Page 33 of One of Them

E ven though she was here in Paris and not in Poughkeepsie, now that she’d done it—actually told someone from her Vassar life that she was Jewish—Anne felt unexpectedly elated.

Ever since she boarded that train to Poughkeepsie more than two years ago, she’d kept this part of herself hidden.

Sharing the truth was such a relief. Even Delia’s reaction—cold, judgmental—didn’t dim that. Not a bit.

The disclosure had a ripple effect. She became more confident in her classes, raising her hand, answering in French that wasn’t so terrible after all and soon became passable—even decent.

One of her professors, Monsieur Leblanc, took note.

“Très bien, Mademoiselle Bishop. Maintenant vous parlez couramment le francais.” Anne thought that “fluently” was a generous assessment of how she spoke French, but she was definitely more comfortable.

Paris was beginning to feel more accepting, even welcoming, to her.

She felt like she belonged. She and Nancy became regulars at Le Petit Saint Ben?it; the gruff waiters seemed a little less gruff, and one of them even smiled in recognition when she came in, albeit the smallest smile imaginable.

The woman at the bakery put an extra pain aux raisins in her bag for no discernible reason.

Her term paper—written in French!—on the depiction of Jesus Christ in three paintings she’d seen at the Louvre received a top grade.

One day she took the Métro back to the marché aux puces , alone, and tried on a secondhand fur coat of sheared beaver, the dense brown plush of it so dark that it read as black.

She looked at her reflection in the cheval mirror that the fur dealer had standing at the back of his stall and almost didn’t recognize herself.

She felt like a different girl now, the change visible in her face and even her bearing: the coat was a talisman, a portal ushering her into a new phase of her life.

She bought it without a second’s hesitation, counting out the franc notes into the dealer’s eager, outstretched hands.

Best of all, she and Drew had fallen into an easy routine.

On Sunday afternoons they often strolled around the city together, and Anne soon realized that these walks gave her a chance to see the world through Drew’s eyes.

He always carried the Leica and frequently stopped to take photographs.

At first she didn’t understand what caught his eye—a boarded-up store window, a group of people sitting on a bench, torn newspapers and bits of trash in the gutter.

But soon she began to see what he saw: the boarded-up store had a melancholy, wistful feel, the grain of the wood in the boards an intricate, engaging pattern of its own.

There were little interactions and even dramas between the people on the bench, one person talking, another listening or instead looking away.

Someone clutched a glove, someone had been caught fiddling with a button or leaning over to tie a shoe.

And the detritus in the gutter formed an unexpected kind of urban collage— an apple core next to a torn headline from Le Figaro , a lone tarnished key, a broken baby’s rattle.

Random bits and pieces of the city that somehow made poetic sense when they were all contained by the frame of the photograph.

Sometimes he took photographs of Anne, but never a formal portrait; he liked to take candid pictures of her looking at a painting in a gallery or museum, or raising a cup to her lips for a sip of coffee.

Now she could literally see herself through his eyes, a vision both illuminating and flattering.

During the week they were often too busy to get together, but sometimes they found the time to meet at a café midway between the Herald ’s Paris office and Anne’s dorm.

Drew ordered beer or a glass of wine, and soon Anne began to do the same.

She found the taste of beer offensive, but Drew guided her on the subject of wines, and soon she developed a taste for some of them, like burgundy and cabernet, as well for the sweeter, lighter whites and aperitifs like Lillet.

Anne remembered how Delia had shocked some of the other girls at school by drinking a nightly glass of wine.

But now she understood this daily ritual as civilized and even ceremonial, with Drew always touching his glass to hers before he drank.

She let the unfamiliar flavors fill her mouth, trying to sort them out and identify them; the experience was nothing like that time she’d joined that horrid Duane in swigging from his flask at the Yale dance.

On a gray and cold afternoon in early December, Anne arrived at the café first. She was wearing the fur coat for the first time, and when Drew saw it, he made her spin around a couple of times before she sat down.

“Where in the world did you get that? ” he asked.

“You look just like a Parisian girl.” Anne beamed; she could think of no better compliment.

“I bought it at the flea market. Do you like it?”

“Flea market! You really have become a Parisian girl.” He helped her out of it, first touching the dense fur and then her shoulder before he hung the coat on a hook behind the table.

As always, even the slightest, most casual physical contact between them felt like a small electric shock to Anne, one whose effect lingered for several seconds.

The wine had arrived, and Anne waited for Drew to touch his glass to hers. When he didn’t, she realized that he looked disturbed, even anxious. Was something wrong? The feeling seemed to flow straight from him to her, and she absorbed it as if she were a piece of gauze.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he began. Was he going to say that he didn’t want to keep on seeing her, that she was really too young and inexperienced to be a good companion? Or even worse—that he’d met another girl he liked better, and wanted to spend what free time he had with her?

“... and I’m going to be leaving Paris the week after next,” he said.

“What? Leaving?” With her mind spinning all sorts of scenarios—none of them good—she had missed the first part of what he’d said. “Where are you going?”

“Palestine. The UN just voted to partition the state, and I’ve been assigned to cover the region.”

“I don’t understand.” Palestine? Drew was at the paper’s Paris bureau; Palestine might as well have been on Mars, although, amazingly, it was also where Delia’s mother was living. How strange that a place she’d never even thought about should now crop up twice in a matter of days.

“It’s not a war zone yet, but it’s probably going to become one. They want me to photograph what’s happening there—not any actual combat, but what life looks like on the street and in the public spaces.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

In between sips of wine, Drew told her about this part of the Middle East. There had been a lot of tension in the area, especially in the last thirty or so years.

Jews and Arabs both claimed it as their own.

“The Jews are Zionists. To them, Palestine is their ancient homeland, and that’s where they want to establish a Jewish national state,” he explained.

“But the native Palestinians—Arabs—see Palestine as their homeland. It’s where they’ve been living for centuries.

They want to limit Jewish immigration and set up a secular Palestinian state.

” He leaned close, both hands lightly touching the Leica that sat on the table between them.

“The British got there around 1917,” he said.

“And they’ve been trying to appease both sides.

It hasn’t worked. And after the war, Jews flooded into Palestine—illegally.

The more radical Jewish groups thought they’d been betrayed by the British and started using guerrilla tactics, as if the Arabs had no right to be there.

But the Arabs felt justified in protecting land they saw as theirs.

The whole thing was getting too much for the Brits, so they threw up their hands and turned it over to the UN. ”

Anne was quiet during this history lesson. “How long will you be gone?” she asked finally, since that was what mattered most to her.

“I can’t say. And I can’t say I’m not a little scared. But I’ll be the youngest photographer there. It’s a big opportunity for me.”

“It sounds dangerous.”

“It could be. Okay, most likely it will be. But that’s part of the job—going where there’s trouble. Conflict. Change. And maybe this will be a change for the better.”

“You really think that?”

“It’s hard to say.” Drew said that Zionists had been going to Palestine since the nineteenth century, and there had been talk of establishing a Jewish state for years.

But it was what happened during the war that made the whole thing seem more urgent.

It became clear that nationhood was what counted.

“Jews found out that in order to survive, they needed a homeland. And they claim Palestine is theirs.”