The Flight Portfolio Read online

  ALSO BY JULIE ORRINGER

  The Invisible Bridge

  How to Breathe Underwater

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Julie Orringer

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material may be found at the end of the volume.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Orringer, Julie, author.

  Title: The flight portfolio / Julie Orringer.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | “This is a Borzoi book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018044985 (print) | LCCN 2018053903 (ebook) | ISBN 9780307959416 (ebook) | ISBN 9780307959409 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fry, Varian, 1907–1967—Fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—France—Fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—Refugees—Fiction. | Jewish refugees—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Biographical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3615.R59 (ebook) | LCC PS3615.R59 F58 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018044985

  Ebook ISBN 9780307959416

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures and public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph by Gary Yeowell/Getty Images

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Julie Orringer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: Despise What Is Not Courage

  Chapter 1: Gordes

  Chapter 2: La Dorade

  Chapter 3: The Splendide

  Chapter 4: Les Cyprès

  Chapter 5: Rue Grignan

  Chapter 6: Montredon

  Chapter 7: On the Vieux Port

  Chapter 8: St. Cyprien

  Chapter 9: Westbound Train

  Chapter 10: The Open Gate

  Part Two: Implicatus

  Chapter 11: Borders and Barriers

  Chapter 12: La Fémina

  Chapter 13: Arles

  Chapter 14: Basso’s

  Chapter 15: Villa

  Chapter 16: Revels

  Chapter 17: Noailles

  Chapter 18: Sinaïa

  Chapter 19: Pamiers

  Chapter 20: Camp du Vernet

  Part Three: More Bang

  Chapter 21: Escargot

  Chapter 22: Bar Splendide

  Chapter 23: Gide

  Chapter 24: L.H.O.O.Q.

  Chapter 25: Breitscheid and Hilferding

  Chapter 26: An Escape

  Chapter 27: Ausgang

  Chapter 28: Exquisite Corpse

  Chapter 29: Impediments

  Part Four: Body and Life

  Chapter 30: Fever

  Chapter 31: Cargo Loaded

  Chapter 32: Gone

  Chapter 33: Reckoning

  Chapter 34: Departures

  Chapter 35: In the Garden

  Chapter 36: Lumine Tuo

  Chapter 37: Under the Knife

  Chapter 38: The Coast of France

  Chapter 39: Refoulé

  Chapter 40: Morningside Heights

  Author’s Note

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Ryan, Jacob, and Lil

  Have you ever seen my face

  In the middle of the street, a face with no body?

  There is no one who knows him,

  And his call sinks into the abyss.

  —Marc Chagall

  ONE

  despise what is not courage

  1

  Gordes

  There was, as it turned out, no train to the village where the Chagalls lived: one of many complications he’d failed to anticipate. He had to pay a boy with a motorbike to run him up from the station at Cavaillon, ten miles at a brainshaking pace along a narrow rutted road. On either side rose ochre hills striated with grapevines and lavender and olive trees; overhead, a blinding white-veined sky. The smell was of the boy’s leather jacket and of charred potatoes, exhalate of his clever homemade fuel. At the foot of the village the boy parked in a shadow, accepted Varian’s francs, and tore off into the distance before Varian could arrange a ride back.

  The streets of Gordes, carved into a sunstruck limestone hill above the Luberon Valley, offered little in the way of shade. He would have given anything to be back in Marseille with a glass of Aperol before him, watching sailors and girls, gangsters and spice vendors, parading the Canebière. The Chagalls had only agreed to see him on the basis that he not bring up the prospect of their emigration. But what other subject was there? The Nazis had taken Paris months ago, they were burning books in the streets of Alsace, they could send any refugee over the border at will. At least the Chagalls had agreed; that was something. But as he reached the house, an ancient Catholic girls’ school on the rue de la Fontaine Basse, he found himself fighting the urge to flee. His credentials, if anyone examined them, amounted to a fanatic’s knowledge of European history, a desire to get out from behind his desk in New York, and a deep frustration with his isolationist nation. And yet this was his job; he’d volunteered for it. What was more, he believed he could do it. He raised his hand and knocked.

  An eye appeared in the brass circlet of the peephole, and a girl in a striped apron opened the door. She listened, strangling her index finger with one dark curl, as he stated his name and mission. Then she ushered him down a corridor and out into a courtyard, where a stone path led to a triangle of shade. There, at a bare wooden table, Chagall and his wife sat at lunch: the painter in his smock, his hair swept back from his forehead in silver waves; Bella in a close-fitting black dress too hot for the day.

