
? Had he not read this banned masterpiece that, serialized in
Demain
and other avant-garde magazines, had achieved an underground reputation? I wished Lionel were in Paris, so I could meet him for a drink and report that Picasso was still telling the same story. Though maybe it was fortunate. Lionel's vanity could be easily wounded when he realized that someone—especially someone like Picasso—had never read his work.

What followed was one of those instances for which the master was famous, when it seemed that those blazing-coal eyes read your mind like the Spanish Gypsies from whom, before people found out the truth, Picasso claimed to be descended.

He said, “Let me show you a drawing that was inspired by that American, your writer friend. What was his name? Leon something. Typical American. Naive. Like little children. He was explaining how enlightened and civilized the French are. So I made him this picture”— Picasso led me across his studio until we were standing in front of a framed drawing of a guillotine.

I could hear Lionel ranting about how much he'd wanted the drawing and how Picasso had grinned as he grabbed it. Back in New Jersey, Lionel was probably still wishing he had it, a regret that might haunt him until the day he died.

Picasso gave me a sly smile. He knew that I knew the story.

I said I thought that Lionel Maine was a major talent who would one day be appreciated as the original he was. Picasso looked bored. He said he was sure I was right, but mostly he remembered doing the drawing and my friend thinking he deserved to get it as a gift. Who did he think he was?

I said we'd better get started. I imagined he'd want to be there when I photographed his studio. I warned him not to be alarmed by the small explosions produced by the old-fashioned magnesium flashes I still used for lighting. I assured him there was no danger that this could start a fire.

Picasso held up his hand. He grinned at me. Then he rocked back on his heels and laughed.

“A terrorist!” Picasso said. “I've always wanted to meet one!”

From the (Unpublished) Memoirs of Suzanne Dunois Tsenyi

To be destroyed on the occasion of its author's death

IT TOOK THE
Germans a while to realize how docile their victims would be. Occasionally one saw struggles, but most people did what they were told. They gathered their possessions, walked to the waiting car or truck. They wanted to live. Who could blame them?

But at first the Germans didn't know that, so they'd send gangs of thugs. Hearing the commotion, Gabor and I would go to the window and look down at the street swarming with woolly gray-green grubs. Potato bugs, we called them.

After I joined the Resistance, I was always sure they'd come for me. I leaned against Gabor, but I couldn't explain why I kept shivering even after I saw which house the police went into. I let Gabor think that my fear was for others. It was safer for him. Often I thought of his photo of me, lying dead on the sidewalk. Would he ever be able to look at that image again if I was shot and fell on the pavement beneath his window?

One rainy night, Gabor and I watched an arrest. At the center of the wriggling potato bugs were a woman and her two teenage sons. The boys were taller than their mother. They locked their arms around her until the soldiers pried them apart.

Gabor and I couldn't speak. We went back to bed. We killed a bottle of bootleg brandy. We said we loved each other and passed out.

Nor did we talk about the mother and her sons the next afternoon, when Gabor got back from Picasso's studio and I returned from the language school, where a German woman told me in broken French that her navy officer husband was going up to the Normandy coast, where they were expecting some action. I told her that the word for
ship
was the street argot term for
urine
. After dinner I would need to fake some illness and go to Ricardo's clinic at the hospital. Our comrades in the north needed to know about the action in Le Havre.

After the war, no one believed that I could have done what I did without Gabor knowing. But it was true. I couldn't put him at risk. He was a foreigner, under suspicion. Every day he wasn't deported was our lucky day.

Each time he left home with his camera represented a decision to choose art over safety. He took pictures of bombed-out houses, of a calico cat living in the rubble of its former apartment. He caught a trio of pretty French girls eyeing a German soldier with such undisguised sexual contempt, that image alone could have gotten him shot. People told him secrets they wanted recorded on film. A priest brought him to see lovely white marble statues of saints, blackened by the coal cellar where they were hidden. I was terrified for weeks after a humorous Resistant posted a broadside on which Gabor's photo of three men in lipstick, mascara, and ermine coats at the Chameleon Club was juxtaposed with a snapshot of Hermann Göring, dressed and made up the same way.

Twice he was required to get new papers. Once he received an official request for a notarized letter stating that Tsenyi wasn't a Jewish name. It made him so angry he wanted to go down to the Gestapo headquarters and say that Tsenyi
was
a Jewish name. Was it hypocritical that I talked him out of the kind of courage I was called upon to show every day, carrying forged documents in my bicycle basket and fake passports on the Métro?

Gabor's love gave me the resolve and strength to help smuggle stranded British soldiers, Resistants, and Jews across the border, to distribute newspapers, to get medical care for the wounded and the Aryan identity cards that people needed in order to work. Meanwhile I was charming my language students into telling me where troops and supplies were being moved.

I knew that Gabor would make a terrible Resistant. He claimed that being Hungarian gave him a talent for keeping secrets. But there was always a chance that he might go to Picasso's studio and have a few glasses of wine, and from pure sociability and genuine fellow feeling, mixed perhaps with the desire to impress the Spanish genius, he would describe the dangerous missions our group was carrying out. Not even Picasso could be trusted with the knowledge that a German officer, practicing his French during a playful language lesson, had given us the information we needed to blow up a munitions train en route to Bordeaux.

I said, “Why make trouble for yourself? Not only are you not Jewish, but Tsenyi isn't even your real name.”

Gabor saw the logic in that, though logic wasn't the point. It gave him an excuse
not
to do something that might cost him dearly and would accomplish nothing. He suffered from being cut off without news from his parents. Every so often he wrote them. He told me his letters came back. After his death, I found evidence that these letters were never mailed.

Close as we were, we never discussed the most important things. We never mentioned my contraband radio or the BBC broadcasts. Though it was technically illegal, everyone listened to the nightly half-hour program in French. It wasn't the sort of offense for which you'd get sent to prison, except perhaps in a small town where a cop had a grudge against you or nothing better to do.

For part of every broadcast, the announcer read personal messages. Hello, Mama, I am in a prison camp, but I am safe. Don't worry. Darling, I pray every night for your return from the Front.

Many of these were coded communiqués from de Gaulle's agents in London. I had to listen carefully. Once, for example, I found out that a British aviator had landed in a tree in the woods outside Paris and had to be rescued at once.

Gabor claimed the messages were better than Surrealist poetry. Mama, the fox has gotten into the figs. Dear Cousins, the sunflower wants its coffee. The moon has eaten all the Camembert. The cannibal king is on a diet.

He would repeat them several times. Was he helping me remember them? After the war, he said, Yes, he was. I had been raised to be truthful, but during those years our lives depended on lying. Sometimes I wondered if we would ever get used to telling the truth again.

After the war, Gabor's photo of the Allied troops rumbling into Paris and being welcomed by the exultant crowds became one of the most famous images of that joyous event. Many people knew the story of how Gabor was shot at as he took the picture. A sharp-eyed GI saw the flash and thought he was a sniper.

In the minds of many, this near disaster has become an act of heroism, just as Gabor's documenting the Liberation has been viewed as evidence of his helping to make it happen. Gabor insisted that he had known everything. He used to ask how much
I
knew about what
he
was doing.

I know that he never hesitated to do anything I needed. When I asked if he would mind taking the pictures of friends who had lost their food ration cards, he said he would be glad to. They could come to his studio any time, free of charge. And when I suggested that a steady stream of desperate clients might draw the wrong sort of attention, he said he would take their photos wherever I wanted.

In the same way he'd staged scenarios early in his career, we devised little scenes for him to document. What German, however suspicious, would question a guy photographing two lovely young women in kerchiefs and summer skirts in the Luxembourg Gardens? And who, including Gabor, would suspect that the faces he took for ration cards were being used for forged passports and the Aryan certificates necessary to get a job?

I worked with a counterfeiter known as Cigarette Butt, a moniker he'd had long before the Resistance gave everyone code names. He refused to find another alias. Maybe if he had, his luck would have been better.

Like most counterfeiters, he considered himself an artist. He would have been delighted to know that the portraits he was sticking with pins to fake an official seal had been taken by his fellow artist Gabor Tsenyi. But we couldn't tell him that, no more than I could tell Gabor that his photos were being processed by a guy named Cigarette Butt.

Many of the best pictures my husband took during that time were used on transport visas. Everything he touched turned to art. Except for his book on Picasso, which was work for hire, the images he created during that five-year nightmare reflect his eye, his compositional sense—and the needs of the Resistance.

Once I told him to pretend to be a private investigator snapping a shot of me and my Moroccan boyfriend meeting for coffee (or the foul brew of acorns roasted and served as coffee) in a café. Then we could crop the picture to replace the photo on Ahmed's lost sugar ration card.

Ahmed was a courier from Casablanca. The police were closing in. Subsequent generations have interpreted our transfixed gazes as passion.

Gabor saw his expression for what it was: urgency and terror. But he never said so, and when he printed the picture, he kissed me and said, “Now your other boyfriend can have sugar in his tea.”