  “Ah, Monsieur Fry,” Chagall said, rising to meet him. The painter’s eyes were large and uncommonly sharp, his expression one of bemusement. “You’ve come after all. I thought you might. You won’t forget our agreement, will you?”

  “All I want is your company for an hour.”

  “You’re lying, of course. But you lie charmingly.”

  They sat together at the table, Bella on Varian’s left, the painter to his right—he, Varian Fry, sitting down with the Chagalls, with Chagall, author of those color-s
aturated visions, those buoyant bridal couples and intelligent-eyed goats he’d seen in hushed rooms at the Museum of Modern Art. Bella filled a plate with brown hard-crusted miche, soft cheese, sardines crackling with salt; she handed it across the table, assessing Varian in silence.

  “Had you been here a few days ago, we would have had tomatoes,” Chagall said. “A farmer brings them up to the market on Thursdays. I’m sorry we don’t have more to offer. The bread’s a little hard on the tooth, I’m afraid, but c’est la guerre!”

  “This is lavish,” Varian said. “You’re too kind.”

  “Not at all. We like to share what we have.” He gestured around him at the bare yellow stones, the rough benches, the shock of gold-green hillside visible through an archway in the wall. “As you see, we’re living a quiet and retired life in our little dacha. No one will bother us here at Gordes.”

  “You have a studio,” Varian said. “You’re still producing work. That’s what makes you dangerous.”

  “Our daughter says the same,” Bella said. “She’s been saying it for months. But you understand, Monsieur Fry—my husband’s reputation will protect him. Vichy wouldn’t dare touch us.”

  “With respect, Madame Chagall, I don’t believe that for a moment. Vichy is subject to the Nazis’ whims. And we all know what they’re capable of. I’ve seen it myself. I was in Berlin in ’35—sent by the magazine I worked for. My last night in town there was a riot on the Kurfurstendamm. The things I saw—men pulled from their shops and beaten in the streets—an old man stabbed through the hand at a café table—boys dragging a woman by her hair—”

  “These things happened in Germany,” Chagall said, his tone harder now. “They won’t happen here. Not to us.”

  “Let me speak to my friend at the consulate,” Varian said. “Ask him to start a file for you, at least. If you do decide to leave, it might take months.”

  Chagall shook his head. “My apologies, Monsieur Fry. I’m sorry you had to come all this way in vain. But perhaps you’d like to have a look at the studio before you go—if you’ve finished, that is.”

  Varian couldn’t speak; he could scarcely believe that a person of Chagall’s intelligence, a person of his experience, could fail to see what he himself saw clearly. Chagall rose and crossed the courtyard to a set of ten-foot-high blue doors, and Varian got to his feet. He nodded his thanks to Bella, then followed Chagall across the broken paving stones. Beyond the blue doors was a long, high-ceilinged room with a wall of windows: the former refectory of the girls’ school. Canvases lay about everywhere, and for long minutes Varian walked among them in silence. As well as he knew the painter’s work, he had never seen it like this: in its pupal state, damp and mutable, smelling of turpentine, raw wood, wet clay. From the canvases rose ghostlike images: a grave-eyed Madonna hovering above a shadowed town, serenaded by cows and angels; crucified Christ wrapped in a prayer shawl, his head encircled by grieving sages; a woman kneeling beside a river, pressing a baby to her chest; clusters of red and white flowers rising like flames.

  “It’s no small matter to cross an ocean,” Chagall said. “More can be lost than canvas and paint. An artist must bear witness, Monsieur Fry. He cannot turn away, even if he wishes to.”

  “An artist can’t bear witness if he’s dead.”

  The painter removed his hat and set it on his knee. “The Emergency Rescue Committee mustn’t concern itself further with our welfare,” he said. “Save your resources for those who truly need help. Max Ernst, for example—he’s rumored to be in a concentration camp at Gurs. Or Jacques Lipchitz, my friend from Montparnasse. Who knows where he’s fled to now? Or Lev Zilberman, who painted those massive murals in Berlin.”

  “Yes, I know Zilberman’s work. Alfred Barr fought to get him on our list.”

  “You’re not entirely on the wrong path, then. Help Ernst, help Zilberman. Not me.” And he turned away from Varian, toward his canvases, toward the brushes and knives, the wooden boxes cluttered with crushed tubes of paint. “I’ll mention your name among our circles,” he said. “I know plenty who are eager to leave.”