From
The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

BY
NATHALIE DUNOIS

Chapter Thirteen: A Shopping Trip

 

AS A MECHANIC,
Lou Villars should have been glad when Bonnet told her he was getting rid of the Mercedes. No client should hang on to a vehicle that was costing him so much time and money. But as a “community liaison worker,” Lou was concerned. Would selling the car reduce the ease and frequency of Bonnet's trips to her garage?

Bonnet reassured her. Lou was doing such a good job that he planned to expand her duties. First he wanted to take advantage of her professional expertise. Would she come along when he shopped for an automobile to replace the Mercedes?

What kind of car was he thinking about?

“A Rossignol,” said Bonnet.

On the evening before their visit to the Rossignol showroom, Lou drank herself unconscious, then sat up in bed at two in the morning. Wide awake, she replayed her association with the Rossignols, from the night when the baroness stopped by her table at the Chameleon to the evening when the baroness, Didi, and Armand came to inform her that she'd been demoted from champion to mechanic. Lou missed Armand—his patient instruction, his rambling lectures, the candy smell of opium on his clothes and his hair. She knew better than to let herself dwell on the loss of her racing career.

 

Designed by the modernist architect Alain Park-Joris, the Rossignol showroom's exterior resembled a Babylonian ziggurat or a rocket ship poised for takeoff. Its sophisticated aesthetic was lost on Lou as Bonnet motioned for her to enter first. The showroom contained half a dozen cars, their glossy beauty emphasized by the proportions of the room and the calculated angles at which the high windows scattered coins of sunlight across the glossy exteriors.

Amid all the desirable vehicles, the only one that Lou saw was Armand's green sedan. As she drifted toward it, Didi de Rossignol walked into the room.

Since she'd last seen him, Didi had grown to look more like Armand, as can happen after the death of a loved one. This glimpse of Armand's ghost made Lou want to protect Didi, without yet knowing from what.

Bonnet took out his handkerchief before shaking Didi's hand. Polite to a fault, Didi gave no sign of thinking that this was abnormal.

They chatted a while, then Bonnet glanced at Lou, who beckoned him over to Armand's car. She and Didi knew whose car it had been. They exchanged a freighted look. Didi held Lou's shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks.

He said, “Mademoiselle Lou, allow me to say that you are looking terrific.” It was exactly what he'd said the night he'd come to fire her. Then he turned to Bonnet and said, “This is not a new car, as you may have discerned. But I knew its previous owner, and I promise you, it was well taken care of. Cherished, one might say. Thanks to our currently limited access to parts and materials, this sedan, used or not, is far superior to anything we have been able to manufacture since. And the fact that it's not new allows us to offer it to you at a significant discount. . . .”

Lou watched Didi's mouth form words. She prayed, Make him say Armand's name. Make him say that the green car had belonged to his murdered brother. She missed Armand more than she missed Arlette, or Inge, or even Robert. A Bolshevik Jew had killed him. The Israelites deserved their fate. She glared at Didi with something like hatred. Why wouldn't he say
my brother
?

But all that Didi said was, “I'll leave you two to talk it over.”

When he left, Bonnet asked Lou what she thought.

She said, “He's right. This is the best. The most beautiful and the best.” She would have said anything to drive that car again. It would prove that you could start over, maybe not from the beginning, but at least from a happier moment than the present. This time things would be different, this time—

Bonnet said, “I'll go talk to the salesman.” How could Bonnet, who knew everything, not know who Didi de Rossignol was? Or was he pretending for some malicious reason of his own?

Lou kept one hand on Armand's car as Didi and Bonnet reached an agreement. It took almost an hour. Lou was afraid to leave the green sedan for fear she would lose it again. She watched them from across the showroom and several times was sure she saw something like anguish on Didi's face. Why was he selling Armand's car if it was causing him so much pain?

At last the two men shook hands again, Bonnet's handkerchief between them. Bonnet waved Lou over, and she watched them work out the details of how Bonnet would pay for the car and when it would be delivered. Didi wouldn't look at Lou as they said good-bye.

As Bonnet got into his Mercedes, Lou felt the impulse to glance back, together with the certainty that she would regret it. She thought of Lot and his daughters fleeing the Cities of the Plain. Of Orpheus, and Eurydice stranded eternally in hell. Arlette used to sing—very badly—an aria in which Orpheus poured out his grief at having lost his beloved forever.

Lou looked in the window. Didi stood beside the green sedan.

Staring fixedly at Lou, Didi spat on his brother's car.