  * * *

  ________

  Varian stumbled along the road toward Cavaillon, down the hill he’d seen through the courtyard arch. It would take him two hours to reach the station at this rate; another two on the train after that, and then he’d be back in Marseille, having made no progress at all. And what would he report to his colleagues in New York—to Paul Hagen, who directed the Emergency Rescue Committee, or to Frank Kingdon, its chair? That summer, when he and Paul and Ingrid Warburg and Alfred Barr and the others had compiled their list—two hundred artists, writers, and intellectuals who’d been blacklisted by the Gestapo and had no way out of France—they hadn’t imagined that their clients might resist being helped, nor that they’d consider themselves beyond Vichy’s reach. There were so many things they hadn’t considered; his life in France had become a process of discovering them, often to his embarrassment. It was a miracle he’d managed to get anyone out at all. There had been only twelve so far, a minuscule fraction of his list.

  What he ought to do, he thought as he kicked stones along the rutted road, was to write his wife that night to say he was coming home. He’d confess—and what a relief it would be—that his work wasn’t going as planned. How had he imagined it would take a month, one month, to find and extract two hundred endangered artists? He’d envisioned himself riding a rented bicycle through the countryside, rounding up refugees by the dozen, as if they’d be waiting in the lemon orchards with traveling papers in hand. He’d imagined that the consulate would contort itself miraculously to help him. But then the chaos of this place, the innumerable bureaucratic barriers, the cretins in the U.S. Visa Office, the resistance of the artists themselves. What a mistake he’d made, crawling out from behind his desk at the publishing house. How could he have presumed to take the lives of men like Chagall and Ernst into his hands when he had no idea how to manage them—no idea, even, of how to convince them they were in danger? Eileen wanted him home; she feared for his life. Her letter from last week had made that clear. Well, home he’d go. He’d write her at once; he’d write her as soon as he reached the Splendide.

  2

  La Dorade

  He arrived at his hotel to find the usual line of refugees waiting at the entrance, in the shadow of the petaled glass awning. Those who had visited before called out in recognition or waved papers in his direction, and those he’d never seen crowded close to speak to him or touch his sleeve, as though he were the goddamned pope. He told them, as gently as possible, that they’d better go home for the evening. Then he went inside to ask for his mail at the desk, hoping for some word from Eileen. But there was nothing from the States at all, no blue airmail envelope, no telegram. Only a telephone message, scrawled on a slip of yellow lined paper: La Dorade 19:00. Vincit labor ignorantiam.

  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?

  Vincit labor ignorantiam. A refrain from the Hound and Horn, his literary quarterly at Harvard, conceived over drinks one night in the Gore Hall bedroom of his friend and sometime bedfellow, Lincoln Kirstein. Work conquers ignorance. Meant ironically, of course, because that night they’d said to hell with work in favor of Kirstein’s scotch. Now he touched the words of the Latin motto with his thumb, the hotel clerk’s penciling soft and smudged against the yellow slip. Could Kirstein be here in France? He’d heard nothing from
him in months. Last spring, an après-ballet party at Kirstein’s midtown apartment had devolved into an argument about whether or not the States should enter the war; Varian had left before he could get himself in trouble.

  He could imagine nothing at that moment that would cause him to hesitate. He thought only that it would be interesting to see his old co-conspirator, former co-editor of the Hound and Horn. He could conceive of no one else who could have left him that message. And so he went upstairs, changed his shirt and tie, combed his hair, and brushed his hat, trying to guess what news Kirstein might bring, or what service he might ask Varian to render. At the door of the hotel room he took a shot of whiskey, then regretted it at once; his gut burned always, chronically, and drink made it worse. But he owned this burn, would own it all his life. Fortified, he went out into the fine-grained fog of an August evening in Marseille, ready to meet whatever awaited him at the Dorade.

  * * *

  ________

  The walk from his hotel took him down the boulevard d’Athènes and across the aorta of Marseille, the Canebière, where diners lounged at café tables and jazz angled from the open restaurant windows despite the post-occupation ban. The street smelled of diesel fuel and cardamom and wet gutters, of tobacco and women’s perfume. From the base of the Canebière, the Vieux Port exhaled a constant fragrance of seaweed and salt. At this hour the port was still faintly illuminated by a horizon line of brilliant yellow, the last liquid dregs of a sunset that had insisted its corals and saffrons through the fog. But in the streets, darkness had already fallen; the alleys of the port district snaked into ill-lit caverns on either side of the boulevard. He’d visited this quarter of small undistinguished shops his third day in town, in search of a cobbler to repair the valise he’d torn on the flight from New York. On the way, he’d become distracted in an antiquarian bookstore, where a slim volume of Heraclitus had corrected a lapse of memory: οὐδέν, not ίδιος, in the old quote about everything changing, nothing remaining still. He’d wanted to put the line into a letter to Eileen and didn’t like the thought of getting it wrong. The bookstore was shuttered now, its awning furled for night.